Godot really seems to be hitting that upward trajectory, that critical mass that pushes an open source project over the top.
I've noticed that generally, there seems to be no such thing as open source software being competitive with closed. In any given space, the open source projects are either marginal (in number of users, and in quality often chasing taillights) or dominant, because once an open source offering gets big enough to beat lock-in and network effects it tends to snowball and take over, after which the only workable competition is new open source offerings.

So for instance, I suspect in a few years Blender is going to be the main thing doing Blender-like stuff while all the commercial offerings shrink. Godot isn't there yet, but it's headed in the direction that will make it a genuine contender in quality, features and popularity--and once it's a genuine contender it will be too late to stop it.

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Quoting: WorMzyI can see this happening a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNuFcIRlwdc [External Link]

Oh, that's brilliant.

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Quoting: The_Aquabat

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe individual countries can't print money, devalue their currencies to encourage exports

As I see it there is two main economics schools, Keynes and Hayek... I think both of them agree that destroying the value of the currency is bad.

The major policy implication of Keynesian economics is that the ability for governments to stimulate the economy during recessions is crucially important. The Euro combined with the EU rules on deficits make it impossible for Eurozone governments to do that. EU "austerity" doctrine is pretty much explicitly anti-Keynesian. And it has created a worse-than-lost decade in much of the EU.

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Quoting: mos

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: mos

Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääSoo, could all this be possible to package somehow to a state that even a non-tech-savvy random occasional gamer could then enjoy Unreal Tournament on Linux? :huh:

moving a couple files around and setting an env var or two isn't "tech". nevermind being "savvy" about it.

Ooo, aren't we 'leet?

ooh is reading already considered l33t among the millenials? guess we have to start producing manuals in the form of instant messages. with emojis ofc. and video guides on tiktok! now that would be perfect for the modern layman!

Sigh. Fine, I'll give you something to read.
First let me say your initial statement was simply false. If you talk to people of any age group and ask them what an "env var" is, most will not be able to tell you. So yes, it is tech, and yes, it is being savvy about it, and so yes, claiming that it is neither is specious nonsense whose only purpose is to parade an affectation of superiority.

Now. I'm not saying that your level of technical sophistication is elite. I'm saying that your attitude towards technology and those who are from your perspective techno-peasants is that of a 'leet teenage hacker, what they used to call script kiddies. I see people every day here on GamingOnLinux who are deeply technically knowledgeable, whose knowledge I respect, and who are polite, helpful and uncondescending in dealing with people who don't know their fields. You're not acting like them. Incidentally, long as we're talking about "modern" and "millennials", I think it's pretty likely I'm older than you.

As to the validity of your attitude towards non-technical people: A computer is a tool for doing things. Some people have deep knowledge of how to do the things that in turn make it do things . . . programming, sysadminning and so on. I have a fair amount of respect for such people, they're good skills. But those skills are not and should not be required to just use the tool. If someone is an artist, I am not going to claim their art is unworthy because they can't write their own paint program, or that they should be disallowed from doing art on the computer if they don't have other unrelated computer skills. Any more than I'd claim a programmer shouldn't be allowed to use a computer he's not capable of doing good art on.

Now, here, we are talking about playing games for crying out loud. No, people should not be barred from playing computer games because they can't set "env vars", whatever the fuck those are. Sometimes that sort of thing is unavoidable, but it is not a desired situation.

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Quoting: Cyba.CowboyMaybe I'm missing something, but I don't see what the problem is with the first link and although I only skimmed the rest of the links, the general argument seems to be a disagreement with the direction and / or priorities of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation... That's not really doing anything sinister, disturbing or immoral.

That's why I said "problematic" rather than "sinister" or "immoral".
There's certainly a range of interpretations you can put on Gates' actions. You can say he's acting out of genuine conviction that his approach/es are the right ones. Probably to a good extent he is . . . people often convince themselves that the approach which is good for them is the right one.
But consider. You have a guy with tens of billions of dollars, on which he would normally pay tax. He shelters that money from tax in a charitable trust. He invests that money in profitable endeavours; the capital gains made would, again, normally be taxed, but because it is a charity they are not.
He then uses the untaxed money both to donate and to lobby. He donates money to things such as education . . . money that might have been available for the democratically elected government to spend on education had he not sheltered it from taxation in the first place. In doing so, he shapes the way education is delivered. So he is substituting the priorities of the public with his own private priorities--and in setting the agenda, he shifts public money to being spent on what his private money was donated towards. Even if his priorities are good ones, by what right does he hijack public policy?

