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Valve Steam Deck

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Re: Valve Steam Deck

#561

Post by isatty »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #140
dralley wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. I'm a little surprised they didn't go with something like Fedora. The kernel / drivers are kept just as up-to-date as Arch but the rest of the system is a little more stable.

Aren't up-to-date libraries fairly important for steam?

From my personal experience not really. I’ve steam running on an about 2yo old (at this point) Gentoo system that’s still working perfectly fine. I really should update it but I don’t do much on that system except play a single game.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#564

Post by majormajor »

Siira wrote: post #523
modeless wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a great link. Perhaps even more interesting is this: Valve is working with anti-cheat vendors for Linux (Proton) support. So one of the biggest remaining obstacles to Linux gaming may soon be addressed as a side effect of this.

Anti-cheat is not exactly consumer-friendly. They should design their games such that the client is not trusted, and then the only possible cheats would be UI/AI assistants to the human players, which is not really cheating.

An "assistant" that generates input to move your player in a sports game, or aims for you in a shooter, is absolutely cheating.

You can't make the client untrusted to the point of "I don't trust that the human really pushed the button" or you don't have a useful multiplayer mode anymore. Cheaters are truly ruining everything, here.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#565

Post by penagwin »

darkwater wrote: post #548
modeless wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a great link. Perhaps even more interesting is this: Valve is working with anti-cheat vendors for Linux (Proton) support. So one of the biggest remaining obstacles to Linux gaming may soon be addressed as a side effect of this.

I'm totally out of the game scene nowadays and I don't understand how anticheat software should be installed locally. How does it work? I thought it was done on the server level.

You _must_ have server-side anticheat if you have any at all because client side can (eventually) be bypassed - however client side anticheat is better at catching subtle but low effort/obvious cheats.

Also some types of cheats such as wall hacks can only be detected client side.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#566

Post by Defenestresque »

gorgoiler wrote: post #347
jchw wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m super excited to see that they’ve chosen Arch as a base for SteamOS. I understand fully why they originally chose Ubuntu, but I feel like Arch actually hits a lot of sweet spots for consumer use cases and could be adapted for such use quite effectively. (To be fair, I feel similarly about Gentoo, which was similarly adapted for ChromeOS quite successfully.)

I love a good distro story but it doesn’t seem very relevant here. A Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Arch or Gentoo provides a platform for users to configure their system. The distro is a toolkit for finishing up a generic OS into the specific workstation needed by the user to do their work. Steam Deck on the other hand has one job to do: launch /opt/steam and run things linked against libsteam. The end user won’t b…

>The end user won’t be doing anything with the OS itself.

What makes you think so? The desktop environment will be powered by KDE Plasma.

>Accordingly, the underlying distro just doesn’t seem that interesting.

Valve is pretty clear that in addition to having a gaming mode they want the device to be a full-fledged (linux-based) PC.. hopefully with everything that entails.

>What about the distro could possibly be surfaced to the end user/gamer that they would care about?

Maybe nothing in "gaming mode," but in "desktop mode", it's Arch running KDE Plasma. It's essentially a Linux-based PC with a gaming option. (Or vice-versa, depending on your primary use case and point-of-view.)

Given the fact that the desktop mode exists and is leaned on as an important feature, I'd assume a lot of underlying functionality will be exposed.

>It’s not like Steam will apt dist-upgrade their device: upgrades will be a complete reimage.

I too am interested to see how they will handle this, but based on their website copy I would not be surprised if you could at least apt-get upgrade the desktop portion, with the gaming mode running either on top or separate from it.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#567

Post by westpfelia »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #289
chx wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, it could end up all but killing off PC gaming if it is super successful. Why? I thought PC gaming is about powerful graphics cards you can't have pretty much anywhere else.

There's a relatively niche segment of the PC gaming population that really wants to push the envelope in graphics. I think most PC gamers like gaming on their PC because it is a very open platform that allows them to play games they bought the 90s, all sorts of mods, games from random nobodies on the internet, the latest games, and also emulate a wide variety of game systems and computers.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

This is directly from valve. It's probably what Valve looks at when making these decisions. I assume this APU is relatively similar to the 1060 in power? Maybe the 1050. But I haven't seen any benchmarking around the APU.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#568

Post by [deleted] »

Siira wrote: post #523
modeless wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a great link. Perhaps even more interesting is this: Valve is working with anti-cheat vendors for Linux (Proton) support. So one of the biggest remaining obstacles to Linux gaming may soon be addressed as a side effect of this.

Anti-cheat is not exactly consumer-friendly. They should design their games such that the client is not trusted, and then the only possible cheats would be UI/AI assistants to the human players, which is not really cheating.

[deleted]

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#569

Post by jakeinspace »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #289
chx wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, it could end up all but killing off PC gaming if it is super successful. Why? I thought PC gaming is about powerful graphics cards you can't have pretty much anywhere else.

There's a relatively niche segment of the PC gaming population that really wants to push the envelope in graphics. I think most PC gamers like gaming on their PC because it is a very open platform that allows them to play games they bought the 90s, all sorts of mods, games from random nobodies on the internet, the latest games, and also emulate a wide variety of game systems and computers.

Based on my experience, people wanting to play games which are over 20 years old are much more of a niche crowd than those using beefy GPUs. Obviously, few people have RTX 3080/3090 levels of investment, but based on Steam statistics, mid-tier cards from a few years back like the GTX 1060, RTX 2060/2070, and RX 580 are all near the top of the most recent steam surveys.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#570

Post by caymanjim »

Siira wrote: post #523
modeless wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a great link. Perhaps even more interesting is this: Valve is working with anti-cheat vendors for Linux (Proton) support. So one of the biggest remaining obstacles to Linux gaming may soon be addressed as a side effect of this.

Anti-cheat is not exactly consumer-friendly. They should design their games such that the client is not trusted, and then the only possible cheats would be UI/AI assistants to the human players, which is not really cheating.

It'd be great if clients could be completely untrusted, but the reality is that it's impractical--if not impossible--to have the server dictate what's visible. Games rely on client-side rendering to determine if you can see something. In milliseconds-matter FPS games, there's no way that the server can calculate whether you can see someone poke their head around the corner or whether you're using wall hack to see them in advance. Human reaction time is way too fast, and even great networking is too slow for that to be effective, even if there were enough computing power server-side to run all the numbers. I can't even think of a way that things like aimbots could be prevented server-side; it's hard enough just to detect them.
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