Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: JanneDoes the new game have a wider array of different challenges, or does it suffer from the same issue?

It's still really the same game, with the same sorts of objectives. There are some new mechanics, but it's mostly big quality of life improvements and more deterministic physics. If you don't have either the second one is the one to get, but if you've already got the first one it's a more tricky decision.

Good to know. I also felt the first game fizzles quickly into a very repetitive rote loop. The second game feels like it should be a DLC with an appropriate price tag.

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Quoting: prueba_holai really hate the Windows logo in the super key

if they provide a ISO keyboard, i will buy it if the price is not crazy

You can buy keycaps (singles or sets) without the Microsoft logo on the super key.

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I'm a keyboard nut so I'll keep an eye on it, but what I hear so gives me concern. It doesn't sound ANSI standard so replacing keycaps would be very expensive.

Some things I'll be looking for:
1. Is it going to use Open Firmware like ErgoDox and Hexgears feature? There are already configuration utilities for this firmware. This means no lock in.

2. Are the keycaps and layout ANSI standard? This is important if you want to switch keycaps because they wear out, break, or just want a different set of caps.

3. What switch selection will they offer and will the switch sockets be hotswapable? That means they're user serviceable.

4. Will they offer PBT over ABS keycaps?

5. How portable will their keyboard be to other distributions and OSs?

There are already some really good open keyboards on the market designed with users in mind. The blog article wasn't very encouraging either. I got the impression they're trying to design a keyboard experience in the mindset of Apple, rather than focusing on keyboard features power users want.

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I've been keeping this game on my radar but the friendly fire design is reason enough to drop this off my list. What a stupid design decision.

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StatCounter hasn't moved at all while NetShare is bouncing around? Sounds like NetShare numbers are complete bunk unless they publish something explaining their variance.

The comments are interesting. We all see what we want to believe. Every year has been the Year of the Linux Desktop since 2004 when I got my intro to Linux Land.

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Great article BTRE. It got me to read the links and dig around for more info. This seems to be a lot bigger than it looks on the surface. Here are my thoughts.

After digging a bit, it will basically affect every Secure Boot system whether it uses GRUB2 or not. That is because all the trusted binaries and signatures will need to be invalidated. This doesn't make Secure Boot useless without repair, but there are a _lot_ of signed binaries that will need to be invalidated through their very poorly tested and vetted Revocation system.

Canonical appears to one of the least affected by this because their Secure Boot keys are run through an intermediary which they maintain and control. On one hand it minimizes the impact on users. On the other, a central authority gets to control and decide with no apparent community management or influence.

This issue is really caused by Microsoft controlling the CA that issues certs. Basically, signed bootloaders or shims must go through Microsoft. Another thread could be dedicated to why that is bad, but the point is that it is a significant cause and it still is. Nothing is changing in how this system works and it's flawed by implementation, not design. I don't really want Canonical, IBM, Oracle, Google, or anyone else to be a monolithic gatekeeper like this either.

If GRUB2 is loading the Windows Bootloader then Windows is directly vulnerable according to an article I read on CSO. It requires admin privileges on the Linux desktop and the user would need to allow code to modify grub and the windows bootloader. I'm not sure how realistically plausible it is to pull off. I don't dual boot either, but it's worth a further thought if you do.

My distro is Fedora. Fedora doesn't work with secure boot at all, out of the box at least. I think that's one of its weaknesses. It's also one area that feels most out of community reach to change. Both are a little frustrating to me.

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Both Kathy Rain and Whispers of a Machine run well under Proton for me under Fedora 32 with nvidia closed drivers. I have them on Steam and I enjoyed them a lot. My only real complaint is they both employed some neat ideas and systems that they should have developed further (more robustly).

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Quoting: mylka

Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: mylkayeah i know, but his games arent really that complex
i understand it for cyberpunk or other huge open world games, but a pixel style point and click.... i dont know... doesnt seem to by very economically

If you're sticking to one style, the knowledge and control of the codebase a custom engine gives you tends to outweigh the flexibility of a general-purpose one.

he makes 2D pixel art games. how flexible do you have to be for that?
if you need special water effects, or physics, or lightning, or trees... anything..... i would understand

but why all the work for

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Have you actually played the game and experienced the character switching and multi-character narrative? Thimbleweed Park is fairly ambitious in some aspects and it doesn't surprise me they want a custom engine. Your comment comes across as particularly thoughtless by posting a pic of pixel art and then saying something like "how hard can it be". Just because you don't see or understand the need, it's still there.

