Quoting: Gamewizard

Quoting: TuxeeI can remember when I got the first "professional grade" games with the first Humble Bundle in 2010.

I never really got to experiences that as I used to own several of the Loki releases, so I watched they dream die and the be resurrected when that first Humble Bundle happened. Glad Valve hoped on the Linux train six years ago.

Not so much "hopped on" as "hooked up a powerful locomotive".
I still have a couple of those old Loki ports . . . been a while since I tried to get them to run. Last time it was tricky, but do-able, although I wasn't getting sound. Alpha Centauri's still the best in its genre . . .

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Very stylish.

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: elmapul" There's something satisfying about download an open source game engine using an open source downloads app…"

isnt that what package managers suppose to do...
sigh.

yeah, looks like the fragmentation leads yet again to people reinventing the whell, because its too hard to support all distros otherwise.

steam became the norm, since we were busy competing instead of cooperating

Maybe I just haven't experimented much, but these days isn't there basically
1) A large family of distros using apt with a graphical front end, whether Synaptic or something called "Software manager" or something
2) Red Hat
3) A smaller family of distros using whatever Arch does

That isn't a whole lot really.

But I'm not sure it's relevant. Games are different from other stuff, package management wise. Culturally, and because most Linux games are closed source and cross-platform, whereas most other Linux software is open source and often Linux-only, or even if cross-platform dominated by its Linux use. This game engine is open source, and no doubt the developers have a fondness for Linux because Linux is the centre of gravity of open source stuff, but it probably isn't primarily for Linux users. So its main method for being acquired isn't going to be through Linux distros, it's going to be through portals that Windows and maybe Mac people use, and because it's a game-related thing, that will be a game portal.
Long story short: Normal Linux software comes from your distro's software manager thingie, game stuff comes from Steam or GoG or Itch. There is nothing to be upset about here.

1) A large family of distros using apt with a graphical front end, whether Synaptic or something called "Software manager" or something

out dated softwares, with an outdated list of what is avaliable for linux.

"This game engine is open source, and no doubt the developers have a fondness for Linux because Linux is the centre of gravity of open source stuff"
that explains why construct didnt had an version for linux? sigh

"There is nothing to be upset about here."
except that canonical made 0 dollars on their store, and now they dont care about the desktop anymore, the ones who do is valve.

I'm not clear what point you're making.

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Quoting: PatolaYeah, everybody and their mother are told that capitalism is a monster which threatens the planet, rewards malignant greed and leads to big corporations ruling over the individual and lazy gamblers gaming with money at the stock market.

You do realize I didn't say anything about any of that stuff, right? I would like to be quite clear that I was making analytical comments, not ethical or normative comments. I never said capitalism was bad, or socialism was good, or markets were either good or bad. I was just commenting on the relationships between them, which are not what a lot of people think they are.

But in fact, everybody and their mother are told the exact opposite of (wot you said), and all the media is owned by people in whose interests it is to make sure everyone thinks the opposite of (wot you said). There is a quiet but quite substantial system of subsidies and library gifting dedicated to spreading the works of Ayn Rand, for instance. On the other hand, nobody with money has an interest in promoting anticapitalist ideas. Given that, it's really quite surprising they are as widespread as they are. There are many persuasive arguments in favour of capitalism, or against its critics, but the idea that poor baby capitalism is just overwhelmed by the universality of anticapitalist propaganda which somehow by magic totally controls the message, is not one of them.

Quoting: PatolaNothing could be further from the truth. The stock market is a market of risks vs. rewards which offsets investments which otherwise wouldn't be given money to succeed, so it leads to production of riches, of real value. Also, capitalism is a [url="https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Capitalism"]system of voluntary trade[/url], there is no cohercion if we're talking about the same thing. And finally, "intellectual" property cannot be part of capitalism because it is based in private property, which conceptually depends on the scarcity (or rivalry) of the good -- non-scarce goods cannot be property.

I have seen all of these assertions before, many times. I have seen many refutations of them, and counterarguments for them and so on. On balance, I do not find any of these assertions convincing. Oh, except the "intellectual property" point--I quite agree that "intellectual property" is not in fact property and that it is warped to treat it as such. To me, however, the very fact that the term has been universally agreed on and pushed with such vigour in unison by so many of the wealthy and powerful of the world, and economists have generally fallen in line, suggests that actually existing capitalism has little in common with the apologetics for it that masquerade as theories.

