If it's helpful, there's this thread [External Link].

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Quoting: GuestI fear the game will be sufficiently different from Syndicate to disappoint people expecting, well, Syndicate. Just how it always is. So I'm personally going to wait for the released game and some more footage & reviews before I invest into this (the footage I've seen didn't appeal me so far).

It's a tricky call. I get a distinct Syndicate vibe from it and have been loving it so far. It looks like the more freeform mission structure is probably going to be what divides people (it's hard for me to judge that though since there's a bunch of instructional text that's missing which might change the way that things are presented).

Quoting: WorMzyYeahhhh.. I wish I could be a plus one, but the game is pretty unplayable on Linux right now (at least on my machine) due to graphical issues.

What kind of issues are you having? Aside from untextured cars and a missing font, I'm not encountering anything that's impacting on the game's playability (in fact, it more or less looks as good as it did when I played it on a Windows machine at PAX Australia).

My biggest issue at the moment is performance and load time, but I'm way overdue for an upgrade and they're pushing a bunch of tech, so I don't consider that to be a big deal.

Edit: Oh, there is some SSRR (screen space raytraced reflections) related issue where you can wind up with big blobby black shadows covering up the game, but I had that turned off.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it looked super neat. It's neat to see the ways in which this differs from the gameplay and presentation of Lacuna Passage (another game they're working on). Both definitely seem worth paying attention to.

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Quoting: GuestHow similar to Trackmania (Sunrise/Nations…) is this? Can you join a multiplayer game at any time and pass through other cars… Or is it more conventional?

It's more like Trackmania with regards to collisions (which has numerous benefits, but makes some people sad).

Quoting: GuestAlso how is the single-player mode? Any fun? Does it have global high-scores?

Single player is broken up into just tracks like Trackmania as well as "Adventure Mode" which has a lot more atmosphere and constructs a bit of an abstract narrative. Adventure Mode is still under development, but what's there so far is pretty interesting to me.

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I backed this on Kickstarter and haven't had any regrets. It's Tron meets Trackmania and you can fly. So awesome.

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Quoting: GuestI am very grateful for wine but I still don't understand why there is no support beyond DX9 after this many years.

I get the impression that most of the people who get paid to work on Wine aren't developing support for games.

Beyond that, it's down to whatever enthusiasm/passion volunteers have, and it's a huge undertaking to get that sort of stuff working. I can't blame anybody who feels they have better stuff to do with their time than reimplementing Microsoft's APIs :D

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My experiences with Wine have been pretty positive over the past 8 years. I've had the good fortune to have most things that I like/care about either have native builds available or run fairly well in Wine without fiddling.

As mentioned in the video, things have definitely improved over time. There was a time when getting many games to run required compiling Wine with particular patches, but I haven't found any need for that since the fixes needed to make StarCraft 2 run out of the box were merged into the main line.

One recent problem my partner had was not having 32 bit audio libraries installed, which made Morrowind crash at the main menu. Other than that and Zombie Driver HD needing a DLL override, I don't think she's had to do anything to get the games that she plays in Wine working.

I've never used PlayOnLinux, but it seems to solve a problem I don't have. Winetricks sorts out a bunch of library/configuration things that some people might have trouble with, and creating separate .wine profiles is as easy as putting WINEPREFIX=~/.wine_foo/ before calling Wine in a terminal. I prefer to install all my apps via a command line so that if there are any problems, I have some idea of what's going on, and Wine automatically creates .desktop launchers for applications which include the appropriate prefix, so running after installing is just a matter of double clicking an icon.

The Wine project's AppDB [External Link] is a nice resource for looking whether others have had success running an app, and has a nicer way of presenting test results/information than the PlayOnLinux site IMO.

Before Steam for Linux landed, I think all but two or three games from my Steam library (it was around 200 by the time Steam for Linux launched) ran happily under Wine, and DRM didn't play a role in the problems I had with those. I'd definitely advocate people buying stuff from GOG, but those considering Steam shouldn't need to be wary of DRM related problems unless the game uses some third party DRM (in which case, it's worth considering not buying/playing it anyway :D ).

Back in the early days of SteamLUG, we were a community of Linux users who ran Steam in Wine. There were definitely people who had problems, but on the most part, I think positive experiences were the norm. These days we don't see much Wine discussion - I guess that either fewer people are using it or nobody's having any problems.

I definitely don't use it as much as I used to, but Wine is a tremendously impressive piece of software that represents a mind boggling amount of work, and I'm glad it's there (alongside DOSBox, ScummVM and UAE) for legacy stuff :)

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Wow, this does look neat :3

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Quoting: ripper

Quoting: CheesenessI found time to chat with one of my developer friends earlier today who tells me that they see stats for purchases and playtime separately (each broken down by platform), and says that they see nothing which appears to be that "first 7 days of playtime" figure that determines which platform publisher gets paid for the sale.

