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Latest Comments by Kimyrielle
Cities: Skylines is free to play until the end of the weekend, big Paradox sale going on
11 February 2021 at 6:03 pm UTC

I love this game! I hope they will continue polishing it. It could really do with an engine upgrade at this point. There are so many awesome mods out there, but you can install only that many before the engine starts crashing. I also would love to see a proper North American city theme one day. Our cities just look different than they do in Europe, and it would be nice to have it in game. There were mods around that did that, but they got broken by game updates.

Godot Engine gains a $120K grant from game developer Kefir
10 February 2021 at 5:06 pm UTC

Quoting: gradyvuckovicImagine if a large AAA game studio made a game with Godot that produced hundreds of millions of dollars worth of profit? Throwing a few hundred thousand back to Godot would be pocket change for them, cheaper than hiring an entire dev team to work on an internal game engine for sure. Godot gets better and the studio can continue making great revenue off games and don't have to worry about licensing fees.

I can't see AAA studios switching to Godot anytime soon, but what you described might just as well happen with smaller and medium sized studios, looking for a hassle-free engine with a hassle-free licence without having to write it from scratch, which they won't have the capacity to do anyway.

120k is quite a game-changer for Godot. No idea if they already have plans for the money, but it should be enough to implement a few serious new features to make a splash with, and draw some more devs into using the engine. Let's hope there will be more such donations. :)

Terraria for Stadia cancelled, due to Google locking the developer out
8 February 2021 at 11:27 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Purple Library GuyMan, suddenly I feel ahead of the curve. As a university employee my email is through work, I have a vestigial Facebook page which I visit maybe once a year, I don't have files in the cloud. I do buy stuff on Amazon some, but not enough that I'd have any big worries if I was somehow locked out of it. I do have some kind of Google ID, but I only use it for, like, if I'm reading articles with certain fairly common comment systems and want to comment I'll use the Google ID.

I use Google phones and even a Chromebook, but I am not using their cloud at all. The apps sync to my own Nextcloud instance. I am no longer employed, but my e-mail is provided by the same hoster I rented the webspace from, so it's not Google, either. I am using a few throwaway G-Mail accounts for signing up for newsletters and forums, which I couldn't care less about loosing. No Facebook. No WhatsApp. No Instagram. No TikTok. I use DuckDuckGo as "front end" for Google, so they know considerably less about me than about most people. I never purchased any apps or other content from the Play Store and I don't use Google Pay, either. Losing my Google account wouldn't make me lose too much sleep, really. I'd just make a new one and transfer my devices to that one.

I have to admit I am a heavy user of Amazon and have been since the days they were still a bookstore. I would love to see some more competition in that business, honestly. I do order with smaller stores when there is any around having similar offers, but off-line shopping has largely left my life even before the pandemic and I have no desire to have it back.

QuoteAll in all, the only online service that would make me even bust out a few cusswords if they dumped me would be, well, Steam. I haven't downloaded all my games, only the ones I've actually played . . .

Same. Steam going out of business would suck. But by big-business standards they're not THAT evil, so I would think they would give you ample time to download your purchased games before closing shop. Not sure about the DRM, of course. The matchmaking services would be gone, too. Let's just hope it doesn't happen! :)
Them blocking me I can't see happening. I don't play any Valve games, so their Anti-Cheat thingie can't trigger on me accidentally. And I don't participate in the Steam community in any shape or fashion (except my immediate family, there is nobody on my friends list), so it's hard to conceive a scenario giving them even the weakest reason to ban me.

Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, EndeavourOS 2021.02.03 and Solus 4.2 out now
5 February 2021 at 4:45 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: kon14Gaming on an LTS release or a stable branch is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Unless you're on really old hardware that doesn't support Proton (or other modern tools) and barely gets any gpu related updates anyway.

That makes no sense at all. Steam will update Proton automatically and your graphics driver will update when the system does (in case of NVidia you have to add the correct launchpad PPA to your repositories, but that's all). Both of that happens whether you're using LTS or not.

Google shutting their internal game dev studios, focusing directly on Stadia tech
2 February 2021 at 11:32 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: Kimyrielle
Quoting: GuestActually, "Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially."

Translation: Making AAA games costs money.

Google must have been really shocked to find out. It was such a well-kept secret that making AAA games costs money!

