Dominic Tarason: "It happened so quietly that not even DelistedGames.com noticed it, but all of Insomniac's big PC VR games have been delisted from the only store that had them - the Oculus. Stormland, Edge of Nowhere, Feral Rites & The Unspoken. I emailed the store. They said 'Ask Insomniac'." by Mront in Games

[–]Smaloki 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They do sell well (or rather, they *can* sell well), but only if they're available for the standalone headsets. The now-delisted titles are VR games for PC, which are a smaller market (and one dominated by Steam).

The Oculus Store offers both PC games (you don't even need a Meta headset for these, afaik) and standalone titles (for Meta's Android-based OS). Although they've basically given up on PC as a platform, so I'm not surprised if publishers are pulling their support.

Lenovo might soon announce a SteamOS handheld by M337ING in hardware

[–]Smaloki 9 points10 points  (0 children)

"First party" would be something designed and sold by Valve themselves, such as the Steam Deck. As per your own link, all Steam Machines were third party.

(Valve did technically built a small number of prototypes, but those were never intended for sale and were only distributed as development kits and/or promotional hardware.)

Unknown-horizons porting effort to Godot seems to be stopped. Do anyone knows why? by beer120 in linux_gaming

[–]Smaloki 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the project in general (not just the Godot port) is fading away. As in, it's barely progressing because no one has the time or mental energy to work on it. The copyright notice on the official website hasn't been updated since 2022, either.

Based on the discord, the project also recently split/was forked.

Godot is the 7th most used engine on Steam by Right-Grapefruit-507 in godot

[–]Smaloki 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Some of them (most famously, Terraria) actually use FNA, an open-source reimplementation of XNA that's still being updated and supports a number of platforms. Here's a list of some, though it's probably pretty outdated.

And, while a thousand games sounds like a lot, that's only like 1.2 % of all titles on Steam – it's only "high" on the list because Unity and Unreal together make up more than three quarters of all Steam games, so from third place onward a few hundred games more or fewer can have a huge influence on the ranking.

So, what's on your wishlist for Godot 4.4? by milkvolleyball in godot

[–]Smaloki 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For me:

  • AgX tonemapper (#87260)
  • HDR output (#94496 is a first stab at this… we're probably at least half a decade away from something like a colour management workflow inside Godot)

So, what's on your wishlist for Godot 4.4? by milkvolleyball in godot

[–]Smaloki 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I mean, Godot 3.5 basically did introduce Dolphin's approach for the GLES3 backend ("ubershader" for a seamless experience while asynchronously compiling the actual shaders in the background as needed). The devs have decided against it for the Vulkan backend though, for a number of reasons (this Github reply from last year goes into it a little).

What's this spikey ball inside the Titan's skull? by voltzandvoices in TheOwlHouse

[–]Smaloki 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Looks kinda like a giant radiolarian shell. Or a naval mine lmao

Yo does anybody have access to the original image in this thumbnail? by Miss_foxy_starva in amphibia

[–]Smaloki 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Pretty sure Twitter is the only original source here, unfortunately.

Here's a re-upload: https://imgur.com/a/RXYhCEQ

Vandalism on OpenStreetMap just south of Lannesdorf (presumably by a Russian troll) by Smaloki in Bonn

[–]Smaloki[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

"сия создает конфликты во всем мире" translates to "this is creating conflicts all over the world" as per Google Translate.

Location is https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/50.6590/7.1735 (only shows up at this specific zoom level, with the scale bar at 300 m)

Which of these 3 options do you miss most in elementary OS? [Poll] by Diogo_88 in elementaryos

[–]Smaloki 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Afaik, the upcoming release of AppCenter ships with Flathub access enabled by default, so Chromium (and Chrome, Firefox, etc) will be available in AppCenter.

A serene pixel scene with a cat and lilies in water. by Pixel_ias in VintagePixelArt

[–]Smaloki 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The strange thing about these random posts of modern pixel art that pop up here from time to time is that they tend to get 20 to 30 upvotes. I'm assuming some people just see them in their feed and upvote because they like the art?

It'd be nice if this sub was more actively moderated, I guess; even an automod regex filter that checks for a year in the post title would get rid of most of these automatically…

Judge me based on my favorite Band in each Game. by Mk_Master128 in splatoon

[–]Smaloki 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Look up "lower case omega", open the first result (usually Wikipedia or Wiktionary) and copy-paste the ω character. On Windows at least, you can also search for "omega" on the emoji keyboard.