That's interesting. I wonder why Defender's Quest developer was seeing something else. Or maybe he was simply mistaken how to interpret those numbers? It would be great to have more evidence.

Lars is quoting correspondence with Valve. It's hard to know whether there might have been some kind of miscommunication.

Evidence would be great, but Valve suck at transparency (just look at the Steam Hardware & Software Survey >_< ) and I don't have high expectations for clarity here.

Quoting: ripper

Quoting: CheesenessPurchases are broken down into daily sales per platform. Given GranPC's comments in Reddit thread I linked to, the purchases aren't likely to be linked to play time since he can see purchases from platforms that the game he works on doesn't yet support. If the figures for this data were subject to the first week of playtime, that would result in historical records fluctuating (Valve might be sloppy with some things, but they're not that sloppy :D ).

I wouldn't consider it sloppiness, but a feature. It needs to work that way at least for the porting studios - the numbers for the last week always change a bit. Or, they are not advertised for the last week at all. It could work the same even for "standard sales view". But that's just an idea. If it didn't change at all, it would be even more important to buy from Linux, to keep the sale stats correct. However, what about Android etc sales? Tell me about sloppiness, if all those sales were counted as Windows...

If historical values were changing would be incredibly sloppy, and it'd make the data unintelligible. The raw data is downloadable for given time periods as a CSV. If you grabbed this every week for your own analysis (or even just looked at your sales on the Steamworks stats page once a week), you could end up working with consistently out of date data, which would undermine the purpose of exposing this data. If they did do that kind of back correcting, I'd be expecting them to have some kind of notice or disclaimer reminding developers that numbers weren't final (which none of the people I've spoken to have mentioned).

As I said previously, I was pretty sure I'd read somewhere a developer saying that they could see Android purchases. I haven't been able to talk to anybody who can confirm that over the past week or so.

Quoting: ripper

Quoting: CheesenessPlaytime is apparently displayed as daily totals of peak simultaneous players per platform. It's unclear whether an individual user playing on multiple platforms will be counted multiple times (I'm going to imagine that that's the case though - it'd be a nightmare to calculate otherwise and would arguably be less meaningful).

That's great, developers have access to real numbers even from playtime. Which means it's even more important to not just buy from Linux, but actually play from Linux. The results are very visible.

Yeah. I wish I could find some sources to cite, but I've definitely read articles where Valve have championed playtime/players above raw sales data for measuring the effectiveness of promotions and overall performance.

Quoting: ripperMaybe you would consider writing a follow up article?

I don't feel like there's enough solid information out there for me to construct something reliable or comprehensive (which is the sort of thing I like to write :D ).

If I ever sell anything of my own on Steam though, I'd be happy to compare weekly data sets to see if historical values are indeed fluctuating and perhaps compare that to alternatively sourced per-platform activation metrics (if it were appropriate to implement that sort of data gathering for whatever game that might be).

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Quoting: ripper

Quoting: CheesenessI haven't yet found anybody who's been able to confirm that that first week platform assignment figure is even viewable in the Steamworks stats stuff (I am asking around though and will report back with what I come up with), but either way, developers/publishers can see and probably rely on stats beyond the stuff that the article talks about.

If you're able to find out the details, please report back, that would be very interesting.

I found time to chat with one of my developer friends earlier today who tells me that they see stats for purchases and playtime separately (each broken down by platform), and says that they see nothing which appears to be that "first 7 days of playtime" figure that determines which platform publisher gets paid for the sale.

Purchases are broken down into daily sales per platform. Given GranPC's comments in Reddit thread I linked to, the purchases aren't likely to be linked to play time since he can see purchases from platforms that the game he works on doesn't yet support. If the figures for this data were subject to the first week of playtime, that would result in historical records fluctuating (Valve might be sloppy with some things, but they're not that sloppy :D ).

Playtime is apparently displayed as daily totals of peak simultaneous players per platform. It's unclear whether an individual user playing on multiple platforms will be counted multiple times (I'm going to imagine that that's the case though - it'd be a nightmare to calculate otherwise and would arguably be less meaningful).

Based on that conversation and others, I feel comfortable believing that the numbers talked about in the article aren't actually visible in the normal Steamworks stats pages (which would mean that the quote from the Fortress Of Doors blog post includes some misunderstanding about what was being talked about).

It's possible that they might be visible as some kind of total that represents what per-platform third party publishers like Feral or Aspyr are getting paid for if that's configured (and I'm going to suggest that for the majority of Linux games on Steam, that's not the case), but it seems safe to assume that the rest of the normal data would be visible as well, so users shouldn't worry specifically about being identified as Linux users, and should instead think about how the timing of their purchases might impact on trends that developers see - if there's a massive spike following a Linux launch, then that's likely to be interpreted in a totally different way to Linux users purchasing games that don't have Linux support.

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