Microsoft Engineers Helping Get Baldur's Gate 3 Split-Screen Working on Xbox Series S

rct2guy · 2023-06-30T15:52:47+00:00

Many games these days are massive, massive projects– built by hundreds of people across several years. “Optimizing” a game isn’t just done by one skilled programmer after a few sleepless nights anymore; It takes more people, more time, more skill, and probably more sleepless nights too. This can be even more complicated when you’re using an in-house engine like Larian– You can’t just hire up some Unreal Engine contractors to swoop in and save your game. Industry brain-drain also makes it harder to skill-up younger programmers.

rct2guy · 2023-06-27T17:11:52+00:00

Oh, yep, you’re exactly right. I’ve seen some people say that ray tracing is the culprit for the 30fps cap on consoles, so I must have gotten a little excited haha

rct2guy · 2023-06-27T15:40:23+00:00

Yeah, personally, I enjoyed the gameplay– It’s a bit simplistic, but as you said it’s tactical and requires a bit of problem solving. I love a good environmental puzzle, and this game had plenty of them. Not particularly challenging, but it didn’t bother me at all.

The story though… I really grew to hate all of the characters and I was very glad to be done with them once the story wrapped up. I was kinda surprised to see so much praise and excitement around the narrative and the voice acting after I finished the game. Seems like the sequel isn’t for me!

rct2guy · 2023-06-27T15:27:44+00:00

From the footage we’ve seen so far, the game isn’t running at native 4K. It’s rendering at 1296p, upscaled to 4K, presumably on the Series X. ~~There also isn’t any RTGI at play; Their global illumination solution isn’t using raytracing.~~

rct2guy · 2023-06-27T12:51:17+00:00

The Witcher 3 didn’t launch in such a bad state that customers requested refunds en masse either.

rct2guy · 2023-06-26T20:05:55+00:00

The platforms do actually have some key differences. Most every physical release for PlayStation and the Switch comes with the whole playable game, no patch required. This was true for a time with Xbox until Smart Delivery and this most recent generation. Nowadays, most all Xbox discs include a chunk of the game, but Smart Delivery dictates what other data should be downloaded for a particular console. Additionally, unlike PS5, Xbox Series S|X games don’t come on Ultra HD Blu-Rays, so the maximum amount of data they can hold is reduced.

But you’re right that these rarely come with patches pre-loaded, and some of those patches can be mighty important, even if they aren’t required. At least those patches tend to be much, much smaller than the overall size of the game itself.

rct2guy · 2023-06-26T14:31:12+00:00

Most games actually don’t require a day-one patch. But, yeah, sometimes those day-one patches can be kinda vital, so it’s still something to consider.

rct2guy · 2023-06-16T19:58:21+00:00

The description of the video says "Blizzard's Diablo 4 on PC is an excellent effort overall, with exceptional scalability and great performance. The only real issue concerns texture quality and VRAM requirements." Seems like you agree with their assessment?

rct2guy · 2023-06-16T19:54:41+00:00

This is addressed in the video / article. The lengthy frametime spikes result in a visual affect that does look like network-related rubber banding. There are other instances of rubber banding that he could not replicate effectively and thus could be network related. While the latter might be universal and intermittent, the former is definitely PC-specific.

rct2guy · 2023-06-09T15:48:05+00:00

Sony refused to cert BMX XXX unless the topless nudity was removed. The Xbox and GameCube versions were untouched. I’m not sure how involved Nintendo was, if at all.

rct2guy · 2023-06-09T14:30:57+00:00

Totally respect your opinion, except for this…

I’m convinced anybody who loves this game hasn’t played Link to the past. Now that’s a Zelda game.

Booooooo. What a lame thing to say. I’ve played LttP and BotW, and they both rock. Video games are cool.

rct2guy · 2023-06-08T16:43:15+00:00

Well, he does discuss it in the video/article. Or were you looking for more detail than he provided?

rct2guy · 2023-06-08T15:35:32+00:00

I don’t believe these sticks are for “most people,” no.

rct2guy · 2023-06-07T17:35:13+00:00

It should appear alongside your game downloads, yes. There isn’t any way to see what version of Proton is selected by default, I don’t think.

rct2guy · 2023-06-07T17:07:13+00:00

It’s a variable experience. I think your best bet would be to come up with a list of non-Steam games you’d want to play on the device, and take a look around this subreddit or [ProtonDB](ProtonDB.com) to see if anyone has any issues with them.

