Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: ArdjeThe title is bad... I thought yet another zombie kill kill kill nostory whatsoever, or another arcade space thing.

Agreed - this series seriously needs to change its name :D It's just dumb and doesn't do justice to the game at all. Sounds like a stupid speculative way to coin off the (fading) zombie craze.

I suppose. But certainly the first game was about space pirates . . . and zombies . . . so, seems pretty descriptive.

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Ooo, it's out!

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Quoting: MintedGamer

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI had not been paying attention to developments in Windows land. That does not sound that good for Valve; they may want to sit up and take notice.

Yes, Microsoft continue to slowly boil their captive frogs with the 6 monthly updates. They're playing the long game as described by @danniello after their attempt to strong-arm metro and the store/UWP/Windows Phone failed.

With regard to Linux as a whole growing, the OS tracking stats show that it is continually steadily growing.

Well, I guess . . . but it's like, for the last few months a number of sites have shown significant growth. And back I dunno, like 10 years ago for a while there was significant growth, back when we started from zero and edged up to the 1.5 percent-ish range. But in between, well, yeah, probably Linux was growing, sorta, but it's been like up a tick here, down a tick there, and if you graph it . . . OK, maybe this thing has a tiny slope up but if we kept on "growing" at this rate Linux would be a significant desktop platform around the time everyone's moved to doing their computing by telepathy. Linux was certainly improving through that whole time, but desktop growth was pretty flat. So I'm certainly happy that it seems to be speeding up, plus on top of the actual Linux growth, Chromebooks seem to be carving out a little space. Some say Chromebooks are Linux, some say they ain't, but in terms of platforms being supported by hardware vendors and whatnot they sort of stand or fall together whether they're "actually" the same thing or not. So for some purposes I think it's certainly legit to add Chromebook uptake to Linux growth when you're figuring effective Linux size and impact as a platform. What with one thing and another, I think Linux-(ish) desktop growth is looking a lot more growth-y than it has for quite a while, and I really hope it keeps up. Still don't know why, though--maybe it's just that some key improvement levels have been quietly reached, where little pain points (like "no games" ) that kept people from switching just aren't there any more.

(On Chromebooks and Linux gaming--if I were Google, I would definitely make sure Vulkan ran on Chromebooks so in the end I could make the little buggers run Android games. They're not much of a computer for full scale PC games, but should run phone stuff fine, and in general surely the mid-term plan for Google on Chromebooks has to involve letting users run Android stuff so they can buy anything in the app store. I've seen the Android point made a few times. If they do it, then that's one more platform using Vulkan, and probably a growing platform because Chromebooks are doing OK already and Android integration would make them more useful so they'd probably grow faster.)

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I had not been paying attention to developments in Windows land. That does not sound that good for Valve; they may want to sit up and take notice.

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Blackberry is my jam. I pick them in the fall, buy some of that Certo pectin stuff, and use significantly less sugar than the instructions tell me to. Yummm!
But this game seems like it could be pretty good.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: killyouGuys, to be honest this is it. We already had the best out of the "linux gaming" movement, now it's loosing momentum. There will be some more games but it will not get any better than it is right now. It might get worse though. We will not exit the artificial life support phase unless something happens on the Microsoft - Valve front.

I think you're being incredibly pessimistic. Nothing about Linux gaming is losing momentum. SteamOS is not the start and end of Linux gaming. I've found the experience of Linux gaming to get better year on year.

If nothing else, most sources seem to be showing increasing Linux use lately. Percentages are creeping up.
There is the admittedly important exception of the Steam survey, which may be screwy or may be getting warped by issues around lots of new Steam members being from the least Linux-y parts of the globe. But generally it seems pretty likely that Linux is seeing a bit more desktop uptake lately, after a long period of relative stagnation. I don't know why and I don't know if it will continue, but it's a dashed good sign. Increased market share will make us less dependent on Valve, at the same time as it gives Valve more incentive to back us.
And it's a good time for it. I think right now, if someone tries Linux out, kicks the tires a bit, there's less reasons than ever before for anyone to want to go back. We got lots of different Linux desktops, but they're almost all good; we got plenty of good games, far more than ever before; we got lots of good, pretty mature open source software; we have good hardware support, even getting pretty decent with the graphics cards; and we still don't do all the control freak crap certain other OSes owned by corporations do. And all the fundamentals of Linux seem to be just continuing to get better. I saw an article about something like "Top 10 Linux annoyances" or something a little while ago, and I read it, and after going through the list all I could think was, "Are those really the worst problems we have left? This is piddling compared to the old days!"
Any growth we get should be sustainable, is what I'm saying, because I can't see there being that much adopter's remorse.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: crt0megaFive years ago I discovered GoL because I was searching news regarding Steam for Linux :D F*ck, I'm getting old.

