Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan • Hacker News Board

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#291

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #110

kungtotte wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there's never any issues keeping games working on Windows...

There are sometimes problems, sure, but compared to Linux, where an application compiled 2 years ago for the same distro often won't work on the current version, it's pretty damned good at compatibility.

> where an application compiled 2 years ago for the same distro often won't work on the current version

Ship non-system libraries with your application instead of assuming they will be in /usr/lib* and that's a solved problem. Valve even does that for you with the Steam runtime.

This isn't any different on Windows - if you don't bundle your dependencies (including MSVCRT / .NET / whatever) then you will run into problems.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#292

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:25 AM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #114

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is super hard to get right. Not _really_. The issue is that games are trying to do god-knows-what when they lose focus. In reality, they just need to ignore this happening. Regular applications handle losing focus just fine, and games would too -- unless you try to do magic funky stuff when you lose focus (my guess is that they do this to work around funky WM issues on window that don't exist on Linux).

First, sure, if games didn't do complex things, it would be easier to support. But they do. So it is hard. Also, it's much more complicated than that. When running in exclusive fullscreen mode (which almost all fullscreen games did before about 5 years ago), they have to do stuff like restore the original display resolution, tear down their graphics stack, and restore all of that when bringing the window back up. Man…

I think the point was that for some games it might be better (perfect even) to not tell the game that it has lost focus since on X11 there is no such thing as exclusive fullscreen anyway. Of course that won't work for everything (game won't auto pause, might continue polling for mouse input, ...).

AFAICT Proton already lies to games about the fullscreen resolution and silently upscales the result instead changing the monitor resolution (which I think might be the single most awesome thing Proton adds) so this isn't unprecedented.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#293

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:33 AM UTC

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #246

coldpie wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, sure, if games didn't do complex things, it would be easier to support. But they do. So it is hard. Also, it's much more complicated than that. When running in exclusive fullscreen mode (which almost all fullscreen games did before about 5 years ago), they have to do stuff like restore the original display resolution, tear down their graphics stack, and restore all of that when bringing the window back up. Man…

> they have to do stuff like restore the original display resolution This is something that I find incredibly annoying: games handling their own resolution and having their own resolution configuration. It's like their reinventing something that the OS already provides. Just use the resolution that's configured: if I wanted to change it I'd change it. Non-native resolutions look awful on LCDs anyway, so apps really s…

> Games that try to detect screen resolution themselves very often screw up picking the right resolution when you have multiple screens: but again, the problem is they're trying to do too much.

Even with just one monitor, Unity (native) refuses to believe that 3840x1600 is what I want. Why are hardcoded resolution lists still a thing. At least Unity doesn't change the monitor resolution though, just the internal render resolution.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#294

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:35 AM UTC

graynk wrote: post #283

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have to do stuff like restore the original display resolution This is something that I find incredibly annoying: games handling their own resolution and having their own resolution configuration. It's like their reinventing something that the OS already provides. Just use the resolution that's configured: if I wanted to change it I'd change it. Non-native resolutions look awful on LCDs anyway, so apps really s…

> Just use the resolution that's configured: if I wanted to change it I'd change it. So you're saying you'd want to change desktop resolution each time you want to play a performance heavy game? > Non-native resolutions look awful on LCDs anyway, so apps really shouldn't change it. So you're saying developers should take away the options that people actively use because you subjectively don't like how it looks on you…

> So you're saying you'd want to change desktop resolution each time you want to play a performance heavy game?

Yes, for the Window definitely. If you need to drop the render resolution for perf then the game should upscale at the end (and for fucks sake, handle arbitrary aspect ratios correctly!!!). Personally though, I'd rather wait until I have hardware that can run the game at full resolution.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#295

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:39 AM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #201

coldpie wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We investigated that briefly. It's not as easy as it sounds, and even if it was, some games do useful things when they lose focus (e.g. auto pause the game, stop sending audio). We decided it wasn't worth pursuing.

From one engineer to another: I'm sorry you keep having to deal with people who haven't spent a single minute working on this problem second-guessing your work. I get the same thing regularly and it can be very frustrating. As you noted: if the solution were so trivial it would have been done and shipped already.

You can work on something forever and still have others provide new insights. Feedback is not an attack, even if you have already considered that option (and even then there might be crucial details that could change things).

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#296

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:47 AM UTC

ben-schaaf wrote: post #150

forest_dweller wrote: post #47

This is nice and all but they need to fix things like alt-tabbing in an out of a game. Many games just crash. I know it sounds dumb but sometimes when organising a game or using discord you need to alt-tab from the game to the chat app. This almost never happens with Windows unless the games are old. Also performance when streaming via discord or OBS significantly drops the framerate even on games my rig can play at…

I don't play many non-native games, but I have had many games on Windows crash or behave badly when alt-tabbing. Personally I've found that aspect significantly better on Linux.

