Quoting: Quote from Hamish

Quoting: Quote from CheesenessGosh, what a delight it was to finally get to glide with Pontius' shield. The franchise had been crying out for it since day one, with its spiritual predecessor, The Lost Vikings, having set precedence for "the fat guy should fly".

Has Frozenbyte ever acknowledged a connection between the two? It seems to be the great assumption with regards to Trine is that it is based on The Lost Vikings, but I have never seen Frozenbyte themselves make the connection.

I've spotted Joel say that it provided some inspiration. I wasn't meaning to imply that Trine was based on The Lost Vikings as such, just that due to any inspiration that was drawn from it and the similarities between character dynamics encourage the comparison.

Quoting: Quote from Hamish

Quoting: Quote from CheesenessI do feel that it'd be nice if Pontius could hurt enemies by jumping on them with the shield below, but maybe we'll get that in Trine 3 :D

I do wonder what Frozenbyte's next move is going to be. When the expansion was announced there was word of a new IP, but now they seem to be talking up the idea of a new Trine game instead. I personally feel that it would be better for Frozenbyte to try something new; while there are a few more places it could go (as you mentioned, hurting enemies with the shield) the sequel was already getting rather abstract with the powers and the plot and characters only have so much more life in them. But they could always surprise me.

My spider senses tell me something new and big is on the way.

Quoting: Quote from Hamish

Quoting: Quote from CheesenessI'm unsure about how good a thing the flexible skill point allocation is. On one hand, it's nice to be able to experiment and try different things, but not having the skills lock in at all means that you often find yourself pausing the game to switch skill configurations instead of using what abilities you currently have to solve a problem (which is more interesting from a puzzle/critical thinking perspective).

It is a trade off between flexibility and economy - while it does indeed diminish the need to select powers carefully and figure out how best they are used, it does also allow the player to come up with more creative solutions to problems. For my part, I basically treated the skills as as being hard set after I selected them until I reached the Goblin Menace levels, where all of the new powers with higher skill prices prompted me to do a bit more experience exchanges.

I found myself being less creative, to be honest. On my first runthroughs, I didn't bother with magnetism much at all, opting to reallocate points to skills that I was more familiar with the use of instead of really exploring it. This lead to me being thoroughly confused by a seemingly impossible to reach chest in the ice level.

Quoting: Quote from Hamish

Quoting: Quote from CheesenessII now have an itching to play the game again. We should have a co-op runthrough at some stage! It'd be neat to attempt to stream a GOL playthrough or something.

I assume that the Steam and DRM free versions can not communicate with each other, which would be problematic?

My understanding was that there were plans to allow DRM free and Steam players to play together, though I'm not sure what came of that. It's not really a big deal though. I have both ^_^

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Great review, Hamish ^_^

I wasn't previously aware of the CC screenshot licencing. That's fantastically progressive and scores Frozenbyte additional (how is that possible?) love points.

I like that you highlighted Margaret's presence in the series (something I didn't get to touch on with my review of the original Trine 2 game). I do feel that whilst her being the MacGuffin of Goblin Menace strengthened Amadeus' character, it did seem to significantly weaken Zoya, who as you say, was starting to border being hateful. I recall feeling that Pontius' stupidity being used for comic relief in Trine 2 might have been a bit excessive, but it's been a little while since I played it through.

Gosh, what a delight it was to finally get to glide with Pontius' shield. The franchise had been crying out for it since day one, with its spiritual predecessor, The Lost Vikings, having set precedence for "the fat guy should fly". I do feel that it'd be nice if Pontius could hurt enemies by jumping on them with the shield below, but maybe we'll get that in Trine 3 :D

I'm unsure about how good a thing the flexible skill point allocation is. On one hand, it's nice to be able to experiment and try different things, but not having the skills lock in at all means that you often find yourself pausing the game to switch skill configurations instead of using what abilities you currently have to solve a problem (which is more interesting from a puzzle/critical thinking perspective).

I now have an itching to play the game again. We should have a co-op runthrough at some stage! It'd be neat to attempt to stream a GOL playthrough or something.

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Quoting: Quote from s_d

Quoting: Quote from Cheeseness

Quoting: Quote from s_dI recall this popping up on Reddit also!  Exciting, but I'll believe it when I see it :)

Same here, although I'd like to see the Linux gaming community help highlight any demand for a Linux version.

I recall that during the JP debacle, Dan said that they'd been looking into all sorts of things including Humble Bundles (at that point, they were cross platform only), so it's possible they've been considering it for some time.

