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Open source fights back: 'We won't get patent-trolled again'
(www.zdnet.com)
tl;dr: It's a Yuzu fork.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I feel Tears of the Kingdom is overrated. Yes, it has some welcome quality-of-life improvements, and yes, it has more content than its predecessor, but I find the characters less interesting, the environments less inspired, and the encounters more repetitive. Every time I pick it up again, I get bored within a couple hours and go back to another play-through of Breath of the Wild.
I would vote for Baldur's Gate 3 over TotK without hesitation.
What do these professions have in common? Requirement for a government-issued license?
This tool looked interesting to me until I noticed that its external dependency count is in the hundreds, each of which increases exposure to vulnerabilities and supply chain attacks.
I hope that Rust will some day have a rich enough standard library that the "trust everything" software development model falls out of favour amongst the developers who use it.
You might start with the documents posted to the EFF site over the past year. For example, the September opposition letters include specific court decisions and put them in context, including commentary from law professors.
Looks like things have changed:
Will my registration expire?
No, your registration will never expire. The FTC will only remove your number from the Registry if it’s disconnected and reassigned, or if you ask to remove it.
https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/national-do-not-call-registry-faqs
It's re-posted from a news community, where it was since removed for not being from an acceptable news site. Unfortunately, the acceptable news sites covered this more than 30 days ago, which disqualifies their articles regardless of whether they were ever posted to the community. shrug
I couldn't find a better article in the time I had to spare, so I re-posted this one. I think what's important in this case is just that word gets out. I don't see anything misleading about this one, and the EFF link (which is also not exactly a news site) is plainly visible.
Some of the APIs in use on Linux today come from older Unix variants. (For this reason, I probably wouldn't call one of these a "Linux API" as the author did, though I guess it works linguistically for those that are usually present on Linux.) These APIs have semantics that were designed before threading existed on many platforms. Making them thread-safe without breaking existing code can be challenging.
If setenv(3) is among these, it could explain why glibc's implementation doesn't support multi-threaded programs, and why its documentation states as much. To have used it in a multi-threaded environment, ignoring the docs, was a bug in the Steam client. Perhaps it never occurred to the people who ported Steam's code to glibc that threading issues might be different from what they were used to on other platforms.
To be fair, the author might be aware of this, as he did refer to glibc's implementation as a tradeoff rather than a bug.
Matrix messaging apps. It's nice to have modern messaging features, end-to-end encrypted, with no single point of failure, no Google involvement, and no phone numbers. I expect to start recommending it widely when the 2.0 features land in the popular clients.
WireGuard VPN. It's fast, even on low-power devices.
Self-hosted Mumble. Excellent low-latency voice quality for chatting or gaming with friends.
Radicale, DAVx⁵, and Thunderbird, for calendar and contact sync between mobile and desktop, without handing the data over to Google or anyone else.
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DXVK Version 2.5
(github.com)
Memory managment
Resource and memory management were completely rewritten in order to use allocated video memory more efficiently:
- Reduced fragmentation may reduce peak memory usage in games such as God of War by up to 1 GiB in extreme cases.
- Memory defragmentation is now performed periodically to return some unused memory back to the system. The goal is not to reduce VRAM usage at all costs; instead this is done conservatively if the system is under memory pressure, or if a significant amount of allocated memory is unused. Keeping some unused memory is useful to quickly service subsequent allocations.
Note: Defragmentation is currently disabled on Intel's ANV driver, see #4434. The dxvk.enableMemoryDefrag config option can be set to enable or disable this feature via the the Configuration file.
Driver support
While technically not required, the new memory management works best on drivers that support both VK_EXT_memory_budget and VK_KHR_maintenance5. The Driver Support page was updated accordingly.
D3D8 / D3D9
Software cursor
Support for emulated cursors was implemented for the D3D9 cursor API, which allows games to set an arbitrary image as the mouse cursor. This fixes an issue in Dungeon Siege 2 (#3020) and makes the cursor appear correctly in Act of War and various older D3D8 games. (PR #4302)
Sampler pool
Unreal Engine 3 games using D3D9 have a quirk in that they pass a seemingly uninitialized value as the mipmap LOD bias. In order to avoid creating more Vulkan sampler objects than the driver supports, previous versions of DXVK would round the LOD bias to a multiple of 0.5, which could introduce visual inaccuracies. As a more correct soluition, DXVK will now destroy unused Vulkan samplers on the fly and use the correct LOD bias.
Note: The aforementioned workaround was never needed or used in the D3D11 implementation, it only affected D3D9.
Bug fixes and Improvements
- On Nvidia driver version 565.57.01 and newer, strict float emulation is enabled by default for improved correctness. Games for which this option was already enabled may see a small performance uplift on this driver.
- Made various changes to potentially improve performace on certain mobile GPUs. (includes PR #4358)
- Display modes are now ordered by refresh rate to be more consistent with wined3d and fix issues with some games picking the wrong display mode.
