Incidentally, does anyone else find the core mechanic in recent Civ that every time you found a new city, your people get significantly unhappier, to be kind of silly?

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Quoting: nifker

Quoting: FUltra

Quoting: nifker1. Any special reason why would you support Unity3D?
2. Everyones acting like X11 is the past and is really buggy and slow - but really most don't have real problems with X11 and if there are problems let us fix them or rewrite parts if neccesarry.

But X11 is the past and is really buggy (try for example to create a 100% no-one-can-bypass screen saver lock for X11). More to the point is that the devs behind X11 is the same devs that are creating Wayland.

The only sad thing with these nice changes to Unity3D is that AFAIK Unity3D is statically linked to each game and does not exist as a shared resource in for example Steam so for this new version to be used games have to be updated one by one(?).

As I said stop creating new projects and help existing - for me it is "I WILL NEVER STOP USING X11" unless I'll see dwm for Wayland which I guess won't happen and Wayland needs to be cross-platform like other Unix-software.
Anyway who says it is the past and is buggy - Really who needs screenssavers thats like Im not at my desk but I need something running at my screen.

Sorry mate, but really that ship has sailed. Yes, X11 has done yeoman service over many years, but as FUltra said, the people making Wayland are the X11 people. It's coming and that's that. And X11 has/creates a whole bunch of security problems, which don't matter to me sitting at my desktop but matter plenty overall. And X11 ultimately just has too many concepts built deep into it which are at odds with how graphics are done now. It just does not, at its core, do things the way modern graphics work, and that creates bottlenecks and limits capability. For a long time the advantages of maturity outweighed that, but the people who developed X11 seem to pretty much all agree that time is past. They could "just update" X11 but for that to work it would have to be a distinction without a difference--the name is about all that would be left.

Wayland has been slow, but it is arriving. And maybe Mir I guess, wtf Canonical and their Not Invented Here syndrome.

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Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: KimyrielleI am however, genuinely curious what can still done to Civ to improve it.

It's hardly an immaculate concept -- from the ground up, there's so much to improve, to make it worthy of the name 'civilization', as it were. Sure, the core design has to 'gameify' a huge range of social-political dynamics; nevertheless it takes a bit too much for granted.

To begin with, you assume a godlike dictatorship of a nation-state back in 4000BC. Money pretty much has its 20th century significance from the start.

There's quite a bit of the designers' own political leanings informing the design -- in one of the past Civs, the stock exchange increased overall happiness in a city, for instance. And unless you're building an expansionist empire, you can't really aspire to any of the victory types.

You can argue for sure that the game glorifies both capitalism and imperialism with some of its designs. And yes, to make your civilization able to prosper you need to expand. But tbh, size DOES matter in real life international relations. The US is powerful, Switzerland isn't. For the simple reason that one country is large and the other isn't. Power in real life has nothing to do with how "great" a nation is. It's just a function of size. Translating this simple truth into a game where you compete against other nations to become the most powerful one, it makes sense that expansion is needed, no? They sure could relax the ultimate goal to be the "best" nation, but what would the new victory conditions be, then? What would be the goal in Civ for a nation like Switzerland?

I do agree with it being silly that the stock exchange creates happiness. It should create wealth and that's all.

If that. I would be interested to see a Civ-type game in which some of the technologies seemed like a good idea at the time but adopting them ended up causing more problems than they were worth (except maybe if your setup was in other ways just right for them). So if you build stock exchanges, they generate money . . . at first . . . but then a while later you start getting reports about losing tax to corruption and havens . . . on the other hand, if you don't build stock exchanges, other countries that do gradually get more hostile with you and won't trade . . .
Extending that idea, one of the keys to a well-working civilization would be to go with a technique set that worked together. So for instance, in Civilization (as of V) you have these ideologies and such. Presumably if you adopt Communism, stock exchanges are not going to do good things for you since they undermine your whole system (even assuming they ever do good things for anyone other than stock traders).
This all might work better in science fictional games like Alpha C, where there are technologies that you don't really know what they do or what the implications might be.

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Quoting: PeciskI reall doubted they wouldn't release it for Linux - CivV was highly successful on Linux/SteamOS after all. As not being on release - as it is not in-house port, that's understandable. Also with Civ having known issues at release usually it most people will wait for first DLC to drop anyway.

What bothers me a bit that at this point having same OpenGL port for Mac and Linux might drag us down a bit. OpenGL on Mac is in effective limbo state and Apple seems have deemed it to silent, silent death there.

