SDL VS steam-runtime

Wayland works well on the Steam Deck because Valve controls the whole system. Because they have their own Wayland compositor (Gamescope), they're able to implement protocols to work around issues in Wayland without being delayed by the bureaucratic process of getting them approved. Here's an SDL pull request where a graphics developer at Valve discusses how two protocols necessary for good GPU performance haven't been added to Wayland yet so Valve added equivalent protocols to Gamescope as a workaround: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345

One thing to note is that the Steam Deck only uses Wayland for its fullscreen gaming mode. When you exit to its desktop mode (meant for running non-Steam software), it switches to X11.

The linked project doesn't use any ObjC files at all. SDL2 has a bunch of Cocoa files[1] so you did use Cocoa even if unknowingly.

[1] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/src/video/cocoa

Correct. It's explained here:

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201...

XWayland has special hooks into the compositors that normal wayland clients don't get.

Found about this through the release of SDL 3: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/build-scripts/SD...

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/include/SDL3/SDL_events.h

If that app ran in a 640x480 mode, memory accesses would be just as fast as the VGA applications 25 years ago, correct?

I think there's a lot more going on than that. Here's SDL's current pixel access code:

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_su...

We use the code examples throughout the article. The ellipsis characters "...." in the code were added by the author of the article. You can find the source files on the official GitHub of libsdl. In addition, each fragment has a reference to a specific area in the code. By the time this article is published, many errors will have already been fixed thanks to the issues we opened (for example, here and there). However, the links in the examples point exactly to the code you see in this article. Not only do we enjoy teasing developers but we also like making their projects a little bit better!

FetchContent_Declare(SDL2 GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL.git GIT_TAG release-2.28.3 ) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(SDL2)

It's not that difficult, I recently started learning to use graphics APIs myself. OpenGL is for linux, etc., directx for windows and vulkan for all platforms. I read through a bunch of forums yesterday and decided to go for vulkan (here is a link to the sdk) for my next small projects because it can run on all platforms. I would recommend to watch a basic tutorial series (like this one) for the graphics api itself to get an understanding of whats going on. And on top of that I use SDL2 for eventhandling and ImGui for the graphical user interface. Here is a link to a guide for setting up vulkan on your platform in case you would go for it.

> It turns out that unless the game is explicitly marked (by Valve reviewers), Steam Deck will use the Windows build + Proton even if a Linux version is available.

I found this which sounds like it's not the default, but is in fact a result of compatibility testing:

> If your game has gone through Steam Deck compatibility testing and the testers reported that the native Linux version didn't work (because of #579), then it might have been flagged to run the Windows binaries via Proton by default, instead of the native Linux version.

per https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/issues/585

> Where is it written that steam-run will magically execute most binaries without patching them?

Somewhere in here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

:p

But I do get what you're saying. Once Flakes are default, I hope people start a proper push to clear up documentation and streamline the development process. The end-result is amazing, and the perfect OS/packaging system for my needs. The means of getting there... need a lot of work. I'm along for the ride either way.

I think they have something a bit like a container built into Steam: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

this is for steamworks API, my understanding is there's a separate SDK for consuming Linux dependencies like glibc. Like Soldier runtime, Sniper runtime, and so on. Am I wrong in thinking these are two separate SDKs? here's the link to the other SDK I'm talking about: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

I'm not sure we can distribute a flatpak or an appimage through Steam. They have their own controlled environment called Steam Runtime (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime) in which I should compile to be sure it runs everywhere (very similar to what I am doing). Last time, I look at this, it wasn't very clear and they supported only old versions of GCC. But it seems the documentation improved and now that I succeeded in building a modern version of GCC in my own container, maybe I could do that in theirs.

I believe it's usable outside of Steam: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime though the instructions are not particularly clear. There's also a link to the APT repo they use as a reference: https://repo.steampowered.com/steamrt/

Looking at the Flatpak version, if you want to use Proton versions 5.13 or newer with Steam in Flatpak, you need to install Flatpak from backports https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/issues/294 . Using Flatpak saves having to install i386 if that matters to you.

> Game developers would be fine to target a single distro like Ubuntu 22.04.

Valve has its own container-only Linux distribution, called "Soldier Runtime" (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime); especially for games distributed on Steam, it probably makes more sense to target that distribution instead of Ubuntu.