Quoting: uraeusI think if people look at crowdfunding as a version of pre-ordering then supporting a crowdfunded game does not makes sense. However if you look at it as 'Do I want to see this project that would otherwise not go forward happen bad enough to put some money into it and maybe it will succeed' then supporting crowdfunding campaigns make sense. I have personally supported probably 25 projects and due to doing some serious evaluation of each project I only had 4 of them go bad so far. I also never put in more than 15-20 dollars so that if the project fails I can write off the loss without regrets. But just before the crowdfunding tend to offer you a copy of the game as a reward don't start categorising this as 'buying' in your head, because if you do then of course it doesn't make sense.

Yeah, the article sums up the risk side--what you should watch for to maximize the chance of a game, with Linux on it, coming out the other end. But of course that's just one side of the equation--the other is, is it worth the risk to you? If a crowdfunded game is just something pretty normal but incrementally better/different from what's out there anyway, there's no point accepting much risk to get it. If on the other hand it is exactly your personal game fetish and there is no hope of normal game publishing corporations making such a thing because it's outside their radar of what a "game that sells with a genre we understand" is supposed to be, then it might be worth it to take a bigger risk.

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Probably should, a lot of people seem not to like Civ:BE. I don't mind it, although it's no Alpha Centauri. As to crashes and such, it crashes almost immediately on my desktop but runs fine on my laptop--both running Mint. So, hardware related presumably.

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I'll buy it even if it won't run on any of my current computers.

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I didn't realize even experimental Wine was even very near the point of actually allowing any DX11 or Vulkan games to run. Is it just me or has Wine been moving very fast lately?
Like really, for years it felt like Wine was noodling along making tiny incremental improvements but basically pretty hit or miss, only usable with increasingly outdated stuff, and any new version seemed as likely to break something that worked as to make something work that hadn't. It felt like it had turned into one of those stagnating back-burner projects with just a few people keeping it alive. But for the last, I dunno, few months or a year, it feels like it's been just charging ahead.
I wonder if that's a real thing or if it's just that they've been patiently laying groundwork all this time which we are only now suddenly seeing the fruits of?

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Thing is, with older games that are more likely to be run in Wine, the performance hit isn't as much of an issue because hardware has gotten faster since they came out. So as long as things work, it's cool. Great to see the progress Wine has been making lately.

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Quoting: ColomboPLG: Your post makes no sense with or without quote.

I see the problem. For some reason when I first saw your post either the quoted text wasn't there or I didn't notice it. So it was a non-sequitur from my point of view, and looking for something it might be about I concluded it must be assuming Shadowrun was some kind of D&D clone. My mistake.

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Quoting: Colombouh, Ad&d rules suck. Seriously, we have 21. century. We know better rules than half-assed wargaming rules applied to pnp RPG.

I'm trying to figure out what that's referring to and I'm coming up empty.
So you know, Shadowrun was never based on D&D rules of any sort. It was, and is, its own separate game system with quite different mechanics from anything D&D. IMO Shadowrun's rules have some significant problems, but they have some great aspects when it comes to expressing the style of a mixed cyberpunk/magical world; the essence rules for instance were a great idea that helps bring a lot of flavour.
The Shadowrun video game did bring in some kind of level thing for the NPCs so you can make some quickie decisions improving them, but for your own character it's a point-based system somewhat similar to the Shadowrun RPG.

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For some reason the Shadowrun series really hits my sweet spot. Well, for one thing, I used to play Shadowrun pencil-and-paper and I'm quite fond of the setting, so I was quite pleased to see something that seems quite true to the game. But I like the combat quite well, and I find the amount of character improvement and acquisition of novahot goodies is enough to see a pretty nice progression from mediocre to asskicking over the course of one of the games. And I like the stories and such, and I find for me the pacing is a fairly nice mix between story and fighting. And I've enjoyed trying a few different kinds of characters; even within say Street Samurai, your tactics are quite different if you go with a sniper than if you put together a hand-to-hand cutter type.
Dragonfall is probably the best, but I like the other two--even the more basic one, Shadowrun Returns. A lot of people damn that one with faint praise, but I actually find it pretty good--although I'd love to back-port some of the other games' more advanced magic and cyberware to it.

I too never had Stupendous Man's problem with saving, by the way.

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Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, the big engines probably make money hand over fist. Maintaining and improving Linux support I would expect is cheaper than adding it was in the first place. And the thing about Linux is, even if there were no non-techie Linux desktops at all, Linux dominates in most other spaces and shows no sign of that diminishing. Between that and the attractiveness of the FOSS idea, Linux has a strong allegiance among programmers. Once they've jumped the hurdle of putting in support in the first place, even if keeping it isn't worth it financially it's probably worth it just for morale within the company and goodwill outside.
There's also the checklist effect. If you offer a product it's kind of hard to measure which features are making you money, which make the difference in people's choices to use your product or a competitor's. But if that kind of product has a checklist of features that most of them support, I suspect most companies would be leery of changing their product so it gets a red X beside something on the list while their competitors still have a green check mark.

So I suspect chances are pretty good Linux support in the engines will stay for a while.

I certainly hope you are right. I think we can assume a few years of speculative Linux support, but beyond that there probably has to be a commercial argument, and it is currently unclear how that will pan out.

Not gonna argue. The long and the short of it is, in the end we're gonna need market share, and while there's some indication that may have been growing a bit lately, I still don't see any big obvious sources of Linux desktop growth right now.
I do think the potential is there--the Linux desktop, in various versions, is really quite good and just getting better. Linux has always had some unique strengths as a desktop; it has also, let's face it, had unique disadvantages (including lack of games), but these have been gradually chipped away over the years and at this point few remain. But quality and adoption aren't always related, and I don't know what commercial interests are likely to put Linux on desktops any time soon. Hoping some emerge.

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Quoting: oldrocker99I started in 2008, with Ubuntu 8.04, and, at the time, there was exactly one freely-available commercial game that had a Linux client available: Neverwinter Nights. I happily played it (and still occasionally fire it up, and it still works; not bad for a 15 year old port) until the Humble Bundles came up. I dual-booted from 2012 to 2014; when X-COM came out for Linux, I deep-sixed my Windows partition and haven't looked back.

I have seen gaming on Linux grow from Steam's initial offering of mostly Humble Bundle games to the wealth of titles we have now. I used to buy just about every Linux game that came out, and now I'm pretty damn picky.

We are in a Golden Age of gaming for Linux.

Let us hope it turns out to be only a Silver Age, with the Golden Age of World Domination yet to come! ;)

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