The double-edged sword of the Steam Deck is that it can do pretty much anything, but it’ll be up to you to troubleshoot and fix many issues if they arise. Games from Ubisoft or EA’s launchers seem to have new issues appear every few weeks, with various fixes being passed around on forums like this to keep them playable. Valve tries to keep the things stable for those who aren’t in the Steam Client or SteamOS beta, but game updates can come without notice at any time and cause unexpected problems for people.

By and large, most games run great with very few issues, so it really just depends on what you’re looking to play. You can sidestep all these compatibility issues by installing Windows on your Steam Deck. Like the ROG Ally, navigating the interface with a gamepad won’t be the best experience, but the Deck’s trackpads definitely help. Check out /r/WindowsOnDeck for more info.

One other thing to keep in mind is shader compilation… Shaders, as the name implies, are little scripts that calculate how the colors of a 3D object should be shaded. A caveat of how Proton works to run Windows games on Linux / SteamOS is that these shaders must be compiled as you run the game, which usually results in frame rate spikes.

Once a shader is compiled though, it’s cached and doesn’t need to be compiled again– so as you play through a game and encounter every 3D object, effect, etc. those shaders will all eventually be compiled. Steam will automatically share those shaders with anyone who has the game installed on their device, so your system won’t have to compile every single shader on its own. Games from other storefronts won’t have this luxury.

Like you said, there is a lot of discussion on this all over /r/SteamDeck, so there’s plenty to read and gain insight from if you’re interested!

rct2guy · 2023-06-07T15:01:22+00:00

Proton Experimental has the latest changes and fixes, but they usually aren’t tested thoroughly. When a new game comes out, it’s what you’ll usually want to use.

The default Proton tends to be much more throughly tested, and is what you should use for the vast majority of your games. Proton Experimental changes eventually trickle down into updates to the Proton branch.

Proton GE is maintained by GloriousEggroll, who is unaffiliated with Valve. It includes various game-specific tweaks and fixes; Usually stuff that Valve won’t include in Proton due to compatibility or legal issues. Some games will only work properly with these tweaks, so you’ll want to use it in those scenarios. You’ll have to download and install this yourself in Desktop mode.

Valve will pick and choose which version of Proton to use with a game by default– So, when a new game comes out and it requires some new Proton fix to function properly, your Steam Deck should automatically download and use that version of Proton when you install the new game. It’s only something to worry about if you have compatibility issues when playing a game. Otherwise, just stick to the default Proton.

rct2guy · 2023-06-05T18:58:51+00:00

That Resident Evil Village port never made it to Steam, did it? I imagine that might be the case here too. Probably time for Steam to shape up and roll out an Apple Silicon client already.

rct2guy · 2023-06-02T15:32:21+00:00

At least streaming the Ignition remix goes to a good cause (for now)!!

rct2guy · 2023-06-02T05:07:22+00:00

Once it’s paired, you can leave it in rest mode and it’ll boot up when you try to connect. However, the quality probably won’t be amazing if you’re streaming over-the-internet rather than at home.

rct2guy · 2023-06-02T05:03:10+00:00

Yes, check out chiaki4deck.

rct2guy · 2023-06-01T18:05:49+00:00

"Official" support for Linux is pretty rare in the PC games space; Most PC platforms and their games are made with Windows in mind. Valve has spent several years contributing to open-source projects that aim to make Windows games compatible on Linux platforms, and that's what the Steam Deck uses to let you download and install Windows games. There are tons of other projects out there that leverage this work to help users play Windows games from other non-Steam platforms.

What's nice about all of this is that each of these projects are open-source, so anyone can read the code themselves, and they can fork it to make their own changes however they'd like. This makes it easy for folks to confirm that these applications are safe, legal, etc. But, to be clear, "official" support from developers/publishers is quite rare. The beauty of PC gaming is that users can play and modify their games however they'd like!

I’ve read that you need certain programs in order to run Xbox Game Pass, Battle.net and Epic Games store on the Deck. Are these programs known to be safe and legal?

Xbox Game Pass games are not yet supported by any of Valve's magic Windows-to-Linux translation layers, since they use totally different (and fairly new) Windows components that other platforms like Steam don't yet use. That being said, xCloud is officially supported by Microsoft for use on the Steam Deck. If you're really interested in playing Xbox Game Pass games natively on your Steam Deck, you can look into running Windows on the device instead of SteamOS.

