Rise to Ruins, one of my favourite indie games that mixes in a city-builder with tower defense and god-like interactions with powers has a big update out. Also, it's going to finally leave Early Access later this year.
The "InDev 32" update brings in an overhaul of the entire particle system, which allows some much more interesting effects in the game. Particles in Rise to Ruins can now be "all shapes and sizes, and even animations" so nearly all the particle effects in the game have been updated and improved.
Additionally, you should see performance improvements since "all particle and emitter logic has been shuffled off to a new dedicated thread". They say if you have at least 4 CPU threads, you should see a pretty decent performance boost which will likely be especially noticeable when you have a larger village built up with a lot going on.
As for leaving Early Access, the developer has said it's going to happen this year. However, they made it clear that will not be the end of development:
I have no intention on stopping development once the game leaves Early Access, nor do I plan to stop anytime soon. As long as you are all here supporting my work, I will be here to support it too. After Release 1 expect plenty of additional content over, hopefully, years of future development.
They aren't giving an exact date just yet but they did make it clear the price is going to rise just before release.
I did have an issue launching the latest version, as it seems to by default on the fullscreen option use the resolution of my two monitors together and it fails to display. If you also have the issue, deleting the file "profiles/settings.properties" in the installed folder should reset it for you to windowed mode which allowed me to get back in. I've let the developer know about this to look into it.
Finally, they also showed off some stats on Twitter about their sales across a whole year "Feb 2018 -> Feb 2019":
It shows that China doesn't particularly sell well on Linux and overall Linux accounted for around 1.49% of the sales. That's not a lot (obviously) but it seems to be punching well above the currently listed market share for Linux on Steam (0.82%).
You can find Rise to Ruins on Steam and itch.io.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I'll certainly give the game another spin once I'm done with Surviving Mars. So far, I did not manage to survive more than two years with some of the recent changes that completely nerfed some towers.
It seems France has more %Linux than others with 3,18%, while USA has 1,14%, and China has 0,16%.
Germany doesn't surprise me at all, they're one of the most privacy conscious nations of the world. France is a pleasant surprise, but given that their parliament gives representatives a choice between Windows and Linux on their work computers, it probably shouldn't. Brazil is an interesting case, where Linux is sold preinstalled on cheap computers. The only other country I know this to be the case is Hungary, but that doesn't seem to show on the statistics.
Quoting: PikoloSeems like Linux users are unusually highly concentrated in the rich markets of Germany and France, as well as the emerging market of Brazil.
Germany doesn't surprise me at all, they're one of the most privacy conscious nations of the world. France is a pleasant surprise, but given that their parliament gives representatives a choice between Windows and Linux on their work computers, it probably shouldn't. Brazil is an interesting case, where Linux is sold preinstalled on cheap computers. The only other country I know this to be the case is Hungary, but that doesn't seem to show on the statistics.
Brazil has some factors I think. The previous elected government did some work to foster open source software that still has some effect today, also there's a huge amount of pirated software, a lot of it Windows. But Windows 10 is a bit harder to pirate, and as it's flaws start to arise some people simply prefer to try Linux instead. And if they have an better than average performance/compatibility they will tend to stay with it simply because it's more stable.
Oh and about the game I bought and play it mostly on Itch, I need to reinstall it because I was having some issues.
Last edited by bgh251f2 on 25 February 2019 at 11:51 am UTC
hardpenguin Feb 25, 2019
https://twitter.com/hardpenguin13/status/1100001122377453568
Windows use is very entrenched in Japan, and Excel even more so. Also, many distributions and Linux apps don't make it easy or convenient to use kanji, and that hampers uptake even more of course.
Quoting: hardpenguinHere are some of my takes on the subject:
https://twitter.com/hardpenguin13/status/1100001122377453568
Interesting! Note that France may have a strong Linux market share but if you compare with other countries (US, UK and Germany) it also has the lowest global market share for this game (units - Win, Mac and Linux - sold by inhabitant, assuming that there is more or less the same percentage of gamers vs global population in each country - again, only looking at France, US, UK and Germany -, which may not be the case). :)
Quoting: JanneAlso, many distributions and Linux apps don't make it easy or convenient to use kanji, and that hampers uptake even more of course.Same problem with Chinese. You can install it, but it is a hassle to do so and often requires many more steps than just "sudo apt install myGreatChineseStuff".
gradyvuckovic Feb 25, 2019
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