soulsource

soulsource , 8 days ago

Android has become such an unusable mess otherwise…

I mean, you can’t even find the option to allow sideloading on my Android TV box without first enabling developer mode…

soulsource , 8 days ago

I have been using Linux for more than 15 years and would consider myself a semi-advanced user, but that thing in the screenshot - it scares me.

soulsource , 10 days ago

It really depends on what you are doing with your system…

On my main PC I want the full Linux Desktop experience, including some Gnome tools that require webkit - and since I am running Gentoo, installing/updating webkit takes a lot of RAM - I would recommend 32 GiB at least.

My laptop on the other hand is an MNT Reform, powered by a Banana Pi CM4 with merely 4 GiB of memory. There I am putting in some effort to keep the system lightweight, and that seems to work well for me up to now. As long as I can avoid installing webkit or compiling the Rust compiler from source, I am perfectly happy with 4 GiB. So happy actually, that I currently don’t feel the need to upgrade the Reform to the newly released RK3588 processor module, despite it being a lot faster and it having 32 GiB of memory.

Oh, and last, but not least, my work PC… I’m doing Unreal game development at work, and there the 64 GiB main memory and 8 GiB VRAM I have are the absolute bare minimum. If it were an option, I would prefer to have 128 GiB of RAM, and 16 GiB of VRAM, to prevent swapping and to prevent spilling of VRAM into main memory…

soulsource , 15 days ago

Afaik the –reflink isn’t needed any more with modern coreutils versions.

soulsource , 15 days ago

The main issue with btrfs is the RAID 5/6 write hole. If you aren’t planning to use RAID 5/6, it’s fine.

There are some other problems too, but those don’t affect data integrity. The most annoying one currently is that defragmenting breaks reflinks, such that snapshots get turned into full copies, potentially wasting a lot of space. (I have honestly no idea how noticeable fragmentation is on SSDs, and if defragmenting is even worth it nowadays.)

soulsource , 1 month ago

I would recommend to play Skyrim on PC though. Even if your computer is old, you should be able to get a much better experience from it than the Switch version.

I mean, I played it on the Xbox 360, and it worked like a charm. On an ancient three-core console with 256 MiB of RAM.

Then I wanted to replay it on the Switch, and was disappointed. There are a lot of physics glitches on the Switch, but what is worse is that the NPC pathfinding takes a lot longer on the Switch, such that NPCs move in nonsensical directions during combat, as they start to follow paths that they would have needed several seconds earlier. Instead of moving near the player to attack, they move near the position where the player had been some time ago. This is particularly bad on the overworld, but also noticeable in dungeons.

soulsource , 1 month ago

I would recommend to play this on Switch though. That’s because, unlike the PC version, the Switch version can be played without an Ubisoft Account. All one has to do is to disconnect the Switch from the internet, and suddenly the game runs without login.

soulsource , 1 month ago

Yes and No.

In the short term the answer is a clear “yes”, as it allows players to play nearly all Windows games on Linux without modifications, and game developers to ship their games on Linux without any extra costs.

In the long term it might have a bad effect on the market, as it further helps to cement Microsoft’s control over multimedia APIs, since game developers now have little incentive now to target anything other than DirectX…

In this case it’s a bit weird though, as the game lists Linux as supported platform, but obviously just ships the Windows build with Proton instead of having a native Linux build that uses open cross-platform APIs.

soulsource , 1 month ago

Sorry, I was a bit confuse. I meant, in the short term Proton is definitely a good thing.

soulsource , 1 month ago

95% being trial and error. At least where I work.

soulsource , 1 month ago

I’m still hooked on Backpack Battles. It’s slow enough that medicine-induced-brain-fog ridden me can play it, and it’s a lot of fun.

soulsource , 1 month ago

I loved that game, and completed it twice, but the last chapter (or last 2 chapters - depending on which ending you get) is super annoying. The encounters are repetitive, and there are quite a lot of them. It’s almost the same group of enemies again, and again, and again. Once you have a working strategy those encounters aren’t even that challenging, but if you play turn-based, they take a lot of time…

soulsource , 2 months ago

Mesa has its own OpenCL implementations for AMD GPUs too: Clover and RustiCL. However, Clover is not really developed any more (afaik) and lacks some important extensions, such that many programs can’t use it. RustiCL is rather new, and I don’t know how well it works.

soulsource , 2 months ago

Backpack Battles. I should have never bought this. It’s eating all my spare time.

soulsource , 2 months ago

anti-trust authorities

The same anti-trust authorities who have been ignoring <gestures vaguely towards IT industry> completely?

soulsource , 2 months ago

If you are using systemd, there’s a tool called coredumpctl.

soulsource , 2 months ago

I’d strongly recommend to stick to a mainstream distribution like Fedora, Debian, Mint,…

With bigger distributions you have more people working on them (-> more packages well maintained), you get a bigger community, and therefore it’s easier to get help if anything breaks.

