Posts

Origin Over the years I’ve been collating a small bullet-point list of personal software development principles. I refer to it now and then to make adjustments, but also to remind myself of the wisdom and best practices that I should be trying to adhere to. This personal development practice came up recently in a conversation with a colleague and it dawned on me that there’d been no good reason to keep the list to myself.

I spent 5 years working on AAA native Linux ports. That’s not a long stint by some standards, but nothing to shake a stick at either, so it’s not unexpected that I’ve had a bunch of people come to me wanting a hot take on Valve’s position on the future of that effort now that the Steam Deck is on the horizon. I don’t want to ignore the nuance, and now that I’m out of the business I’m not sure how much value my opinion holds on it anyway, so instead of offering up a juicy hot take I instead want to explain a part of where my head was at 3 years ago when I left porting behind.

(Originally posted to Gaming On Linux) Years ago, when we could still meet in the hundreds in small enclosed spaces, I was speaking to a Valve employee and brought up the topic of integrating Wine into Steam. I was met with something that I assume is taught to all of their employees during orientation - a sly, precise and knowing smile. When performed correctly it’s a smile that offers up no information other than a confidence that there are good things to come.

I’m taking a mental health day off work today. I think we all need every once in a while. But in the interests of solidarity and as a form of light therapy, I want to vent a little here on paper. Tomorrow was going to be our wedding. Weddings are ridiculous events when treated the wrong way. When you invite people to be a pawn in some attempt to create that “perfect” day.

2019 was a fantastic year for Linux gamers. At the end of the decade we had almost two thirds of the top one thousand steam games rated gold and above in terms of Linux compatibility. By contrast, just one year earlier, that number would have been sitting at the native game proportion of only a quarter. In plain numbers that’s 400 out of the top 1000 steam games unlocked for Linux in a single year.

What’s the one game keeping you a dual booter? Maybe it’s PUBG, or Rainbow Six: Siege? Maybe it used to be Overwatch? For me, that game was Elite Dangerous, and one year on from Proton’s release, I have a story to tell. There’s a certain “je ne sais quoi” about Elite Dangerous that I’ve never been able to put my finger on. It’s a game set in a scientifically modelled, full-scale replica of the whole Milky Way galaxy, and as with that setting, the game is truly vast, remarkably cold, and frequently incomprehensible.

So I was making a montage full of native Linux games and then Valve dropped their Proton bomb I think it’s fair to say that a rather large spanner was thrown into the works on the 21st of August ‘18, and I couldn’t just leave that heinous crime un-mentioned. I mean, for real, couldn’t Valve have waited until I was done? I kid, I kid, Proton has much larger and far-reaching consequences outside of just my small crowdsourced video, and I’d like to talk with you about them if you’ll let me.

Directly helping to bring games to Linux can be super complicated - I’m talking low-level, real-time, writing-a-GUI-in-Visual-Basic-to-hack-the-Gibson complicated. What if there was a way to support the platform you love with just your regular old self? After years of stringent Meditation, Study and Calculations™ I’ve come to a miraculous conclusion: without even getting close to finding yourself stuck in vim, you can actually make a difference! Hear me out, friend.

It’s Mother’s Day, and I recently binge watched Sword Art Online. These two don’t exactly fit together, but bear with me. Near the end of the second series of SAO there is a scene involving a mother and her teenage kid that hit particularly close to home to me, and in the spirit of Mother’s Day, I felt the need to write up why. Minor spoilers for SAO ahead. For context, SAO is a Japanese anime that explores the implications of “full-dive” technology, effectively Star Trek’s holodeck, or, more accurately, a much more consensual form of the Matrix.

Hi, I’m a developer who works primarily on Linux games. I’d like to quickly cover the basics of what AMD’s new driver is, how it functions, and speculate on how it may fit into Linux gaming as a whole. If you’re technically minded then you’ll find a large, detailed, and up to date explanation of some of these aspects over at the AMDVLK GitHub repository. What’s this thing’s name? AMD’s official name for the driver is the “AMD Open Source Driver For Vulkan®”.