Friday Facts #446 - An ARM and a Frame

[motmontheinternet]

Question: I have a Steam Deck but I don't like the UI for it, how can I change it to the same as Desktop? Cannot find into the config menus.

There isn't a specific UI for Steam Deck. That's just what the resolution looks like when you play on a tiny screen. You can plug your Steam Deck into a monitor and play at a higher resolution, or you can try adjusting the UI scaling. Adjusting the UI scale might introduce its own problems.

[GalegO]

Question: I have a Steam Deck but I don't like the UI for it, how can I change it to the same as Desktop? Cannot find into the config menus.

There isn't a specific UI for Steam Deck. That's just what the resolution looks like when you play on a tiny screen. You can plug your Steam Deck into a monitor and play at a higher resolution, or you can try adjusting the UI scaling. Adjusting the UI scale might introduce its own problems.

The screen isn't too small, it should be possible to give back the tool bars to use as normal desktop.

[raiguard]

After a few failed attempts having to do with incompatible glibc versions (which is a dynamic dependency that we, unfortunately, cannot avoid)

Is there a reason you can't use musl and statically link that? Do you rely on glibc-specific functionality?

If you statically link with musl, then it prevents you from dlopen()ing any dynamic dependency which depends on glibc... including OpenGL, Wayland, Pipewire, X11, and PulseAudio, which are all things we need to be able to have.

[raiguard]

So, what exactly is needed before any graphical play of Factorio is possible on a raspberry Pi? That seems like an essential thing for learning worldwide!

The raspberry pi simply does not support the features Factorio graphics engine needs. It might be possible to adjust the engine to work on the Pi, but I don't believe it to be worth the trouble, because I highly doubt that the Pi will be able to get any semblance of good FPS.

Factorio is much more graphically demanding than people realize.

[raiguard]

Question: I have a Steam Deck but I don't like the UI for it, how can I change it to the same as Desktop? Cannot find into the config menus.

If you change the control scheme to "keyboard+mouse", you can get the standard UI layout, but you lose all of the gamepad functionality. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to get the standard UI layout while using a gamepad.

[Stargateur]

My raspberry Pi was waiting for this since 5 years

[bobucles]

Why put a battery in a headset? Wireless power transmission is pretty trivial nowadays. Just beam a 2kw radio tower at your brain stem and let the antenna do the rest. Or wire a vest piece up to your head.

[BHakluyt]

Really? ^ so much needed? In 3033 here my time its all just works. No 777G beamed into the brain hey. VR my PR

[Managor]

Next you *need* to make a mode that allows you spread the map on the floor and walk on it. Then you can point at things to make bots do things.

[mmmPI]

Nice to see this happening ! VR is not my thing for now, but maybe in the future and i think it can only help factorio age well.

[sarge945]

After waiting a LONG TIME at the loading screen:
20260918_10h07m27s_grim.png
Not perfect, but the game runs! I will have to do more experimenting with OpenGL profiles to fix the rendering issues - and switch to a Raspberry Pi 5 for better performance.

I think you installed the Censored NSA version.

09-19-2026, 12-56-43.png (47.54 KiB) Viewed 779 times

[Techjar]

Lowering graphics settings did not help the performance, which suggests a more fundamental limitation in how Factorio's OpenGL renderer is interacting with the Frame's software stack.

Guess it's time to add a Vulkan renderer.

[n_slash_a]

What is that magic you did with the inserters and power poles for the train loading? Wow, 5000 hours and I'm still learning new things

[BlueTemplar]

I think that was force-replace ?

Next you *need* to make a mode that allows you spread the map on the floor and walk on it. Then you can point at things to make bots do things.

So will there be VR treadmill support for moving the player character when the player moves?

This kind of niche stuff is what open software / hardware / standards allow anyone to do.
For instance I was able to make Clair Obscur : Expedition 33 ('s combat) work with a dance pad. It also has shown where the developers failed to be open enough : some of the game keybinds were not rebindable ! (But open standards to the rescue again : I was able to bypass most of these limitations thanks to the ability to rebind keys at the OS level, per program !)
(Or another example would be how there's a mod adding multiplayer (!) to Exp33('s combat), which I suspect heavily relies on the somewhat open and standardised nature of Unreal Engine ?)

So my guess is that these seemingly wild ideas are already possible for anyone with a hacker mindset to implement. (Potentially having to work with the devs for the few missing elements.)

[MayeulC]

Of course we are going to support the Raspberry Pi, especially considering that I used mine to obtain the initial sysroots used in development! Unfortunately, the Pi's OpenGL support is rather limited, so while you can easily host servers from a Pi, you cannot play the game with graphics.

You can override the OpenGL driver auto-detection (to fake Pi's compatibility with 4.3, while also forcing the Pi to use specific profile):
[...]

That's promising! Did you try Zink too? (OpenGL-on-Vulkan)MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink. Unfortunately I don't have a Pi with me to test.

[eugenekay]

That's promising! Did you try Zink too? (OpenGL-on-Vulkan)MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink. Unfortunately I don't have a Pi with me to test.

Not successfully yet.

[MayeulC]

That's promising! Did you try Zink too? (OpenGL-on-Vulkan)MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink. Unfortunately I don't have a Pi with me to test.

Not successfully yet.

Ah, too bad. In theory it isn't too complicated, but I just realized I only have Raspberry Pis gen 1, 2 and 3

---
Another thing I was curious about, and which actually made me register on the forums: this is the first videos I see of hte Steam Frame playing 2D games. I have been wondering for a while if it was possible for "flat" applications to present a different buffer for each eye, if there was an API for that. This would enable stereoscopic rendering. Obviously more interesting for 3D apps and games, but factorio could in principle render UI elements at a different depth from the background, which would be really cool. The way I understand it, one would just need to render the UI elements at a different position on the left and right viewport (giving it a different parallax than the game itself). The same could be done for things that are present at a different Z level: projectiles, drones, etc.

I do not think that the assets need to be revisited projecting elements with different parallax would give the impression that the UI is composed of 2D planes floating one in front of another. You could programmatically add some textures (the same everywhere) to add a little depth, looking like a painted metal plate for instance (in that case the texture would be for the edge of the plate).

There is so much potential, I hope that developers will investigate it. In the worst case, the community can always try to use shaders to bolt this on top (I am not familiar with factorio's rendering, but if it uses GPU compositing and a depth buffer, I think it should be fairly doable to add as a post-processing step.