Yeah, "battlestation" is a word, it's been around in SF for decades. And OK, Apple is a word too, but you can trademark "Apple" used as a reference to a computer (as opposed to a fruit). But here we're looking at someone using the word "Battlestation" in reference, near as I can make out, to there being battlestations in the game. If someone had a brand of vacuum cleaner or air conditioner or something and decided to call it "battlestation", then that would be reasonable to trademark, and then reasonably nobody else would be able to call their vacuum cleaners "Battlestation" vacuum cleaners. But a trademark able to stop people from using the word "Battlestation" for a game about battlestations seems wrong to me.
Next they'll be trademarking a brand of actual apples so nobody else can call their apples apples. Then the rest of us would have to call our apples "oranges" or something, and then how would you compare them . . .

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: DamonLinuxPLTF2 after The Tough Break for me is unplayable.

Huh. Tough break.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: LeonardKVulkan is an important part in porting but it's also low-level -- which makes it harder to use for indies that do not rely on a 3rd party engine.

Mind you, that is not the kind of game Linux is badly lacking at the moment.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I dunno. No matter the this and the that and the overall growth of Steam and the survey methodology and so on, the trend has not been great lately.
I mean, we don't know for sure but I would tend to assume that however the dang survey works, it hasn't been changing over time to be progressively worse for Linux. So even if our numbers should be higher overall, a drop is a drop. And OK, maybe Steam is growing, but a drop still means if Steam is growing, we're not.

We need the Steam Machine to do well, and we need it bad. Crossing my fingers for a renewed launch with better features this Christmas.

Thing is, I really don't understand why Linux should be dropping as a proportion of PC desktops (which is the vague implication I get from the gradual drop of Linux on the Steam survey--I realize there's a lot of caveats between the one thing and the other, but all else equal that's what you'd expect that to mean). I mean, in terms of how usable and likeable the Linux desktop and general software ecosystem (including games) is compared to Windows, we're in about the best shape we've ever been except possibly for a brief moment when everyone was ragging on Vista. And we didn't have games then. Nobody's marketing Linux on the desktop, sure, but nobody ever really was. Linux off the desktop--everywhere else in computing from tiny to huge--just keeps going from strength to 500-lb-gorilla dominance.
So what's the deal?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

More specifically, I wonder how many of them are attached to Steam Machines, which do not show in the hardware survey?
I wonder if Valve are actually playing their cards fairly close to their vest.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Wouldn't preserve my spacing, made the flowchart unreadable (and not funny). Oh well.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Incidentally, does anyone else find the core mechanic in recent Civ that every time you found a new city, your people get significantly unhappier, to be kind of silly?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: FUltra

Quoting: Guest1. Any special reason why would you support Unity3D?
2. Everyones acting like X11 is the past and is really buggy and slow - but really most don't have real problems with X11 and if there are problems let us fix them or rewrite parts if neccesarry.

But X11 is the past and is really buggy (try for example to create a 100% no-one-can-bypass screen saver lock for X11). More to the point is that the devs behind X11 is the same devs that are creating Wayland.

The only sad thing with these nice changes to Unity3D is that AFAIK Unity3D is statically linked to each game and does not exist as a shared resource in for example Steam so for this new version to be used games have to be updated one by one(?).

As I said stop creating new projects and help existing - for me it is "I WILL NEVER STOP USING X11" unless I'll see dwm for Wayland which I guess won't happen and Wayland needs to be cross-platform like other Unix-software.
Anyway who says it is the past and is buggy - Really who needs screenssavers thats like Im not at my desk but I need something running at my screen.

Sorry mate, but really that ship has sailed. Yes, X11 has done yeoman service over many years, but as FUltra said, the people making Wayland are the X11 people. It's coming and that's that. And X11 has/creates a whole bunch of security problems, which don't matter to me sitting at my desktop but matter plenty overall. And X11 ultimately just has too many concepts built deep into it which are at odds with how graphics are done now. It just does not, at its core, do things the way modern graphics work, and that creates bottlenecks and limits capability. For a long time the advantages of maturity outweighed that, but the people who developed X11 seem to pretty much all agree that time is past. They could "just update" X11 but for that to work it would have to be a distinction without a difference--the name is about all that would be left.

Wayland has been slow, but it is arriving. And maybe Mir I guess, wtf Canonical and their Not Invented Here syndrome.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: KimyrielleI am however, genuinely curious what can still done to Civ to improve it.

It's hardly an immaculate concept -- from the ground up, there's so much to improve, to make it worthy of the name 'civilization', as it were. Sure, the core design has to 'gameify' a huge range of social-political dynamics; nevertheless it takes a bit too much for granted.

To begin with, you assume a godlike dictatorship of a nation-state back in 4000BC. Money pretty much has its 20th century significance from the start.

There's quite a bit of the designers' own political leanings informing the design -- in one of the past Civs, the stock exchange increased overall happiness in a city, for instance. And unless you're building an expansionist empire, you can't really aspire to any of the victory types.

You can argue for sure that the game glorifies both capitalism and imperialism with some of its designs. And yes, to make your civilization able to prosper you need to expand. But tbh, size DOES matter in real life international relations. The US is powerful, Switzerland isn't. For the simple reason that one country is large and the other isn't. Power in real life has nothing to do with how "great" a nation is. It's just a function of size. Translating this simple truth into a game where you compete against other nations to become the most powerful one, it makes sense that expansion is needed, no? They sure could relax the ultimate goal to be the "best" nation, but what would the new victory conditions be, then? What would be the goal in Civ for a nation like Switzerland?

I do agree with it being silly that the stock exchange creates happiness. It should create wealth and that's all.

If that. I would be interested to see a Civ-type game in which some of the technologies seemed like a good idea at the time but adopting them ended up causing more problems than they were worth (except maybe if your setup was in other ways just right for them). So if you build stock exchanges, they generate money . . . at first . . . but then a while later you start getting reports about losing tax to corruption and havens . . . on the other hand, if you don't build stock exchanges, other countries that do gradually get more hostile with you and won't trade . . .
Extending that idea, one of the keys to a well-working civilization would be to go with a technique set that worked together. So for instance, in Civilization (as of V) you have these ideologies and such. Presumably if you adopt Communism, stock exchanges are not going to do good things for you since they undermine your whole system (even assuming they ever do good things for anyone other than stock traders).
This all might work better in science fictional games like Alpha C, where there are technologies that you don't really know what they do or what the implications might be.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PeciskI reall doubted they wouldn't release it for Linux - CivV was highly successful on Linux/SteamOS after all. As not being on release - as it is not in-house port, that's understandable. Also with Civ having known issues at release usually it most people will wait for first DLC to drop anyway.

What bothers me a bit that at this point having same OpenGL port for Mac and Linux might drag us down a bit. OpenGL on Mac is in effective limbo state and Apple seems have deemed it to silent, silent death there.

What with OpenGL rotting and refusing to go for Vulkan, Apple is fast becoming a less viable gaming platform than Linux.

View this comment - View article - View full comments