Mikina

I hate Boids with passion. It's the Red Herring of local navigation, every gamedev tutorial has them, but it's borderline unusable once you get a little bit more complex terrain or require slightly more complex situation, not to mention that setting up the weights for it to not be totally ugly is pain.

If you ever need local navigation in a game, do yourself a favor and forget Boids, and just go directly for Context Steering.. It's still not perfect, but it can handle slightly more situation with a little bit more grace.

But fuck local navigation, I hate that problem with passion.

I totally get it, even for me, someone who is pretty tech-savy, it took around three attempts in the last three years to switch to Linux, and I've always given up until now.

But the issue is the reputation Linux gaming gets. I was convinced that I probably will have to dual-boot to play games, aside from a very small subset of games that may work. Every time I was trying to switch, I didn't even get to try any games just because I kind of assumed that it's going to be even bigger struggle than it was to get some of the tools I need to run, so I gave up.

But this time I gave steam a try, and was really surprised that so far, every game I tried running, including some with Easy Anti Cheat, I had almost zero problems, with the only outlier being the cutscenes.

Also, of course it's not a lot easier to just use Windows and game on it, but you pay the cost of privacy and Windows stuffing ads into your face, using increasingly darker patterns to push their bullshit. So, I'm not looking for an easier way to game, but doing it to not let anyone use my habits and data out of principle. I'm already used to minor inconveniences attachted to it, such as lack of cookies so you have to relog, VPN breaking default language on sites, or some apps not working properly on my phone (GrapheneOS). It's totally worth it for me, but it's not for everyone.

So, my point was not to convince everyone that Linux is better for gaming. But to let people like me, who would like to try switching are afraid that they will still have to dualboot for most of the games, know that's not really the case novadays, and that Linux is perfectly fine for gaming.

I've finally decided to make a switch to Fedora, after giving up last time due to almost nothing I needed working.

I still didn't manage to get Unity working, which I unfortunately really need, and for some reason it's also not working in a Boxes VM, but I was really surprised with Steam! Not only every game I tried so far is working great (after solving some initial trouble caused by NVIDIA card), I also managed to just run the games I have pirated directly from the Windows drive, without having to reinstall them, by simply adding the .exw to Steam.

The only issue left is to solve missing cutscenes/videos, being replaced by that "TV color test" image. Has anyone managed to solve it? I've tried installing various codeks, but it didn't help.

The only thing I'm missing is Parsec, since I was pretty used to workong remotely through wake on lab and parsec, but I suppose that's solvable down the line. Oh, and everything being Electron apps, especially since i unfortunately need O365 stack for work. But its not that bad.

So far i love it, and have already set Fedora as my default boot. Only have to switch for Unity, as of now. I'll see how long it will last.

If anyones looking for a new year resolution, go give your favorite distro a try! And if you have an NVIDIA card and even after following a random guide you get stuttering or lagging text in Electron apps, as i did, try the other repository for the drivers, thats what solved it for me.

The whole article felt like bullshit, and if I went to college and had to sit through listening to something like that - just random doomsaying without any proof, that doesn't even makes sense ("we won't need real CS engineers, but we will need prompt engineers to somehow convince the model and discover the correct prompt, since we don't know why it's replying as it is" - oor, maybe you can just leave out the AI step and have a real person do it.), and it's lacking any sensible point.

Oh, right. I get it now. So that's the point.

It happens partly through the use of platforms like Fixie, his company’s platform for easily creating AI-based applications

I would be so mad if something like this happened on my college.

You are right I shouldn't have equaled bitcoin with the rest of the crypto ecosystem. While most crypto is utter scam, it's true that there have been some slight advances here and there, and there are coins that may be actually useful for some cases, mostly Monero and I suppose Ethereum. I'd still say that crypto has done more harm than good in the world, and I say that as someone who's really focused at privacy, care about it a lot and have invested significant amount of time and effort into staying as private as possible.

But it's great that Ethereum managed to solve most of the issues with Bitcoin - unless I'm mistaken, it's not really used for investment speculation, and if it managed to keep the energy requirements low, that's good. But last time I remember researching about blockchain (it was few months, so feel free to correct me), isn't it running into serious issues with ledger size, that makes it infeasible for long-term (decades) of use, without sacrificing some of it's guarantees? Which is one of the main issues with blockchain tech in general, that I don't think has been solved so far.

