I can only say some surface-level stuff right now:
* get LSP or CALF plugins + a DAW (e.g. Reaper)
* look for Linux versions of your plugins
* use your Windows VSTs with yabridge
Coming from FL though, Reaper has been pretty fine. I'll write about it in detail once I've made a few songs in it :3c
A screenshot of DaVinci Resolve showing a bunch of footage in the timeline, but also an Arctic fox explaining Half-Life map surfaces
The same fox explaining a basic example layout for a level. And a fox blob character in the background
Okay, now what if..
a VR fox that teaches you Half-Life mapping
Note that there's also a "part 2" which I wrote pretty recently, sort of a review after a couple months.
microfox.dev/blog/10-26-l...
Right now it's missing a few bits, but it should give you good enough of an idea, still.
Oh yeah I finally wrote that blog post!
Here: microfox.dev/blog/10-25-l...
Well, it's more like a bunch of notes along the way, with a few editor notes here and there.
Audio track in Reaper
35 minutes of yapping about Half-Life mapping.
This will be my first video produced fully on Linux, so let's hope nothing goes wrong(tm)
Half-Life Asset Manager, displaying Barney from Half-Life. It only has a Debian package though.
This is J.A.C.K., the de facto level editor for Half-Life and GoldSRC games. It has very poor-quality packaging though, with libraries just missing out of the box.
I'll publish a far more detailed version of this on my website, eventually.
Overall I'm quite happy. I expected there to be A LOT more tinkering, lasting up to 3 months to try all this out.
Later, I also wanna package some Half-Life modding tools for Linux. It would make things much easier. (6/6)
My game engine running as usual, nothing special here. It has a little test level with a bunch of physical boxes.
Right now I'm setting up environments for my programming projects. There's C++ stuff, C# stuff, and a bit of basic webdev stuff. nixOS has a non-standard filesystem, so for some situations, setting up these shells is a must.
I managed to get my C# game engine to run, so that's pretty good! (5/6)
Reaper, a recording of my guitar, and some plugins.
This is when I was testing Ardour. Sadly it was unstable and had lots of pops, I don't know why. In either case, all these plugins worked, some through yabridge, others natively.
Music production took the longest. I had to tweak a lot of numbers to get low-latency, pop-free audio on my Scarlett 2i2, so I could play instruments in real time. Oh PipeWire...
I tried out a couple DAWs, settled on Reaper for now. Coming from FL Studio, I'll need to get used to it more. (4/6)
Abiotic Factor, an Unreal Engine 5 game, running just fine on nixOS. It's worth noting I mostly play singleplayer games and the occasional small multiplayer/co-op.
Far Cry (2004), the starting level. I have it on GoG and I ran it through Lutris. Funnily enough, it would appear that DXVK fixes the water reflections. On Windows you'd have to install a patch yourself, here it comes out of the box.
SteamVR environment with the "wlx-overlay-s" overlay, providing me with a virtual desktop.
Here is what my CUDA troubles looked like, when connecting my headset to ALVR. A bunch of error boxes with rather vague messages. This was a rather easy fix though, and likely wouldn't have been an issue on AMD.
2D art, 3D art, Steam games, GoG games, it all just worked out of the box.
Assetto Corsa needed some tinkering, and I needed to install a kernel module for my Logitech G29 wheel.
VR (Pico 4, ALVR) worked just fine, with a bit more research & tinkering, in particular w.r.t. CUDA support. (3/6)
My "research notes" before I decided to embark on my Linux journey. Back then I still didn't know much about nixOS, and was planning to use EndeavourOS or something like that. My only prior experiences were Mint and Arch on my laptops.
Over the years, I switched to more open-source apps. I switched to Blender from 3DS Max etc. for various reasons.
I knew most of my hobbies would just work on Linux, but 4 things held me back: nVidia, VR, music making and sim racing.
But that's exactly why I wanted to try it out. (2/6)
My computer's boot menu with Windows 10, and 3 builds of nixOS.
Two years ago, I told myself Windows 10 was gonna be my last Windows, that I would switch to Linux at some point.
3 weeks ago, I finally gave it a proper try. Not in a VM, not on my old laptop, but on my main PC, dualbooting nixOS alongside Windows.
It went well! (1/6)
I could do that, I only got 45 callbacks remaining. But until I sort out entity spawning, I'll be doing it gradually, setting them up as I go. I'm lazy.
I'll have to do the same when I start porting the clientside. Now that's gonna be fun.
The author was mostly just exploring some environment art, seeing what they could cobble together (mostly with existing assets!) to reimagine some aspects of Quake's environments, not all of it, so it makes sense to me. Level design wasn't the intent here.
So, what's next? I dunno, I have the entire engine API ported, I could spawn some entities and port a few brush entities here'n'there. One thing I always do in game engines is spawn a model that rotates randomly, so I might as well do that.
NGL part of this feels like I'm opening a portal to hell
Week 2 of porting Half-Life to C#:
So I took my HostFxr wrapper from 2022, polished it up real good and tested a few basic things on .NET 8. Works perfectly fine in x86.
After a bit of messing around with calling conventions, I got printing to Half-Life's console to work!
I'll most likely end up writing my own, minimalist .NET hosting library. All I really wanna do is obtain function pointers and exchange some more function pointers.
The library I tried provides way, way more stuff which I don't need, like exposing the garbage collector, C#'s type system etc.
Week 1 of porting Half-Life to C#:
Translated all the engine headers to C# (edict_t, entvars_t...), set up Coral (C++/C# interop library), only to realise Coral doesn't work in 32-bit apps? Yay!
A green smiley face attached to an "info_player_start" entity
I'll probably never replace this spawnpoint icon
A rainbow-coloured "terrain" mesh, and a box labeled with XYZ axes.
A little baseplate with X and Y axis markers, a few random objects and a couple lines for testing.
June and December 2024
Hello, it me :3c
