> it’s always easier to make an engine than a game.
It could just be different interests. The kind of person who makes a game engine is a technical optimization-focused tech-focused person, sort of like a mechanic. In order to make a game, you have to deal with softer concepts like "is this fun" which is more like a designer/artist. Game studios need to bring these people together, but in the FOSS world the mechanics are happy to spend their time building an engine that runs beautifully without concerning themselves with the art side of things.
I'd disagree. Just like how no one needs to find an engine usable, no one needs to find a game fun. My personal itch.io account is full of games no one finds fun :)
Why assume that a game has to be made? Making a handful of tech demos doesn't come with that baggage and deflects criticism of making an empty shell of an engine with nothing to speak of.
In the real industry the very technical people are focused on very concrete problems like level 3 is causing too much overdraw on Xbox. What can we do without breaking X,Y, and Z.
Yes and no. It’s true that some people really only care about a slice of the process, but if you’ve been around the gamedev scene long enough you’ll also see people working on very technically ambitious projects while they’re fooling themselves thinking they’re making a game.
I just need a few more years working on my 4D non-euclidian voxel MMO engine before I can make my game!
This is precisely the reason that I do not log in to HN on my phone. My phone is read-only and if I want to upvote or comment then I have to switch to my laptop. Pretty easy with firefox because I can send tabs to other devices.
I have a special place in my heart for UT2004 because it was one of the very few games that had an official native Linux version at the time. I think I enjoyed the fact that it was running on Linux more than I enjoyed the game itself.
Yes! I remember at the time I had just gotten linux to reliably work on my dual Opteron workstation so that I could migrate away from Win2K64. UT2K3 and UT2K4 were just about the only games I could run because Wine didn't work very well back then.
In retrospect, I have a much greater appreciation for Windows 2000. User experience was really front and center in a way that we seem to have gotten away from since Web 2.0. It basically never blue screened. Games ran well. Personal computing seems to have taken some steps backwards since then.
There are big companies, that are actively doing harmful things to undermine personal computing, in order to farm engagement, attention and show us ads. Phones become more and more locked down, except for very niche products. Many people don't even have a PC any longer, and only have phones, with none of the freedom of personal computing that we enjoy(ed). Only people in the know are able to and willing to put in the effort to run an OS that includes freedom. Trying to help a friend or family member with a computer or phone problem, one will quickly notice the efforts that big tech makes to undermine freedom respecting solutions.
Not just working, but it actually ran better in Linux for me -- my university-mandated laptop could only run it at 1280x800 in Windows if you wanted to hit 60fps, but the Linux client was able to run at the panel's native 1920x1200.
Yes! I had both a Linux (main) and a Windows box in my office back in the day, and a friend came over frequently and we would "kill things!" for hours :-)
IIRC, I bought the metal case for UT3, but the linux binaries never appeared ...
Yes it's in combination with KDE that it doesn't work well yet. Simpler window managers are ok. But big desktop environments still have major issues with freebsd's wayland. KDE for sure and I believe Gnome also (I don't use it).
That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0].
I have a near infinite amount of respect for Wine. It seems like for at least the last twenty years, Wine just keeps getting better and better with every release.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility.
Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t bother even checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is so consistently good that it’s not worth the small effort to check ProtonDB.
I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine. This isn’t a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it’s a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows entirely.
Sadly Wine only seems to be working well for games. Every non gaming app I've tried to run does not work. It does seem like Valve and the gaming community is contributing almost all the effort on the project.
If its for your parents, then why not switch them to OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much better than LibreOffice).
There's an alternative project that runs Windows apps in a VM but integrates them fully and transparently into your Linux desktop, with MS Office particularly tended to. The apps run as if they're native to Linux. It was discussed here just this past week.
I wouldn't hold my breath. I've been trying to get them to switch for the better part of a year, and even Windows Update completely bricking my mom's computer [1] (look at my post history if you want more details on that) wasn't enough to convince them. I'm not sure what else could happen outside of Bill Gates personally leaving a flaming bag of dog manure on their porch.
[1] I'll say it again; if anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider getting out of the software game and maybe consider a job in the exciting world of janitorial or food service, because you are exceedingly bad at the whole "software thing" and you should be ashamed of yourself and how much damage you have cost the entire world with your utterly incompetent software.
Given how good Proton is, I don't think it's useful to target Linux for most indie devs unless it's a one click build for multiple platforms. Even then, I've definitely had more issues with games with native Linux builds than Proton, where there's been a number of games I've set to use Proton over native to get better performance.
Given that older Linux builds of games consistently run worse than the Windows versions of those same games through Wine/Proton, I hope never.
Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for everyone. Developers need to Just™ not use a few footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything, while consumers get a game on that works just as well on Linux as on Windows.
Not if you as a developer don't touch the footguns. Avoid those, and your game works fine with no problems, no intervention from Proton or Wine needed.
It's the Pareto principle doing its thing. 80% of games were fixable by not a whole lot of fixes to Wine (I mean, it's still a lot of work, but once the work is done, you don't need to redo it for 1500 other games), while the remaining 20% are out there doing weird stuff and needs manual fixes of some kind.
If you don't do anything weird, you land in that 80% and everything works as it should. With developers noticing SteamOS being a thing, more of them start doing sanity checks to make sure it works on Linux, and that 80% starts growing to 90%.
Then there's the kernel anti-cheat that's unfixable though, which pulls the percentage down again.
I fail to see why? It was pretty short sighted of developers to build Linux verions of their games back when they did, since most either perform poorly today, or just crash on more modern versions. I don't expect those games to get fixed any time soon. Far from it, I expect Linux versions to degrade as more and more of their dependencies change and Linux changes over time. I don't expect the situation to be different for native Linux ges made today.