Getting more specific, the policies he pushes are self-dealing ones, which increase the profits of the very firms his funds are invested in. This helps the fund grow . . . lather, rinse and repeat. You could say, doing well by doing good. But what are the opportunity costs? Now there you get into opinion, certainly.

What direction should the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation be moving in, and what should their priorities be?

Well if I asked that here, I'd probably get a dozen or more different answers... Each answer would be based exclusively on what that individual Community Member thinks is the right direction to move in or are priorities in the world.

The fact that other people may have other opinions on what policy is best is not a reason for me to stop having opinions. I have an opinion about the earth being on the round-ish side despite my knowledge that there are people who hold the opinion that it's flat. I have an opinion about the Third Reich being a bad thing; the existence of neo-Nazis who disagree does not sway me.
But if you do want to say that all opinions are purely subjective, then Bill and Melinda Gates are just spending money at random and there's nothing either good or bad about it. I prefer to think that it's possible to evaluate policies. So for instance, we have a pandemic right now. Some policies will result in more people dying than other policies. I think that matters.

But in the normal day in, day out, year in, year out workings of governments and societies, some policies will still result in more people dying. At some point the rubber meets the road and people's opinions result in life or death. Some countries have higher incidences of disease, death in childbirth, and so on. Some countries have shorter average lifespans. There is a lot of research on what can be done to improve public health, what is cost effective and what is not. Far as I can tell, while few may be willing to bite the hand that feeds them, when the research isn't about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation but is on the general question of what measures are good for public health, experts rarely say that the way to go is to spend most of your public health money on patented pharmaceuticals at monopoly prices.
Gates is of course a big supporter of intellectual property; his beliefs about software extend naturally to other areas like drugs. The Gates foundation lobbies for IP as a string on its donations. But in the case of pharmaceuticals, intellectual property is a life and death issue, particularly in the third world where they cannot afford the jacked up prices.

So yeah, in my opinion, if you push a third world country's priorities away from low-tech public health measures, and get it to back off on generic drugs, instead using its health care money to buy the expensive drugs your donation was the gateway for, that is going to result in a bunch more real people dying. And in my opinion, that's not particularly good.

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Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGates does genuinely give away a huge amount of money to charity. But, to be specific, Gates has established a huge charitable fund, which he controls, which doesn't pay taxes because it's a charity. So the process of giving to charity doesn't really reduce the amount of money that he has under his control. I don't know whether he actually gives away more money than he would have paid in taxes.
This charitable fund of course has investments. Some specific areas of heavy investment include pharmaceutical companies and private education. Gates then structures the fund's charitable donations in ways that seek to shape the ways that countries approach relevant issues. So for instance, in terms of public health, Gates donations steer a country's public health emphasis towards buying expensive patented drugs (creating profits for pharmaceutical companies) and away from, say, buying mosquito netting, which might be more cost effective in saving lives. Similarly, in the United States, the Gates foundation lobbies consistently for the privatization of education, which in my opinion is a Bad Thing, so as to increase the profits of the private education companies it has investments in (perhaps Gates himself also has an ideological belief in private education, with which I would disagree). Stuff like that. So I feel Gates' charitable donations are more problematic than one might think at first glance. He wields his charity somewhat the way the IMF wields its loans.

Do you have any references for this?

A bit of searching later . . .
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/07/16/bill-gates-among-billionaires-fuelling-us-charter-schools-movement.html [External Link]
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8760199/gates-foundation-criticism [External Link]
(meat on this one starts around halfway down)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/02/toxic-agriculture-and-the-gates-foundation/ [External Link]
https://nancyebailey.com/2019/03/08/bill-melinda-gates-dont-discuss-their-takeover-of-americas-public-schools/ [External Link]

I've read a fair number of other articles, particularly about the health stuff, often in Counterpunch, but it was hard to track down good focused ones.

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Quoting: NagezahnThanks for your comments, I played some more and already got the feeling that a single game takes indeed very long. So research speed might be adequate, but progression still feels slow. Even on fastest speed, time does not pass that quickly. Don't know if it's limited by my machine.

The thing I don't like about "real time with pause" is that sometimes I have to wait for quite some time before anything happens, then again things might happen several days in a row. With turn based I can focus on different tasks in a row (colony management, fleet management, relations, ...) and then get ready for the next turn. Here things happen in no particular order, often requiring me to react to them, so I'm often doing different small tasks, which I find somewhat tiring.