I’m not sure which distribution to recommend though, as they all have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to gaming. Ten years ago I have switched to Gentoo (which is definitely not a distribution for new Linux users) when I got fed up with Ubuntu’s Enshittification, and have stayed there ever since, so I lost a bit track which distributions are good for gaming now and which aren’t.

soulsource , 2 months ago

It’s not a dumb question at all, and there is no “agreed upon” definition.

For me the most important characteristics of a “Mainstream Distribution” would be the size of their maintainer team - though that is also inaccurate if we are talking about distributions that are built on top of other distributions - as in your example.

Another indication is to check who is sponsoring a distribution’s development. If there are plenty of commercial sponsors, then chances are that the distribution is well maintained. Similarly, if the distribution is created by a commercial company (Intel, Canonical, RedHat,…), as those companies also have an interest in keeping their product in a good state.

Age of the distribution might be another indicator. If a distribution has been around for a long time, chances are it isn’t bad either.

However, I am lazy and would not actually check any of this by hand. Instead, the thing I would actually do is to just go to distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major and read through their list. 😉

soulsource , 2 months ago

• Book of Hours. It’s a strange game, set in the Secret Histories, the same setting that Cultist Simulator had. Unlike Cultist Simulator, which was rather gruesome, Book of Hours is a relaxed game, about cleaning out and restoring an abandoned library, reading the occult books left in it, and drinking tea with your guests.
• Potionomics. While it’s primarily a puzzle game about brewing potions, it has a lot of heartwarming dialogue.
• Settlers 2 (the original DOS game, not the remake). The Settlers series was what brought up the term “Wuselfaktor” (No clue how to translate this. There is an English explanation of the term in this article.), and imho Settlers 2 is (by far) the best part of that series.
• Kerbal Space Program. I can’t say why this game makes me happy, but it does. There’s something strangely relaxing about drifting through space in free-fall, seeing the planetary surface pass by at high speed below.

soulsource , 2 months ago

Quake II RTX is fully raytraced though. I’m not sure how well performance measurements done with it apply to other games that do a mix of raytracing and rasterizing.

soulsource , 3 months ago

I feel like I have to link this here: The open source project (which also has builds for other platforms than Windows): sc2.sourceforge.net

soulsource , 3 months ago

Who knew electing fascists would lead to fundamental freedoms being removed?

FIFY

soulsource , 3 months ago

I don’t know that particular system, so I can’t give any hardware-specific suggestions. However, it might be worth checking out the games that previously were included in Humble Mobile Bundles, especially the very first ones. Sorry, I don’t have a nice to browse list, but this site seems usable enough: barter.vg/bundles/3/76/

That said, OpenTTD is available on F-Droid. That should keep you busy for a while 😉

soulsource , 3 months ago

“PPA” is Ubuntu’s branding for third party repositories. So, of course you will have a hard time adding a Ubuntu-specific third-party repository to anything that isn’t the Ubuntu version it’s made for…

Debian of course supports third party repos, just like Ubuntu. On Debian they just aren’t called “PPA”.

---

For more information on how to add third party repos to Debian (or Ubuntu, if you don’t use Canonical’s weird tooling), check out the Debian Wiki page on UseThirdParty or SourcesList. There’s also an (incomplete) list of third party repositories on the wiki: Unofficial. And just like with PPAs, anyone can host a Debian repo.

soulsource , 3 months ago

Ubuntu was pretty good, until 2010 or so. People who still recommend it probably haven’t used it in the last 10 years.

soulsource , 3 months ago

It’s basically what the Steam Deck does, and for a gaming device it makes a lot of sense. The vast majority of games will probably be installed to the user’s home folder anyhow…

It might be that some games require additional libraries that don’t come with the immutable base OS, but you can always install them in a custom folder (like, the game’s install dir), or just install Steam and use the Steam Runtime for everything.

