I am happy to support Greek angry mobs.

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Quoting: DrMcCoy

Quoting: KelsThere are some interesting questions raised by this comment about feeling entitled to access to a creative product.

That's...kinda my point, yeah.

I do think I'm entitled access to this creative product. And not just me, not just this creative product. I think everyone is entitled access to every creative product. For the good of the people.

Mind you, in this case it seems to me that in order for everyone to be able to access it, it would have to be something different, in which case it wouldn't be this creative product and therefore nobody at all would be able to access this creative product . . .
More generally, by rights you should be complaining about every single game (or book, album etc) being sold for money, since around half the world's population can't possibly afford to buy the things. Not that I would have a problem with that complaint necessarily, I'm just saying that your position isn't compatible with support for capitalism. The availability constraints of this particular game seem minor and fair compared to the more general constraint of "no money, no play".

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Rare to see people with a long view these days. It's all "What's in it for me today, even if that'll hose me in a year." You'd think with where the climate is going people might be starting to notice the problems with that approach. Kudos to this guy for thinking beyond the end of his nose.

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Quoting: skryIf you don't want to use Steam runtime (or need something that it does not include), learn the very few gotchas about dynamic linking / library loading in Linux compared to Windows and supply your own. Usually this means a simple launcher script. If you need only a handful of libraries or binary size is not an issue, you can also consider static linking.

Really, when I watch my package manager downloading stuff, one thing I notice is that most libraries are very small. For most games of any size, I bet all the libraries you might be worried about would take up less space than one of the game's video clips or whatever. Static linking shouldn't be a problem most of the time.

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Well. Someone has to say it . . .
That's some Bad Juju.

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Well, I'm not pleased, but I'll forgive them if they actually, you know, sell a bunch of Steam Machines.
Based on current pricing I'm not holding my breath; hopefully there will be "Steam Sales".

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Quoting: Vash63Isn't UE4 the most advanced open source game engine? This is free software and UE4 is not, but aren't both open source?

I think this reflects a misunderstanding of what "open source" is. According to both the original definition and the common usage, "open source" is more or less the same thing as "Free/Libre" software. It just emphasizes different issues. Just being freeware, available for no dollars, does not make something open source, nor does even the ability to look at the source code. If you can't make changes and redistribute, it ain't open source.

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I remember Master of Magic. It was a fun little game. The magic got pretty cool. If I remember right, the one thing that occasionally bugged me was that much of the development and the powerful magics you learned and so forth were eclipsed by the antics of the heroes you recruited, who could stomp their way across battlefields crushing everything in their way.

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Quoting: stss

Quoting: seveni don't wanna spell doom or anything but i don't think steammachines gonna be a success, i hope i'm wrong but i don't see them kick a dent in the xbox/PS universe

The comforting thing about this though is that Valve doesn't expect it to compete with consoles. That's just not what it was made for, and I'm pretty sure they are well aware it's catering to only a small portion of their overall users. So even if sales aren't spectacular it doesn't mean the project was a failure at all.

It's good to keep that in mind, because I think the biggest threat to steam machines is not the low quantity of people who will buy them, it's all the people who are no doubt going to be comparing steam machines to console sales and spreading FUD all over the place the moment they realize steam machines sales don't measure up (which they almost certainly won't).
It's a threat to their success because it could cause even less people to buy steam machines when people see "not successful" all over the place, even though that standard of success is an artificial one that valve was never shooting for in the first place

Welll . . . On one hand, my impression was that competing with consoles was to a fair extent exactly what they were intended to do. Not precisely, perhaps, they'll do other stuff as well, but there's a big overlap there. And so I'm kind of hoping that they will indeed successfully do that (unfortunately current price-points on Steam Machines publicized so far are not creating optimism on this front, although I doubt that's the final word).
But on the other hand, it's true that from a Linux gaming perspective, even a relative flop will be a success. I just looked up sales totals for the PS IV and the Xbox One; 20 million and ten million, respectively. I seem to remember there are currently about 1 million Linux users registered on Steam? So, say Steam Machines take 3% or less of the major console market--that is, sell 5% as many as PS IV, 10% as many as Xbone. That'd be a million units, which would double the number of Linux boxes on Steam, which would vastly improve the chances of a port beating break-even. If Steam Machines became a minor competitor in the console world, like 10% of the market, that would in a stroke catapult Linux over the Mac for purposes of PC game sales.

One nice thing is that Steam Machine success isn't self-limiting in the way that a true new console would be. That is, normally if you start a new console from scratch, a simple competitor to the big PS and Xthings and I guess Wii, one big problem is having games exist and continue to be developed for it. If you don't win big right away, whatever market share you got at the start is doomed to erode and disappear fairly soon, because developers won't bother. It's happened before if I'm not mistaken. But with the Steam Machine, it plays PC games as long as they're ported to Linux (and to some extent even if they aren't--that streaming thing). It already before release has a catalogue of over 1000 games, albeit mostly indy. If it has any success at all, that catalogue will just get bigger and higher-end, which allows Valve to build on initial mid-level success in a way that a typical new entrant to the console space could not. And near as I can figure, Valve is very good at steadily building on initial success.

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Back when I heard the game title "Gratuitous Space Battles" I thought "Wow! Cool!"
But when I started reading reviews and stuff, I always got the impression that it just wasn't really space-battle-y enough. Like, it didn't seem to actually do most of my favourite things about building space fleets and fighting battles with them. The review points out one of them: You don't actually get to fight the battle, you just sort of point your fleet at the enemy and then watch the movie.
The other thing I like about space fleet stuff is building elaborate, clever spaceships with interesting technologies calculated to do various nefarious things to the enemy. Like overwhelm them with brute firepower and/or missile swarms, or run rings around them potshotting from range, or unleash hordes of vicious fighters, or use subtle tech against which they are defenseless to disable them, or open small black holes directly in their line of flight, or use gravity rays to make them smash into each other--all using cunning ship designs to exploit the capabilities I choose to emphasize.
Anyway, I was surprised that when I looked into it, it seemed like GSB wasn't especially awesome in that department either; not terrible, but not nearly as good as one might expect for a game that didn't have to worry about all the 4X stuff and could concentrate on just the fleets.
All in all, if I want to watch a movie of an awesome space battle maybe I'll grab some classic anime or something. But for all the good 4X titles out there, I'm not sure the space battle goodness I'm looking for has really been made yet.

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