Hm. I'm not sure I'm massively enamoured with anyone involved. Yes, yes, Kickstarter goals not a guarantee, yes, Proton works and all (although mileage varies--I've only tried to get things working on Proton a couple of times and I haven't actually been very successful so far). But still, I don't like it when people say they will do X, take money from people who are hoping they will do what they say, and then do not do X. It does not give me more respect for them.

On the other hand, the publishers sound like jerks and I don't know what the hell a "publisher" is supposed to really do these days. I mean, anyone can "publish" their game on any of the major platforms, so the publisher isn't "publishing" the game. "Publicist" or "Promoter" might be a more accurate description? So like, their job is to make more people buy the game and their go-to approach to a dispute is to make it impossible for anybody to buy the game, so as far as I can tell they're just a value subtractor. And whatever claims they may make about what's going on might as well be vacuum as far as I'm concerned, because people whose job is to puff and twist the truth should just not be listened to when there's any dispute about the truth. Probably they hid some horrible gotchas in the contract which mean that the people who actually wrote the game get dick all for it and then pulled the plug when the people who actually wrote the game said "Say, shouldn't we be getting some money when the game we wrote sells?"

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Quoting: HelmicWe are here specifically due to an ideological opposition to the concept of intellectual property and are using copyleft licenses as a means to undermine it, proselytizing Linux to further normalize FOSS in people's lives so that they can go about their lives without being exploited by the companies that make hte software that runs on their devices...

There's the key assumption that is likely to cause you problems. I'm here largely for that reason, but many just like Linux because it works well, or because they like tinkering and aren't interested in the ideological reasons behind why Linux lets them tinker, or for various other reasons. I think the proportion using Linux for ideological reasons is significant but definitely a minority (and they're not even all the same ideological reasons).

And you can't tell people "You're doing the project wrong" when they're doing a completely different project. You can persuade people that your project is worthy and probably compatible with the one they're already doing . . . but you are probably not going to be very successful at doing that by telling them they're "brainwormed".

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Quoting: 14

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThinking of mindboggling technologies, I've been thinking for a while that that's something these games often get wrong. For good reasons, but still to my thinking in the end wrong. And that thing is, they nerf the awesome technologies in the name of game balance. They're worried about multiplayer, they're worried that people will get sick of a lack of challenge on single player, so they keep the technologies very incremental no matter how cool their name is. It ends up feeling pretty bland. And my thinking is, screw game balance. If I've evolved my species into beings of pure thought fielding massive inertialess planetoids bristling with cosmos-destroying weapons we control with our minds, I don't want some hicks with destroyers and railguns to be able to put up a fight, I want to bat them out of my way with contemptuous ease. I'm perfectly happy to have not one or two, but multiple totally game-changing technologies, stuff that makes me feel like "Yeah, we're hyperadvanced now!"
Don't get me wrong, I don't think games with more incremental, somewhat boring technology that lend themselves well to multiplayer and stop runaway wins should go away. But I do love the feel of pedal to the metal tech supremacy, knowing all the Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and then some, and looming like a titan over the puny primitive also-rans.

I expect a game mode that allowed such dominant technology would effectively turn into a tech race, because players would quit once they discovered their opponent had the game-ending technologies. Maybe better against AI only.

Yes, sorry, I meant to imply that I was talking about games that were at least not emphasizing multiplayer, and likely single player only. I never play multiplayer, and I do think some design decisions can be good or even important for multiplayer but at the same time actively make single player worse.

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Quoting: jens

Quoting: Nezchan

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: jensAls far as I remember, there were four elephants between the giant turtle and the disc :)

But what about The Fifth Elephant?

That was a Bruce Willis thing, right?

Close :), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Elephant [External Link]
(Assuming that this was indeed where Purple Library Guy was referring too)

Edit: Damn I’m slow, just getting now that you were actually joking and referring to the fifth element :)

For that matter I always assumed the book title was doing that too.

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Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: Purple Library GuyUm. I'm not sure what I think of that. I don't play 4X space games to be an RPG, I play them to explore the galaxy and manage economies and research mindboggling technologies.

Totally fair. I should mention that CK II never really hooked me like Stellaris does, so I was (pleasantly) surprised that adding seemingly similar mechanics would be so interesting to me. I think the difference is that CK II has so many characters, and they're constantly dying and being replaced with new ones, and they're all just various randomly-generated collections of traits and stats with little you can do about your own traits and nothing about anyone else's (except your kids). Here, the number of leaders you'll have has been pared down quite a bit, and unless you're playing an Overtuned origin there probably won't be a huge turnover, so you can actually get invested in your leaders a bit more. Being able to choose their traits at each level up, at least for me, really made more engaged in their progress, rather than "Oh look, scientist #14 leveled up again and got an exploring trait that they'll never use because they're leading engineering with their Spark of Genius trait already." When I said it was like an RPG, that's all I meant; you're not going to be having extended talks with all your leaders around the space-campfire or anything like that. (I think the legendary Paragons might have a bit more flavor and event chains, but there are only 8 of them and you'll only [possibly] see the 2 or 3 corresponding to your ethics, from what I gather.)