And, as you said, a lot of open source tools and games (DosBox for instance) are available as Flatpaks too.

soulsource , 3 months ago

After finishing my second playthrough of Loren the Amazon Princess, I’ve now started Tales of Aravorn: An Elven Marriage. And I must say, it is pretty good. From what I can tell up to now, I like Elven Marriage more than Loren, so it’s a bit sad, that it didn’t sell that well…

Apart from that I’m playing way too much Against the Storm. It’s a pretty fun city builder rogue-like. Basically Settlers, but only the fun parts, with a bit of random challenges sprinkled in.

I also tried to play Albion (the DOS game) again, but I died in my second battle and hadn’t saved from the beginning… 90s games were something different, when it comes to difficulty. I will definitely start over again soon, this time actually saving frequently.

soulsource , 4 months ago

There are some amazing fan projects though:

• While it isn’t a remake, OpenMW improves upon the original game’s graphics - it does not change textures or models though, just rendering features.
• Skywind is a remake though - it uses the engine of Skyrim to recreate Morrowind.
• Skyblivion is the same idea, but with Oblivion.

soulsource , 5 months ago

It has gotten an update recently, to improve compatibility with modern systems: Patch Notes

soulsource , 5 months ago

On the topic of Visual Novels: I’d like to recommend basically everything from Winter Wolves Games that is tagged as RPG. The classic is of course Loren the Amazon Princess, but, to be honest, their writing has improved since then, so you might want to check out their newer Tales of Aravorn games, like Seasons of the Wolf. Also, Loren is really long, so if you don’t have a ton of time, the newer, shorter games might be a better choice.

A word of warning though, by Winter Wolves themselves: mastodon.social/

soulsource , 5 months ago

A geh, is doch iagendwie liab, oda?

Übahaupt, jetzt wo si Hochdeutsch imma mea duachsetzt, und vü junge Leit übahaupt nimma richtig östareichisch^1^ redn leanan, missn ma doch schaun, dass unsa Sproch net oafoch ausstiabt, oda?

Mia hom a a longe Tradition, wonns um Mundoatdichtung geht. Da Dichta von da obaöstareichischn Hymne zum Beispü, da Stelzhamer Franz, hot gonz vü in Mundoat gschribn.

Und weis ma grod eifoit: Es gibt a a eigene Wikipedia in unsam Dialekt: bar.wikipedia.org Oba do dua i ma söm schwah, dass i des vasteh. De is scho in da äagstn von de oagn Mundoatn gschribm.

(So, jetzt woas i net, wöcha Sproch i im Dropdown do untn auswöhn soid… Wei wirklich Deitsch is des jo net…)

[^1^] I am fully aware that the dialect I’m writing in is not called “Austrian”. The two big dialects spoken in Austria are “Alemannic” and “Bavarian”, and the one I’m writing is the Bavarian dialect. I’m only using the word “östareichisch” here, because that’s what I expect most people to use in spoken conversation.

soulsource , 5 months ago

War ja auch nicht ernst gemeint. Ich bin bei diversen Chats im Freundeskreis eigentlich immer der einzige, der auf Hochdeutsch antwortet 😉.

soulsource , 5 months ago

Apart from Subnautica, which only is tedious regarding food/drink in the very beginning, I enjoyed Unreal World a lot. It is turn based, so there isn’t any real-time time constraint imposed by in-game hunger/thirst. It also tries to feel realistic in a lot of aspects, including the amount of food/water your character needs. While at game start you of course need to focus on immediate survival (though, that depends a bit on the scenario you play), that focus shifts rather quickly to preparing for the winter, as in stocking up supplies (think: smoking/curing meat/fish, gathering fire wood,…), and building a shelter that you can heat, so you don’t freeze when it gets cold outside. Since the game is set in fantasy iron age Finland, you probably also want to build a sauna 😉.

soulsource , 5 months ago

How does that work if you haven’t installed the game already? Also, what about copy protection?

soulsource , 5 months ago

I’m positively surprised that this works.

That will make installing old games so much easier on my Steam Deck. Thanks!

soulsource , 6 months ago

Even before Proton Valve was heavily invested in Linux gaming.

SteamOS has been around way longer than Proton, and the Steam Client had a native Linux version for such a long time, I don’t even remember when it was published. Also, the Steam Linux Runtime is something worth mentioning - it is a common base that game developers can target instead of the various different distributions.

soulsource , 6 months ago

Enable SSH access (but make sure it only accepts key-based logins - password based on a mobile device that might operate in untrusted networks is a bad idea).

