Quoting: "Cheeseness, post: 7456, member: 122"The thing is though, the Humble Bundle guys are probably in a prime position to assemble a translation team (in house, external, community driven, etc. - whatever method used, the ongoing/regular nature would help bring responsibility/accountability that could ensure decent translations) that they could offer/contract out to bundle participants. It would be pretty neat to see them raise the bar for indie games a bit by encouraging/requiring participants to have a minimum set of translations.

Waveform's translations were crowdsourced and that turned out really well by all reports.

I'd like that to happen. I think they could reach more people in more countries and provide a valuable and reliable service to indies.

Back to the lack of support issue, they should be more strict about quality at launch time, specially when the port isn't done by the HB team. We can't live on promises that games will be fixed some time. I assume the HB team doesn't lie when they say they'll eventually fix their ports.

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Interesting info and ideas.

How much pressure/control should Humble try to exert over developers in that sort of situation? Could this be solved through better title selection? Are there ways to just make supporting ports more attractive? Are developers hearing about the problems with their ports? These are all questions that I hope the Humble Bundle guys are continually asking themselves.

Exactly the same happens on Windows when sales slow down for a title, updates slow down too. Some developers aren't selling their games out of the bundles, so their interest on updating is zero. Even the games being sold after the bundle won't make enough sales to make it count. There are a few devs really committed to their users that will make updates no matter how new sales go, but this happens on any platform, I guess.

Another issue that doesn't get much talk is localization. That's important in some countries. Even if I'd like to get some games for some people, or just hook them up I can't because the web is English-only and the lack of localization on several games.

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Quoting: "Anon, post: 7424"I just hope for one thing - that people start using the bloody XDG specs and stop throwing their save games randomly around. Thank god that at least Icculus, Urkle and Flibit adhere to them.

There have been some complaints about the lack of standards across distributions. We should let them know these exist.

Icculus is involved in developing a spec for fullscreen mode apps. That's an interesting one too.

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I thought the Jack Claw version was a user-driven effort instead of an official port, I didn't know Alternative Games was behind it. It didn't work very well when I tried it. And for Shank 2, I was convinced Ryan's name was there somewhere. How wrong I was, I guess it was for Shank. I should have my facts. Thanks for your clarification and your excelent reports. I like to know who's doing the hard work.

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I think Shank 2 was ported by Icculus. Jack Claw wasn't released for anything than Windows afaik. Good read.

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I tried to share my thoughts in the Valve thread but I can't create an account because I can't install Steam. Please someone, tell me I'm wrong.

The recipe is simple, make a tar.gz with the Steam client and all needed libraries for both the Steam client and the games, including libraries needed by other libraries, everything down the software stack until you reach the kernel (excluded) or SDL (included). Anything under SDL is conveniently abstracted so it shouldn't matter what it is, and the kernel is completely binary compatible backwards. The Valve software would interface with the outer system thru SDL and the kernel. That's what SDL what's meant for, abstracting system details. Games developers wouldn't ever need to worry about distribution and version their game will run on, just worry about the library set Valve is providing. And our system and packages would be kept safe and under our control.

It'll be funny seeing how hard they can fail by messing with package managers and dependencies on multiple always changing distributions. Hehehe... :rolleyes:

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Quoting: "Hamish, post: 7401, member: 6"I agree with much of what you are saying, but they actually have quite qualified hands on their team such as Sam Lantinga and Forest Hale.

I'm sure they have them working on other things more related to programming, or I would think they aren't so qualified when it comes to software distribution.

For now, Desura and HB are my preferred game distribution channels, even with their mistakes. I can buy DRM-free games and they don't mess with my system in unpredictable ways.

I'm pretty worried this ends like some much other half-cooked tries to get gaming to GNU/Linux, saying the platform isn't ready when it's them doing things plainly wrong.

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They're doing it the hard and wrong way. Someone should tell them to stop messing with the package system and do their things in their own directory, don't mess with anyone's system or you'll get in trouble. Desura is an example in the good direction, although it can improve. Moreover, any game does it better than Steam.

It seems they didn't hire any GNU/Linux experts, or they aren't hearing what they might have to say. The package system is for the distribution maintainers, it isn't nor shouldn't be a place for anyone to dump their garbage. I'm using GNU/Linux for several years and I've jumped from wanting distribution native packages to avoid them like the plague, and there're good reasons.

They want to control the games, now it seems they want to control your computer too. They'll install, upgrade and remove packages for you. Is that a disease? Ugh...

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Damn, I think I contributed to the name thing. Sorry Hamish. ;)

Good review. The game is a bit easy and short, but I enjoyed it from start to end. The Unity engine has debuted very well, everything run smooth, and it's the first game I've seen that lets me change the system volume with the media keys. I didn't have problems with screen resolutions.

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Quoting: "sobkas, post: 7312, member: 411"Someone was asking why Ed thinks it's not worth to port His games to Linux:
http://www.formspring.me/EdmundM/q/407802266146330190 [External Link]

From Edmund:

OS's are like sports teams for so many people.. ive always found that so odd but its very common online, but seriously... if you want to play games on your computer... why use an OS that limits your ability to play games? i understand that you think your sports team is the best! but be reasonable, you like your sports team because its YOUR sports team, dont expect everyone else to attend all the games of the team whos in dead last place...

It's so dumb... No words. So in line with what I said in my previous post... I respect their decission though, not hard since I'm not a fan of their games neither. I just regret having paid for them.

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