Considering that some traits are now "Council" traits that provide bonuses to your entire empire (like more mineral production, or faster research) when a leader is on the council, choosing traits at level up can also affect the managing of your economy and how fast your research progresses on mindboggling technologies :smile:. It's the same underlying gameplay, it's just that leaders have now been made a much more integrated and interesting part of it.

Well, that sounds like it might be nice. As for the Paragons, they kind of sound to me like a really extended exploration/archaeology event, which means I'd probably like it although it's not necessarily something I'd fork out much extra cash for.

Thinking of mindboggling technologies, I've been thinking for a while that that's something these games often get wrong. For good reasons, but still to my thinking in the end wrong. And that thing is, they nerf the awesome technologies in the name of game balance. They're worried about multiplayer, they're worried that people will get sick of a lack of challenge on single player, so they keep the technologies very incremental no matter how cool their name is. It ends up feeling pretty bland. And my thinking is, screw game balance. If I've evolved my species into beings of pure thought fielding massive inertialess planetoids bristling with cosmos-destroying weapons we control with our minds, I don't want some hicks with destroyers and railguns to be able to put up a fight, I want to bat them out of my way with contemptuous ease. I'm perfectly happy to have not one or two, but multiple totally game-changing technologies, stuff that makes me feel like "Yeah, we're hyperadvanced now!"
Don't get me wrong, I don't think games with more incremental, somewhat boring technology that lend themselves well to multiplayer and stop runaway wins should go away. But I do love the feel of pedal to the metal tech supremacy, knowing all the Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and then some, and looming like a titan over the puny primitive also-rans.

Stellaris isn't too bad for this. But a while ago I finally managed to get Galactic Civilizations III going in Wine, and the tech was so bland and boring I just couldn't be bothered to play the game more than a couple of times. (And it was all for nothing because they included one origin that let you find/make these weird space stations that boosted you so much it was practically game over once you managed to get them going, so bye bye game balance)

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: MohandevirIn my case, battery autonomy is make or break. If all this raw power is wasted because you need to cap everything to gain minutes of playtime... What are you getting? A little more powerful Steam Deck with less input options, unreadable 3rd party apps, crapy os interactions and still worse battery autonomy (the Steam Deck's autonomy is already to the limit)?

It occurs to me that this bad feature of the Ally would compound with a bad feature of the OS they're using--with little battery time it seems to me you'd really want to be able to easily suspend a game and stop using battery, but someone was saying with Windows it won't do that.

Have you looked at the comments section of the video posted by @Slaapliedje?

Quoting: Slaapliedjehttps://youtube.com/watch?v=qLVgr29NMA0

4k thumbs up for the comment about the missing suspend/resume. By far the most liked comment. Didn't think it was such a big deal.

I must admit that without it...

*Low battery warning*
"-Oh! I must find the next save spot real fast..."
*System shutdown!*
"God... CENSORED!!! CENSORED handheld!"
:grin:

Edit: Sorry, there is a comment with more thumbsup, but it's about the video editing. :grin:

I was surprised how many comments I saw saying the Deck's Linux interface made it better than the Ally's Windows. Note that I'm not surprised about that being true, I'm surprised that quite a few people seem to be saying it.

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Quoting: legluondunetThe gap between today's consoles and working emulators is narrowing. We had never known an emulator that emulates a console still on sale. I don't think it's ethical to publicly release an emulator of a console that's still on sale, in my view, developers should at least wait for the end of life of a console. Nintendo is an innovative company and produces user-friendly games, switch emulators must be costing them a lot of money.

I don't see how. My understanding of the business model for consoles is they lose money on the consoles but make it back on the games. If they can make money on the games without having to first sell a loss-leader console, then money-wise there is no downside.
I'm sure Nintendo are still very unhappy about it, but that's because they're Nintendo, not because it loses them money.

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Quoting: CatKiller

It does this with thanks to the DXVK translation layer, which NVIDIA now have their own fork of just for this.

This suggests to me that Nvidia internally prioritise Vulkan over Direct3D. They could have just done it in DXR, and stayed in the DirectX realm, but they've chosen to translate all those DirectX games into Vulkan instead.

Huh. So like, in a weird way Windows games on Windows will all be using Proton . . .

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Quoting: Guestthe biggest downside for me is dynamic memory management in dxvk in torture scenarios

Have you considered just . . . not torturing people? :tongue:

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Quoting: jensAls far as I remember, there were four elephants between the giant turtle and the disc :)

But what about The Fifth Elephant?

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