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I consider pcgamingwiki.com to be one of the most comprehensive repositories of technical data on video games. And, at the same time, PCGW is one of the most difficult to find games that meet certain criteria. Especially when compared to Steam search with additional capabilities provided by the Augmented Steam and SteamDB browser extensions. Moreover, external wiki search is useless, because the mere mention of some feature on the page does not mean its presence in the game, since it is only a field header in a table, for which an arbitrary value can be set as an icon. I understand that technically a wiki is just a set of text files united by links. This makes it very accessible for editing, mass, but, unlike database-based systems, makes it very limited for research. I propose to create a task and formulate a technical task for it to expand the wiki with the ability to flexibly search for games by parameters, using inclusion and exclusion filters. Probably, this will require setting up regular parsing of updated pages. And here the established practice of using templates for pages will greatly help us out. To start, it is enough to include several of the most popular parameters in the search, adding others over time. Alternatively, you can allow users to search by parameters that are currently unavailable in Steam. For example, the presence of a DRM-free option, Multi-monitor, Subtitles, separate search by GUI language, audio and subtitles. Similar issues were discussed earlier in the topic "Template:Feature - Transition over from semantic search to pages with the embedded query", which is now locked.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_(2012): This version of the game's wiki page says it doesn't support a 4K resolution and I've also heard that the 2012 Square Enix version supports a rendering resolution of up to 1080p from this video here: My question is whether or not this is actually true because I'm playing the Steam version on a 2560 x 1440 monitor and not only does the game's launch window actually recognize my monitor's native resolution but judging by my own eye balls the game seems to actually be rendering in 1440p too. I've also tried playing in 1080p on my 1440p monitor and the game looked a little blurrier in that resolution so I feel like it could be true that the game does render in higher resolutions than just 1080p. Then again the game does also seem to be a little blurry if I stretch the image through the launch window, even at 1440p (though the image is being stretched so I don't know). Of course I don't have a 4K display to test if the game can render in 4K at the moment but regardless I'm still curious whether or not the game only being able to render in up to 1080p is true or not? If anyone is able to test this or definitively prove this please let me know.

Hi there! :) We talked with Andrew about our program. It might be featured later in more official fashion. But for now forum post seems to be best way to introduce it. Released on Steam previous week: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1190750/GameAssistant_The_Tool_For_Every_Gamer We thoroughly analyzed each supported game and in many cases our program provides some exclusive tweaks that are not listed on PC Gaming Wiki. When there are descriptions of useful changes that are hard to automate, we show link that directs to PC Gaming Wiki page. In case of disabling startup videos, we always remove or overwrite files, if possible. Program also provides cheats, sometimes as tweaks. To enable god mode in Outlast 1 exactly 60 properties in INI config are modified. Program can override FOV in STALKER games, where DLL file is modified. PC Gaming Wiki tells you to download some ZIP, which must be extracted into proper dir, and then some batch script must be run and finally proper number must be entered. Program is able to: - modify config files (10 formats supported: from simple key = value to engine specific) - modify registry entries - modify binary files - set compatibility modes for executables (admin, win xp) - set CPU affinity - set process priority - copy files - remove files - create directories - extract files from archives - mark files as read-only - show formatted hints All changes can be reverted. About 200 games are currently supported with more to come: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1190750/discussions/0/2659872290967762982 Program is moddable, so new games can be added without programming skills. Detailed HTML documentation is available. Program can download Community Pack with multiple configs. Unfortunately, program did not receive much media coverage. You can spread the word and get 3 keys. More details here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1190750/discussions/0/1751276551817474198

Over the past few years I've been trying as much as possible to get away from buying games through DRM restricted sources, mainly buying from GoG.com and Itch.io when available, and pages like The big list of DRM-free games on Steam has been INVALUABLE for identifying games on Steam that can be downloaded and backed up. One thing I've been looking into is games that contain ROMs that can be played in emulators. Things like the SEGA Classics Collection just have the raw ROMs in the folder, but some other games they're embedded in the game data. I've found a few bits of custom python scripts here and there for extracting them, but it's been difficult tracking some of them down. For example, I found scripts to extract ROMs from Mega Man Legacy Collection and Mega Man X Legacy Collection but not Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 and Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2. If there was a dedicated section on The big list of DRM-free games on Steam page specifically for ROMs that can be found in purchased games it'd make it easier to centralize all known ways to get the ROMs out. Maybe actually pointing to software for extracting the ROMs is against site terms, I'm not sure, but at the very least a list of games known to contain raw ROMs, or maybe even ROMs that can be easily extracted with an archive manager, would be a helpful resource.