What with OpenGL rotting and refusing to go for Vulkan, Apple is fast becoming a less viable gaming platform than Linux.

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Shadowrun Hong Kong, mostly. Been trying a couple different character types to experiment with cyberware and whatnot.

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I also have less trust for professional reviewers than "ordinary people" commenting on games. Which isn't to say I particularly trust "ordinary people" commenting on games--rather, I trust most professional reviewers so little that my lacklustre opinion of average-people reviews looks good by comparison.
I like Shamus Young, though.

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Quoting: Mountain ManThe biggest problem with Linux gaming at the moment is that there is no compelling reason for someone who is happy with Windows to switch to Linux. All they see are fewer games with worse performance. Now there are many good reasons to kick Windows to the curb, but try explaining that to your average user who will then proceed to viciously defend Windows.

While you're quite right about this, I see it more as a glass half full. There are various non-gaming reasons to switch from Windows to Linux. Until recently, gaming has been a hideous reason not to, quite enough to override many people's frustrations with Windows and induce them not to switch. The situation was so bad that even for a casual gamer it was just prohibitive. But now, if someone who plays games some but isn't an avid gamer who follows all the latest releases says "Well, I'm interested in Linux, but can I play games?" the answer can to a fair degree (similar to Mac, say) be "Yes." That was never true before. And so far, it's just continuing to get better.

So certainly, if your main reason for using a computer is that you're a serious gamer, there is no reason to switch to Linux and still good reasons not to. But if your main reason for using a computer is to browse the web and do some spreadsheets or whatever, but you also like to play a few games, Linux may now be viable where it never was before.

The future has some bright spots even on the hard core gamer front, though. With the advent of Vulkan, it seems as if graphics card drivers will be simpler and there will be little reason for them to perform worse on Linux than on Windows. At that point, speed will become a question of which OS is more efficient in other ways. Currently, it's unclear whether Linux is fundamentally faster on a gaming load than Windows--graphics card effects generally dwarf such differences if there are any. But it may well be, and it may soon get faster still under such loads--I've seen articles recently about problems with the Linux scheduler under multiple cores which may lead to speed improvements. More generally, I trust the development model and general nature of Linux over Windows. If people want Linux to run games faster, it will be changed to make games run faster. Windows, not so much. So, crossing fingers, but there are reasons for optimism.

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We can pretty much assume that anyone who uses Linux and plays games on it (and isn't strongly committed to completely DRM-free games) is on Steam, and has been since fairly early in the Steam Linux gaming push. So basically, all growth of Linux on Steam has to come from either new people using Linux, or people who use Linux but didn't play games on it before deciding it's workable to play games on Linux (which probably means, switching from using Linux part time to full time or nearly so).

Growth of Windows users on Steam presumably does not come mainly from new adoption of Windows, since it's already a monopolist. So either it comes from people beginning to play games on PC at all when they previously didn't game or gamed exclusively on consoles, or it comes from people who already gamed on Windows shifting from other ways of getting games (buying boxes in physical stores, for instance) to using Steam. Mr. dmantione may have a point that some sort of saturation has to be reached eventually, limiting this growth.

So yeah, if that first trend of increasing Linux numbers that we presume are from actual Linux adoption continues, and the second trend eventually stalls out, then we could expect the percentages to start going up eventually (even aside from Steam Machines, which as near as I can make out don't currently show in the statistics at all).

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When it comes to these 4X space games, you know what I'd like to see? I want a game that just goes crazy on the tech tree. Too often you get all these technologies and they'll have awesome sounds-crazy-advanced names and they do something like increase industrial production 5% or make ship components very slightly smaller or give your missiles +1 damage, woo hoo. Everyone wants to be careful, and systematic, so they keep the impacts of technologies balanced, and predictable, and incremental, and kinda boring.
To heck with worrying about balance (or maybe have an optional "tame" tech tree), just make with the super science at the upper levels and if the implications of a tech let you totally break all feeble opposition if you use it unscrupulously, so be it!

I'd play again and again just to try different game-breaking technologies and gloat as I used them to sweep aside my foes and dominate the galaxy.

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NATO? Shooting at ISIS? Kind of unrealistic. Shouldn't it be either the Syrian Army, Russians, or maybe Hezbollah, manning that machine gun?
Maybe there should be a NATO espionage game about carefully siphoning weapons, money and trainers to ISIS.

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