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Comment by hn8788 | Hacker News Reader

Steam Deck is just a handheld PC, I'm not sure what support the engine developers would need besides being able to understand the built-in controls.

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It’s a Linux pc.. so top notch Linux support I’m assuming is part of it. Plus it has a kind different control system and whatever graphics and sound it has as well.

Valve wants developers to target Proton as opposed to "native" games. This prevents rot from developers not testing their game on Linux.

Where did you get that info from?

Here they state that they have no preference: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/11/valve-answers-the-ques...

There were claims that Valve asked some developers to remove their Linux "native" versions of the game since the Proton version is better since the devs didn't support the "native" version very well.

Allowing developers to outsource the work for supporting Linux makes game developer's jobs much easier.

Asking some developers to remove a native version of their game is not the same as asking all developers to target Proton. If anything it's more an indictment of those specific dev's ability to target native Linux.

That doesn't contradict what they said, it reinforces it even:

> Really, it comes down to whatever is the best experience. So if it's easier for the developer to get to a point where the best experience is achieved through Proton we think that's great

I don't use Godot, but I don't think there's an official Steamworks integration.

This is speculation, but I think this means they're working on an official module, and it'll come with support that ensures all controller bindings pass through nicely, etc.

I wish Valve would do an official module for LÖVE!

That's right you have to merge some code from GitHub and recompile. Which thankfully is a 30' affair unlike UE4 where it's more like a half day wasted.

I can imagine at least a "hello world" project with all the settings configured to work out of the box on Steam Deck would be a start. Maybe they have some custom libraries to hook the game in to the OS, and they want to give developers a running start with menu systems etc.

Engines can always benefit from optimizations and improvements. They can fine tune it for usage on their APU, improve their Vulkan renderer and what not.

general optimizatiin & tuning & profiling on an open source scarcely funded engine, is my first second third & fourth guesses. just a little bit of technical assists can often do wonders in open source. that expert look, is, alas, uncommon.

would be freaking sweet if they'd buy the team some pizza, beer, & coffe but hey we cant expect the world. that'd be basically unprecedentedly nice to open source.

Beer and pizza? Godot devs are not homeless nor live in a frat house. They have the means to buy food.

True, they have a patreon (and corporate sponsors).

In the console space it is really common to have the platform loan out devs for onboarding to their platform. Maybe they are just providing consultation on common pitfalls when it comes to their architecture.

Consoles are just PCs, they have a lot of specific optimizations.

When the description "just a PC" is applied to Steam Deck, it usually implies not just the x86/IBM-PC-descendant hardware configurations, but also the lack of strict software/hardware lockdown measures to prevent the use and execution of unapproved sw/hw. PS4/PS5/XB1/XSX are indeed similar to PCs hardware wise, but from this definition of "just a PC," they really aren't.

Optimizations on the consoles involve things like adjusting memory access patterns, using gpu-specific intrinsics and hardware specific latency info etc to tune the game engine. It's likely the same with Steam Deck.

There are a lot of generation specific optimizations that are often even exposed on PC but don't make it into any games because games don't often optimize for each specific generation of hardware (unless it's something particularly notable like DLSS/RT). This, I have noticed, is especially common on AMD recently, where some optimizations are very useful on consoles and eventually exposed on PC too, but never actually used there because of their issues until this latest generation.

Valve has probably worked to integrate those into Godot, there's also the consideration for power management, perhaps Valve has exposed additional APIs to make it easier for games to exchange information regarding power availability etc, so while most games just run as if they were running on a PC, there's the possibility for the game to also be Steam Deck aware/optimized.

Having seen what failoverflow had to do to get Linux running on a ps4 I would say you are mostly correct.

They are not IBM pc compatible.

But for the most part once you get everything working... The difference is negligible.

Linux already runs on more than just PCs. I'm not sure it's a useful benchmark of PCness.

I didn't say that. Failoverflow gave a talk on how they got Linux working on the ps4. It does not have a lot of the ibm PC compatible parts of x86.

What I am getting at is: it is close to a Pc but not. In the ways that matter it is (CPU GPU pcie USB data etc)

Go watch the talk, it's over at media.CCC.de I think at congress 33.

Edit: spelling and grammar

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