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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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: slaapliedjeOn that note, I was trying to figure out how you'd even have 100 mile per hour winds... if there was too thin of an atmosphere to properly have winds? I'm pretty sure there are large dust storms on Mars, but are they more in the upper atmosphere? I recall the first pictures before we'd landed anything on there was always showing that it had nasty weather patterns, and giant dust filled hurricanes. But it seems all the rovers aren't seeing that, except for maybe some sand dunes on the edge of craters.

You might find this interesting. [External Link]

Spoiler: It's the first Google hit for "Mars storms".

Dunno if slaapliedje did, but I did.
So, the winds only get to 60 mph and the atmosphere is 1% as thick. I think that's not quite as wimpy as it seems at first glance; if I foggily recall my grade 11 physics, the energy would vary with the square of the velocity. So like, to have as much impact as a full-atmosphere wind of speed X, a 1% atmosphere would have to be at velocity 10X cuz 10 squared = 100. Soooo, if I'm not getting this all totally mangled, a 60 mph wind on mars would have the pushing power of a 6 mph breeze on earth.
Still not exactly capable of threatening to push over a rocket and stranding a certain astronaut, though.

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Quoting: Kels

Quoting: Patola

Unlike Tropico, which Haemimont Games previously worked on, they're going for a more sandbox approach instead of following some sort of campaign.

Oh, come on!!! I hate open-ended games like that, a Campaign is the way to go. I like to play games like if I was reading a book, follow along an interesting, captivating story, not arranging random pieces of loosely coupled fragments of tales here and there. I guess I'll have to buy [url=undefined]Maia[/url] instead.

Oh, I missed that part. Personally, I'd rather have the choice between campaign and sandbox, given the choice.

So, given the choice, you'd like to be given the choice?

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It feels weird to me that as near as I can figure, the latest stable release is 3.0 but the latest development release is still 2.x. Wha?

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