Why is this game lagging when steam is in online mode? Everytime in the menus too. It drops to 1 fps for 10 seconds and that repeats. Whenever I go into offline mode this problem dissapears. But why does this game work like this?

There's a little reported bug with the GOTY version on steam that causes some DX11 point lights to not blend correctly and show their polygonal edges. Here's the steam thread with the fix: https://steamcommunity.com/app/200260/discussions/0/810939350937769623/?ctp=2 And the fix itself in a google drive link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B60dyrffWO_PNU50N0h3bE9fZkk/view?usp=sharing Visually the issue is very noticeable when looking at Tyger helicopter searchlights and the first room in the museum with the TVs pointed at Batman, they look like giant polygonal shapes that brighten anything within or behind them from your POV. The fix replaces two shader files that were sourced from the original GFWL release, the steam version's ones are the culprit. If someone could archive these and add a link and description on the wiki page that would be great. Unrelated, but I was trying to post this on the arkham city discussion page but captcha kept on resetting after pressing add topic, sorry I just made the account to try to put it on there so if I did something wrong my mistake.

After some past requests we have implemented ProtonDB links in all relevant PCGamingWiki articles. The new link now appears in the form of a ProtonDB icon in the bottom of the infobox where other partner links are placed. This is automatically added when a Steam App ID is added to any game article. Proton is a tool released by Valve Software that has been integrated with Steam Play to make playing Windows games on Linux easier to achieve. ProtonDB gather reports from other gamers as they test games with Proton on Linux and provide aggregate scores of how well games perform. Hopefully this link will encourage more reports to be submitted to ProtonDB to help Linux gamers get their games working. I have also spoken to buck, the developer for the site, who is looking into mutual linking from ProtonDB pages back to PCGamingWiki in the future.

Hi, my name's Voxarp. I learned of PCGamingWiki from the late TotalBiscuit's videos back in the day and I used to help contribute from time to time but now days I'm mostly just a user. Thanks to everyone involved for providing such a great wiki! Recently Valve has introduced a new feature of SteamPlay called Proton which is a variant of WINE that allows Linux and possibly OSX to run Windows-only games. It's an exciting time! What the community seems to desperately need is a resource to: Report game compatibility, possibly with a WineDB type rating of Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum - right now all we have is a spreadsheet on Google Docs. Present fixes and workarounds for games that don't work out of the box. Provide clear delineation between Proton versions, a game might work properly on one Proton version but not another. Possibly provide an overview page with statistics on the percentage of games working, with a table that lets you sort by criteria such as Proton version or compatibility rating. I know this is a lot of effort and not to be taken lightly, but I feel it fits right in with PCGamingWiki's objective of providing fixes and workarounds for every single PC game. Relevant Links Valve's Announcement: https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561 SteamPlay on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamPlay linux_gaming on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming Compatibility Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DcZZQ4HL_Ol969UbXJmFG8TzOHNnHoj8Q1f8DIFe8-8

Steam stats show that the number of concurrent logged in users has now exceeded 20 million. The all time highest number for Steam at the time of writing is now 20.3 million users which ocurred on Sunday March 15th, 2020. This comes as no surprise as lockdowns continue to be announced worldwide with more and more people staying at home due to Covid-19. Not only this, but the Steam userbase continues to grow, and certain Steam games like CS:GO also achieved its all-time concurrent player peak of over 1 million this Sunday.

Fallout 76 is coming to Steam on April 7, 2020. The game has been exclusive to the Bethesda.net platform since release on November 19. 2018. The release coincides with a new free expansion pack Wastelanders, which brings fully voiced NPCs to the game as well as other new content. Here is some information about how the Steam/Bethesda.net content will work:

