Fanatical has a big strategy game sale on with some good Linux games cheap

Bought Stellaris :)

Quoting: PatolaGreat! I bought the USD 1.99 strategy bundle. It has Space Hulk Ascension and Grand Ages Medieval, which I have been planning to buy.

Thanks for mentioning that. I've been thinking about GAM myself, but probably wouldn't have looked at the bundle otherwise.

Ooh, only 12 minutes left on Surviving Mars now! Nah, still too expensive for me at the moment. It's (or was :) ) a good offer if you have £20 to spare, mind you.

How do they now that the buyer has bought it for Linux to acknowledge the Linux buy?

Too bad the Attila port was trash - wish CA didn't try to do things in house.

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: amataiHow do they now that the buyer has bought it for Linux to acknowledge the Linux buy?

I don't think they ever get to know that. They just resell steam keys, and it is steam that will acknowledge the activation for a particular platform when it is done.

I asked a few developers whose games were offered here. They claimed it did not matter to them. It is important that I buy and activate on Steam and play on Linux and they will know that I am playing on Linux.

Because the keys on Steam are not assigned to a specific platform but to a specific publisher. Thats why there is no such thing as Linux keys.


Last edited by DamonLinuxPL on 13 July 2018 at 4:55 pm UTC

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: bakgwailoToo bad the Attila port was trash - wish CA didn't try to do things in house.

In which sense it was bad? Performance? Features? Graphically?

Performance. Also, being an house port, you would think CA would have solved cross platform multiplayer, but, nope. To be fair, the performance on Windows was/is also garbage, but, the Linux/OSX ports are even worse. Its disappointing as it really is a good/great game otherwise.


Last edited by bakgwailo on 13 July 2018 at 5:24 pm UTC

Interesting. I was having a look at Crusader Kings II's DLCs. The price in sale is basically the same price normally on Steam here on Brazil (considering the dollar). A shame, otherwise I'd be swimming in it.

Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: PatolaGreat! I bought the USD 1.99 strategy bundle. It has Space Hulk Ascension and Grand Ages Medieval, which I have been planning to buy.

Thanks for mentioning that. I've been thinking about GAM myself, but probably wouldn't have looked at the bundle otherwise.

I have bought into GAM on release...

don't. GAM sucks. The core didn't sucked THAT much and could be significantly improved if devs continued to work on it and released some patches and DLCs to improve it. But it got serious backslash, mainly because it was wrongly marketed as an empire building game, which it wasn't really. So devs/publisher cut their loses and balked out.

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: bakgwailoPerformance. Also, being an house port, you would think CA would have solved cross platform multiplayer, but, nope. To be fair, the performance on Windows was/is also garbage, but, the Linux/OSX ports are even worse. Its disappointing as it really is a good/great game otherwise.

You know, I wish I could understand this lack of cross-platform multiplayer. I reckon there are different network libraries for each system, but the packages themselves are regular IP packages, what difficulty might arise in crafting exactly the same packages (even if using different libraries) between platforms so they can communicate? A linux browser can connect to a windows web server and vice versa because the network layer is platform-agnostic. Why can't it happen in certain games?

Floating points arithmetrics differ between platforms and sometimes even between compilers. That is the current problem with Civ 6. If Devs are not aware of this problem at start and are not prepared to handle it from the beginning, you are probably doomed. The Banished dev had a nice blogpost about it.

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: bakgwailoPerformance. Also, being an house port, you would think CA would have solved cross platform multiplayer, but, nope. To be fair, the performance on Windows was/is also garbage, but, the Linux/OSX ports are even worse. Its disappointing as it really is a good/great game otherwise.

You know, I wish I could understand this lack of cross-platform multiplayer. I reckon there are different network libraries for each system, but the packages themselves are regular IP packages, what difficulty might arise in crafting exactly the same packages (even if using different libraries) between platforms so they can communicate? A linux browser can connect to a windows web server and vice versa because the network layer is platform-agnostic. Why can't it happen in certain games?

From what I know of both CA's and Feral's statements, its due to CA using a windows specific math library (or one that is cross platform but behaves differently on OSX/Linux and Windows). Basically, the code calls this library to keep the game synchronized between clients (as it is peer to peer), and most likely the floating point math (or something along it) returns slightly different results, thus making synchronization impossible. This is, of course, all reasonably valid - except that CA could have changed this years ago given Feral has been porting 'em since the original Rome, and CA itself did two ports in house, too.