Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: EhvisI think you didn't quite get the essence of the post you replied to.

I think you're right :) Care to explain?

People were actually saying the reverse--not that the Proton version worked badly, but that Proton worked better than the native version and that, weirdly, Proton actually worked better on Windows than the native Windows version on Windows, due to Vulkan not triggering certain NVidia driver malfunctions.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: elmapulthe art direction seems great but...
the video is too edgy, i mean, oh no, some one blew up the white house!
it would be an great premisse if i didnt saw it 1000 times before, now i cant take it serious.

and so on...

Speaking as a Canadian, everyone else can dream, but we actually burned the thing down.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: scaineI played the Steam demo and it's excellent. Reviewers do give it a hard time for its second act, but apparently it recovers well in act three.

I'd have bought it already if it was native, but it's one of those games that gets a pass from me exactly because it's not. It's a Unity game and his previous two titles were both available for Linux (Pony Island and The Hex)... indeed many of his Itch.io projects even support Linux too, so I was gutted when this didn't.

If there's a Linux port in my future, it's getting bought immediately.

Uhhh . . . according to a bit of thread involving Liam a few days ago, aren't you, like, not allowed to say that?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: MalThe (only) optimal way to game now, due to severe pop growth limitations, is essentially finding an effective way to steal population. Even cause disasters in foreign space to produce some hundred billions refugees to then welcome in your Ecumenopolis is legit (never trust egalitarian xenophiles).

Huh. That approach never occurred to me. I can see where it would work pretty well. Maybe I play at lower difficulty levels. I find the old fashioned approach of just exploring aggressively, maximizing Influence and such to grab as much real estate as possible and terraforming every planet in sight gives me enough places growing pop that I get handily ahead just from ordinary organic growth. In the earlier game I pretty much never do diplomatic deals or influence-costing Edicts because dash it, I have systems to claim.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: elmapulhell, even microsoft is doing some nice inovative stuff, directX 12 came before vulkan was a thing.

I don't remember it being quite like that. Didn't they kind of get developed/specified around the same time? DX12 might have been officially released before Vulkan was quite finalized, but it was all happening about the same time and basically drawing on the same ideas, which were being developed mostly in public.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CybolicEDIT: Seems that they're just giving a -5 nice value to the pid of the focused window and its parent processes, keeping track of those changes and setting them back to 5 when the foreground pid changes. This should be doable with a shell script :)

Makes you wonder why nobody thought of it before.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: furaxhornyx

Quoting: sub

Quoting: gradyvuckovicSurprised there's no "Steam Deck Sale" planned. Maybe they will wait a year, make sure everyone who wants a Deck, has one, before they do the sale.

(1/2 off-topic)

I'd like to see Valve giving devs/publishers a discount on the platform fees as an incentive when they provide a native Linux build for a long time.

Wouldn't that be an even greater thing for the Steam Deck?
I mean that would help twofold:
Getting more games to the Deck, making it more attractive,
plus, giving native Linux games a push.

But then, publishers would be able to release their Linux build on some other platforms, rather than being dependent on Proton... Now, I am not saying that Valve is trying to do anything evil, just pointing out the fact that more Linux builds may not be that much beneficial, from Valve's point of view.

If there was a big enough audience for Linux stuff for anyone to care about it just as a market rather than, as Valve does, for strategic reasons, it would be easy enough for other platforms to deploy Proton. It's open source after all.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: anewsonAcemoglu is the world's greatest political economist (among other things).

Heh. Well, if he has an ideology different from mine, he can't be the world's greatest! :grin:

The Guns, Germs and Steel geographic interpretation is not a hill I'm gonna die on, although I'd want to see the actual arguments for what's wrong with it. Certainly I've seen some more specific things Diamond was seriously wrong about. And I'm definitely seeing many modern Western institutions becoming dysfunctional in ways they weren't so much 50 years ago, and making the society work poorly, so I'm not going to claim there's no such thing as a cultural or institutional factor.

But it's all very vague at best. Western Europe suddenly became the big enchilada a few hundred years ago; does that mean Western European institutions were the best? Well . . . except Western Europe was a cultural and technological backwater for hundreds of years before that; does that mean Western European institutions were the worst? Somebody flipped a switch somewhere in the 1400s or so and Europe went from having an ineffective culture and lousy institutions to suddenly having really good ones? Colonizing the heck out of various places was all about institutional superiority and had nothing to do with having developed one or two particular technologies, such as gunpowder?

And it's going to be a massive pain teasing out the reality, in part because of human psychology. I'm thinking of the experiment these guys ran with Monopoly, where they would have two people play and they'd give one guy three times as much money to start, give them extra money when they passed Go, and let them roll three dice while the other guy rolled one. Obviously, the one with the advantage would win. But two things showed up: First, the one with the advantage would become more aggressive, ruder, change their body language to take up more space and such. Second, they would generally tell themselves that they won because of skill, superior play, not because they were given an advantage. Even though objectively, that was obviously rubbish. So I don't have a ton of expectations of objectivity from scholars figuring out the cultural factors that lead to victory. It'll be "The Mismeasure of Man" all over again, except at a cultural rather than individual level.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PangaeaNeed to become a member apparently, which means it isn't free, and they can feck off.

Amazon's constantly flogging Prime to me, trying to get me to become a member and forget to stop. "We'll give you X bucks off this purchase if you join Prime, free for just long enough for it to slip your mind!" I actually went for it one time, but I made dashed sure to figure out before I pressed the button exactly how to get the heck off it again right after.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It feels kind of strange to realize there are people out there who would be into the kinds of thing Stellaris is (strategic SF sort of stuff) who don't in fact already have it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments