Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: hardpenguin

Quoting: kellerkindtRidiculous shot to the knee by M$ to support DX12 only on Win 10 - but I cannot complain about that :D

Well, that's exactly what they did with DX10 and DX11 (available only for Windows Vista and newer). And as most of you probably noticed, they really want everyone to use the latest version of their system ;)

Yes, the shot in the knee part is when they expected Win 10 to be successful, and people didn't even want it for free, making DX12 stuck with a market share that will force developers to offer DX11 legacy support for years to come... Or just use Vulkan and get rid of the problem entirely. :D

It is a huge advantage for Vulkan, and one which as far as I remember hadn't even come up in previous discussions on the subject around here. We'd been talking about the different platforms Vulkan supports (and contrariwise about DX12 running on Xbox), but it had never occurred to me that Vulkan, unlike DX12, supports Windows(pre 10). That's massive.

It could be good for Linux in another way too. Consider, people resisting the Win10 (or higher) upgrade over the next couple-few years will increasingly find themselves buying Vulkan games. If pre-Win10 Windows gradually becomes less viable and they think about moving, well, Vulkan games will presumably almost all run on Linux, so smooth upgrade path there. OTOH, Vulkan games may not all run on Mac because that would require porting to Metal . . .

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Oh. My. God. I was watching the trailer and in the game, it looked like people with shields were moving like they intended to actually use the shields to block with! No, really, shield forward protecting the body, sword arm back where it isn't vulnerable, generally not looking like Hollywood prats!
I feel like buying the game just for that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KimyrielleGraphics drivers and related performance issues are probably our biggest sore spots right now, so that's good news. I hope he won't work on -just- VR though, at least not as long as the drivers are lagging behind their Windows equivalents in general. To be honest, VR is very unlikely to become a mainstream thing in this decade, that will be a battle for another day.

Near as I can tell, there is a fair amount of overlap between what what VR needs and general speed improvement, so VR work won't be useless for everything else.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: saildata

Quoting: KimyrielleI am utterly not interested in the DLC, but the "free" patch is nice and welcome.

As a side note, I really wonder if really EVERY country on the planet gets added before Canada does. I know, I know. We're America's hat. But still!

Canada is way too nice to be a war monger : ) I went to Victoria recently and would move there today if it wasn't so cold in the winter..

Eh, they could call the DLC pack "Canadian Winter" and make it a "Seasons!!!" pack together with the Australian summer thingie. We got at least as much snow as Australia got sun. Maybe more. And actually...Victoria is pretty warm. By our standards. I live close by. :D

Huh. I'm a Vancouver man myself. And really, Victoria? Cold in winter? Half the US is colder than Victoria in winter; I think half the time they never get a single snowfall. Or, like, maybe one or two, that stick for a day and then there's rain the next day. Even Vancouver doesn't get much, except this year which has been a total Global Weirding bizarrefest.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: Duckeenie

Quoting: cprnHonestly, I'm not disappointed at all. Learned that Windows developers are untruthful bitches long time ago. It's not even their fault, really... They just lack knowledge, skill and consistency. Period.

. period. is presumably longhand for an ellipsis?

Not really. If English isn't your first language, then the best explanation I can think of is that the word "Period" as a one-word sentence is to emphasise the utter finality of the previous sentence. It's emphasising that this discussion is over. Nothing more to say.

Like if you do something awesome and exclaim, "Nothing can beat that. Period!"

I was assuming it was a joke. If "period" = ".", then ".period." = "..." = ellipsis.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments