I like their work a lot but I wish they didn’t use dwarFS, simply because it’s not easily installable on most distros.
They suggest Arch or other very up-to-date distros to play their games (and it’s true that you get the best experience with the latest AAA games) but in reality 90% of their releases are tiny indie games (that they insist on compressing with dwarFS) or older games that’d run very well even on a Debian oldstable, it’s a pity they’re kinda cutting out a lot of potential users
Lately I’ve been playing only small games on my laptop, I’ve been getting the windows gog releases (freegogpcgames.com) and installing them into Lutris, it’s super convenient
We use dwarfs in order to provide more features to the users instead of maintaining the status-quo. Even if most of the games are small, at a high scale of quantity the mounting system will be useful to people that want to seed them. There are other various advantages such as overriding game files instead of overwriting them for example when mods are used that way.
The reliance on up to date systems is mainly because outdated ones can yield different results than what was tested. We also use the new wine vulkan mechanic from wine and plan to replace dxvk with it as much as possible. This makes the scripts more reliable instead of requiring to reach github for the latest dxvk version.
We dont want to pack any of this open source software with the game files given that they receive updates and it would take away the convenience for the user to use its own compilations and so on.
Latest wine is of course available on stable distros as well.
Appreciate the response, I guess my point of view is of a patientgamer, that would not add extra pacman repos just to check out a game…
But I see how you guys have/want to keep up with the cutting edge to offer serious competition, and so from there the need of standardization and not doubling of the efforts makes perfect sense
I’m probably in the minority of gamers, but in the majority of linux users, and most of those that I know even forget they can play casually on their machine and instead rely on consoles or secondary pcs for fear of breaking their main system
In any case your collection is incredible, so if it makes people interested in installing a rolling distro and avoid that windows partition or closed up console, that’s a huge win in my book. Thumbs up 👍🏻👍🏻
We’re very patient gamers as well, when it comes to the games themselves. For example the empress cracks are made by a very sketchy person and we decided to not have any of it’s releases uploaded. This means that we’re instead waiting for someone else to crack denuvo (unlikely) or for it to get removed. The games are also very popular and we’re missing out on some pretty big names.
Also we look at the rating of games before uploading them and only take into consideration ones held in very high regard (above 85% with some exceptions). It doesn’t really make everyone happy but it makes for more healthy gaming instead of swimming through new games every day. So I’d say we’re patient in many ways.
you guys have/want to keep up with the cutting edge to offer serious competition
Back in the day there were people regularly coming to our chat just to ask us why are we bothering with it when windows repackers exist. They compress better and the amount of native games is not significant. Well even if we had the native files for every single game on our list it would barely get past a 20% ratio anyway. We started investing regularly to get native files to help with that.
Thanks for these infos, it’s very interesting to get a glimpse of what goes on behind the “scene”. Makes what you do even more impressive, keep it up 🙂
And I’m sure if dwarfs gets more popular and well maintained, it’ll get distributed more, so it’s not an issue. Also after commenting here yesterday I tried a quick tiny game (Jetstream) on a debian install and saw that dwarfs release on github comes with a dwarfsextract package that’s usable standalone, no installation required, in a few minutes I was playing the game’s exe bypassing the script.
we have a setup page for debian, and switching to sid isn’t necesarry (for now) as debian 12 is recent enough. dwarfs is easy to install from MPR (aur for debian, the hunterwittenborn ported the PKGBUILD system from arch) mpr.makedeb.org
Way back in its beta days, a couple of mates couldn’t put it down. They couldn’t explain why digging holes was fun nor placing cubes. I really didn’t get it after a demonstration from them. Eventually had a LAN with a mate that was vaguely curious but also didn’t think it was going to be interesting.
We didn’t sleep for the next 36hrs, nor notice it was a new day until my family got up and started making breakfast.
Did you two play much afterwards? I’ve played a few times with friends but I find it usually fizzles out after a couple months then it’s just me who hosts occasionally messing around.
Fully the same here. Sometimes I get bouts of inspiration to hop on the server or organize to do something with the group we have, but always fizzles out after a few months as you say. Which is fine really, a lot of other good games I tend to circle back to over time just like minecraft.