- Fixed a large number of wine test failures.
- Ascension to the Throne: Fixed old regression that would cause parts of the ground to render black. (#4338, PR #4341)
- Command & Conquer: Generals: Fixed performance issue caused by a missing D3D8 entry point. (PR #4342)
- King's Bounty: Warriors of the North: Fixed water rendering issue. (#4344, PR #4350)
- Tomb Raider: Legend: Fixed flickering geometry with strict float emulation. (#4319, PR #4442)
- Rayman 3: Fixed a regression that caused rendering issues. (#4422, PR #4423)
D3D11 / DXGI
Resource management changes
In order to reduce system memory pressure and improve stability in 32-bit games, creating, uploading and discarding resources is now throttled if the amount of temporary staging memory allocations exceed a certain threshold. This fixes crashes in Total War: Rome II and a number of other games. Additionally, large DYNAMIC textures commonly used for video playback will no longer use a staging buffer.
The d3d11.maxDynamicImageBufferSize and d3d11.maxImplicitDiscardSize options were removed accordingly; affected games such as Total War: Warhammer III and Ryse: Son of Rome should now perform well by default, without excessive memory usage.
Note: These changes negatively affect CPU-bound performance in a number of games, including Shadow Warrior 2.
Bug fixes and Improvements
SEQUENTIALswap effects are now implemented for DXGI swap chains, which allows games to read previously presented backbuffers. This fixes an issue wherein savegame thumbnails would appear black in certain visual novels. (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7017)- Devirtualized some D3D11 method calls to improve compatibility with Special K.
- Fixed incorrect shader code generation for
EvaluateAttributeSnapped. - Lock contention is reduced in certain games that use Deferred Contexts for rendering. This may improve performance on older CPUs in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and some other games.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered: Fixed a possible GPU hang. (#3884)
- Diablo 4: Work around an issue where the game does not start if an integrated GPU is exposed.
- The Sims 4: Work around a use-after-free bug in the game's D3D11 renderer for real this time. (#4360)
- Vindictus: Work around potential rendering issues caused by uninitialized constant buffer data. (#4405, #4406)
- Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami: Fixed a regression introduced in DXVK 2.4.1 that would cause these games to lock up on start. (PR #4297)
Miscellaneous changes
- An SDL3 backend was added for dxvk-native. (PR #4326, #4404)
- Fixed an issue introduced in DXVK 2.4.1 which would lead to error messages about failed buffer creation.
- Fixed a long-standing issue where overlapping occlusion queries would lead to incorrect Vulkan usage. (#2698)
- Fixed a rare issue wherein timestamp queries would not be tracked correctly and could read incorrect data.
- Fixed various other issues that led to Vulkan validation errors in games such as Dishonored 2, Tales of Arise and The Sims 4.
- Fixed various issues with MSVC builds. (PR #4444)
- Disabled a workaround for boken render target clears on Nvidia drivers prior to version 560.28.03 on unaffected drivers.
- If supported,
VK_EXT_pageable_device_local_memoryis now used to enable better driver-side memory management.
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I hope they're using this time to learn lessons from their Starfield flop and gather the talent and budget needed to improve upon Skyrim. A modern engine probably wouldn't hurt.
However, my expectations are very low at this point.
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mox
joined 9 months ago
Elite Dangerous is my go-to lately.
It's different to most other games, by not being goal-oriented except for the goals you set for yourself. No main quest line dictating progress. No mandatory tasks. No win condition. Instead, it drops you into a simulation of our entire galaxy roughly 1300 years in the future, where humanity has mastered hyperspace travel and spread through hundreds of star systems.
(To give an idea of the simulation's scope: Around 85 million systems have been recorded by players so far, and those are a vanishingly small fraction of what's out there. Space is big.)
I like that it offers a variety of activities to fit whatever mood I might be in on a given day. I can hunt pirates, mine asteroids, engage in a bit of piracy myself, find and collect bio samples, infiltrate rival settlements, venture into vast unexplored areas of space, discover Earth-like worlds that nobody has ever encountered before, defend humanity against hostile forces, photograph beautiful stellar phenomena, rescue stranded survivors, customize and finely tune my ship to perform beyond its original specs, team up with friends, pledge to a political power and expand their influence, or chill out as a space trucker and haul cargo to earn enough money for my next upgrade. It can occupy all my attention, or just be relaxing entertainment while I listen to music or an audiobook.
It's an MMO in the sense of having a large game world (galaxy) shared by all players in real time, but PvP is optional. One mode exposes you to other players, while another limits you to NPC encounters. You can switch between them at will.
One warning: A space ship has more than a few controls to learn, and they're better suited to a game controller or HOTAS than a keyboard and mouse. I use button combinations for almost everything beyond basic flight controls, since there aren't enough buttons on a controller for everything.