If 5 years since first reading GOL makes you feel old, how old do you think I feel when I still remember typing this....

10 print HELLO
20 goto 10
run

Now that takes me back to my TRS-80. Well, technically my dad's TRS-80.
2K of ROM, 4K of RAM.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: Mountain ManMy question is, is there enough momentum in the Linux gaming market for developers to continue supporting Linux in the event that Valve gets bored and kills off their grand experiment? That's my primary concern at the moment, that we're almost entirely dependent on Valve and Steam for the majority of our games, and if Valve goes away then we're going to be right back where we were five-years ago with a niche market that only a handful of independent developers even bother to support.

I guess the critical moment was when all major engine creators added Linux support to their products that make it (comparatively) easy to publish cross-platform. There is barely any reason NOT to support Linux these daysz

Let's be honest, as a game developer/publisher, Valve has been a non-factor for a while now, so if they chose to stop porting games to Linux, really, who'd notice? And Steam Machines never picked up any steam to begin with. Linux gaming has grown without them just nicely.

No, their great contribution is and was porting the Steam client to Linux in the first place, opening a mainstream publishing channel for developers on Linux for the first time ever. That deed is done and time won't get rolled back on that. The biggest help we're getting from Valve these days is them getting involved in improving Linux drivers and components for gaming. Which should hopefully drive down Linux related support costs and performance issues, which is the LAST sound reason larger studios still have not to publish on Linux.

There was never really a technical hurdle to supporting Linux. We've had OpenGL for years, and id Software's ports and Epic's experiment with Unreal Tournament 2004 proved a long time ago that Linux was more than capable of running AAA games. The real problem was, and still is, market share, and I'm a little concerned that if Valve ever expressed any lack of confidence in the Linux platform that a lot of developers would simply walk away.

Depends what you mean by technical hurdle. I'd agree that since forever it's been probably as easy to develop a game for Linux (alone) as for Windows (alone). But it was always much harder to develop for more than one platform than for one platform, no matter which additional platform you're talking about. And since for games, "one platform" meant Windows . . .
I agree with Kimyrielle that the big change is support for Linux on the major game engines. For a really big chunk of the game market from most of the indies up through some fairly major outfits, that lowered the cost of publishing games cross-platform so that the break-even point happens at a much smaller market share. That one factor makes releasing for Linux even at its current market share financially viable, maybe even closing on uncontroversial, if you're using one of those engines. There have been other increments as well. Vulkan may prove to be another again, as well as advances in packaging--Snaps and whatnot--and the move to Wayland. But the engines were the big one.
So if Valve walked away it would obviously not be a good thing, but the situation would be IMO very different from how things were pre-Steam. Developer assumptions are different now, and there are probably more developers with some idea how to build a game with Linux in mind, but above all it's simply a lot cheaper and easier to make games with Linux as one of the release platforms.

The other question of course is, how likely is Valve to walk away? But the question underneath that is, how likely is Microsoft to convincingly not be covetous of Valve's market? How likely is Microsoft to abandon things like introducing and gradually integrating app stores in Windows and trying to get games to be sold there rather than on Steam? I'd say fairly unlikely; that's a lot of revenue and control MS would be leaving in an outside third party's hands when they have a shot at getting it themselves. And it's even more unlikely that they'd be able to not only abandon the idea of doing that, but also convince Valve that there's no threat of them ever doing that. Companies, much less Microsoft, don't permanently abandon potential large revenue streams.
So my expectation is that, for as long as MS don't make any serious moves, Valve will play Linux-related stuff like now--quietly simmering on the back burner, ready to be brought to a boil when necessary.

Crystal balls are notoriously inaccurate, though. So I don't discount the worry--who knows what could happen? But Linux is on those game engines now. Things are a bit different.

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Quoting: kydrosso many RTS, and the MMOs?

MMOs aren't just a different genre of game like say FPS, they're a completely different kind of economic problem. I suspect the point at which it becomes worth it to support a platform involves bigger numbers for an MMO, so unless we gain market share there won't be a lot of them.
Luckily, near as I can make out every metric except the Steam survey shows Linux growth lately. Crossing fingers! (Not that I care about MMOs--I care about market share. Enough growth to get MMOs is just one more part of the virtuous circle I'm hoping for where removed barriers and more available software lead to growth which leads to more available software such as MMOs which leads to further growth etc)

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Quoting: MayeulCScientific accuracy is a nicety, I won't let this stand in the way of a good game. That said, it can also make a game good (or not, it's up to the game designers).

Yeah, all else being equal, scientific accuracy is good. But all else is often not equal; say you wanted to do Barsoom-style-Mars or Space:1889--then the last thing you'd want would be scientific accuracy.

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