Quoting: PatolaSorry but you need a better understanding of Evolution. I urge you to read books like the Selfish Gene by Professor Dawkins for a good introduction to the subject.

I suggest The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch by Terry Pratchett and professors Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart instead for a slightly less academic but a more entertaining read. :P

Hey, don't judge me. These books are actually not bad as far as popular science goes.

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Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoAfter upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS to Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS, the game works fine with the hardware listed in my profile and 390.48 drivers..

Seeing as you've got 8GB of ram, it will work even better if you upgrade to 396.24. This new beta driver fixed the problems I had with 396.18 in other games.

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Quoting: nieknooijens

Quoting: slaapliedjeNintendo HAS to be different, so the buttons are switched.... Died many times in Breath of the Wild due to that.

Actually those buttons have been that way since the SNES it's microsoft who decided to flip the A&B and X&Y buttons on their xbox controllers!

While this is a minor usability matter, I think the left-to-right layout is more intuitive than the opposite for us here in the west. In any case, Nintendo wasn't the only player on the market even back then, and there was no accepted standard for controller layouts. It's not a cultural thing either: Even Sega went with left-to-right A B C, while I remember seeing the monstrous Atari Jaguar gamepad going right-to-left.

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This is getting a bit ridiculous, but can't resist dragging this even further off the rails. One last time, I promise.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: tuubiAnd why do you think people didn't gossip about the lavish lifestyles of rich merchants and traders back then? Again, you might point out that their surviving legends are violent, but so is most modern entertainment.

I have no proof they didn't, no. But you can't really build an argument on "I can't prove otherwise". There are a lot of ridiculous things I can't prove to be false.
I mean, I'm sure people talked about rich merchants some. Just, not as much as they talked about rich clergy, or powerful warlords.

And that was my entire point. I wasn't asking you to prove a negative. Just wanted to point out that there were wealthy merchants trading in the fruits of others' labours already. There were entire market towns with real economies and social structures, and it wasn't just kings getting rich in the process. That wealth might have been bullion or jewelry or just basic commodities, but it was still wealth mostly for the sake of wealth.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAs to all the same people--all I was getting at was that the vikings unusually didn't really have a separate warrior vs. peasant class or warrior vs. merchant class.

Well, I don't know how uncommon that really was. Kings and nobles drafted soldiers from the peasant classes mostly, with nobles themselves leading the armies. Successful merchants weren't likely to grab an axe and go on a raid either. But I do see what you mean.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI wouldn't be surprised if increasing social stratification was part of what ended the "viking age".

Sounds plausible. And interaction between the different cultures and societies around Europe and elsewhere probably played a part in shaping these strata, with trade a likely driving force.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: tuubiIn any case, trying to reduce any society to a single value or ideal is counterproductive. That forces you to ignore the human factor. Life might have been simpler, but not to such an extreme degree.

I respect you, but really, have you been reading what I'm writing or some funhouse mirror version of it? I feel this is a serious misrepresentation of my thesis and my extensive "human factor" qualifications of it. It's quite annoying.

My apologies. I'm certainly not trying to annoy you. I'm actually enjoying our conversation.

("I respect you, but..." :'()

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYes, yes, the world is messy, whatever. That does not mean there are no patterns to be observed. Human society is dominated by human ideas, human ideologies. And human ideas tend to be simple at the core. There are all kinds of reasons why any given dominant ideology doesn't control the whole show, why complexity comes in will we or nill we, but that doesn't mean those dominant ideas are not dominant or that they themselves are not fundamentally simple.

What I was trying to say was that these dominant ideas have never been as dominant as we'd like to think. What historians tend to concentrate on is what changes, not what stays the same.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI really don't quite see which bit of what I've been saying constitutes romanticized yearning for excitement. If anything I've been quite negative and brutal about the ethos both of the medieval and dark ages past and the 18th c. to modern era.

Overemphasis on the brutal and the negative is part of what I mean. Most vikings never went viking, and the dark ages produced some really remarkable works of art and advances in science.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI have been drawing a picture of two different elites running things for their own benefit largely to the detriment of everyone else--just in very different ways, with different basic organizing concepts and productive systems.

Yes, the mechanisms and methods change, but what I dispute is the grand difference between ancient and modern elites. Wealth takes many forms, but ultimately it's always been about "greed", or the pursuit of wealth and power. If the way to fame and fortune is through warfare or business makes little difference in the grand scheme of things. Especially as warfare has always been and still is often motivated by the pursuit of wealth or personal power.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyOur fundamental needs are to some extent beside the point. Our fundamental needs are the same as those of stone age hunter-gatherers, but one cannot claim that stone age hunter-gatherers were motivated by anything we could productively call profit; they were (and the few remaining ones are) as human as anyone else, but clearly had no merchant class at all or anything like one.