I just hope bitcoin will finally die. It's literally just wasting absurd amount of energy, only to allow scammers to scam billions of dollars from victims, and regular people to steal from eachother by investing into it. I mean, if the only use of bitcoin by now is for speculation and investment, then it means that any dollar you made, you literally stole from someone else who will be left with useless bitcoin once it's all over. There's no value, and with the ledger getting bigger and bigger, and bitcoin more expensive to mine, it will eventually be worthless. And we all know it, so anyone who makes thousands of dollars, there's someone who probably financially ruined himself by making a wrong and stupid investment at the wrong time.

I hate crypto so much :D.

Oh, you are right, now I got your point. Sorry for that, I honestly didn't realize that I was making such a hyperbole.

I definitely plan to switch to Godot once I'm finally done with the school-project turned indie, that we're struggling with for the past 5 years and it's mostly holding on sunken cost fallacy. Unfortunately, since at work we mostly work on ports for other studios, I doubt I'll ever get to work on Godot there. But maybe at least the Unreal experience is better on Linux, never really checked that out.

700kWh per transaction? That's absurd amount of power. That's 70 EUR of energy per one transaction at current (EU) exchange price.

Is there anyone here knowledgeable enough about this issue to say whether those numbers are correct, or just an overestimate? It feels wrong.

After several of my favorite songs disappeared from Spotify, I've adopted a different approach to music.

If I see on on a band show merch stand, I buy a cassette. It's more of a novelty item and a way to slightly support the band. While I do have a portable tape player, I only rarely take it out. I switched from LPs to tapes because of the costs and huge effort associated with playing or storing them (that is, if you do it right are are not OK with fucking up your LPs), but tapes are cool and don't have that many storage or playing problems.

Other than that, I've stopped paying for any kind of streaming services, and save the 10$ per month to just buy one or two (new or old) albums from my favourite artists on Bandcamp, that I've spend the last month listening to the most. The albums I buy I add to my NAS library, which usually replaces stolen copies of said albums that I've previously got from Redacted.

This allows me to keep a pretty expansive library, by just stealing what I need, but with a promise that I'll eventually buy the album (using the money I saved on streaming services), if it's something that I've listened to extensively. I'm also not at mercy of streaming services, that can take away my music whenever they decide to.

So far I've been doing this for a few years, and even increased my budget for just buying albums if I can't immediately find them on Redacted.

From my experience, just getting Unity to run on Linux has a plethora of issues. When I tried running our project we've been developing on Windows for the past few years, I couldn't even compile it. Apparently, Unity on Linux doesn't support some kind of media file formats we use for cutscenes. While I was trying to resolve it, Unity crashed few times.

And then there's the hug problem with "works on my machines". We're targeting Windows, Windows is still major market share for gaming, and me being the lead programmer, I can't afford not being able to build and test a build on the OS we're targeting.

Even if the differences between build targets are minor, there's still a posibility that something will just work differently on Linux than in does on Windows. And then you have the whole DirectX issue - IIRC, you can't use DirectX on Linux, so we would have to develop the game for Vulkan or something else, which adds another problems to deal with for other programmers in our team, who don't use Linux.

And then you have consoles. Do the SDKs for Sony, Switch or XDK even support running on Linux?

I've tried switching to Fedora several times, but I never managed to get it to working conditions. Unity Hub was regularly crashing, I got a bazillion of errors related to unsupported type of media files we're using for ingame videos, and only during the time I was trying to troubleshoot the issue, Unity has crashed several times.

I suppose that if I was starting a new project, I would just go with Godot and on Linux, but a project that has been build for the last few years on Windows, and is planned to only be build for Windows for now, it adds unneccessary risk to the whole development. Just the fact that I would have to dualboot just to test whether builds work as expected is additional bother, and I suppose you will eventually run into issues with something not working the same on Windows as it did on Linux.

Also, isn't there the whole issue of DirectX not being supported on Linux?

And since gamedev is usually a lot more resource-intensive compared to other development, you can't really containerize it.

I would love to finally switch to Linux, but it's basically unusable for any kind of gamedev...