Steam On Linux Crosses 1,400 Games

[mitcoes]

Steam OS is a console OS, so I think it must be compared to other console OSs as PS4 and Xbox and their number of games are:

https://steamdb.info/linux/ 1190 + 567 (hints of Linux support) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_360_games "There are currently 1,163 games (multiplatform: 959; exclusive: 112; console exclusive: 73) on this list as of June 23, 2015." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...tation_4_games "There are currently 647 games on this list (47 of which have been confirmed as free-to-play) as of June 23, 2015."

The desktop Linux games number is a "gift" Steam does to the GNU/Linux OSs as a gaming platform, but the goal for them is not to make home MS WOS users to switch to GNU/Linux to play games, but It is for console gamers to be able to play desktop titles at their consoles with affordable console machines. A new "world of games" for console gamers.

[RealNC]

Sorry to ask directly but please name some, which key people?

Martin Gr??lin is one example. Quote:

I have never understood the need to change the resolution.
If the screen is larger than the resolution supported by the game, why not run in windowed mode? At least I (though I'm not a gamer) hate the pixel graphics I get when running a game which supports only 1024x768 on my full HD computer screen.
...
I hope we could agree that nobody wants to change the resolution, but that faking the "right" resolution for the game window should be enough.
...
I think on this thread a good approach has been highlighted: upscaling in the compositor and not changing the resolution.
...
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for improving the situation, I'm just someone who is very sceptical and am looking for the best solution not from a theoretical aspect but from a practical one.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-s...ead.html#00001

The above is just an example. Many core people in the Linux stack are totally clueless about video games. They have the very strong view that video games are just like other desktop applications, and that video games should be changed to work like desktop applications. In this example, we have a person who doesn't know anything about video games trying to convince a video game expert (Ryan C. Gordon) that he's wrong. Like, seriously. He's suggesting that video games should *go through the compositor*. I shit you not... Look it up yourself.

You can not expect those people to make Linux gaming awesome, as they have no idea what's even needed, why it's needed, and why Windows gets it 100% right and Linux gets it 100% wrong.

[RealNC]

Input latency? Input latency is slower on Windows.

No, it's not. In Windows, I can set the amount of pre-rendered frames to 1. That way, there's at most 1 frame in the buffer. Mouse input feels immediate that way.

On Linux, there's no such setting. Mouse-look feels floaty, with 2 or maybe even 3 frames buffered. That makes it unplayable for me. The only workaround for that seems to be to disable vsync. But then I get tearing. I don't like that either.

On Windows: it's perfect. Low latency, no tearing.

Of course, if you don't do these tweaks under Windows to begin with, then yes, it's gonna be pretty much the same in both Linux and Windows. That is: high latency in both.

[anda_skoa]

Martin Gr??lin is one example.

Then maybe you should find a quote that supports your claim instead of one that invalidates it?

Cheers,
_

[RealNC]

Then maybe you should find a quote that supports your claim instead of one that invalidates it?

Cheers,
_

???

There should be no exclusive fullscreen mode, and the compositor should upscale? And three years have passed and nothing was done to fix any of the problems?

Really? This invalidates my claim?

OK, I'm done here. Have a nice day. I'm booting Windows to play some games where this stuff works correctly.

[dungeon]

OK, I'm done here. Have a nice day. I'm booting Windows to play some games where this stuff works correctly.

I guess you know how Windows kernel is called... but do you know how Windows xserver is called?

[anda_skoa]

Really? This invalidates my claim?

Yes it does.
Developers working together to find a good solution to a problem is the opposite of not considering the use case that uncovered the problem.

Cheers,
_

[Passso]

Steam OS is a console OS, so I think it must be compared to other console OSs as PS4 and Xbox and their number of games are:

The desktop Linux games number is a "gift" Steam does to the GNU/Linux OSs as a gaming platform, but the goal for them is not to make home MS WOS users to switch to GNU/Linux to play games, but It is for console gamers to be able to play desktop titles at their consoles with affordable console machines. A new "world of games" for console gamers.

At least someone who understand that Valve is far to be an idiot grunt who made a bad choice with Linux.
The SteamBox has to compete versus PS4 (yes I consider the 2 others globally out), not versus Windows PC.

Let's just pray that they will not modify things like kernel so that Linux compatibility will remain over years

Microsoft won with "developers developers developers". May Valve win the same way!

[Cyber Killer]

On Linux, there's no such setting. Mouse-look feels floaty, with 2 or maybe even 3 frames buffered. That makes it unplayable for me. The only workaround for that seems to be to disable vsync. But then I get tearing. I don't like that either.

That is the fault of bitmap cursors, for some reason they get low performance. If a game uses hardware monochrome cursors then the mouse input is near realtime. Check some games that allow to switch this option (e.g. Battle for Wesnoth) to see for yourself.

As for general quality of the ports - I also feel they aren't good enough. Quick example: Settlers Online showed up today and? it fails to run on any 64bit system, because it needs 32bit pepper flash installed on the users system. There's a custom hack on the game forum that fixes it, but it doesn't excuse the developers who didn't test their game on a normal system (IMHO most GNU/LInux users are on 64 bit systems since at least 5 or more years ago, we had 64bit distros ever since the first amd64 cpus started coming out).

That seems to be the most common problem - lack of testing. Most of the bugs in faulty ports would be fixed if the devs took care and tried their game on 3-4 different machines with different distros.

[Inopia]

Of those 1400 games there are a bunch that don't actually work on SteamOS because Valve isn't shipping any version of Java on it. They don't even have openjdk in their repository. Game devs depend on it as nearly everyone has Java, but it is not a core Steam library so SteamOS doesn't have it. Complaining to the game devs to bundle Java doesn't help because SteamOS is still such a niche platform that bundling stuff just for it isn't worth the effort. No other system has problems with having Java available.

Of course I should just Linux up and install it myself from 3rd party source but that is not really the console experience I'm looking for in SteamOS. Hopefully Valve will come to their senses and include openjdk before the actual release.