"Profit" might be a relatively modern term, but I don't see how that changes anything. This discussion was originally about greed. Even stone age societies, wherever those formed, had a distinct pecking order where some had it all (power, first pick of the tastiest berries and most desirable mates) and others did not. And, allowing for different personalities and whatnot, people did seek to improve their station and gather the equivalent of wealth.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyWhat about 'em? In case you hadn't noticed, we have powerful warrior classes now. And yet I'm not trying to claim capitalism isn't a real thing.

Neither am I. And I'm not claiming that feudalism was basically capitalism. All I'm saying is that capitalism is more or less an adaptation and evolution of what was before. As you said, we define capitalism by its differences to other paradigms. This definition serves a purpose, but isn't very objective or scientific. Of course it's by evolution and adaptation that all economic and political systems form.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyIn the old days merchants existed and made money, but they didn't rule, and if aristocrats got fed up with them they took their stuff. What constituted dog and what constituted tail was different, and what was considered the important social virtue was different. Compound interest was often illegal. And who dominates song and legend is far from beside the point. Vikings had song and legend about great warriors, we have news shows dominated by talk of the stock exchange and media that talks incessantly about lifestyles of the rich and famous--many of them famous solely for being rich.

And why do you think people didn't gossip about the lavish lifestyles of rich merchants and traders back then? Again, you might point out that their surviving legends are violent, but so is most modern entertainment.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe vikings were actually a little odd in that their merchants, raiders, conquerors, and even peasants, were pretty much all the same people. But a lot of what they traded was precisely things they had stolen while viking--and people, actually; the viking slave trade was huge for a while. But these multi-role people, if you look at their own accounts, cared the most about the raiding and conquest and fighting--that was what made a man respected and followed. The merchant stuff was fine, but it wasn't as important, it wasn't what society was about.

What do you base all this on? Sure, vikings traded on all kinds of valuables and commodities, even slaves, just like their foreign peers. But they were also world class craftsmen. And their merchants, jewelers, blacksmiths and whatnot were just that, not raiders who also dabbled in a bit of trade.

In any case, trying to reduce any society to a single value or ideal is counterproductive. That forces you to ignore the human factor. Life might have been simpler, but not to such an extreme degree.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI really think we tend to overestimate that aspect because it's what we care about and it reassures us to think people back then were just like us, that what we care about is inevitably what everyone has to care about.

I'll ignore the slightly patronizing tone, but you're right, I do assume our basic needs are the same as those of people a thousand years ago. I actually think it's the other way around: We tend to romanticize and mythologize people we have no direct experience of. Even famous historians and archaeologists have commonly fallen into this seductive trap. We have this strange need to make history seem exciting when most of it is decidedly not.


But maybe we're getting slightly off topic here? :P

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@Purple Library Guy
What about all the evidence we have of powerful, rich merchant classes in most feudal societies throughout history? Even vikings, known for their bloody conquests and raids as you point out, had a proper trade empire reaching all the way to the middle east and central Asia, as far as their boats would take them. There's not much romance in gathering wealth and it's the warriors and kings who dominate song and legend, but that's beside the point.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyFeudal societies based themselves on warrior virtues, and tended to disdain merchants as much because they weren't bloodthirsty enough as because they were too greedy.

That's the romantic view of feudalism at least. The truth is, while kings and nobles had it all, merchants got rich in feudal societies as well. Capitalism isn't a radical new economic and political system, just an evolution or adaptation of what was already there. Power brings wealth, and wealth gives power. The focus of greed just shifted slightly from one to the other.

Ideals of a society rarely correspond closely with reality.

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Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoHow knows... Maybe Feral is already being helped financially by Valve.. That could explain the Steam exclusivity...

As long as Steam is so dominant in the PC gaming space, Valve doesn't need to bother paying for exclusives. I think it's more likely that Feral simply doesn't see taking their games to GOG as worth the investment. They might be right or they might be wrong, I wouldn't know. Personally I'd like to see them do it regardless.

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Quoting: kalinHow to unsubscribe ?

If you mean from the comment thread, you can manage your article subscriptions here and your forum subscriptions here. Both links can be found in your User CP.

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Quoting: Ardje

Quoting: buckysrevengeI'm still on the drivers that came in the latest SteamOS (387.something) and this beta resolved my main issue which was the cutscenes would grind the game to a halt. Thank you, Feral!

I haven't seen any problem, except for an almost unnoticable error in some shaders.
I am running 387.22-0+steamos17+bso2 on a zotac sn970 (gtx960).
I do switch to full performance before starting the game though...

But maybe the problem is with newer cards?

No, I think the crucial difference is that he has 8GB of ram and you have 16GB. As I said in the other thread, the game eats several gigs more memory on the old shader compiler. It'll "grind to a halt" when it starts swapping, or just crashes if there's no swap space available.

I completed the game yesterday and haven't tried the new beta. Maybe it's better now. But it was already almost perfect for me on 396.18.

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