Also for a beginner it's hard to plan what you have to do when to get what you later need. For example the sprawl thing which I managed to grasp somewhat - planets grow so slowly you cannot react quickly to changing demands. To be fair I haven't played around a lot with the job system/prioritising/redistributing.

I'll give it some more time though. Just declared war for the first time to conquer a system that's sealing me off, only to find out that a single enemy star base has more military power than my largest fleet. :( So far I've only battled space monsters and a pirate fleet, and it cost's so damn much resources I can hardly imagine it's ever worth the cost going to war.

I wouldn't say I'm a good enough player to give tips, but . . . I will anyway. :D
First, yeah, in the early game I find I really don't want to spare resources for the navy because there's too much else I want to do. It's a problem. Worse of course is they cost to maintain. And they cost indirectly because I want to research strategic technologies--economy boosters, research speeders--but for a decent navy I gotta slow that down and research those weapons and stuff. But at some point you gotta, and it can be tricky to recognize the time when you need to bite the bullet and spend those resources and buy those techs. But that's not so different from MOO, really.

I always try to expand as fast as I can get Influence to make outposts with. Which also means any time I can get a perk which lets me get systems for less Influence, I take it. So like, I'm a big fan of the "Interstellar Dominion" ascension perk and the -10% Starbase Influence cost thingie from the Expansion tradition group. I tend to avoid treaties in the early game because they cost influence/turn meaning I expand slower. When borders are stabilized a few treaties might be worth something.
Pretty early on I'm working a few science ships for exploration in all directions and a couple of construction ships following along to grab the results. Exploring faster than you can take systems, you have a choice what to grab first, so skip low-resource systems that are side branches in favour of high-resource or stuff that takes you further out, past those potential bottlenecks.
When I'm a democracy I always give a big YES! when the factions show up and give me more influence, and I check to see if there's any policies I can tweak to pander to them so they'll be happy and make with the influence. I usually play democratic so I don't really know what vicious oppressors do for Influence. :wink:

In the early game IMO the place to get resources is space. Energy and minerals should come mostly from mining stations, not dirtside where you could be using your jobs for research or generating Unity or consumer goods or bureaucrats . . . or alloys for those ships.
Skip hard anomalies at the beginning when your scientists are low level; you can go back for them later. Researching a tough anomaly with a noob scientist takes so bloody long it can set back your exploration hard.

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You can have a Council of Trent . . . but can you have a better Diet than Worms?

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Wishlisted. Such a cool concept . . . and the trailer has a Canadian general! I have to get this, subject to availability of $$$.

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Quoting: soulsource

Quoting: NagezahnI suspected it'll be on sale when I read the post about the new update. But didn't suspect it'll be free to try, so I went ahead and downloaded it. It's quite overwhelming when you start it. After a while when I got a bit accustomed to it I guess it's nice, but mostly two factors impact my enjoyment negatively: the overall slowness (research takes forever when compared to Master of Orion, for example) and the game not being turn based. Had this on my wishlist since it was released, but I'm sceptical I'd like it enough in the long term. :|

The issue with research speed is that the tech-tree is rather small. Already on normal research speed you run out of researchable technologies pretty early in the game (meaning: usually before end-game starts), unless you don't care about your administrative capacity.
(Actually, since you mentioned being a new player, you might not have seen this yet: Keep an eye on administrative capacity. If your empire sprawl exceeds it, your research will slow to a crawl. That _can_ be compensated by having lots of scientists, but since the Federations update it's probably easier to just get a bunch of bureaucrats to increase your administrative capacity instead.)

It not being turn-based is something that can be annoying in multiplayer, but in single player there's always the pause button to take your time.
(Some people might call the game turn-based, given that the smallest time unit of the game is one day. There are no fractional days. Also, if you pause, the game will always complete the current day first. However the player doesn't really see/notice this, it pretty much feels real-time.)

The whole real-time, not-turn-based thing weirded me out at first. But not any more; turns out it wasn't that I didn't like it, just that I wasn't used to it. Also, at the most basic level on that issue don't forget you can increase or decrease the speed. In the early game I think it would be kind of annoying if I couldn't push the speed faster.
I don't think the tech tree is that small; it's more that a whole game is really long. I just went straight from playing Master of Orion (the remake, "Conquer the Stars") to playing Stellaris, and the contrast drove it home: Stellaris is just a way bigger game--more complex, more sprawling, more eventful, deeper.

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