When it comes to these 4X space games, you know what I'd like to see? I want a game that just goes crazy on the tech tree. Too often you get all these technologies and they'll have awesome sounds-crazy-advanced names and they do something like increase industrial production 5% or make ship components very slightly smaller or give your missiles +1 damage, woo hoo. Everyone wants to be careful, and systematic, so they keep the impacts of technologies balanced, and predictable, and incremental, and kinda boring.
To heck with worrying about balance (or maybe have an optional "tame" tech tree), just make with the super science at the upper levels and if the implications of a tech let you totally break all feeble opposition if you use it unscrupulously, so be it!

I'd play again and again just to try different game-breaking technologies and gloat as I used them to sweep aside my foes and dominate the galaxy.

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NATO? Shooting at ISIS? Kind of unrealistic. Shouldn't it be either the Syrian Army, Russians, or maybe Hezbollah, manning that machine gun?
Maybe there should be a NATO espionage game about carefully siphoning weapons, money and trainers to ISIS.

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Quoting: jo3fis

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: KimyrielleNice to see it outperforming OpenGL (was there any doubt that it would btw.?) But the much more important question is...will it outperform DX12? Because if it doesn't devs will go "Why would we add a Vulkan render path for these 1% that use Linux?" To succeed on the market, being the second fastest API won't be good enough when the fastest one already controls 90% of the market.

Definitely an important question. Seems like so far we're looking at rapid improvement, so good sign there. From what I've heard about how similar they are, though, I have this feeling they'll end up at rough parity.
I'm thinking if I were making the decision of DX12 vs Vulkan as someone wanting to sell a game (once Vulkan is properly off the ground), it would come down to "Do I want DX12 for Windows and Xbox, or Vulkan for Windows and (everything else)?" And probably my answer would be "I'll just use an engine that does both and get all of the above for almost free."

This to me is the answer. Whatever will reduce development time and give them easier platform options. Linux might be only 1% but android on the other hand...

Well, and correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to recall hearing that PS4 will run Vulkan . . .

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Quoting: KimyrielleNice to see it outperforming OpenGL (was there any doubt that it would btw.?) But the much more important question is...will it outperform DX12? Because if it doesn't devs will go "Why would we add a Vulkan render path for these 1% that use Linux?" To succeed on the market, being the second fastest API won't be good enough when the fastest one already controls 90% of the market.

Definitely an important question. Seems like so far we're looking at rapid improvement, so good sign there. From what I've heard about how similar they are, though, I have this feeling they'll end up at rough parity.
I'm thinking if I were making the decision of DX12 vs Vulkan as someone wanting to sell a game (once Vulkan is properly off the ground), it would come down to "Do I want DX12 for Windows and Xbox, or Vulkan for Windows and (everything else)?" And probably my answer would be "I'll just use an engine that does both and get all of the above for almost free."

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It's odd . . . I am not a programmer. Like, at all--I took one, one-hundred-level programming course in university and a couple in high school; Pascal and Basic. And yet somehow, my hanging around paying attention to Linux issues for a fair number of years made even me think "Oh dear, I think that wasn't the way to go" a few times while reading that writeup.

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I'm getting the general impression that Vulkan must genuinely be fairly clean and simple, thus easy to make the drivers, since overall it seems like development of this stuff is happening faster than I was really expecting.

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Certainly sounds like the game's a pile of Bullshot.

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To hell with Mono and the .Net it rode in on.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Nel

Quoting: Mountain Man"Personally, I think these sorts of contracts do no good, and I am not a fan of them. I am surprised such a contract is even legal!"

Why should they be illegal? If an employer says, "Here are the terms you must agree to before we'll hire you," and the employee signs on the dotted line anyway then that's on them. Trendy Entertainment is perfectly within its right to enforce a contract that both parties willingly agreed to.

ROFL

Just one sentence from Noam Chomsky:
The idea of "free contract" between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

Unless someone is holding a gun to his head, a prospective employee is under no compulsion to sign a contract he doesn't agree with.

That seems almost the exact inverse of what, when TheBoss said it, your rejoinder was "You're right, that is a stupid example". This is a ludicrous claim, why do I see it so often? Of course it's not the case that there is no such thing as compulsion that doesn't consist of holding a gun to the head. There are many kinds and degrees of compulsion. And it's certainly the case that overall, in gaming companies, people tend to need jobs much more than companies need any given employee, and this differential in power is often used to insist on crap working conditions and nasty contracts. If the power dynamic were different, so would the contracts be. And indeed, every so often you get a superstar programmer who is in great demand, and is well enough off not to really need a job at all, and whose contracts, surprise surprise, are very different. The notion that contracts are, ever really, something happening in some hypothetical magical neutral space where everyone is freed of all coercion is laughable.
This is one reason why it's important for there to be some kind of outside social arbiter (such as, although not necessarily limited to, the state) imposing some limits on how unfair contracts are allowed to be, how much power imbalance is allowed to be brought to bear.

As to this particular case, I think I dislike everyone involved. Stieglitz sounds like a jerk, given the way he seems to have treated people he bossed. Trendy sound like creeps who were probably just fine with Stieglitz's management style until it blew up on them and they had to shuffle things around to save face, and their contract is BS. Even some of the employees . . . even if Stieglitz was treating them like crap, was whining to the media the best action to take? I have my doubts. But dislike Stieglitz personally though I may (given current information at hand--maybe he's a great guy and the people who worked under him were indulging in horrible calumnies), I'd rather see this blow up in Trendy's face because abusing vicious contracts is a broader problem whereas Stieglitz is just one particular dude.

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Saw the headline, "Banished Linux port" and all I could think was "What?! This is an outrage! Why did they banish the Linux port?"

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