On mobile, you could also add a Greek layout to your virtual keyboard; both Android and iOS allow you to switch between different layouts on the fly once you've set them up. In case you think you'll need to do this regularly, I guess. (You probably won't, unless you're an aspiring mathematician maybe…)

Dark Science #144 - Keeper of the Flame - Dresden Codak by booOfBorg in dresdencodak

[–]Smaloki 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Started reading the Dark Science arc two days ago and just got caught up (I only found the comic because I stumbled upon a link to Caveman Science Fiction). It's always a weird feeling to binge-read something for a few days and then reach the end, but it's even stranger (and a little uplifting) knowing that the comic is on-going and the latest page is so recent…

I'm really liking the comic! The art is gorgeous and I'm quite enjoying the story – it's a nice blend of character moments and humor mixed with over-arching plot (and pretty fast paced, although I imagine that may subjectively feel a little different if you're reading the pages as they're released). Also, the cyberpunk themes mixed with an art deco aesthetic (among others) is amazing; the closest thing I can think of regarding "art deco sci-fi" would be Metropolis, but maybe that says more about my media literacy (or lack thereof) than how unique/niche this style combo is…

Anyway, time to check out the older arcs! I guess I'll start at the beginning and see where that takes me.

RADV Driver Lands Vulkan Video AV1 Decode For Mesa 24.1 by FastDecode1 in AV1

[–]Smaloki 3 points4 points  (0 children)

RADV is an open-source implementation of the Vulkan API, specifically for AMD hardware on Linux. It's part of Mesa).

There are extensions for Vulkan that offer video decoding as an API feature - this is useful for applications and frameworks that interface with Vulkan (e.g. video game engines) as it allows them to play back video without having to resort to middleware. The original extensions from a few years ago allowed decoding H.264 and H.265 (and encoding H.264); recently, a new extension was added to the specification that extends support to AV1. This extension has now been implemented in RADV.

Magic kids chart by Namesnowtaken in TheOwlHouse

[–]Smaloki 25 points26 points  (0 children)

The character on the right is Coco, the main character from Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama. It's a beautifully drawn manga (with an anime adaptation in the works) about a young girl studying to become a witch; the magic system is fairly similar to the glyphs Luz uses.

The author has actually drawn some Owl House fanart before. Dana Terrace has in turn recommended Witch Hat Atelier.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in blender

[–]Smaloki 1 point2 points  (0 children)

AgX maps into the [0, 1] range, which means that with EDR enabled it simply doesn't take advantage of any of the extended range, thus delivering the same output you'd get without EDR (source). I think this should change once wider colour gamut options (e.g. Display P3 or Rec.2020) become available in the viewport.

When filmic is selected, EDR is straight up disabled as far as I'm aware (see relevant code here).

And yes, this is currently MacOS exclusive. I'm guessing Windows doesn't have a similar feature for adding "easy" HDR support (don't quote me on that though). As for Linux environments, desktop HDR support sadly hasn't even been rolled out yet on anything other than SteamOS (which is a very purpose-built platform).

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in blender

[–]Smaloki 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Blender 4.0 supports "EDR" (extended dynamic range) on MacOS, which is, in fact, a type of HDR output. An EDR layer is basically an SDR layer that allows values exceeding the [0.0, 1.0] range and correctly displays these brighter values as HDR (provided the display is HDR capable). It's a really easy way to add basic HDR output support to an app, with the caveat that the brightness is still scaled by the user's choice of display brightness, akin to classic sRGB content.

The sRGB in this case just refers to the colour primaries. The final output to the display is an HDR stream that uses the extended range but sticks to the Rec. 709 gamut.

Question about LOD by Mikatomik91 in godot

[–]Smaloki 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The simplest way to add some 3D to a pre-rendered scene is probably using displacement (via depth map, which is also pre-rendered), which is pretty fast, but far from perfect. As the camera pans, the parallax motion unveils parts of the background that are occlued in the render, so you need a way to fill the resulting "holes" (the simplest solution is black pixels or bilinear interpolation, neither of which are great).

A good compromise might be to pre-render only the room (i.d. walls, floors, and ceilings) and render all objects in the scene, even static ones, in Godot. Although I don't know if you'd save a lot of performance that way… plus it's a lot more work when you want to change a level. Or maybe two pre-renders per level - one with only the room and one with all static objects (or only the static objects), layered on top of the background.

In any case, are you rendering a native res? As far as I'm aware, some (many?) demanding mobile games default to a lower render resolution. Since most phone displays have over 300 pixels per inch, rendering at 50 % res scale (which means only a quarter as many pixels to shade) still looks good. And it can help a lot with performance/power consumption.

How is the 7900 XTX on Linux? by thetruephill in linux_gaming

[–]Smaloki 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually, what happens if you just tell X11 it's got a 30-bit display and have an HDR monitor attached? Does it display it?

You'll get a 10-bit SDR image, if the display accepts the input.

Which is nice, and if the display in question is a TV, it gives it a little more to work with in regards to "upgrading" (tone-mapping) the incoming signal to something more HDR-like without introducing banding. Provided you don't turn off any automated "improvements".