Quoting: Creak

Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: mylkayeah i know, but his games arent really that complex
i understand it for cyberpunk or other huge open world games, but a pixel style point and click.... i dont know... doesnt seem to by very economically

Look at it from the other side. For someone developing many different styles of game, gaining some knowledge of, and competence in, a general-purpose engine like Godot, Unity, or Unreal makes a lot of sense. But they're jacks of all trades. If you're sticking to one style, the knowledge and control of the codebase a custom engine gives you tends to outweigh the flexibility of a general-purpose one. And because the games aren't that complex, it isn't too hard to do. (It's beyond me, but if you know what you're doing...) I've seen single-person studios making point-and-click adventures in their own engines.

As a game developer in a AAA games company, and although we have our own game engines, I am still not convinced that doing your own game engine is a good thing. Game engines have become beasts, it is not just a matter of graphics, it is also about sound, AI, inputs, physics, animation, data management, etc.. and, on top of that, a whole editor for the game devs and artists to integrate their stuff in the engine. That why it is preferable to talk about "game editor" rather than "game engine". The engine is just a small part of the whole piece.

Developing these kind of game editors cost millions of dollars a year and it is, of course, never finished. On the other side, if you choose to use an existing game editor (Unity, Unreal, Godot, ...), you get all the new fancy features with each upgrade and you can focus only on what's important: your game.

As a developer, I understand the urge to own and control your own code but, to make a poor analogy, developing your own game editor to make your game is a bit like developing your own Photoshop to create your textures.

Edit:
I would add that open source is, to me, the perfect compromise. You don't have to develop everything just by yourself, but you still have control over the code. When Godot will get to a point where it would compete with Unity and Unreal, I think this will be a game changer (pardon the pun :wink:)

So many times I've played a game where the studio chose to use an off the shelf engine and it really shows. Often it's easy to even spot the engine the studio chose from it's characteristic behaviors and flaws. This can happen with custom engines too. They're not perfect and it's also obvious when a studio is clinging to their old beloved engine tech.

I think the point being that there isn't a one fit right answer when choosing a toolchain for a software project. It really depends on what you want to do and what tools, if any, support that out of the box (or easily modded).

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Quoting: scaine

Quoting: randyl

Quoting: katp32You can do this with OBS as well, it's pretty cool ^-^

The article mentions OBS and how that is a much heavier option. This one runs as a background service that creates a video on keyboard shortcut. To me, that's rather slick for the job it's supposed to do.

I mean... simpler, sure. But it's always recording, forever, right? So, naw - I'm quite happy to run OBS and its replay-buffer, to be honest. Also, that way I get scene selections, or web-cam overlays, if I want them. And the replay-buffer is configurable - you can make it longer or shorter than 30 seconds. I think I have mine on a minute.

Huh - I wonder how this thing captures sound? I guess... it doesn't?

The guy who wrote this tool says "However this requires opening OBS and start recording. I do not know when something will happen that I want to share."

It's like he's never heard of the Replay Buffer. Sure, you start OBS and "start recording", but nothing is written to disk. It just buffers a loop in memory until you hit the "record this" shortcut (again, configurable). It's the same as this tool, as far as I can tell. Only... better??

I don't know if I'm missing something.

I haven't read much about the project. It doesn't record sound according to the article, but it's apparently on their todo list.

OBS has a a bit of a brutal learning curve. I'm sure once a person is familiar it's very comfortable to use, but OBS isn't very intuitive or easy out of the box (I do still want to learn it though). This doesn't really look like a replacement to me either. It looks like a nice tool for simple short review clips in addition to simple screenshots or more robust videos. OBS is the full toolbox and not just one spanner. This program feels more like a single useful tool in the box.

As a service I suppose it probably is always running, but I don't know if that means constantly recording or just sucking up some memory while an app is running. Does it work for any screen and any 30 seconds? Is it sucking up a bunch of memory holding that data or writing stuff to a disk cache? You bring up good points. Since it is a service it should be as simple as systemctl stop <service_name> and systemctl start <service_name>

If I were still doing reviews and articles I would probably use both this and OBS. I suppose it caught my eye because it's so simple and straight forward and I appreciate that.

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Quoting: katp32You can do this with OBS as well, it's pretty cool ^-^

The article mentions OBS and how that is a much heavier option. This one runs as a background service that creates a video on keyboard shortcut. To me, that's rather slick for the job it's supposed to do.

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