Quoting: dubigrasu

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: dubigrasuAFAIK:
They are not the same builds that you can find on Stadia, those (including Exodus) are using DXVK this time (for the record, that doesn't mean they're using Wine).

That is different from everything I've heard before. Do you have evidence that it is the case?

Well, if you download your Stadia data with Google Takeout, you'll find dxvk caches in the Metro files.
For the Metro Exodus Linux port on Steam see for example this: https://steamdb.info/patchnotes/4929373/ [External Link]
I mean, is even in the game credits:

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(this is from our friend here, Corben)

Well, sure enough. Huh, go figure. That makes me less happy about Stadia.

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Quoting: Linuxwarper

Quoting: EikeSupport costs for a huge variety of systems, compared to cloud servers or console systems.

Here we are on a site dedicated to gaming on Linux, hopeful that one day games will be natively released for the platform, and you raised the point that if developers decide to forego local releases entirely, which Stadia could lead to, then it would be because of support costs assosciated with supporting another platform. That means exclusion of support even for Windows, making it the entire PC platform. You just proved how Stadia can become a bad thing in the long run.

I'm pretty sure Eike meant hardware platform. PC as a platform has a wide variety of hardware configurations compared to consoles or dedicated servers, leading to higher support costs.

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Quoting: dubigrasuAFAIK:
They are not the same builds that you can find on Stadia, those (including Exodus) are using DXVK this time (for the record, that doesn't mean they're using Wine).

That is different from everything I've heard before. Do you have evidence that it is the case?

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Quoting: Liam DaweUpdate: Feral Press replied to our question about cross-platform online support, as traditionally their ports are locked for Linux/macOS and Windows by itself. Here's what they said:

We do not have anything to announce in regards to the support of the cross-platform multiplayer.

Should the situation change, we will make an announcement on our official site and social media channels.

Heh. Seems more like they un-replied.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: SeegrasIn chemistry and pharma aren't working either. The fact that a lab creates a vaccine and is not immediately available for every other lab to palliate with a disease, whether that is a solving erectile dysfunction or a pandemic, but rather they can prevent others from doing the same, or getting rich by leasing the patent, is utterly annoying. It could only come from the mind of a psychopath.

I have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

That's a way we the society ensure that. It's not at all the only way. For instance, Moderna's development of a Covid vaccine was financed entirely up front by the US government--they didn't spend a dime of their own money and indeed made a profit before they'd ever started manufacturing. Then they were given a patent as well, but I don't see what the point of that was.

It's kind of an odd approach generally. I mean, most people who defend the patent system for pharmaceuticals concede that the big pharma companies don't really do a whole lot of original basic research--that's mainly public sector and pharma mostly piggybacks off the public sector ideas. What pharma does is lots of clinical trials, which cost a lot of money. OK, fine, for clinical trials to be done, money has to be spent, but what should that have to do with patents? It's a fairly mechanical process that doesn't involve coming up with original ideas, so why should our method of compensating it pretend that it does?

And as a method, it doesn't work terribly well. Vaccines don't typically make pharmaceutical companies a ton of money, so they don't spend that much money developing them. But vaccines are very useful in terms of public health. In fact, in terms of medicines, there is to some extent an inverse relationship between utility and profitability. Palliative treatments are more profitable than cures, since they can be sold again and again.
If you're a fan of "free markets" (which, OK, I'm not), patents are a massive distortion of those whether you're talking about the original Adam Smith et al. sense or the modern sense, since from Smith's perspective they create huge windfall economic rents and from the modern perspective they involve massive government intervention and from both perspectives they represent the literal creation of monopoly for the express purpose of distorting prices.
Those prices can get jacked up especially high because of the nature of medicine--how much will you pay the only person who can save your life? The highest profit will necessarily come at a price-point high enough that many won't be able to afford it. This is cruel and immoral. But there is also a substantial public interest issue. Bad public health has social and economic implications.
So between these issues, leaving it to the (patent-distorted) market to decide just which treatments and vaccines should be pursued is inevitably going to give you perverse outcomes where worse medicines are emphasized over better ones, and the medicines produced are undersupplied and overcharged for, leaving many untreated, and sucking unnecessarily huge amounts of money out of the broader economy, leaving pharmaceutical companies with huge windfall profits.

Those windfall profits are also a huge motivator to falsify the outcomes of clinical trials to make drugs look better and less risky than they are. This has caused tens of thousands of deaths. It would be better to just have companies that do clinical trials, have public agencies that decided which drugs should have trials done, and pay them to do them. The public agency's purpose would be to improve public health, not make a profit from perverse outcomes. So they wouldn't be motivated to avoid cures in favour of palliative treatments, nor to falsify results of clinical trials. Clinical trial companies would compete on price and accuracy. Then the drugs, once approved, could be handed over to generic drug makers who would manufacture them cheaply and, again, in competition rather than with a monopoly. And that's just one possibility. I'm sure there are plenty of other approaches that would be better than what we have for everything except letting big pharma siphon off windfall profits.

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So I'd have to say that, given the existing legal framework, patent system and so on, this is a fair cop.
There was a patent, they knowingly infringed on it, and they shelled out a cost-of-doing-business 4 million bucks for it.

That said, it's a stupid patent.

And beyond that, the patent system is . . . only insane if one imagines its purpose to have anything to do with increasing innovation. Who knows, maybe that was true 200 years ago. But the modern patent system has been carefully designed, increment after increment, to do something very different: Siphon more money and power to the already wealthy and powerful--create barriers to entry, encourage monopolies, oligopolies and cartels, and enable price-gouging based on artificial scarcity.

Spoiler, click me

Note that in the modern patent system, inventors never patent anything. Corporations with teams of lawyers patent things, the inventors working for them who actually dreamed up the innovation hold zero "intellectual property". Even if inventors were independent, they don't have the amounts of cash needed to successfully file a patent, let alone defend it. Also note that a lot of the innovation which is then patented by corporations was actually innovated by public sector researchers; the profits were then privatized. For instance, the messenger RNA technology used by Pfizer to create their new-type vaccine which they have patented, was invented at the US National Institute of Health, doubtless building on a bunch of other public sector research conducted worldwide and published in scholarly journals. But the National Institute of Health ain't seeing any cash from it. This is normal; the whole point of the exercise is for the Pfizer types to make money.

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Now I feel like having a nice game of Thermonuclear War.

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The time to worry is if they change their name to "Extender Group" . . . then we'll know the further change to "Extinguisher Group" is just around the corner.

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Quoting: Liam Dawethe overwhelming urge people seem to have to just not think things through about commenting on it is either ignorance or just plain stupidity to make a dig at GOog.

Gotta say, Liam, if that wasn't you saying that I'm not sure you'd approve of how the tone contributed to your community.

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PRIM already screams quality at me and that's exciting.

QualitEEEEEeeee!!!!!

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