Quoting: ThormackIs/was it a scam?

I wouldn't call it a scam. But definitely overambitious and underfunded.

That said, their selling of virtual trinkets for lots of real money did put me off, but is not exactly uncommon practice in today's gaming industry.

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"SDL render batching, which Ryan Gordon wrote about in this Patreon post" is not in 2.0.9. As Ryan writes in the very same post:

"This was a lot of work, and I'm thrilled with the end result. This project is sitting in the "SDL-ryan-batching-renderer" branch in revision control; we're about to ship SDL 2.0.9 and it's way too late to drop a change this huge into it, but it will merge thereafter."

Other than that, yay! SDL is likely my second most favourite open source project.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeUltima IX was delayed and the engine redone like 3 or 4 times, it has almost as bad a development history as Duke Nuke'em Forever.

Yeah, I remember that the first screenshots I saw seemed fully 3d, but still had the classic top-down perspective. The final product looked nothing like that.

Quoting: slaapliedjeIt was though one of the early 3D accelerated titles (so early it originally only worked with software rendering or 3Dfx, and Direct3D was added in a later patch.) I thought the game was amazing, but yeah there were parts where the story was just missing the things they wanted to do, but ran out of time.

Proud owner of a Voodoo2 card back then; though I think I already had it before UIX came out.

Quoting: slaapliedjeHa, I recently watched a video about UO.

By Garriott himself, no less :-). I really liked how that man pushed boundaries back then, and I did have some hopes that perhaps the nth iteration of Shroud of the Avatar would again reach the level of Ultima 7. Alas, I don't think that's coming to pass any more.

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I've been tempted twice to buy this. The first time when it was on Kickstarter and the second time a few weeks ago when they sold off excess physical copies at a "discount". They still were like $115 (with shipping across the pond included), but given the digital version was $40 at that time and did neither contain access to episode 2 (whatever that entails), nor -- more importantly -- a highly collectible cloth map, it sounded like an okay deal. A quick visit to their forum, however, convinced me otherwise: offline single player, the only mode I would have any interest of playing, still looked more like an afterthought and didn't seem overly compelling. And the writing was already on the wall, with rumours of Richard Garriott jumping ship, low player numbers of the online game, etc. . My gut feeling then and now is that SotA doesn't have a future.

Which is sort of sad. I have the highest respect for Richard Garriott, not in the least because Ultima 7 is still my most favourite computer game of all time (which in turn makes Exult my most favourite open source project of all time). But what he and his team proposed for SotA from the beginning simply seemed too good to be true. I've backed a few Kickstarters against better judgement, and got bitten, but this trap I managed to avoid.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeI actually quite liked IX, but you could tell where the story fell flat.

I think both VIII and IX were rushed out the door way before they were ready for release. So definitely EA to blame. As a result, VIII feels like they cut most of the content, just to get it done, while IX was decent enough, but with a terrible story.

Quoting: slaapliedjeDidn't Richard Garriott leave after 7 though?

From what I remember, Origin Systems was acquired by EA after the release of Ultima 7. Garriott didn't leave until they shut down Origin. Sometime after Ultima IX. I'm pretty sure he was involved with all the Ultimas.

Quoting: slaapliedjeUltima Online 2 being cancelled was the biggest EA travesty and I kind haven't really bought many games from them since then. Somehow UO is still going strong, but I recently tried it in Linux with Wine and it failed hard.

I'm not into online games, so can't really comment on anything going on with UO. But I'm glad I didn't put any money into Shroud of the Avatar when it was on Kickstarter. Though at least that one runs natively on Linux.

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That one has been on my wishlist for quite some time. But with so many games running natively or with wine these days, my backlog grows longer and longer ... which is a good thing, I guess :).

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Quoting: slaapliedjeSome of the EA games for the Atari 8bit / c64 were some of the best around. If only they still published the Ultima games...

After ruining Ultima VIII and IX before shutting down Origin Systems?! ... no thank you!

It's not quite coincidence that a pair of villains in Ultima VII went by the names Elizabeth and Abraham. Or that the evil artefacts resembled a cube, sphere and tetrahedron.

The final EA game I bought has been Dragon Age: Origins, and that only grudgingly because of the online activation and day 1 DLC. I've got a list of companies I don't buy from, and EA is one of them.

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Still waiting for the Linux version to hit GOG. Most likely in vain ...

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In my circles, a lot of people are fed up with Windows, but they always cite gaming or other applications as keeping them from switching. So it's nice to see articles like that.

Personally, I've converted my mother to Linux a couple years back. (Not quite selfless, as it cut back on the computer support quite a bit). Last time I visited, I upgraded her laptop to Ubuntu 18.04 (from 16.04), switching to Gnome in the process, and I was a bit concerned that those changes would cause her some discomfort. Last time I rang her up, I asked how it went with the new system, and she says it's the best upgrade she has ever had (she really likes the Night Light mode).

My take is that for everyone doing simple tasks (web, mail, simple office stuff, photos), Linux has been ready for the job for ages. The problem is, most of those people aren't able to install an OS of any kind, so unless they have a friendly soul to help them (or they can buy hardware with Linux pre-installed), they will always be stuck with Windows.

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Quoting: ArehandoroStill waiting for my backer key from GOG, hopefully it’s sorted soon and I can give it a go.

Seems I got lucky then. Had it yesterday shortly before midnight. You can imagine that getting up and going to work was really painful this morning.

Quoting: SalvatosI'm getting all kinds of mixed signals from that trailer, but most of them aren't positive, and it doesn't look like a half-a-million-dollar project compared to others I've seen launch with less than 100K.

Then you'd better avert your eyes during the intro movie. Once in the game proper, the graphics are okay and it feels pretty polished to me, though. I've got to play some more before being able to give an informed opinion, but so far I like what I'm seeing. No bad choice if you're into narrative games. And obvious bonus points for being DRM free and for 1st day Linux support.

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