I won't take on all those points because it's a really wide-ranging discussion. However, I'd like to make a little note about coercion. Capitalism in England, which is generally taken to be pretty much the first place capitalism took hold, operated to a fair extent by coercion from the very beginning. At the time, there were a whole lot of small farmers who individually had (mostly not owned, but rented from upper class landowners over generations) slightly less land than needed to get by--however, they had access to common land, including both fields for grazing and forests for hunting, firewood, gathering of herbs, mushrooms and so forth. Combine their own land with the commons, and these small farmers could subsist reasonably well. They tended to aim for self-sufficiency but mostly sold some surplus food as cash crops with which to get those things they could not produce themselves. But at the time, there was a new class of people rising who were making money by running workshops where people worked for pay. You have to realize this was a mostly new thing in the world--made goods were up to then created by self-employed craftsmen in guilds, their help mainly apprentices who worked for keep, a little money now and then to go to the market, and the expectation of someday becoming independent craftsmen themselves. Or just by ordinary folk for their own use.

Also new were colonies--places like Jamaica with plantations where slaves laboured to produce raw materials; England had these raw materials coming in, and there was money to be made doing stuff with them. Hence these new workshops. This was not all about technology--Adam Smith's famous "pin factory" example didn't include any new technology, the point was about division of labour.

But these workshop owners had a problem: They couldn't get enough people to work in them. Few people wanted to become entirely dependent on an unreliable--and low--money wage. They had a better deal going--the small farmers had their independent and fairly reliable self-sufficiency and were their own bosses, while to the craftspeople becoming an employee was a simple demotion. So the workshop owners, proto-capitalists you might say, got together with the big landowners and the politicians (all the same people really) and passed various laws to change the status of land; the core of it was called the "enclosure" laws. These amputated the common land. The common fields were handed over to big landowners to do more modern-style farming or to put sheep on or such; the forests were barred from common use and draconian anti-poaching laws were enacted to stop anyone from trying. Rents were raised, various means were used to shrink the small-farmers' plots of land. The result, the planned result, was thousands upon thousands of ex-farmers thrown off their land and made destitute. Harsh laws about vagrancy were enacted as well, to make it harder to just sort of bum around. The whole concept of police started to exist around this time.

Suddenly, there were lots and lots of desperate people willing to do anything to eat, and the workshop owners had a supply of cheap because desperate wage labourers. And that is how capitalism and wage labour began: Slaves overseas providing much of the raw materials, wage labour provided by people deliberately thrown into destitution so they would have no choice.

Now that said, capitalism was clearly dynamic. It reinvested surpluses, created economic growth, drove (and shaped) technological progress, prompted huge population increase. It represented a truly massive break with older systems. It could be strongly, if perhaps uncomfortably, argued that this made it worth a lot of coercion, suffering, and death, at least unless and until something better showed up. But non-coercive? Not so much.

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Quoting: Kels

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Kels

Quoting: subSo sad, all that Valve came up with after all these years is a card game. :/

And the upcoming In the Valley of Gods that Campo Santos is working on. And multiple other game projects that have been mentioned but haven't been officially announced yet.

I am mystified by the implication that a card game is somehow "lesser" than other kinds of games. Seems kind of insulting to the people who enjoy playing them, and the people who put work (in this case, four years of work) into making them.

It may be a fine game, but I can understand the criticism in a way. A card game requires very little graphics, no story, hardly any setting et cetera. If that requires four years of work, there is a certain sense of "The mountain laboured, and brought forth a mouse."

Wait, what? Sure, it doesn't have a lot of 3D models or character animation, but you're going to look at that trailer and say that it doesn't involve tonnes of design, card animations, special effects of various sorts, plus a significant amount of detailed art (a piece for every card)? That isn't nothing and isn't something you can just snap your fingers and you've got it.

Not to mention, card games involve a lot of work to design and balance the mechanics, with significant hours of playtesting to back that up. And I doubt there's less programming involved than most other sorts of games.

But sure, this looks like something a team of three banged out in a weekend. Sounds legit.

You're going a bit over the top, I think. I don't believe I said anything about banged out in a weekend. But making a computer-based card game is a lot like . . . making a physical card game, or a fairly elaborate physical board game. Yes, there are a lot of art assets, yes there is a good deal of design work, yes it takes skill and/or intuition to do well.
But the fact is that creating a physical card game or board game does not cost the millions of bucks or require the number of bodies contributing that a computer game from a big studio does. It's a smaller thing. It's not that there's no creativity involved, it's more the difference between a short story and a large novel. Valve is a big outfit from which people tend to expect big things. Card games, relatively speaking, are small things (although the profits may be huge). I actually am not bothered by Valve doing a small thing, I think it's kind of sweet that unlike most behemoth corporations they can decide to do a small quirky thing. I hope they profit. But that does not make a card game a thing on the same scale as most other kinds of games.

