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A Call To Move Games Outside Of Linux Desktop Environments, Own Wayland/KMS Setup

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  • #21
    Originally posted by asdfblah View Post
    Would this be too much burden on the devs? Would there be a framework for doing this? It's too bad that companies already spent time and resources porting games to linux... Before wayland.
    Anyway, this seems like an awesome idea.
    Most of them are using SDL, and a change like this would be at that level. The way something like this would work would be:

    User starts a game -> game tells compositor its a "take over the computer" app like a game (or Kodi or Steam Picture Mode) -> compositor like Kwin says "alright" and spins up another wayland VT, reparents the game to that, switches to it, and suspends itself so its not burning system resources.

    The only logic there is really notifying the compositor a game is running (which the game binary itself doesn't even need to do, something like Steam could do it for it) so it can generate a new VT and run the game on it rather than itself. SDL would need some updates to handle running EGL right on DRM, plus I'm not sure what setup libinput takes on a Wayland session that might need done, but it could probably include that functionality or spin it off into a minimalist "fullscreen program" Wayland server.

    The game itself doesn't need to do anything, though, as long as its not directly calling X functionality. If changes were needed in SDL and the game were shipping against an old version (such as the Steam Runtime) it would need to be updated.

    The only complications really are external programs running on the original desktop like OBS or Tox. If you switch VTs and halt Kwin and everything on top of it you freeze up the rest of your software. It would also mean in a multi-monitor setup either you run the game across all monitors or you are going to have dead screens.
    Last edited by zanny; 10 December 2015, 01:02 PM.

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    • #22
      I posted this on that blog, but I'll say it again here:

      If a PS4 with a FreeBSD based OS can do it, then I’m sure that Linux could do it.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by zanny View Post
        The only complications really are external programs running on the original desktop like OBS or Tox. If you switch VTs and halt Kwin and everything on top of it you freeze up the rest of your software. It would also mean in a multi-monitor setup either you run the game across all monitors or you are going to have dead screens.
        not really but in wayland you don't need to halt anything just inform it to stop rendering, so win can stop rendering in screen3 where your games is but stay fine in screen 1 and 2, you just need to alt+tab for kwin re route input(may require some magic TM)

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        • #24
          Originally posted by Sethox View Post

          I don't think this is a blog where he wants to bring PR really, it's a blog post for gods sake. It's to bring an argument/discussion to the table to actually start thinking about something. If this was a solid solution he would be in the table working on it already without saying a word since it is kind of useful technology to have for Linux users. Let's just try to be optimistic and reason if it's possible, I say optimistic because we would REALLY want Linux Gaming to become a thing... right?
          My point in saying it lost him a lot of credibility is that I have a hard time trusting the judgement of someone who comes up with that idea and doesn't realize the weaknesses in it (at least enough to acknowledge them) between starting to type and clicking submit.

          It's not a matter of PR, it's a matter of me losing respect in Martin's ability to quickly recognize glaring flaws in solutions. It calls into question his ability to recognize less obvious flaws at all.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by unixfan2001 View Post

            SteamOS is still X11 based. It doesn't do anything special. AFAIK, its compositor doesn't even unredirect.
            I have understood that it does some tricks to integrate games without flickering and modesets to Steam UI and Steam overlay. Unredirecting would be problematic because it could cause flickering when transitioning to games and when using the overlay.

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            • #26
              So, if this is implemented, how much of a performance gain do we get? It might not be worth it.

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              • #27
                Originally posted by sarmad View Post
                So, if this is implemented, how much of a performance gain do we get? It might not be worth it.
                is not how much performance you gain but how much performance you won't lose and that may vary a lot depending the hardware capabilities and the render quality and how nasty is the hit of the compositor rendering offscreen when there is a fullscreen app running on foreground. so maybe a lot maybe few fps maybe null depending the compositor/hardware/game combo

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by ssokolow View Post

                  My point in saying it lost him a lot of credibility is that I have a hard time trusting the judgement of someone who comes up with that idea and doesn't realize the weaknesses in it (at least enough to acknowledge them) between starting to type and clicking submit.

                  It's not a matter of PR, it's a matter of me losing respect in Martin's ability to quickly recognize glaring flaws in solutions. It calls into question his ability to recognize less obvious flaws at all.
                  +1

                  i mean - WTF-. i don't even know where to start ....

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by ssokolow View Post

                    My point in saying it lost him a lot of credibility is that I have a hard time trusting the judgement of someone who comes up with that idea and doesn't realize the weaknesses in it (at least enough to acknowledge them) between starting to type and clicking submit.

                    It's not a matter of PR, it's a matter of me losing respect in Martin's ability to quickly recognize glaring flaws in solutions. It calls into question his ability to recognize less obvious flaws at all.
                    This isn't the first time he's shown a lack of being in touch with how the gaming world works. As far as I can tell he's not actually a gamer at all and so he's approaching this from the perspective of being a developer of a compositor and desktop environment as opposed to from the perspective of a gamer and thus his priority is on performance I certainly agree with the comments on his blog that breaking alt-tab, with the rationale that it's okay because hey Xorg breaks Alt-tab, is just lame, and I don't think a host-key is really an acceptable solution

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                    • #30
                      How about instead of this KDE developers stop being lazy and write a proper desktop drawing handler that doesn't interfere with games. This is the most disturbing turn of events in the Linux desktop development. Rather than do detection that the desktop shouldn't draw and doing drawing correctly they want to just say, push this somewhere else so my code can remain greedy.

                      Laziness, which is fine. The developers spend their hard earned free time doing this work. The part that bothers me is the claim that this is the right way to do it instead of admitting to being obsessed with eye candy and not wanting to give up control.

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