Quoting: jens

Quoting: cprnI just thought about something I don't think anyone thought before. Valve had all the creative freedom over the look and feel of the Steam Machine cases. Why the hell not a single one of them looks like it was steam powered? Literally. No steampunk theme?? No valves and glowing crystals sticking out?? No deluxe version with a mist producing atomizer, cogs and pistons?? WHY...?

It would certainly be a selling point, though it really depends on the content if people would buy a steam machine or not. Valve needs the big publishers to support steam os/linux, the big publisher would need a bigger market to do so, the bigger market will start to happen once there are more big titles. Chicken and egg issue ;). Only time and slow grow side by side on all sides will help imho.

Well, that or a huge marketing push by a very big corporation with enough muscle to line up the big publishers and content providers behind what they can convince same is a not-to-be-missed opportunity for big profit. Valve doesn't seem to want to do that, but even if they did there are questions whether they are in fact big enough and whether their organizational style is capable of that kind of fast push requiring forceful action on a group of fronts at once.

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It's because they think we're kindred souls who understand what the site is truly about: Good Old Games.
So they wait until a game is old before they sell it to us.

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I played Star Control 2 back when . . . I couldn't believe it when I realized I could play it as Ur-Quan Masters on Linux (for free yet!) Such a great game. SC3 was actually pretty good IMO. Guess I didn't run into many of the bugs. Hmmm, wonder how that would go on Wine these days, I should dig up my copy.

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Seems to me that to make China playable at all you'd have to rather lowball the problems China had at the time. It's not just that the big bosses were venal, corrupt bandits--it was venal, corrupt bandits all the way down, just a bunch of vultures squabbling over a carcass. Even if you'd put a brilliant, incorruptible administrator in the place of say Chiang Kai-Shek, he would have just ended up shouting silently into the storm, orders and reforms reaching no further than his palace while everyone continued graft as usual. If anything started threatening to make a difference, someone would kill him.
I'd argue that at that point, the only thing that could have saved China was just what ended up doing so--a broad-based popular revolution taking power from below and sweeping aside the whole rotten bunch. Not necessarily a Communist revolution in specific, but it would have to be some cause the lower classes would have reason to rally round.

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Quoting: Philadelphus

I’d say it’s possible to expect to be fighting a better land war in Asia before the end of the year.

You fool! You've committed one of the classic blunders! Never start a land war in Asia! :P

Well, that's WW II for you, it's all about classic blunders. For instance, executing half your generals and staff just before getting into a major war. Or, getting half your army stranded somewhere with no good way to pick them up so you end up having to get saved by fishermen and pleasure boats.
In the war as in Princess Bride, I notice that going up against Sicilians when death was on the line wasn't really one of the big deals.

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Sell low, buy high

If you're having cash flow difficulties in the game, I think I spotted your problem.

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Quoting: fagnerlnI hope that Feral port to Vulkan their already released games.
Mad Max improved the FPS using Vulkan on my machine, but still on Beta.

Nothing wrong with hoping, but I really doubt this will happen for the most part. You're talking about a good deal of time and money for no additional sales. Sure, some people will like them for doing it, but more people will like them for porting more games, and those people will pay them.

But it certainly looks as if we'll be seeing mostly Vulkan ports in future, and the Vulkan performance on Linux continuing to improve. Good news!

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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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