If you enable SSH, you can transfer files from the PC over WLAN. (If you are on Windows: FileZilla is your friend.) Also, you can remote access the Steam Deck command line via SSH. (If you are on Windows: PuTTY is your friend.) That’s way less annoying than having to type longer texts (think: script files to launch emulators) with the on-screen keyboard.

Oh, and if you are into Retro Gaming, my small guide on how to add DOS games to the steam library and get MIDI working for them might be worth a look.

soulsource , 6 months ago

There are plenty on the web (for instance on handheld.quest), but I haven’t found a single one that contains all details…

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So, I’ll just try to sum up the details here:

First things first: SSH stands for Secure Shell, and is basically an encrypted remote command line, but it offers much more features than just a command line, including, but not limited to, file transfer. The file transfer feature is also known as sftp, and generally considered to be the successor of the more well known ftp protocol.

The very first thing I would do on the Steam Deck would be to set a host name in the settings, such that you don’t need to use the IP address to address it over the network. Screenshot (I totally haven’t just found by googling).

The Steam Deck comes with an SSH server pre-installed, you need to enable it though. The following steps need to be done on a terminal, in desktop mode. The terminal that’s installed on the Steam Deck is called “Konsole” (if I remember correctly). Once you have a terminal running on Desktop Mode, you can enable the SSH server via the following steps (I’ll link the help for all commands I mention, so that you can verify that I’m not trying to trick you into doing something bad):

• First you need to get administrator (“root”) access to the Steam Deck, what can be done by setting a password for the default user. Don’t worry, the Steam Deck won’t start asking for a password on startup, it’s just required in order to get admin access. The command to set/change the current user’s password is simply https://manpage.me/?q=passwd. While typing the password, there won’t be any feedback on the screen. This is normal.
• Once the password has been set, you can use the https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/sudo.8.html command to run other commands as administrator. sudo will ask you to confirm your identity by entering the password.
• To start the SSH server, you can use sudo systemctl start sshd. Help files: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/systemctl.1.html, https://manpage.me/?q=sshd
• To stop the SSH server again, you can use sudo systemctl stop sshd.
• To enable autostart for the SSH server, sudo systemctl enable sshd (but I would not recommend this unless you disable password based logins - see below)
• To disable autostart for the SSH server, sudo systemctl disable sshd

On the PC from which you want to connect to the Deck you will need some kind of sftp client. On Linux most file managers have sftp functionality built-in. On Windows and MacOS one needs a special program for this though (afaik). There are many, many alternatives here (just search “sftp client” in your search engine of choice), but the most well known one is FileZilla, which works on Windows, macOS, Linux and many other operating systems. I recommend FileZilla for two reasons. The first is that it’s open source (and free of charge), the second one is that I personally like it as a tool. At work I (have to) use Windows, and whenever I have to transfer files to a remote system like our webservers, our contractor’s cloud storage, or simply to copy a few music files from my phone to the office PC (yes, I am this old), FileZilla is the go-to solution for me.

If you have started the SSH server on the deck, you should now be able to access its contents via sftp. The default user on the Steam Deck is called deck, the password is the one you set earlier using the passwd command. If you are lost using FileZilla, there’s a user’s guide online.

Now, as promised, a few words on security and autostarting the SSH server. If you plan on auto-starting the SSH server on the Steam Deck, I would recommend to set up a means to connect to it without a password, and then to disable password-based SSH connections. The reason is that the Steam Deck, as a mobile device, will quite likely end up in insecure or otherwise untrusted wireless networks, and passwords are really not the most secure way of user authentication… Since SSH is a full remote access protocol, anyone who guesses your password and can reach the deck over the network could do anything on it. Given that the deck’s battery runtime is already short enough even if there is no bitcoin miner running in the background, you probably don’t want password based logins via SSH enabled permanently.

That’s where Public-key authentication comes in. You can configure the SSH server to allow users to connect without a password, if the users have access to a private key for which the corresponding public key is known to the server. To enable this, all you need to do is to create a public/private SSH key pair, and upload the public key to the SSH server on the Steam Deck. The exact process of creating those keys is again depending on the operating system. Here’s a guide about SSH key generation that includes instructions for macOS and Windows. On macOS or Linux the instructions are actually identical. You just need to open a terminal, and, if they don’t exist for your user yet, run https://manpage.me/?q=ssh%2Dkeygen to create the keys. Then you can use https://manpage.me/?q=ssh%2Dcopy%2Did to upload the public key to the Steam Deck. Once that is done, if your system uses https://manpage.me/?q=ssh%2Dagent, connecting via public key should “just work” - also in FileZilla. If you don’t use ssh-agent, you can try these steps in FileZilla.