Hello and welcome into a Monthly Tux Gaming News which I mention what was going on in this month around the Linux gaming community which you won't find in any mainstream gaming news. Mesa 19.3 stable release delayed, further improvements en-route. Mesa, an open source GPU driver library maintained by the community has it's 19.3 stable version delayed to early December as there are more bugs to fill in. This will be the 1st release which will contain Valve's own shader compiler that is meant to replace LLVM, which is commonly used for this stuff specially when they are complex, with ACO which is specifically made for AMD graphics cards only . The major difference between these two is that ACO takes much less time to compile the shaders and as a bonus provides a frame rate boost, however it currently only works under Vulkan and you must be using Radeon RX 300 series or newer from dedicated GPU whereas in case of APUs it's Bristol Ridge, Raven Ridge or newer. You can learn more information about this feature from their blog post, they have plans to provide support for HD 7000 series and OpenGL along with other shading stages according to this roadmap. But that is not just it, Valve is revising their Secure Compile feature for Mesa's AMD Vulkan driver called RadV which will result in lower resource usage and avoid slower shader compile times reducing the stuttering even more and best of all, this gets backported into 19.3, so by combining that with ACO things will get even more interesting. However, ACO will not be enabled by default as it requires you to run the game with RADV_PERFTEST=aco on Steam you need to use this in launch parameter right at the beginning RADV_PERFTEST=aco %command% Next major release of Mesa will happen in February 2020 which will hit 20.0 and the work has already started. New AAA game Linux port from Feral Interactive + a major update for one of their older Linux ports Feral Interactive was busy this year with porting Shadow Of The Tomb Raider into Linux and Mac. The Linux version uses Vulkan by default and it's based on the DIrect3D 12 version of the game instead of D3D 11, what is the result you ask and how does it compare to Windows? First of all, there's no ray tracing support which can be a bummer, but when it comes to performance compared to Windows version, according to this following benchmark video the difference between them is that the native Linux version is......about 2% slower. That is seriously impressive, however there has been some words that on AMD GPUs in conjunction with ACO the game actually runs faster than NVIDIA but so far no benchmark has been found to confirm this. But this is not the only main thing that has been going on around from Feral, they've also updated their Linux port of Shadow of Modor by providing Vulkan support which currently is in beta and can be opted-in any time by choosing linux_vulkan_beta from Betas tab. As their older port uses OpenGL and was released in 2015 it had a worse performance compared to Windows as they were still new to porting games into Linux, after all, the company was primarily doing Mac ports since 1998 and started with Linux porting in 2014 with X-Com: Enemy Unknown. So, has this helped improving the performance? Considering how since 2016 where they've started playing around with Vulkan by choosing Mad Max i dare to say.... It's jawdropping! The most interesting thing here is that this is not the only thing that got added, Feral also added an option to choose the Vulkan driver of your choice and change the FOV through their launcher. Since Tomb Raider 2013 on Mac got a Metal support, perhaps that game will also receive the Vulkan treatment......or Deux Ex Mankind Divided? Actually, DX:MD seriously needs one. Valve still being busy and awesome with Linux support as usual Besides Mesa stuff, Valve has also been busy with their own stuff. They have activated VKD3D in their Proton 4.11-8 release which is Wine's own Direct3D 12 to Vulkan wrapper allowing you to play games which utilize D3D12, however be aware that this wrapper is still being worked on and speaking of Proton, the recent version that got hit at the end of this month is 4.11-9 which are just mostly bug fixes. One thing thou that received a major change from Valve for Steam is the option to use Steam Linux Runtime as a Compatibility Tool. What does it do? Well basically it forces the game to use the libraries which were included with Steam, including 32 bit ones. This is a very useful option as there is a chance that a native Linux game will not work be it missing a library or 32 bit games not working (Gee, wonder what made them to do it in a 1st place), game developers can also take the advantage of it as well when providing a help for the user that uses a distro not supported by Steam which is Ubuntu LTS or anything based on it or even use it for testing purposes. What else is there? Hmmmm....Oh, streaming option has been enabled on Steam for Linux, wonder what took em so long to do it. What's next in the future? Well after the release of Linux kernel 5.4, the next major version is still in the works and may end up in a freezing state soon, as mentioned previously Mesa 20.0 work has begun and finally perhaps things will get interesting once Ubuntu 20.04 hits in April 2020 which will be a Long Term Support one. "What about Nouveau, the open source NVIDIA driver by the community?" you ask. Still in a poor shape from 900 series and no Vulkan driver of it's own. Hope NVIDIA actually does something about this.

Steam are releasing a new Remote Play Together streaming option. This will allow one Steam user to stream their game with another remote Steam user, and for them to play the same 'local' game together. The feature was announced on the Steamworks website, which is a developer area, however the announcement has been shared publicly: This kind of streaming online multiplayer feature has been available through other methods such as Parsec.

On September 17th, the High Court of Paris passed judgment over a legal battle between Valve, and a French consumer rights group known as UFC-Que Choisir. The court ruled that, (according to a translation by Windows Central), publishers and hosts of digital content must allow the reselling of digital copies of games on the Steam platform: While Valve intends to appeal this ruling, currently, they have three months to change their policy before being in violation of French law. While this would currently only impact Steam users in France, this can have ramifications for digital game services as a whole. If Valve's appeal fails, other services in France may be forced to follow suit in order to compete with Steam's newfound software freedom. Furthermore, these services may adopt this new business model in other territories in an attempt to reach a degree of parity. Still, until the case finishes development, only conjecture exists on the matter.

