I tend not to be at the forefront . . . last few days I've been playing Pandora and Civilization: Beyond Earth (with the Rising Tides stuff). Pandora was IMO better than original Civ:BE, but probably not as good as Civ:BE with Rising Tides added in. Both are pretty good, but neither is quite the brought-to-modernity-and-improved Alpha Centauri that I'm longing for, just as I've yet to meet the "MOO II taken to another level" game I seek in the interstellar 4X genre.

One thing I've noticed: To this day, I don't think I've ever seen a Civ-ish game where espionage is really all that worth it. And the more elaborate it has become, the worse it has gotten; really, I could get more out of a Diplomat or Spy with less faffing around in Civ II than I can with modern incarnations with their endless missions and crap. This is probably true to life; WW II is one of the few times espionage has IMO really delivered enough positive to make it worth all the negatives. Most of the modern intelligence services of countries around the world, whether the American octopus or my country's little-but-obnoxious CSIS or Britain's maximum snoopers, are IMO way more trouble and expense than they're worth.
The Civ:BE espionage takes up my time for little reward, but at least doesn't cost much in terms of resources. In Pandora, on the other hand, there's less time sink and it's more old fashioned, but there are a number of technologies devoted solely to the spies, and I found it effective to simply bypass researching them whenever possible and buy tanks instead.

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Quoting: NanobangGame: This looks wonderful, and I'm glad Aspyr is bringing it to Linux.

Physics palaver: A make-believe story in a make-believe world with make-believe laws of nature and sure enough there are people discussing the unreality of those laws. I'd say it was sad, but in trying to address it, I stumbled across a new phrase that shines like a chrome razor blade: nihil ad rem. So thank you armchair physicists!

It always gets me the people who irrelevantly slag people for talking about irrelevant things. The difference being that the ones talking are usually discussing something interesting, and the ones slagging them are just being negative for, I dunno, self-importance or something.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: femtomaticI played a lot of GalCiv2 when Windows was all I knew and would really love to have GalCiv3 under linux, but I'm not holding my breath.

Part of Stardock's business model is to sell customization softwares for the Windows desktop, I don't know how it compares to their game sales but I'm pretty sure it has increased significantly since Win8... So to be realistic, I doubt they would spend a significant amount of money and energy cater to linux users unless they see a potential for meaningful profits.

Or they could see us as potential customers for their other products "Look, we made Windows as customizable as KDE! All you have to do is pay us a fee to be able to modify a software that you already paid for..." God I'm glad I switched to linux!

From what I understand, Stardock's widgets for Windows make up the vast majority of their income. Game development is something Wardell treats almost as a hobby.

There's an irony there . . . Stardock largely ignore Linux but near as I can figure it, their widgets basically exist to allow Windows to do some of the things Linux does.

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Quoting: Mountain ManThey've been promising to support Linux for years. [Brad Wardell at one point all but promised that GalCiv 3 would get a Linux release](http://steamcommunity.com/app/241990/discussions/0/613937942951572333/?ctp=5#c613937943144071447), but we're still waiting for that one, so I'll believe it when I see it. Stardock used to be one of my favorite developers, but I've pretty much written them off until they show they're serious about supporting Linux. I'm surprised they haven't jumped on it already, to be honest, because being a small, independent developer selling niche games, they would benefit the most from supporting Linux.

Yeah. Stardock seem like a very Windows-and-DirectX shop, despite any occasional comments to the contrary, so I won't hold my breath. Pity, I like GalCiv2 and would like to give GalCiv3 a shot, but no Tux no Bux (I acquired 2 before that was a remotely viable strategy).

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Quoting: TheRiddickThe nouveau drivers are making progress and once NVIDIA is pushed into releasing the appropriate firmware files then it will likely perform extremely competitively VS MESA once that happens, this can be shown in the 500 or 600 series results with the driver as those have the full firmware files to allow reclocking et al.

My guess is NVIDIA are just waiting until AMD and MESA starts to overtake their drivers, atm I don't think they believe it will happen so thus aren't in any rush to compete. However with valve now also working on AMD drivers (since their open anyone can help) I think NVIDIA might be in for a surprise sometime around end of year.

Once NVIDIA is pushed? Don't hold your breath. They're not "in any rush to compete" because Linux is 1-2% of the market and so they'd quite likely rather lose big chunks of the Linux desktop than expose any of their secret sauce. AMD does care a bit about Linux because they're scrambling for every tiny scrap of market share they can get.

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Quoting: razing32

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFor a second I thought this had something to do with Lindows (and boy, does that take me back!)

OK curios now , did that fork into anything ?
Or did all the distros go towards a dead end ? :(

Far as I know, dead end. Well, sort of. On one hand, if Wine isn't ready to be a reliable general Windows (not an) emulator now, it certainly wasn't back then. On the other, the Lindows/Linspire/Xandros pushes towards certain user-friendly innovations were . . . I dunno how to put it. Seems like they were kind of too in-house, too forked, too specialized, and so both hard for a small outfit to maintain, and kind of losing the broader help that is normally an open source advantage. They were hoping they would not remain small, but their hope was not rewarded. So their stuff kind of died and I don't think it was workable to incorporate the stuff they'd done elsewhere. Open source is not kind to people who think they are such Awes0me D00ds that they can do it way better all by themselves than the community can.

But I do think that their example/challenge helped to inspire some of the other distributions that worked on user-friendliness while staying closer to upstream, and software projects like Synaptic and so on that made things easier across many distributions. All the things they were trying to do either got done and better than they ever imagined, or in the case of Wine are still being vigorously worked on because they turn out to be really hard.

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Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: M@yeulCInvert gravity, and you're off to very bad thing.
Invert electromagnetism, and you'll have your limbs splitting off. At least you may still have planets and stars...
But that's nothing compared to what happens if you Invert the strong force...

And invert the weak force and…I don't know, I've never been able to nail down a clear answer on how exactly it works. Free neutrons might get a half-life longer than 15 minutes?

Well, apparently it's responsible for nuclear fusion, so no stars, for one thing.

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Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: M@yeulCThere are some theories that proclaim that our universe works that way, with these constants, because it makes life more likely, thus more likely for us to be sitting into it.

Since that's just assuming life to be a desirable result of the creation of the universe without any tangible theory of why this would be so, that's a fairly unscientific view of things. But I guess people still need to think that they are so special that the entire universe was made just for us, even if there is not the slightest sliver of evidence to support that.

Not really what that sort-of-scientific notion is about. It's maybe easier to dig if you assume massively multiple parallel universes with all different rules. Which universe would we be in? The one with rules that allow us to exist in it. Similarly, can we expect our universe is a big one or a small one? Big, because on average there's gonna be a lot more life in the big ones. Et cetera.

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For a second I thought this had something to do with Lindows (and boy, does that take me back!)

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Hmmm . . . I suck at those games too. I'll have to keep an eye on this.

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