For Roblox and Minecraft, a TV should be perfectly fine and in fact excellent. I will go out on a limb here and say that even for most ‘real’ games a TV is fine. The latency associated with TVs is most noticeable in FPS games. For other genres like strategy, third-person adventure games etc, I do not think it matters as much if at all. Many people, especially those who have not used a low response / gaming monitor, do not even notice a lag at all (Note: You will find many such people in real life but never ever on the internet). It would be nice of course if your TV had a “Game Mode” which lowers latency, but it may not necessarily be there in a 10-year-old TV (though it was not that uncommon even back then, so do look for it in your TV settings).
Regarding programming on the TV, I think the situation is slightly different. Using small text in general doesn’t work for me at all on a TV. Most TVs, other than OLEDs or recent non-OLED ones, don’t seem to handle text well enough in my experience. There’s either ghosting or some other manner of artifacts which makes the text harder to read compared to a monitor (apart from the distance from TV involved). I commonly see this issue even with office televisions used for mirroring laptop output. Maybe playing around with sharpening and other settings might get it to work well enough though and it really depends on the specific TV in question.
Overall, I feel you should be fine, at least for gaming, but probably for programming as well. I have a couple of gaming rigs hooked up to my living room and bedroom TV’s and I quite enjoy gaming on them. The much larger screens and ability to lounge about while gaming more than make up for any perceived or actual lag for me.
I hope your kid and you have a great time with your new setup. Have fun! :)
Been playing Spirit of the North this week. I’ve actually finished it, including 100% achievement completion, because it’s not a huge game. What is really sticking out to me right now, though, is that I adore this game. I like a lot of games, but it’s pretty rare for me to absolutely love one.
I’ve also just finished a run through Baldur’s Gate 2, playing a bard for the first time ever. I enjoyed the class more than I thought I would. Onwards to Throne of Bhaal next week!
What did you like about Spirit of the North? I got it with PS Plus but haven’t bothered with it because it got pretty middling review scores. Looks beautiful though.
So, yeah, the fact that it’s a beautiful game is definitely part of it! Visually it’s stunning, and the music is also really beautiful. I also think it’s superbly written: there’s absolutely no dialogue, but there is still a narrative as you play through each area, and I think that’s genuinely very hard to do well, but Spirit of the North does. I really got invested in the relationship between the two characters. There’s also no combat or fighting in the game, so it’s all focused around the platforming and puzzle elements.
I can definitely see why it’s not to everyone’s tastes. It got “very positive” on Steam, so it’s rated more highly on PC than on the PS, and the negative reviews it did get are complaining about either the controls or the game not telling you what you need to do. So the former is fair, I think: the devs focused on making a beautiful game, so it’s about the experience, not the mechanics. The controls aren’t bad as such, but they’re not as smooth as you’d expect for a platformer, I guess? You get the occasional moment of “why didn’t I make that jump?” But there’s no “miss the jump, die, restart the level” mechanics, so it’s normally 1-3 jumps that you need to repeat if you fall. I found the platforming elements really forgiving in terms of not punishing you for screwing up.
The second criticism, that the game doesn’t tell you what you need to do, I think is unfair. The direction you need to go in is always the way that feels most intuitive, either because of a path, wall, or just the shape of the terrain. Some of the puzzles need you to stop and think about them, and the game doesn’t hold your hand by going “and do this here, and that there, and then that”.
The game I’d most compare it to is Abzu, but with more Nordic and less ocean vibes. If you’ve played Abzu and enjoyed it, then you’ll probably enjoy Spirit of the North too.
Nice, thanks for the write-up! I will definitely bump this up the list then. Honestly it looks so appealing I think I’ve just been looking for an excuse to give it a shot that outweighed my wariness from the reviews.
It’s definitely worth a shot. It’s actually a pretty small game: I didn’t rush, and spent 6 hours on it the first time I played (and 16 hours for 100% achievements). So even if you find it’s not for you, it’s a pretty small time investment to find out. :)
I second skipping over the motherboard for a budget-but-upgradable build. Video card is the most important thing, so as long as the motherboard supports it, it’s good enough, and the vast majority will.
That said, second hand graphics card still isn’t a bad idea, since when you’re finished with the build some years down the line, the video card will be the oldest component.
Instead, get an NVMe M.2 hard drive, and a PCIe expansion for it since that budget motherboard probably won’t have native support. Expansion cards costs hardly anything relatively, and native support can be added to the list. A great hard drive makes ok RAM better than OK and cuts level loading times significantly. Honestly, adding a great hard drive to even some tiny budget dell desktop with built in graphics makes an ok budget gaming computer.