As reported earlier this week by Bleeping Computer, ArsTechnica and other sources, a security researcher found a vulnerability that allows to gain full access to the target computer through elevated privileges, which could be exploited by malicious game creators. According to the articles and included researcher statements, Valve have rejected two researchers' attempts to get rewarded for reporting the issue through the HackerOne platform on the basis of being out of scope and allegedly requiring physical access to the device. The researches decided to go public as the result. Since then, Valve appear to have patched the Steam client but only in the beta as of today. Update: On August 13, the main client was also updated to patch the vulnerability. Update 2: Bypassing the fix is possible.

The story is from Polygon.

DuckTales Remastered is going be removed from all digital storefronts including Steam on August 8th, according to this official tweet from Capcom USA: This gives us barely over one day's notice to quickly snap up this game for the last time on Steam. Luckily Steam keys should continue to be available on official resellers like Gamesplanet where it is conveniently on a 75% flash sale. Make sure to buy a piece of history before they run out of keys!

As Valve's Steam Labs launch three new experimental features today, one has caught the interest of many Steam users: its new algorithm for game recommendations based on Valve's machine learning technology. Valve says the Interactive Recommender uses a "neural-network model that is trained to recommend games based on a user's playtime history, along with other salient data." The data is modified by two sliders that users can edit: one ranges from "popular" to "niche," while the other slider ranges from "older" to "newer" games. Rather than base recommendations around genre or category, the Interactive Recommender instead scans through Valve's data sets to find other Steam users with similar tastes. The model then recommends titles the user might enjoy based on other games played by like-minded Steam users. Valve also says they discard most category information about the game when entering it into their model. "We don't explicitly feed our model information about the games. Instead, the model learns about the games for itself during the training process. In fact, the only information about a game that gets explicitly fed into the process is the release date, enabling us to do time-windowing for the release-date slider. It turns out that using release date as part of the model training process yields better quality results than simply applying it as filter on the output," Valve said. They also discard information about review scores and tags, relying only on popularity and age variables. Users worried about this experimental technology replacing their regular Steam recommendations have nothing to fear for the time being. Rather, Valve says users who want to try the Recommender will have to specifically choose it under the Steam Labs experiments section. Regular Steam recommendations will still function as before. Since their algorithm discards the categories most other game recommendation algorithms operate by, Valve also claims that developers won't have to worry about optimizing their game description to make it more likely to be recommended. "The best way for a developer to optimize for this model is to make a game that people enjoy playing. While it's important to supply users with useful information about your game on its store page, you shouldn't agonize about whether tags or other metadata will affect how a recommendations model sees your game," Valve said. If you want to try the Interactive Recommender, head over to the Steams Labs experiments section. (via PC Gamer)

Crystal Crisis launched for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch earlier this year. Now publisher Nicalis has announced that Crystal Crisis will be coming to PC via Steam at the end of the month. The competitive puzzle fighter features popular characters from Cave Story, The Binding of Isaac, and Astro Boy. Seen as a spiritual successor to the cult Capcom arcade game Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, Nicalis describes Crystal Crisis as the "apex of the head-to-head puzzle battle genre." Crystal Crisis launches on Steam July 31 for $19.99, but pre-purchases will receive a 25% discount, lowering the price to $14.99. You can find Nicalis's full description of Crystal Crisis below.

Classic games The Lion King (1994) and Disney's Aladdin (1993) have been delisted from Steam without so much as a word. Thankfully GOG.com have given a short warning of just over 24 hours in this forum post announcement : Another Disney game, The Jungle Book, has been delisted from Steam but still available from GOG.com - who knows if more Disney games will be delisted in the future?

This year’s Steam summer sale introduced the Steam Grand Prix, a meta-game which gives players the chance to win their “Most Wished For games”. The wording of this competition has caused confusion as many Steam users believed that winners would receive random games from their wishlist. This led to many Steam users removing cheaper games from their wishlist, most notably from independently developed games. As such, many developers and publishers were less than thrilled with this year’s meta-game. Developers receive notifications based on additions and deletions of games to users wishlists. Within hours of the Grand Prix launch, developers watched large amounts of users remove their games from wishlists in nearly real-time. Dan Hindes, developer of the upcoming title, WildFire, tweeted about the situation, showing a graph chronicling wishlist deletions for Wildfire. Thankfully, Valve addressed the furor before it could erupt, and modified the promotion’s guidelines. The new rules now clarify that “if your team makes it to the podium and you are randomly chosen to win something off your Steam Wishlist, then we’ll grant you the top item.” Hopefully, this revision can ward off some of the damage caused by the wishlist purging.