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Latest Comments by Purple Library Guy
Cities: Skylines - Plazas & Promenades expansion is out now
15 Sep 2022 at 6:43 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: PhiladelphusPedestrian-only roads? Hmm, I could try replicating the Melbourne CBD now…
CBD? Isn't that some kind of cannabis thing?

W4 Games raised $8.5 million USD to support Godot Engine
15 Sep 2022 at 6:33 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Valck
Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: Valck[1] with all the vanilla out there, does anyone actually still crave for more? How about bananas?
[2] relatively, for an open source project. Peanuts for "the gaming industry".
1)the more we need now is more income for developers using godot, consoles might help with this.

2)do you think its more likely for godot to "kill it self" than for the competition to kill it?
More money is certainly welcome.
And therein lies the issue -- accepting investors' money opens up for investors' influence. That is exactly how the competition can get their say in an open source project. Usually not immediately, openly and directly, but yes, that is the big concern I have, that the competition will use their influence over key people as a lever to fracture Godot back into insignificance.

- branch them out into a new company, because reasons. Oh yeah, trade secrets.
- pamper them with money
- slowly introduce new features that can't be backported because of trade secrets
- wait for the community to tear itself apart over this
- ...
- profit
That's a bit more subtle than I'd expect from a venture capitalist. And I'm not seeing where the "profit" part comes from. Sure, if it was in fact Godot's actual competitors doing the investing, maybe they'd be willing to burn their money just to screw everything up, and they might have some sort of shot at it. Although tougher companies than anyone likely to be involved in trying to take down Godot have done their best to kill open source projects and failed; it's not easy to do in an open source project that has momentum. The scheme you describe doesn't really scare me a whole lot when I think about it--the problem is that Godot has really hit critical mass lately, meaning both that it has a lot of contributors and this one company is unlikely to have much luck controlling it that way, and that there are various other interests, companies wanting it to continue being useful so they can use it, that would work to thwart something like this. What you describe would likely just result in a quasi-proprietary fork that nobody paid attention to.

But anyway it isn't. This company is not getting money via becoming publicly traded it's just getting financed by some (granted, probably evil) venture capitalists, so there's no obvious way for Godot's competition to be involved. And venture capitalists just want the company to make money so it can pay them $$$. And at least one of the VC groups is likely to know something about open source because they, like, specialize in it, so they won't be trying to make the company kill the project that lays the golden eggs.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of cynicism when it comes to evaluating the intentions of people with money. But I think this particular cynical idea overcomplicates things and ignores some of the facts.

Isonzo is a new WW1 FPS from the dev of Verdun out now
14 Sep 2022 at 11:54 pm UTC

Quoting: drlamb
Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, Italy might be a bit different I suppose. I mean, I'm not an FPS fan in the first place, but I would have figured a normal France-based WW I shooter to be kind of boring--you stick your head up out of the trenches, get it shot off, lather, rinse and repeat.
You just summarized Verdun. There's Verdun (French trench warfare), Tannenburg (German eastern front - so snowy mountains/forests) and now Isonzo with Italy.

I have to wonder what's next for the franchise but I'd bet my bottom dollar that it'll be an entirely new game.
There's always Gallipoli, I suppose. "And the band played Waltzing Matilda . . ."

W4 Games raised $8.5 million USD to support Godot Engine
14 Sep 2022 at 6:15 pm UTC

Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: ssj17vegetaThat's very good news. 8 millions seem like a big number !

Can't wait to put my fingers on Godot 4 :)
considering they were receiving 15k in donations, that IS a big number indeed.

other than that, they had the epic mega grant and a few other big donations
As I've said before, I think it was more of an epic kilo grant.

This Vampire Survivors styled game has you defend against pigeons pooping on your house
14 Sep 2022 at 3:42 pm UTC Likes: 3

What amazed me about the second doughnut heist was, on one hand, the seagulls were sort of working together--my wife was wary of having her doughnut snatched, but one group attracted her attention flying low and looking interested while another gull went in for the snatch. But as soon as it hit the ground and all the other seagulls mobbed it wanting a bit, it frantically swallowed the entire doughnut whole so as not to have to share a crumb. Looked kind of impressive going down, but I was thinking what selfish little varmints--wolves would share the kill.

Such a pity--best doughnuts in town.

Isonzo is a new WW1 FPS from the dev of Verdun out now
14 Sep 2022 at 3:24 pm UTC

Well, Italy might be a bit different I suppose. I mean, I'm not an FPS fan in the first place, but I would have figured a normal France-based WW I shooter to be kind of boring--you stick your head up out of the trenches, get it shot off, lather, rinse and repeat.

EA AntiCheat could spell trouble for Steam Deck / Linux
14 Sep 2022 at 7:02 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Pirolisi
Quoting: GuestSadly this is like a million other topics in society where the problem would be fixed real quick if people stopped buying/supporting crap. Anti-Cheat is also a decent chunk of why I won't buy online games anymore even if I ran Windows. It's an arms race of stupidity where the innocent are guilty and the guilty are guilty. Like a BDSM dungeon of idiots flogging their own genitals because master said so.
I totally do not understand your statements, is like that you are saying "cheating online could be stopped if people do not buy crap games" (I suppose you are referring "crap" to games with anticheats).
Erm, no. It's pretty clear that nPHYN1T3 was saying that intrusive, rootkit-like anticheat "solutions" to cheating would not be used if people did not buy games containing them--game publishers would give in and find some more customer-friendly solutions if all their customers collectively refused to purchase such games.

Which is true enough, if largely irrelevant to the real world, since nobody who complains to this effect ever proposes a mechanism for changing human nature enough to make that happen.

W4 Games raised $8.5 million USD to support Godot Engine
14 Sep 2022 at 6:55 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Valck
Quoting: KimyrielleLet's see where this goes, but I am not too worried. If the worst case happens and that company gets taken over by big-evil-business, I am very confident that Godot will get forked by a new dev team and live happily ever after. It happened after OpenOffice got taken over by big-evil-business, too. The good thing about open source is that it's fairly immune against hostile takeovers.

In the best case, this could be a positive game-changer for Godot. While not everything the team will be working on will get upstreamed to Godot, I am sure that a lot of it will.
I just can't help but wonder how long until the "oops, well of course we promised to give back whenever possible, it just turns out whenever is never" announcement.
The thing is that when your business is wrapped around an open source project, to which there are significant other contributors, "not giving back" actually creates significant costs. Aside from reputational costs, which are going to be serious (look how many people are dumping on them and they haven't even done anything bad yet!) a big cost is just the fact that by effectively creating a separate private fork, you massively increase your maintenance burden. Beyond just maintaining a project, you have to deal with the problem that contributors to the main, open version will not take your private additions into consideration when they add code, so it's gonna break your shit all the time. Or the new open stuff you want to take advantage of will be broken if you try to fit it into your altered codebase, so you gotta tweak it before it will work, but then the open version won't have those tweaks, so when that stuff's updated if you try to import it it will break again . . . way bigger pain than just keeping the thing mostly open.

EA AntiCheat could spell trouble for Steam Deck / Linux
14 Sep 2022 at 6:45 am UTC Likes: 3

Lot of people saying doesn't matter cause they don't play EA games and already hated EA anyway. I don't think I own any EA games either and not planning to get any. But in context, that is unfortunately somewhat beside the point. The point is, in putting some popular games off limits, could this blunt the growing wave of Steam Deck adoption?

I think probably not, on its own, as long as this doesn't either become a product they successfully sell for use in other games as well, and as long as it's not a harbinger of similar moves by other big game companies. But it's not a happy thing.