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More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

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Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#321

Post by edude03 »

barney54 wrote: post #9

For people that own a Steam Deck, how do you like it? And how do you use it? I would like to talk myself into buying one, but I can’t think of a decent use case.

I guess I’m a naysayer but I hate mine. It’s so big in its case that’s it’s impractical to take on trips with me. The games I happen to want to play don’t work on it without hacks and I find it pretty uncomfortable to hold.

I recently got both a GPD Win 3 and 4 and I’ve found they’re much better in all the areas I care about. They’re more expensive of course but better to spend more on something that you use than spend less for something you don’t.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#322

Post by NovaDudely »

parabyl wrote: post #217
NelsonMinar wrote: post #175

Proton is such a huge achievement. The SteamDeck isn't for me (don't care for mobile form factor). But this work also benefits me on a Chromebook using its experimental Steam support. It runs Steam and games in a container that works well with Proton.

Proton is really quite incredible as a compatibility layer, I've not seen any performance drops (if anything, only small performance gains, which I assume is due to fewer background processes in the OS), but most incredible is the frequency with which Proton is updated and worked on. I'd tried gaming on linux before and gave up after a week or two of configuration attempts. I had put it off for ages and tried with pr…

The one very specific oddity depending on how old the system is, at make sure the GPU supports Vulkan. Yes, you can force it down to OpenGL but compatibility is low and buggy. Not the fault.of proton as they are just focusing on the path forward.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#323

Post by dimgl »

belmarca wrote: post #227
dimgl wrote: post #208

I'm currently using a Steam Deck to play through Diablo IV and it's absolutely amazing how well Diablo IV runs. Once you get it working, it works great. That being said it did take me an unbelievable amount of tinkering to get it to work. And unfortunately SteamOS comes with all of the typical bugginess you would expect from a Linux OS baked into a handheld device (keyboard disappears, trackpads stop working randomly…

Maybe you didn't know what you were doing? There are some tutorials to follow online which makes it easy. For non-SD users reading this: you can get D4 running in about the time it takes to download Battle.net and the game itself. You basically install Battle.net on the deck, and then create a launcher from within Steam. That's it.

> Maybe you didn't know what you were doing?

Okay, I'm on Hacker News, what are the odds I don't know what I'm doing?

You don't "just install" Diablo IV on the Deck. You have to add the Battle.net Setup binary as a non-Steam app, or go through Lutris. I chose to not use Lutris and instead go through Steam which requires you to go to desktop mode, install it, and then change the paths from the setup binary to the Battle.net Launcher binary, which means going through the file system to look for it, and the paths could differ depending on whether you installed it on an SD card or the SSD.

Apologies for being defensive. I want to make sure people who read this thread take the positive reception with a grain of salt. I had to do all of this as a brand new Steam Deck user. All of this was made more complicated by a couple of UI bugs in the Steam UI and the fact that desktop mode has a bug where the keyboards and trackpads stop working randomly unless Steam big picture is enabled. I had to discover all of this through Google searches.

A couple more problems: one of the tutorials online forgot to mention you have to change the launch directory as well. That was about an hour wasted trying to figure out why Battle.net was not launching. Additionally, you can't download games with the screen off. That's because pressing the power button behaves like a computer, in that it makes the entire OS go to sleep. You have to literally keep your Steam Deck on in order for it to download the game.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#324

Post by the8472 »

stefandesu wrote: post #103
xyproto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch Linux, btw

Does this make a difference? If I were to build a gaming PC based on Linux and Proton, would I need an Arch based distro to get that ~80% coverage?

You get a recent kernel + mesa + vulkan which means a recent proton shipped with steam can use all the extensions it wants for efficiency. Recent kernels also contain a few features specifically designed to aid wine.

Also, it's probably a joke.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#325

Post by lb4r »

yayitswei wrote: post #182
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are discovering indie games? You are in for a treat! I essentially play only indie games, with rare exceptions once or twice per year.

How do you discover good indie games to play?

I've found many good ones just from looking at games with high review score on MetaCritic. This is how I found Hollow Knight and Chained Echoes, for example.

On a side note, it's quite astounding what just a handful of people, sometimes a single individual, can accomplish. It becomes quite clear that the main limiting factor when trying to create a good game is simply your own imagination and creativity. A large team with a huge budget seems to be just as much of a curse as it is a blessing.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#326

Post by opan »

izacus wrote: post #294
washadjeffmad wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, just bought a base model + dock. I've got a bunch of 128GB SDs, and my only current plans are to use it for PC-98 emulation, so load times shouldn't be a problem.

Just so you're forewarned - some things always get installed on internal storage and people regularly have problems with it filling up. IMO getting at least 256GB internal (or upgrading later) is a smarter decision.

You can work around this somewhat by moving things to external storage and they symlinking it back to the original spot (or so I've heard, I have the top end model and haven't filled it up yet).

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#327

Post by neurostimulant »

causality0 wrote: post #203
christophilus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA: Two of my favorite games, Limbo and Inside, are on sale now for a bundle deal of $3. That’s a great value.

Nice to see at least somebody is actually putting their games on sale. The last few Steam sales have been pretty sad. Back in the day you could look at your wishlist and the average game would be 50% off, with lots of 75%s and 90%s. These days they act like giving you 20% off a five year old game is some big sale.

That depends on what on your wishlist though. I just bought Halo collection (90% off, includes 6 games) and Sleeping Dogs (also 90% off) for a grand total of $5 (localized pricing).

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#328

Post by shaggie76 »

It's an impressive technical achievement, no question, but we're bedeviled by elusive crashes that seem to be exposed by some nuance of the Proton (WINE) emulation layer (at least 2% of our game crashes and at least 25% of our launcher crashes which is disproportionate given that only half a percent of our players are using some version of WINE).

So I wonder about the metric for "playable" -- is a 4x greater chance of crashing when using your Steam Deck vs your PC still "playable"? And I wonder if players, who can't tell if a crash is related to emulation or a bug in the game, will blame the game developer when it isn't really fair to hold them accountable.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#329

Post by Uvix »

shaggie76 wrote: post #328

It's an impressive technical achievement, no question, but we're bedeviled by elusive crashes that seem to be exposed by some nuance of the Proton (WINE) emulation layer (at least 2% of our game crashes and at least 25% of our launcher crashes which is disproportionate given that only half a percent of our players are using some version of WINE). So I wonder about the metric for "playable" -- is a 4x greater chance o…

Depends on how much it's crashing in the first place. The difference between a 1/2500 event and a 1/10000 event is probably not going to be noticed, but the difference between a 1/2 and a 1/8 event probably is.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#330

Post by neurostimulant »

33W wrote: post #204
the_snooze wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking through Steam sales for sub-$10 titles with "Very Positive" or "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews is a good filter. Some of my favorites over the years include Slay the Spire, Celeste, Vampire Survivors, and FTL. Edit: How can I forget the "holy trinity" of mystery indie games? Return of the Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds, and Her Story. These are brilliant games that really make you feel like a detective.

The makers of FTL have another game, Into The Breach, and it is available on iOS for free with Netflix.

So many hours spent playing FTL. I was against getting Netflix subscription (we already had 3 streaming apps) until one day I noticed Into the Breach is available on mobile if you have a Netflix subscription. Can't believe I'm subscribing to a streaming service to play an indie game (wife turns out enjoy Netflix though).
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