And...I dunno. EA and Ubisoft seem to be quite successful making AAA games and Google is 100 times (or 1000?) richer than these two companies combined. *shrug*

They have established studios.....
That is the point people keep missing, because they just have to get their bit in on Google. Creating and maintaining a game studio, one big enough to do costly AAA titles is a huge and extremely messy thing that just isn't Google. Clearly so. Yes others can do it, because they have a long history and started off making smaller games and scaling up.

I'm no huge fan of Google overall (I'm even moving away from gmail after being with it since the start!), despite liking Stadia, but the overwhelming urge people seem to have to just not think things through about commenting on it is either ignorance or just plain stupidity to make a dig at GOog.

Not sure if that "plain stupidity" thing was aimed at me. I suppose so, because you quoted my posting. Ok...Thank you, I guess...

As for your comment, maybe your point would have hold some merit if Google had hired a few dozen freshly graduated devs from college and told them to start coding random stuff, but they didn't. They hired VERY experienced people to build up, and software development is a business I would say Google has a little bit of experience in, don't you think? At least it's not like your neighborhood bakery trying to get into game development without having seen a computer before.

Anyway, if dissenting opinions are met with that level of hostility, I better go do something else.

EDIT: Fun fact: I don't hate Google. Except if buying Pixel phones and Pixelbooks from them is now considered "hate". Judging from what I can see they tried to open a new field of business (cloud gaming), realized that it is going nowhere, and cut their losses. That's just a sane business decision.

Google shutting their internal game dev studios, focusing directly on Stadia tech
2 February 2021 at 6:15 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: MohandevirHave you tried buying PC hardware lately?

Actually yes. Last Christmas. And spontaneously decided that my old PC will serve me well for another year. I know that -right now-, gaming PCs are almost impossible to buy.

But unless you're trying to say that the pandemic (which is ultimately the root cause for this) will become permanent, this is not relevant for the future of cloud gaming vs local gaming. The hardware market will eventually return to normal conditions.

Google shutting their internal game dev studios, focusing directly on Stadia tech
2 February 2021 at 6:12 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: GuestActually, "Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially."

Translation: Making AAA games costs money.

Google must have been really shocked to find out. It was such a well-kept secret that making AAA games costs money!

And...I dunno. EA and Ubisoft seem to be quite successful making AAA games and Google is 100 times (or 1000?) richer than these two companies combined. *shrug*

Google shutting their internal game dev studios, focusing directly on Stadia tech
2 February 2021 at 5:38 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: TheRiddickand also have more local server access points

*cough*

I have a really super local access point for my games. It's called a SSD. The latency is absolutely fantastic, I tell you!

*cough*

Ahem. Anyway... I really also fail to see how Google basically burying what Stadia was meant to be would somehow be good news for fans of cloud gaming, but they seem to argue as if it somehow would be. Denial mode much? The simple truth is more likely that Stadia is dead in the water and Google is cutting their losses. Games tailored for cloud computing would have been the ONE selling point for cloud gaming. Like Super Massive MMOs with photo-realistic graphics. Stuff that just won't run on your own PC, ever. Otherwise there is like -zero- point in cloud gaming. Who wants to play World of Warcraft on a smartphone anyway, or why would I hog my bandwidth if I can install the same game locally and for the same price? People are going to continue having gaming rigs at home, so really, what's the point? Cloud gaming is more likely to become the next VR: A big hype touted as the future of all things, that ends up sitting in a very small niche.

Free cross-platform game engine Defold is now on Steam
29 January 2021 at 5:51 pm UTC Likes: 8

Quoting: PublicNuisance
Quoting: hardpenguinIf it wasn't for Unity being the current industry standard, I would love to spend some time with Defold and Godot as well 😢

If we go by marketshare Windows is the standard of consumer operating systems yet here we all are using Linux. You should use what you want to use regardless of what the lemmings are telling you to use.

I would interpret the original quote more in the direction of "If I am looking to work at a studio, they're more likely to want Unity experience than Godot or Defold". Which is probably true.
If you're a one-(wo)man studio you're obviously right. I looked at Unity and couldn't wrap my head around how art-centric its processes are. Godot is much more up my alley (and I don't have to read a novel-length Terms of Usage document either), so that's what I am using.

Plague Inc: The Cure is out now, free until 'COVID-19 is under control'
29 January 2021 at 4:09 pm UTC

Just to clarify, it's free to play until the devs deem Covid to be "under control", but then you have to purchase it to continue playing? Or is it free as in you-get-to-keep-it?