If there’s money left over get a good sound card or whatever peripherals you’d prefer, maybe Wi-Fi/Bluetooth (budget mobo probably skips them) and RAM if the budget mobo is still a recent one. Despite the TV likely being good enough, too. I wouldn’t focus on the motherboard until you’re picking out the high-end CPU, which is expensive but also just a lower priority than the other stuff, so a good monitor is on that peripherals list, too.
That dell comment is from experience, I made one into a surprisingly decent Minecraft/Roblox machine for a relative. Only thing that stopped it was the HDD it used. A solid-state drive is sufficient, m.2 is just future-proofing.
No harm in trying it first. Beyond basic connectivity, here are some things you’ll need to check for.
You’ll want to make sure you can turn off overscan in your TV settings or the edges of what the computer will display will be cut off in the image. This can make navigating things like the Windows desktop a little difficult.
Then you’ll want to make sure responsiveness is acceptable. Perform any action (click something, type something in Notepad, etc.) and make sure the TV displays it instantly. If not, you will need to enable Game Mode on your TV if it is available. Sometimes a Sports mode will get you there too. If such a mode isn’t on your TV and there are no other settings that reduce the response delay, you’ll need a dedicated monitor.
If you’re OK on both of these things, the only thing left would be stuff like resolution and color matching. For the best image, make sure the computer is set to use the TV’s native resolution. This may not necessarily be the highest resolution available, FYI. As an example, I have TVs that are 720 native but will accept and display 1080, albeit things don’t look great at that scale. Your mileage may vary. For color matching, don’t worry too much about accuracy if you’re not doing things that require a perfectly calibrated display. Set the picture mode on the TV to whatever vivid/movie/sports/etc color mode works for you, but keep in mind some of these can affect the delay depending on the TV (see above).
I’m a pretty big user of abbreviations, and usually I understand them. But some times my mind just gets locked and I can’t decipher the abbreviations, and I begin to wonder if we’re using too much of them.
I’ve done it with an old cheap tv and it sucked and i got ghosting and choppy refresh rate. I’m sure if you get a decent modern tv would be fine though. I’d also want to check latency.
I’ve started playing Ghostrunner. I’ve really missed level based games, and the gameplay is just thrilling. It’s really been a blast trying to go faster than my friends, as well as collecting all the items in some really well designed levels
The easiest way to figure out where a game is writing its saves is to load it up in Sandboxie and save your game, then check sandboxie’s box content to see what got updated or saved and where.
Also, Cyberpunk is on GOG (because it’s made by the people who run GOG), there’s no need to get it through DODI unless you have a severely restricted internet connection and therefore desperately need the smaller size of a repack - you can get the clean gog installer from gog-games. You should just be able to install the latest GOG version over the old version with no difficulty.
Yes, I was planning to download the new version from gog games. But when I installed the game I didn’t think about gog games at all, when searching for games I often go directly to DODI.
Could you explain this Sandboxie method? I don’t understand, what do I have to upload?
Sandboxie is a sandboxing app. It’s main purpose is to isolate an app from your PC, mainly used to run suspicious apps. It can track what the isolated app does.
It’s rather complicated, so it’s easier to find the game here, or as what I do, use Everything and sort by recently modified files so I can check what files are just written.
I can also recommend Everything (1.5a) as it’s the only tool I know of where I can search not only for file names, but also for the contents of pdfs, docx, etc on every drive, including network drives.
You can also check out Process Monitor which is a freeware tool from Microsoft. So basically what you would do is: open process monitor, make a new game save and then process monitor will show you where this save file is located.
This actually worked, thank you. I’ve located the save files now. Now what, I copy it and (in case the reinstallation of the game deletes those files) just paste it?
Yes, backup save and config files, and restore them in case of the reinstallation, but generally games rarely delete them when you uninstall them. This approach works almost with every game.
Also, I went from a 1070 to a 6700 XT myself, can say it doubled framerates in games that needed it (Elite: Dangerous in planetside areas for example), so that's something for you to consider; if you're getting 30 FPS then it'll be a good upgrade, if you're only get 10 FPS it might not be enough.
Ryzen 3700X, however I suggest to not worry about bottlenecking; even if does, it's likely to give you the most FPS per $ spent on upgrading. I ran on a i7 920 for the longest time (including the GTX 1070).
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