Wine meanwhile works perfectly with 80+% of games, and those 20% that don't are all newer stuff or stuff that's never going to get a Linux version short of the Linux desktop actually getting of the ground.
They control the technologies, their direction, how a future DirectX 13 or Windows 12 might look like, and have all the legal system on their side.
Also Microsoft Games Studios owns enough studios to make an impact.
Also Proton means zero game studios have to care Steam OS exists, they target Windows, use Visual Studio, and Valve is the one that has to make the needful if they care.
The same studios might even be using game engines that support GNU/Linux, yet letting Valve do the work is much more appealing.
Graphics APIs have trended to be lower level, running basically directly on the GPU. I doubt Microsoft will be able to convince game developers to go the other way just to get their fingers inbetween you and your game.
Microsoft has been absolute dogshit at releasing newer program APIs for developer to use. Wine doesn't support UWPs/appx just because there's no demand, since no-one uses the Windows Store. You expect that same Microsoft to get game devs to jump on their new DRM scheme?
Microsoft released even their darling Halo in 2020 and 2021, and have committed to release Halo: Campaign Evolved in 2026 on Steam. I can't think of any new titles under the Microsoft umbrella that hasn't also released in Steam. They've realised that battle is lost. They can change course, but that doesn't mean they'll get anything out of that.
Developers are already doing sanity checks and patches specific to SteamOS. That trend will continue if SteamOS or Linux gains ground. It doesn't matter that the foundation is Microsoft, because even if Microsoft goes bankrupt tomorrow, that foundation doesn't disappear, and even the most malicious Microsoft can't unmake reimplementations or translation layers of their APIs.
That same studio would prefer to make a stable Windows version than an unstable Linux version that might not even work in 5 years since it used some stupid dependency. ANd if they're sensible about it and do a sanity check with Proton, Valve doesn't even have to do any work for them outside of what's already been done.
Valve is the one making most of the work, devs target Windows, business as usual.
WinRT now runs on Win32 side as well, that is what new APIs like Windows ML, the abstraction used for all kinds of AI infrastructure now use, just as one example.
Microsoft Games Studio will do whatever they need to make shareholders happy, and if Steam gets in the way of XBox handhelds, maybe a change of heart will take place.
Who knows, Valve is the one that needs to worry, not Microsoft, they control the technology.
> and if Steam gets in the way of XBox handhelds, maybe a change of heart will take place.
Nay a single consumer will see it that way, but rather see Xbox getting in the way of Steam. An Xbox handheld which you can't run your Steam games on will probably be about as much a failure as the Series S and X, or an equivalent successor, which I can't see any way for Microsoft to turn the tide with, and can't imagine Microsoft not knowing that.
> Who knows, Valve is the one that needs to worry, not Microsoft, they control the technology.
Game devs aren't going to follow Microsoft's every whim and desire, and Microsoft can't rugpull current technologies out from under neither Valve nor game devs.
Ubisoft tried that with their newer games. It didn't work. I can't imagine it would work even if they took every single title of Steam that they could. All that would do is make those games not sell.
Ubisoft made games people wanted to play. It's not a ton of leverage, but more than you can say for Microsoft studios.
What can Microsoft even threaten? No more Fallout 76 and Halo Infinite? Linux is banned from Bedrock Edition? They'll re-cancel the Perfect Dark reboot? Every punishment I try to imagine is like death-by-pillow-fighting.
Even Sony is releasing their games on Steam since they finally figured out that releasing their games for the PC is a more profitable venture than having them be console exclusives. Good luck convincing Microsoft of doing the opposite. Sure, they can make their games Xbox or MS Store exclusives, but it would be an irrational decision even if their end-goal is nothing but profit, since exclusivity clearly will lose them more sales than they can earn back in not having Steam be a middleman.
This article was about members of the US congress so their salaries are $174k for your run-of-the-mill congressperson and higher for leadership roles. $174k is a very comfortable salary.
It's low for people who control trillions of dollars in yearly government spending, and who indirectly decide the fate of trillions more in private spending. $174k being "comfortable" is a misdirection: it should be, "what is the market rate to get someone who can reasonably handle trillions of dollars without corruption and for the benefit of their constituents?" And the answer is apparently higher than $174k per year, because many of these people go on to million dollar appointments in the private sector afterward.
See also, for example, Singapore, known for fairly low corruption, who pays government heads over $1M per year.
> The NPU is slower than the integrated graphics for inference.
Yeah, that's expected. On consumer devices, the NPUs are not optimizing for speed and they're not meant to out-perform the GPU. They are optimizing for low power consumption. They want to be able to run simple AI tasks without turning your laptop into a frying pan, so that is where the NPU comes in.
Quoting wikipedia:
> On consumer devices, the NPU is intended to be small, power-efficient, but reasonably fast when used to run small models.
> It should be illegal to run a “support” department where most agents don’t understand the bare minimum of basics about how the internet works.
Recently when Optimum in NYC broke their IPv6, only 1 out of the 5 tech support people I talked to knew what IPv6 is. None of them fixed the problem. The problem resolved after a couple of days, so I assume someone finally noticed their infrastructure was broken. Incredibly frustrating to deal with an impenetrable wall of incompetence.
It could just be different interests. The kind of person who makes a game engine is a technical optimization-focused tech-focused person, sort of like a mechanic. In order to make a game, you have to deal with softer concepts like "is this fun" which is more like a designer/artist. Game studios need to bring these people together, but in the FOSS world the mechanics are happy to spend their time building an engine that runs beautifully without concerning themselves with the art side of things.
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