Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWatched the trailer. Whoa, creepy!
Makes me kind of imagine that somewhere out there, some group is staying out of all the fights, dragging up sand and stuff instead of oil, and noodling along with solar panels.

Sounds like a movie. A world of water. A kind of....waterworld.

They could have awesome sailing ships! And a terrible plot!

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Watched the trailer. Whoa, creepy!
Makes me kind of imagine that somewhere out there, some group is staying out of all the fights, dragging up sand and stuff instead of oil, and noodling along with solar panels.

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Ooooo, shiny!

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Quoting: RayFowler

Quoting: Purple Library Guyis there anything in this that says I should be playing it instead of just firing up MOO 1 itself?

Developer here.

ROTP was made with MOO1 fans in mind, so you will find many quality of life improvements in the game compared to MOO1. There are a lot more customization options to the game and a pretty active user community for it. It's free to download and play, so hopefully you'll enjoy it!

Well, I gave it a shot. It's available for free, but I can never make myself do that, so I tossed in a few bucks. Worked fine last night, played for a few hours, and it does feel like MOO1 but it's definitely smoother to have modern quality of life improvements, mousewheel zooming and various stuff. Liking it.

This morning though it doesn't work. Double click on the .jar file and nothing happens at all. Weird.

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Quoting: Mal

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: MalUhm. Interesting.

That's the first time they actually do something for the (fabled) vertical gameplay.

Planetary ascension tiers finally try to capture those mechanics that in history allowed numerically small communities to be stronger than larger ones.

In history, as far as I can make out numerically small communities were only stronger than large ones if they had a tech advantage.

Tech advantage is more of a consequence of a more efficient society, rather than the cause.

I tend to disagree. Material conditions are more likely to shape both culture and available technique. Have you read "Guns, Germs and Steel"?

One of the biggest things that made the hugest difference to development of societies was domesticability of plants and animals. You would think that no matter where they happened to be, humans would just domesticate whatever was handy, but there are actually some pretty specific characteristics that are needed for it to work, and they're surprisingly rare. So for instance, one might imagine that in Africa they could domesticate, say, zebras to serve like horses did elsewhere. Unfortunately, it basically cannot be done--zebras are not just horses with stripeys, and their instincts do not lend themselves at all to domestication. People have tried, it don't work.

Most of the cereal crops harvested around the world today all have their origins in a fairly restricted part of the Middle East and spread from there. The rest of the world just didn't have anything as good and easy to cultivate. And, like plants in general and to some extent animals, they spread better East-West (ie within climatic bands) than North-South, which meant they got to Europe and Asia much easier than to Africa. The Americas, being basically spread more north-south, generally found it harder to diffuse agricultural techniques from place to place than Eurasia, with its wide east-west span. Other places did come up with stuff, but it was harder and didn't work as well and so got going slower.

I won't say culture has no impact. Hard to tease out, though, and groups on top would always rather conclude that it's because of their superior culture than because of lucky material circumstances. I tend not to trust such cultural explanations.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: Beamboom

When it comes to what platform developers are most interested in, Linux sat at 7%.

So not just interested in, but most interested in? As in, rating it above the other platforms? Really?
It's so I wonder if this either is misquoted or the question misunderstood...!

But if not, that's... pretty darn great!

Yes, most interested in but not above all others.

Well, one implies the other, doesn't it? If you are most interested in Linux that means you're not most interested in Windows or Mac. Else you would be most interested in one of those, and not Linux.

You would think so, but you missed the key bit of that quote:

Quoting: Liam DaweThe full question was "Which platform(s) most interest you as a developer right now? (Choose all that apply)" and Linux got 7% for that.

So, like, someone actually could have checked off Windows, Mac and Linux as platforms that "most" interest them. And, shockingly, many would not be held back by the niceties of grammar! I know, the thought depresses me too.

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Quoting: MalUhm. Interesting.

That's the first time they actually do something for the (fabled) vertical gameplay.

Planetary ascension tiers finally try to capture those mechanics that in history allowed numerically small communities to be stronger than larger ones.

In history, as far as I can make out numerically small communities were only stronger than large ones if they had a tech advantage.

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Quoting: CyborgZetaThe poll reads like developers are just unsure of how the Steam Deck will play out, rather than being negative towards it.

Which is fair enough, really. Still early days to be declaring it a success, much less an enduring one.

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Quoting: dorronTo me, the appeal of the steam deck is having a portable "console" whose game catalog doesn't have to be built from scratch every time a new device is released. When you buy the steam deck you already have all your games, when Steam deck 2 is released you'll have an even bigger catalog, etc. I'm sold on it! Shut up and take my money!

I hadn't thought about that aspect. Quite true, although it might take a little while for people to start realizing it.

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Quoting: gbudnyValve or any other company on this planet can't use Wine to compete with Microsoft. Wine developers will always fall behind Windows developers, and you can't change it.

That strikes me as the core of your point, that a lot of the rest depends on. And you know, this has been a common viewpoint for a long time. And it happened to be true for a long time.
But as far as I can tell, that's just because there weren't very many Wine developers and maybe the project was not approached in a way that made for speed of development. Well, and Vulkan didn't exist. Clearly it's not a necessary truth--say for instance there were ten times as many Wine developers as Windows developers, obviously they'd be able to keep up. But even without going absurd, there are constraints on how fast Windows developers can change Windows. The target can't actually move that fast, or software developers will abandon it, backwards compatibility will be lost and so on. Plus, the codebase is huge and at this point a lot of it is pretty old. Making changes without breaking everything has to be pretty hard. So I think there is a certain critical mass of Wine development, which has actually been reached (for games at least), at which Wine advances faster than Windows changes.
In fact, I think it's clear that for the last couple of years, Wine (plus DXVK et al) have been chasing those taillights a LOT faster than they've been receding. They started well back, and are much closer than they were. That progress is probably gonna slow a bit, because they're moving from big wins to corner cases. On the other hand, I'm really not seeing signs of Windows shifting much as a target lately--no signs of a DX13 coming down the pipe, for instance.

So really, I think your pessimism is unwarranted. It's just a product of a long period where the lack of a strong enough development team to do the job made it feel like the job was impossible.

All this optimistic talk is just about games, mind you. As far as I know there is no similar push happening with productivity software, and the two have different issues; Adobe Acrobat probably doesn't care about DX12.

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