Vulkan improvements. So, pointier ears?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestI am much more inclined to buy games from developers who say 'no Linux version planned, sorry' due to it being financially unviable or something, rather than those who make empty promises. Still, as shakey as it may be, I hope it comes to Linux.

Oddly, I'm not. Well, not for any practical purposes--I suppose there's a distinction between "Won't buy" and "Really won't buy no way in Hell ever". But there are 3000 games on Steam for Linux now and my library is about 30 or so. I literally own only 1% of the games available for Linux on Steam alone. Even assuming at least 90% of the games are either crap or not in my gaming sweet spot, it would take me a decade just to buy the games I might want that are already out for Linux, and they're coming out faster and faster. I really don't have time or money to be buying games that aren't on Linux even if no promises were broken.

I almost wish it were different so I could punish the promise-breakers more than people who just never planned a Linux version, but there you go.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BeamboomYou got SEVERAL hundred games for Linux on your account, and 99% of them are what you would describe as GREAT? OK sounds like you're easily pleased then, I must say.

I got around 200 games now I guess (don't remember exactly), and I can easily say 10% are a pure waste of time, 40% mediocre, the rest being what I'd describe as "quite good" or higher. The ones I'd say are "great" would be maybe 15-20%. And that's after I've done a decision on what to purchase.

I mean, let's be honest about the quality ratio here.

Well, yeah, but he's a pro--games is what he does, he talks to game people (both developers and critics) constantly and so on. Probably it's partly that he gets better information before he buys and so only ends up with games that are genuinely to his taste.

Anyway, 3000, woot! and stuff. It does seem like just a couple of months since 2000, this is getting ridiculous.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: gurv

Quoting: apocalyptechDidn't Civ5/BE have the slowly-dropping-FPS thing as well? I seem to recall that things would get slower the further you are in the campaign (not that it ever got awful, really).

It's most likely because there's a lot more going on screen in the late game.
So that means a lot more draw calls to strangle even more that lone cpu core that's doing all the opengl stuff.

I don't know much about these things, but I suspect a lot of what's going on actually has nothing to do with graphics. In the late game there's a lot more going on off screen. You have more cities and more units and more factors affecting them, the other civilizations likewise, and the possible interactions between them all presumably multiply hugely. In a strategy game like Civ, I suspect a lot of that CPU-bound stuff, especially during the lag between turns, is calculations about city economics and population and pollution and construction and blah blah blah which isn't going to the graphics card because it's not remotely graphics-y (I know it's possible to get graphics cards to do non-graphics work, but the kinds of things that works with are a bit specialized I believe).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: SaladienGreat,
But I think the price is quite high for such an old game. Within one month of the release on the original platform I would be willing to pay this price. But now Hmm at least 50% should be it.
Hopefully Feral and Aspyr will learn in the future that they should release within one month of the original release or they will practically lose money. Atleast in my understanding.
Greetings

For some games, that might be true (although even there, I think you're being a bit hasty). But this is Civilization--the Civ series are iconic and cater to an audience with a long attention span. Hardly anyone planning to buy Civ will just forget the whole idea a few months later, nor will they have bought a similar substitute instead (nobody has the guts to compete head-to-head with the Civ franchise). So I don't think your point applies to Civ games.
(Except maybe Beyond Earth, which does have competition. I actually like Pandora better, and for that matter I think Civ:BE fell well short of the original Alpha Centauri that it's trying to be the successor of. So it might need to get discounted rather faster to sell)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: compholio

Quoting: rkfg...
Wow, I've never heard of that. I presumed, in TBS the host has authority so it does all the random stuff and then just sends the numbers back to the clients. Deterministic engines are made to fight excessive bandwidth and accompanying lags if you have hundreds of units that are constantly moving. Not the case for TBS I guess... Still, an interesting reason for incompatibility.

The standard rand() implementation on any system is not actually random, it is very predictable. This is used to great advantage in many games, since by properly seeding the randomizer you can get consistent behavior without transmitting the full state between systems.

So, lets say you have a treasure chest and you want to make sure it always has the same contents no matter who opens it and without transmitting the contents to everyone. All you have to do is seed the randomizer with an ID for the treasure chest, if you do that then you just need to use the output of the randomizer to determine the contents. This means you don't have to transmit "plate mail (with all associated properties), sword (same deal), amulet (having fun yet?)", you just send "seed X" and all clients will run through the same randomization algorithm (calling srand() and then rand() an appropriate number of times).

If, however, your randomizer works differently on different platforms then you run into trouble.

There are reasons why it's often a bad idea to get cute even if it seems to be saving (effort, bandwidth or whatever)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

QuoteI know people and likely some Mesa developers are opposed to having more game-specific bits in their drivers, but this is about getting the game to actually run, not about hacking around performance issues.

Wellll, it seems like this is extensible though. I mean, it's meant to fix this one game, but it looks like it could work for any game that had some kind of weird OpenGL version requirement--once you've got it working for ARK, you could easily add other games to a list or something, right? And there's bound to be more of them, so.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Crazy PenguinNice! Another Space-Sandbox. It looks like StarMade gets some serious competition.

"it took 2-3 minutes to slow down from full speed which caused me to fly into a repair station and boom"
Liam, you know that you are in Space and it takes time to slow down, right? :D

It helps to have more thrusters with forward-facing surface area on your ship:

To protect your privacy, external media requires approval to load. Source: s28.postimg.org
View cookie preferences.
Accept & Show Accept All & Don't show this again   Direct Link

Can't you just flip and face backwards to decelerate, like in all those interplanetary-hard-SF stories from the old days?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestInteresting interview. Glad to read that Linux sales are several times higher than the famous Steam 1%.

Well, they would be. If 1/4 of the games are available on Linux, then all else being equal 1% of the customers would buy 0% of 3/4 of the games, and 4% of the 1/4 they can play. (With some smudge effects for Wine players, dual booters and such)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Feral's porting pace really does amaze me. It seems like there must be a serious learning curve--once you've done a few games there must be things you know to look for and how to fix so you can get them out of the way quick, or something, because it certainly seems as if Feral can port a game way quicker than, well, most anyone else.

View this comment - View article - View full comments