There can sometimes be issues with native games too, altough I agree that the situaton is better (mostly due to not having exclusive fullscreen in the first place). One game I came across was letterboxed on my resolution but would never re-pain the black borders (after initially clearing them). This worked fine until Alt-tabbing out and back in where (with DRI3) the backing memory for the backbuffer would get reallocated and those black borders would now show garbage.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#297

Post by seg_lol » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:49 AM UTC

chaorace wrote: post #280

seg_lol wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now that cross platform abstraction layer is the Web. - https://get.webgl.org/webgl2/ - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_... - https://webrtc.org/

I absolutely agree. It's the best way to get an app out that works everywhere. In fact, I actually really wish we could collectively work out some kind of shared container environment for such apps to run more "natively". Something like Electron, but shared between many applications and a little more loosey-goosey in terms of hacking on top of it. Essentially, I want emacs for webapps lol

Not being snarky, but I believe that format is html.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#298

Post by WhyNotHugo » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 12:14 PM UTC

graynk wrote: post #283

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have to do stuff like restore the original display resolution This is something that I find incredibly annoying: games handling their own resolution and having their own resolution configuration. It's like their reinventing something that the OS already provides. Just use the resolution that's configured: if I wanted to change it I'd change it. Non-native resolutions look awful on LCDs anyway, so apps really s…

> Just use the resolution that's configured: if I wanted to change it I'd change it. So you're saying you'd want to change desktop resolution each time you want to play a performance heavy game? > Non-native resolutions look awful on LCDs anyway, so apps really shouldn't change it. So you're saying developers should take away the options that people actively use because you subjectively don't like how it looks on you…

> So you're saying developers should take away the options that people actively use because you subjectively don't like how it looks on your specific monitor?

No, I'm saying they should remove it because they shouldn't aspire to reimplement an OS. I mean, why does a game need to have a panel to configure my hardware, my OS already has that.

Imagine if every single app out there implemented their own "screen resolution" management and settings panel.

It makes no sense.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#299

Post by loa_in_ » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 12:17 PM UTC

mosselman wrote: post #2

Valve is doing god’s work when it comes to Linux gaming. I have played over 40 hours of GTA V without many troubles. The game looks great and performs great. So glad I could get rid of my windows install.

They seem to agree that a free OS with an army of enthusiastic geeks ready at all times is at least almost as good for general public (casual gamers) as is MS proprietary garden. If Windows flopped somehow all my friends would have their gaming rigs with most of their games within few days thanks to my experience, and I wouldn't charge more than a few beers.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#300

Post by giobox » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 3:19 PM UTC

jay_kyburz wrote: post #245

giobox wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's beyond scope of a hacker news comment for me, but Epic case against Apple/Google store distribution terms is sufficiently different IMO. How exactly would Epic ship this open platform when Google and Apple expressly control what apps run and do not? From where I stand, without intervention their only option is inferior browser based streaming solutions like this: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/5/21551152/fortn…

By open platform I meant they they should release their own phone. I believe they could do it for not much more than the price of the lawsuit. The iPhone is not even a general purpose computer, it's a brick of consumer electronics that just happens to have an app store on it. It's Apples house and they get to make the rules. If Epic doesn't like it they can build their own house, or they can contribute to a house tha…

Good luck _selling_ that phone to the hundreds of millions of users you lost immediately overnight, to users already perfectly happy with the phone they have. Your customers aren't going to pickup the tab just because you didn't like the distribution terms you had already willingly agreed to on iOS/Google app stores, and its a big tab. A new phone isn't cheap for most. I am also completely ignoring the fact building a competitive phone is likely really hard and Epic have no track record there.

I'd love to be proved wrong of course - who doesn't like a cool new tech platform succeeding? Being realistic though, there isn't exactly a long list of new mobile hardware/OS platforms launching at the scale and success Epic would need to replace lost iOS/Android revenue. In fact, no one has ever managed to do that really! That Epic have already partnered with Nvidia to use browser streaming tech to get Fortnite back onto iOS suggest similar thinking to me. Epic's own lawyers are making similar arguments right now too.

Imagine if every railway company had to build it own tracks, or every airline needed its own airports. Conceptually, app stores on mobile platforms are increasingly similar. It's not practical to keep building more airports and more track networks, especially when in this case the airport or network is a handset the customer has to buy. The railway example is one Courts had to deal with in early 20th century in a lot of countries, same too for shipping ports.