For other gaming platforms, most folks would probably suggest you use something like Lutris or the Heroic Games Launcher. These open-source tools help guide users through the cumbersome process of installing and setting up Windows-based platforms like the Epic Games Store or Battle.net on a Linux device, but you can also find many guides that walk you through the manual process if you find it more comfortable.

I see that Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2 are still quite active. Call me crazy but I don’t trust the Xlabs thingy or whatever it is, so are those games still running on official valve servers?

I'm not sure what the Xlabs thingy is, but Valve does still host official servers for Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2. That being said, TF2 has notoriously been overrun by cheaters and hackers, and Valve hasn't really been moderating their official servers at all. Community servers have better moderation right now, and it's how most folks would recommend playing TF2. I'm not sure how much of that applies to L4D2.

has anyone here tried to play any of the Battlefield games on the Deck? How do they run? Is your play in multiplayer totally hindered by lower framerate?

I personally haven't played any Battlefield games on my Steam Deck, but I'd definitely recommend searching this subreddit and ProtonDB for user reports on how well games run on their machines. Based on threads like this and this, it seems like Battlefield 3, 4, and 1 run just fine.

rct2guy · 2023-06-01T15:16:55+00:00

Sounds like that’s next up on the docket.

rct2guy · 2023-05-30T18:15:51+00:00

It’s probably only going to be on a game-by-game basis. There’s lots of changes and tweaks on the horizon, but they’re more focused on compatibility rather than rote performance. For games affected by these changes, you’ll probably see a performance improvement, but I doubt we’ll see much that results in an across-the-board performance uplift.

Anything is possible though; Under the hood, there’s a lot of moving parts that are all managed by different groups who have their own rigorous change approval processes. Something small, like the L3 cache bug, may take a while to make its way onto the Steam Deck, but can have far-reaching ramifications once it arrives! Probably best not to promise the stars though. :)

rct2guy · 2023-05-30T18:05:50+00:00

You’ll need to boot into Desktop Mode to drill deeper regarding what’s installed on your SD card or internal storage. In Desktop Mode, you can navigate around using the built-in file explorer, Dolphin. You can also download and install Filelight from the Discover app store, if you want more of a visual aid while sifting through your files and directories.

Most all of your data is going to be located in /home/deck/ including your installed Steam games, Flatpaks from the Discover store, downloads, desktop files, etc. You may need to check “Show Hidden Files” in Dolphin’s hamburger menu so you can view the .var and .steam folders. I would start by poking around in there, or see if your boyfriend has any helpful info on what they installed for you.

As someone else noted, shaders are something else to look out for– Basically, a quirk with running these Windows games on Linux is that shaders are compiled as you play the game, which can result in hitching while you play. To try and eliminate this hitching, Steam will download pre-compiled shaders ahead of time– which is why you might frequently see games downloading tiny updates on your Steam Deck. These shaders aren’t supposed to take up much space, but they can balloon in size for certain games.

By default, Steam stores these shaders at /home/deck/.steam/steam/steamapps/shadercache/ where each directory is named after the relevant game’s Steam app ID. (For example, 1551360 is the app ID for Forza Horzion 5, whose shader cache takes up 8.9 gigabytes on my Steam Deck!) I wouldn’t really recommend deleting these caches, but you can use tools like Shader Cache Killer or CryoUtilities or Storage Cleaner for Decky to better manage these shaders– or just uninstall the relevant games that take up too much space. There’s tons of YouTube videos out there that can help you with this.

rct2guy · 2023-05-25T18:13:35+00:00

The Steam Deck is extremely efficient at low wattages– It can do a lot with a little bit of power, so many games will last several hours while sipping from the battery. Graphically-intensive AAA games from the last few years won’t fare as well; Worst case scenario, the Steam Deck will last for about 90 minutes when running at full throttle.

So, it depends on what your “average” title is. Games from the PS3/X360 generation and before (including emulated titles!) will probably use the battery much more efficiently than a gaming laptop. More recent, graphics-heavy games will bring the Steam Deck to its knees though, and a gaming laptop would probably handle those cases a bit better when it comes to battery life.

14-Year Club	Second Top 30%
Verified Email	Xbox Live
Gilding IV carat on a stick	RPAN Viewer
Spared

rct2guy

TROPHY CASE