Thank you very much, Dr. McCoy, that elucidated exactly what I was wondering about very clearly.

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Does anyone have some context for this? I can't quite tell whether this means "Xoreos generally works at least on certain games except for various annoying glitches, and we just cleaned up some of those", or whether it means "Xoreos technically makes certain games run but they are unplayable, and this release cleans up certain issues but leaves that broader unplayable status largely intact".
The progress described, not to mention the tools for easing the continuation of progress, sound very positive, but I can't tell what that means for the general prospects.

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Quoting: KeyrockThis doesn't surprise me one bit. This is the latest in a string of articles from Ars centered around gaming where it was readily apparent the person writing said article was woefully underqualified/underinformed and they've been dipping into click-bait territory with their article titles.

Overall, one wonders if people won't soon be starting to add a letter to "'Ars' Technica".

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Hmm . . . kind of looks like it's going to be MOO 2 with a modern UI and, presumably although it looks like that part isn't finished yet, some spiffed up graphics. I can work with that. I kind of wish Civilization: Beyond Earth had just done that with Alpha Centauri . . .

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Well, people can say sure, there's quantity but what about the quality.
But when you get to this kind of numbers, quantity has a quality all its own. If you've got 10 games and only 10% of your games are any good, you've got one good game. If you've got 1800 games and only 10% of your games are any good, you've got more good games than I can play in years.
Basically, it seems like in the course of a couple of years, Linux gaming has gone from ridiculously marginal to vague parity with Mac. That's hard to believe when I think about it.

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Quoting: neowiz73sounds great, I hope they learned a lot since moo3. moo1 and 2 were great games though.

They were. People sell moo1 short. Moo2 was great, but I sometimes think that in the rush to kind of jump on the bandwagon of "Civilization" style, some good ideas from the first game got lost. Like, in moo1, your planets could work on different things at the same time and it was about balancing them right; same goes for your tech research. In moo2 they'd picked up the Civilization paradigm and your planets were suddenly like a city from Civ, with a list of "buildings" you could make which you worked on one at a time, and the same for technologies--research this technology, then that technology. This had its advantages but I couldn't help feeling something had been lost. Also in moo1 automating ship movement felt more intuitive somehow. Things like that.
Still, moo2 was great. Every so often I'll find me a 4X space game to play, often touted as cool and all, and find myself thinking "Hmmm . . . Moo2 is still better."

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Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: runeIf the game is rather demanding in the first place, then you will definitely notice a difference (if it's a DirectX game). Rewriting an engine, and optimizing the code takes time, and time is money. I guess that they (Feral, Aspyr, etc.) can not afford to spend that much time optimizing the code.

Unless you have optimized code, you can not compare DirectX to OpenGL. I don't believe that the games we're getting now are 100% optimized, not even close.

In a purely theoretical world (read perfect) OpenGL and DirectX might perform the same but, as we have seen, that is not typically the case in our practical world. Code is never 100% optimized. Currently ports seem to choke especially when it comes to multithreading due to technical differences between OpenGL and DirectX.

Simply put, you cannot write DirectX in OpenGL and expect it to perform well

I suppose one issue is that we never see it working the other way. Lots of things written in DirectX get half-assed ports to OpenGL. But if something was written in OpenGL in the first place there is no point porting it to DirectX because OpenGL is already cross-platform. So we don't see what the performance of half-assed ports from OpenGL to DirectX would look like, performance-wise.

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Quoting: Stupendous Man

Quoting: BeamboomI must say I'm surprised about Cities: Skylines receiving that many votes. Apart from that it all looks fine although only one of my favourites won. :)

Me too, I recently bought the game, made a large city, and grew really bored; the game has close to no difficulty as is really just a sandbox. Oh well, to each their own.

It's a city builder. Surely it's supposed to be a sandbox. If people like city builders at all in the first place, surely most of them won't be put off by it being a sandbox.

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Quoting: NyapI personally think that this news is good ~ I came to linux for privacy. By attracting attention, and making more people use linux, we are making it more vulnerable from government wishes to implement backdoors.

Uh . . . what?
. . . I was going to do a takedown of the idea of secret back doors in open source code and stuff, but--are you really someone who dislikes the idea of games being on Linux, coming to explicate your point of view on a site called "Gaming on Linux"?! Or are you just a common or garden variety troll?

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People clearly think differently from me. I'm kind of surprised--very few of the, what you might call "strategic" articles, made the list. You know, like stuff about the Steam Machines and controller coming out and how they were selling and stuff, or about Vulkan (I think I saw one Vulkan article on the list), and so on. To me that kind of thing is more important than news about any particular game, because, like, one game is one game, but movements of Linux as a gaming platform as a whole could mean the difference between thousands of games in the future and very few, between good performance and crappy performance, etc.

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