Once you have confirmed that passwordless public-key logins are working, you can edit the file /etc/ssh/sshd.conf on the steam deck. You’ll need admin access, so the easiest way to do that is probably to run sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd.conf on a terminal (nano help). The relevant change is to replace the line #PasswordAuthentication yes by PasswordAuthentication no (here’s the help file for sshd.conf). In order to apply these changes, you probably need to restart the SSH server: sudo systemctl restart sshd.

soulsource , 6 months ago

And up to now we have zero indication that the current approach isn’t a dead end. Bill Gates, for instance, thinks that GPT-4 is a development plateau: heise.de/-9337989

soulsource , 7 months ago

If you want to know how Games Streaming will look like in 10 years, compare today’s YouTube to how it was 10 years ago.

soulsource , 7 months ago

Okay, Youtube was maybe a bad example. They aren’t that far with the enshittification yet, and just started increasing the amounts of ads…

Things I do expect:

• Price increase
• Tiered pricing (okay, that’s already a thing for GamePass with the “PC” and “Ultimate” plan)
• Lower price tiers including advertisements (could for instance be placed in games streamed from the cloud)
• Other things that aren’t beneficial for consumers.

soulsource , 8 months ago

I liked it a lot, before they added base-building and all that other stuff that doesn’t align with the game’s original vision.

soulsource , 8 months ago

Thanks! I caught it more or less by chance though. I was just scanning all moons in the system, and thought that landing would be a nice break from the scanning routine. And then this happened. It looked even better a few moments before, when the sun that’s visible in the shot was still partially occluded by the gas giant. Took me too long to fire up camera mode to catch that though…

soulsource , 8 months ago

Whoever made that decision obviously never worked in gamedev.

soulsource , 8 months ago

Yes. It’s in the Xbox Requirements, as in, the checklist of stuff you need to fulfill if you want to release a game on Xbox. To be precise, it’s test case 130-04: Featured Game Modes.

soulsource , 8 months ago

I was talking about the person(s) at Microsoft, who decided that it’s a good idea to have less RAM on the Series S than on the Series X…

(And for context: I work in gamedev, and in my experience making games stay within the memory budget is one of the toughest parts of porting games to consoles.)

soulsource , 8 months ago

Tell that to our artists 😉. As a coder I’m all for procedurally generated content. I did replace several heavy textures in our games by procedural materials, to squeeze out a couple of extra MB. However, that’s not the way artists traditionally work. They often don’t have the programming knowledge needed to develop procedural materials on their own, and would need to rely on technical artists or programmers to do so. Drawing a texture however, is very much part of their skillset…

But yeah, the mention of “squeezing out a couple of MB” brings me to another topic, namely that (at least in our games) the on-disk textures are only part of the RAM usage, and a relativley small one on comparison. In the games I worked on, meshes made up a significantly larger amount of RAM usage. We have several unique assets, which need to fulfill a certain quality standard due to licensing terms, such that in the end we had several dozens of meshes, each over 100 MB, that the player can freely place… Of course there would still be optimization potential on those assets, but as always, there’s a point where further optimization hits diminishing returns… In the end we had to resort to brute-force solutions, like unloading high quality LODs for meshes even if they are relatively close to the player… Not the most beautiful solution, but luckily not often needed during normal gameplay (that is: if the player doesn’t intentioally try to make the game go out-of-memory).

But I’m rambling. The tl;dr is: The memory constraints would not be a big deal if there was enough time/money for optimization. If there is one thing that’s never enough in game dev, it’s time/money.

soulsource , 8 months ago

I’m not an artist - my 3D modelling experience can be summed up as “none”, so I can’t really answer your last point. I know for certain that we don’t use normal maps to the extent they could be used, and therefore have way more detail in the meshes than they would need to have. I’m also pretty certain that we don’t do any tesselation on player pawns, and I think (but am not certain) that this is due to some engine limitation (again, don’t quote me on that, but iirc Unreal doesn’t support tesselation on skeletal meshes on all our target platforms).