Quoting: SaladienGreat,
But I think the price is quite high for such an old game. Within one month of the release on the original platform I would be willing to pay this price. But now Hmm at least 50% should be it.
Hopefully Feral and Aspyr will learn in the future that they should release within one month of the original release or they will practically lose money. Atleast in my understanding.
Greetings

For some games, that might be true (although even there, I think you're being a bit hasty). But this is Civilization--the Civ series are iconic and cater to an audience with a long attention span. Hardly anyone planning to buy Civ will just forget the whole idea a few months later, nor will they have bought a similar substitute instead (nobody has the guts to compete head-to-head with the Civ franchise). So I don't think your point applies to Civ games.
(Except maybe Beyond Earth, which does have competition. I actually like Pandora better, and for that matter I think Civ:BE fell well short of the original Alpha Centauri that it's trying to be the successor of. So it might need to get discounted rather faster to sell)

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Quoting: compholio

Quoting: rkfg...
Wow, I've never heard of that. I presumed, in TBS the host has authority so it does all the random stuff and then just sends the numbers back to the clients. Deterministic engines are made to fight excessive bandwidth and accompanying lags if you have hundreds of units that are constantly moving. Not the case for TBS I guess... Still, an interesting reason for incompatibility.

The standard rand() implementation on any system is not actually random, it is very predictable. This is used to great advantage in many games, since by properly seeding the randomizer you can get consistent behavior without transmitting the full state between systems.

So, lets say you have a treasure chest and you want to make sure it always has the same contents no matter who opens it and without transmitting the contents to everyone. All you have to do is seed the randomizer with an ID for the treasure chest, if you do that then you just need to use the output of the randomizer to determine the contents. This means you don't have to transmit "plate mail (with all associated properties), sword (same deal), amulet (having fun yet?)", you just send "seed X" and all clients will run through the same randomization algorithm (calling srand() and then rand() an appropriate number of times).

If, however, your randomizer works differently on different platforms then you run into trouble.

There are reasons why it's often a bad idea to get cute even if it seems to be saving (effort, bandwidth or whatever)

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I know people and likely some Mesa developers are opposed to having more game-specific bits in their drivers, but this is about getting the game to actually run, not about hacking around performance issues.

Wellll, it seems like this is extensible though. I mean, it's meant to fix this one game, but it looks like it could work for any game that had some kind of weird OpenGL version requirement--once you've got it working for ARK, you could easily add other games to a list or something, right? And there's bound to be more of them, so.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Crazy PenguinNice! Another Space-Sandbox. It looks like StarMade gets some serious competition.

"it took 2-3 minutes to slow down from full speed which caused me to fly into a repair station and boom"
Liam, you know that you are in Space and it takes time to slow down, right? :D

It helps to have more thrusters with forward-facing surface area on your ship:

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Can't you just flip and face backwards to decelerate, like in all those interplanetary-hard-SF stories from the old days?

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Quoting: GuestInteresting interview. Glad to read that Linux sales are several times higher than the famous Steam 1%.

Well, they would be. If 1/4 of the games are available on Linux, then all else being equal 1% of the customers would buy 0% of 3/4 of the games, and 4% of the 1/4 they can play. (With some smudge effects for Wine players, dual booters and such)

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Feral's porting pace really does amaze me. It seems like there must be a serious learning curve--once you've done a few games there must be things you know to look for and how to fix so you can get them out of the way quick, or something, because it certainly seems as if Feral can port a game way quicker than, well, most anyone else.

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Quoting: uraeusI think if people look at crowdfunding as a version of pre-ordering then supporting a crowdfunded game does not makes sense. However if you look at it as 'Do I want to see this project that would otherwise not go forward happen bad enough to put some money into it and maybe it will succeed' then supporting crowdfunding campaigns make sense. I have personally supported probably 25 projects and due to doing some serious evaluation of each project I only had 4 of them go bad so far. I also never put in more than 15-20 dollars so that if the project fails I can write off the loss without regrets. But just before the crowdfunding tend to offer you a copy of the game as a reward don't start categorising this as 'buying' in your head, because if you do then of course it doesn't make sense.

Yeah, the article sums up the risk side--what you should watch for to maximize the chance of a game, with Linux on it, coming out the other end. But of course that's just one side of the equation--the other is, is it worth the risk to you? If a crowdfunded game is just something pretty normal but incrementally better/different from what's out there anyway, there's no point accepting much risk to get it. If on the other hand it is exactly your personal game fetish and there is no hope of normal game publishing corporations making such a thing because it's outside their radar of what a "game that sells with a genre we understand" is supposed to be, then it might be worth it to take a bigger risk.

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Probably should, a lot of people seem not to like Civ:BE. I don't mind it, although it's no Alpha Centauri. As to crashes and such, it crashes almost immediately on my desktop but runs fine on my laptop--both running Mint. So, hardware related presumably.

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I'll buy it even if it won't run on any of my current computers.

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I didn't realize even experimental Wine was even very near the point of actually allowing any DX11 or Vulkan games to run. Is it just me or has Wine been moving very fast lately?
Like really, for years it felt like Wine was noodling along making tiny incremental improvements but basically pretty hit or miss, only usable with increasingly outdated stuff, and any new version seemed as likely to break something that worked as to make something work that hadn't. It felt like it had turned into one of those stagnating back-burner projects with just a few people keeping it alive. But for the last, I dunno, few months or a year, it feels like it's been just charging ahead.
I wonder if that's a real thing or if it's just that they've been patiently laying groundwork all this time which we are only now suddenly seeing the fruits of?

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