Linux Update

Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2023
Game: Proteus
Proteus Game Banner
Genre: Adventure, Casual, Indie
Developer: Ed Key and David Kanaga
Release Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2013
Hello everyone!

This is a minor housekeeping update for Linux - the Windows and macOS versions were untouched in this update.

Simply put, a severe performance regression was discovered recently and it turns out OpenGL call lists were to blame - this hasn't been thoroughly investigated yet but so far radeonsi is affected while the NVIDIA binary driver is not. This of course means the Steam Deck was affected, so on the off chance that this gets randomly picked for review we wanted to be ready for it. By default display lists are now turned off, with an option to turn it back on in the graphics settings (though on unaffected hardware it doesn't seem to make a difference, YMMV).

Aside from that, it's just a boring dependency update: MonoKickstart was updated to the latest binaries and SDL2 was updated as well. A minor side effect of this is that 32-bit Linux binaries were dropped, but these were likely unused in 2022 - if you still need them, look for the "linux32" branch on Steam, it's a backup of the last version just in case.

One known issue that remains from the last version is that Xwayland combined with a high-DPI mode will result in a black screen - for whatever reason multisampling is forced on in Xwayland, which breaks our presentation system (and many others, I would imagine). Thankfully with the SDL2 update you can set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland and get around this with a fully native Wayland window. This will eventually be made the default in a future SDL release, so at some point this will just passively go away. (Also: You can enable specialized high-DPI support by passing --attempt-highdpi as a launch argument.)

Thanks for your continued support!

Write your comment!