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Quoting: Kels

Quoting: subSo sad, all that Valve came up with after all these years is a card game. :/

And the upcoming In the Valley of Gods that Campo Santos is working on. And multiple other game projects that have been mentioned but haven't been officially announced yet.

I am mystified by the implication that a card game is somehow "lesser" than other kinds of games. Seems kind of insulting to the people who enjoy playing them, and the people who put work (in this case, four years of work) into making them.

It may be a fine game, but I can understand the criticism in a way. A card game requires very little graphics, no story, hardly any setting et cetera. If that requires four years of work, there is a certain sense of "The mountain laboured, and brought forth a mouse."

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Quoting: elmapul" There's something satisfying about download an open source game engine using an open source downloads app…"

isnt that what package managers suppose to do...
sigh.

yeah, looks like the fragmentation leads yet again to people reinventing the whell, because its too hard to support all distros otherwise.

steam became the norm, since we were busy competing instead of cooperating

Maybe I just haven't experimented much, but these days isn't there basically
1) A large family of distros using apt with a graphical front end, whether Synaptic or something called "Software manager" or something
2) Red Hat
3) A smaller family of distros using whatever Arch does

That isn't a whole lot really.

But I'm not sure it's relevant. Games are different from other stuff, package management wise. Culturally, and because most Linux games are closed source and cross-platform, whereas most other Linux software is open source and often Linux-only, or even if cross-platform dominated by its Linux use. This game engine is open source, and no doubt the developers have a fondness for Linux because Linux is the centre of gravity of open source stuff, but it probably isn't primarily for Linux users. So its main method for being acquired isn't going to be through Linux distros, it's going to be through portals that Windows and maybe Mac people use, and because it's a game-related thing, that will be a game portal.
Long story short: Normal Linux software comes from your distro's software manager thingie, game stuff comes from Steam or GoG or Itch. There is nothing to be upset about here.

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: DJVikingFor them it is all about the money.

That's the sad part. The original intention of Electronic Arts (and the name was carefully chosen) was to acknowledge and foster the creativity of its developers, at a time when even admitting there were real people making videogames was a rarity*. Modern EA is basically the diametric opposite of what Hawkins set it up to be.

*Of course, the founding of Activision is a similar story. And it went the same way.

Both EA and Activision (and many more) . . . It's almost as if there were some sort of economic system pushing people to go that way.

Economic system? Sort of. More specifically, it's the curse of the Intellectual "Property", which by itself is anti-competitive and [url="https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0"]anti-capitalist[/url]. Patents, copyrights, trademarks, DRM and the likes, that's what leads companies down this path...

Hmmm . . . the idea that capitalism as such is particularly associated with free markets or competition or, indeed, necessarily markets at all, is a bit of a misconception. The two things have often gone together and so they're often treated as the same thing analytically, but they're not. Capitalism is about capital, and the investment of capital to make a profit, which can then be reinvested. It is believed by many that competition among firms and/or the existence of fairly open markets can force capitalism to behave fairly efficiently rather than extracting tons of rent, but that's a modifier added on top, and at that one that the capitalists themselves must inevitably oppose since their objective is, and is supposed to be, maximizing profit, including rent.
But there's nothing conceptually to stop capitalism from operating without anything you could really call markets at all; one good contemporary example is the US military procurement system, where capitalists invest, make huge profits, and reinvest the profits to grow their firms, but do not compete or do anything that could really be considered "selling" in a "market". It's still capitalism, quite pure capitalism--that it's not a form most people like doesn't make it any less capitalist.
The same operates contrariwise--socialism is not typically associated with markets, but the basic concept says nothing about them one way or another--rather, it is associated with ownership of the means of production, the firm, by workers, the public, or the state rather than by private capital-owning individuals. In theory even the state-owned kind could involve multiple state-owned firms in any given industry, competing to sell their goods in markets. Variants where firms are mainly owned by the firm's workers assume markets more often than not. I'm on the fence about the impact of markets in non-capitalist systems, personally.

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I realize the two of you are arguing and yet I'm liking you both. But what can I say, you're both thoughtful and cogent.
I take the force of the bus analogy . . . but on the other hand, routinely playing games via cloudy stuff means loads of data going to and fro again, and again, and again; it seems plausible that this would be a serious power-use overhead. It wouldn't be the first time a new computing use turned out to hog a ton of power--look at cryptocurrencies.

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Quoting: tmtvlI mean, it's ugly as sin, so if I bought one I'd have to buy a proper case as well...

...but I so want a Sys76 with an AMD GPU.

Most computer cases are ugly as sin. Just wondering--are you saying it's ugly because of the woodgrain or despite it? Personally, I really think it's past time design in computers got over the whole "We're so hypermodern and futuristic" thing, so the woodgrain is kind of welcome.

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