Well, along with many others, I have e-mailed them and (once upon a time, under an abandoned username) posted in the forum before one of the big forum reshuffles many years ago, as well as (along with a few dozen other Redditors such as yourself) on the recent AMA.  Though, at the time, I recall feeling a little trolled by either dismissive or outright anti-Linux sentiment from other forum denizens (with the exception of the one long Wine thread).  That was frustrating :)  Twitter isn't really in my genes, though.

It's good to hear that they've made other positive noises within recent(ish) memory, aside from the usual "we have no plans for a Linux version at this time" and so forth.  That was what, three years ago?

My memories of early Telltale's responses when I'd nudged/contacted them were that Linux was and beyond their expertise and bandwidth, but devs and moderators had always been supportive of the Linux guide threads, and IIRC, we managed to get some of the launcher stuff tweaked to better work with Wine.

Things started to shift around the time that BTTF and JP were coming out when large numbers of new community members started to come in, release delays made people cranky, and the previously positive and welcoming culture there started to sway.

Oh, and look, here we go [External Link]. That was only February last year? Wow, how time flies. I guess this was during the Walking Dead release fiasco and not the JP stuff after all.

No Linux support yet, though I think one of the indie bundles would want that and we have talked to them in the past

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Quoting: Quote from s_dI recall this popping up on Reddit also!  Exciting, but I'll believe it when I see it :)

Same here, although I'd like to see the Linux gaming community help highlight any demand for a Linux version.

I recall that during the JP debacle, Dan said that they'd been looking into all sorts of things including Humble Bundles (at that point, they were cross platform only), so it's possible they've been considering it for some time.

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Quoting: Quote from AnonymousNot recommended. Team17 has a bad track record fixing bugs as it is, but apparently they are completely unable to support our platform. The Steam install does not supply all required libraries and as such won't run out of the box. Further, the process gets killed due to buffer overruns unless you manually export a "C" locale. It's not like that can't be overcome, but you shouldn't support a company which puts broken products on the market and never does anything in the line of fixing them.

Have these issues been reported, do you know? I wasn't aware of them as I'm yet to experience a crash (though I've only spent maybe a dozen hours or so playing).

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Quoting: Quote from manny"OpenVR", maybe that will become a standard of some sort.

At the moment, OpenVR is just some collection of vendor provided tools and utilities rather than an API for implementation, though that may change.

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Quoting: Quote from ZikZakGames have to be modified to support Occulus Rift, another device means another mod.
Without a standard API of some sort the first on the market will win until someone do better.

The thing though is that the changes needed to support the Rift are pretty superficial (compared to working with earlier HMDs.).

If this device uses a similar approach, it could lead to the formation of such a standard API. Without knowing how they've got stuff set up, it's hard to know where things will lead, but if they are planning to use a similar way of exposing the device's capabilities, then the difference between supporting the Rift and supporting this though could be as trivial as swapping the FOV value and using a different lens distortion compensation algorithm.

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I've spent maybe 4 hours playing TF2 with my Rift on Linux. There seems to be a bit of input lag when there's a bit of action going on (not enough to be particularly bad, but enough to be noticeable).

I prefer to position my Rift to overlap my primary monitor in twinview so that I can see what the HMD displays if I ever need to take it off. This is pretty awkward and requires a convar to force windowed mode, which only does borderless windowed mode, which doesn't allow for focus changing (no Alt+Tabbing out).

The behaviour of fullscreen mode is a little odd in that you can't choose which display it uses in any way other than setting the Rift to be your primary display device (which comes with its own set of issues).

The new two stage activation process is nice though, allowing you to enable VR support, but not actually turn it on until you're ready by clicking the new Activate VR button on the main menu. This allows you to fire up the game and play normally if you don't feel like using your HMD, or to just switch back to normal view without restarting the game.

One of the more interesting things that has come out of this update has been the removal of the in-game configuration utility. This has been replaced by OpenVR [External Link], a separate app (found under tools in the game filter dropdown) which aims to be a collection of configuration tools for a range of devices. Currently it only includes the official Oculus SDK configuration utility, but it also includes an empty folder for Vortex (first mentioned in this interview [External Link], which is Valve's rumoured VR/AR tech. With additional players like InfinitEye starting to appear, having Valve position their games and Steam as being VR device agnostic will allow for some healthy competition and give people more freedom to try and use different tech.

Exciting stuff! :D

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Quoting: Quote from Xpanderonly my channel trailer changed recently

Updated!

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Quoting: Quote from manfaceThe video for gols channel is wrong.

I can chance it, but I'm not sure what it should be. The one that's there now seems to be from the Gaming On Linux YouTube channel (or has it since been fixed?).

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