Thing is, with older games that are more likely to be run in Wine, the performance hit isn't as much of an issue because hardware has gotten faster since they came out. So as long as things work, it's cool. Great to see the progress Wine has been making lately.

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Quoting: ColomboPLG: Your post makes no sense with or without quote.

I see the problem. For some reason when I first saw your post either the quoted text wasn't there or I didn't notice it. So it was a non-sequitur from my point of view, and looking for something it might be about I concluded it must be assuming Shadowrun was some kind of D&D clone. My mistake.

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Quoting: Colombouh, Ad&d rules suck. Seriously, we have 21. century. We know better rules than half-assed wargaming rules applied to pnp RPG.

I'm trying to figure out what that's referring to and I'm coming up empty.
So you know, Shadowrun was never based on D&D rules of any sort. It was, and is, its own separate game system with quite different mechanics from anything D&D. IMO Shadowrun's rules have some significant problems, but they have some great aspects when it comes to expressing the style of a mixed cyberpunk/magical world; the essence rules for instance were a great idea that helps bring a lot of flavour.
The Shadowrun video game did bring in some kind of level thing for the NPCs so you can make some quickie decisions improving them, but for your own character it's a point-based system somewhat similar to the Shadowrun RPG.

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For some reason the Shadowrun series really hits my sweet spot. Well, for one thing, I used to play Shadowrun pencil-and-paper and I'm quite fond of the setting, so I was quite pleased to see something that seems quite true to the game. But I like the combat quite well, and I find the amount of character improvement and acquisition of novahot goodies is enough to see a pretty nice progression from mediocre to asskicking over the course of one of the games. And I like the stories and such, and I find for me the pacing is a fairly nice mix between story and fighting. And I've enjoyed trying a few different kinds of characters; even within say Street Samurai, your tactics are quite different if you go with a sniper than if you put together a hand-to-hand cutter type.
Dragonfall is probably the best, but I like the other two--even the more basic one, Shadowrun Returns. A lot of people damn that one with faint praise, but I actually find it pretty good--although I'd love to back-port some of the other games' more advanced magic and cyberware to it.

I too never had Stupendous Man's problem with saving, by the way.

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Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, the big engines probably make money hand over fist. Maintaining and improving Linux support I would expect is cheaper than adding it was in the first place. And the thing about Linux is, even if there were no non-techie Linux desktops at all, Linux dominates in most other spaces and shows no sign of that diminishing. Between that and the attractiveness of the FOSS idea, Linux has a strong allegiance among programmers. Once they've jumped the hurdle of putting in support in the first place, even if keeping it isn't worth it financially it's probably worth it just for morale within the company and goodwill outside.
There's also the checklist effect. If you offer a product it's kind of hard to measure which features are making you money, which make the difference in people's choices to use your product or a competitor's. But if that kind of product has a checklist of features that most of them support, I suspect most companies would be leery of changing their product so it gets a red X beside something on the list while their competitors still have a green check mark.

So I suspect chances are pretty good Linux support in the engines will stay for a while.

I certainly hope you are right. I think we can assume a few years of speculative Linux support, but beyond that there probably has to be a commercial argument, and it is currently unclear how that will pan out.

Not gonna argue. The long and the short of it is, in the end we're gonna need market share, and while there's some indication that may have been growing a bit lately, I still don't see any big obvious sources of Linux desktop growth right now.
I do think the potential is there--the Linux desktop, in various versions, is really quite good and just getting better. Linux has always had some unique strengths as a desktop; it has also, let's face it, had unique disadvantages (including lack of games), but these have been gradually chipped away over the years and at this point few remain. But quality and adoption aren't always related, and I don't know what commercial interests are likely to put Linux on desktops any time soon. Hoping some emerge.

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Quoting: oldrocker99I started in 2008, with Ubuntu 8.04, and, at the time, there was exactly one freely-available commercial game that had a Linux client available: Neverwinter Nights. I happily played it (and still occasionally fire it up, and it still works; not bad for a 15 year old port) until the Humble Bundles came up. I dual-booted from 2012 to 2014; when X-COM came out for Linux, I deep-sixed my Windows partition and haven't looked back.

I have seen gaming on Linux grow from Steam's initial offering of mostly Humble Bundle games to the wealth of titles we have now. I used to buy just about every Linux game that came out, and now I'm pretty damn picky.

We are in a Golden Age of gaming for Linux. :woot:

Let us hope it turns out to be only a Silver Age, with the Golden Age of World Domination yet to come! ;)

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Quoting: etonbearsFor example, a major reason for Linux game availability is the rise of high quality game engines, many of which have added Linux support. As these engines generally have many Indie developer customers, I'm guessing that as long as the Indies make enough from their Linux sales, then it will be worth the engine companies continuing to support Linux. But I don't know of any concrete figures that would indicate that continued Linux support is worth it for these companies.

Well, the big engines probably make money hand over fist. Maintaining and improving Linux support I would expect is cheaper than adding it was in the first place. And the thing about Linux is, even if there were no non-techie Linux desktops at all, Linux dominates in most other spaces and shows no sign of that diminishing. Between that and the attractiveness of the FOSS idea, Linux has a strong allegiance among programmers. Once they've jumped the hurdle of putting in support in the first place, even if keeping it isn't worth it financially it's probably worth it just for morale within the company and goodwill outside.
There's also the checklist effect. If you offer a product it's kind of hard to measure which features are making you money, which make the difference in people's choices to use your product or a competitor's. But if that kind of product has a checklist of features that most of them support, I suspect most companies would be leery of changing their product so it gets a red X beside something on the list while their competitors still have a green check mark.

So I suspect chances are pretty good Linux support in the engines will stay for a while.

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Quoting: GuestMark my words, someday, when Vulkan is at full speed (the true equalizer), and a big AAA game comes out for Linux/Mac/Windows, someone will do a comparative benchmark and realize how powerful a Linux Kernel is when its no longer staked to the ground with outdated APIs, hodge-podge drivers or a shoddy game port.

I'm certainly waiting to see that.

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Quoting: tmtvl

Fixed Steam not obeying SIGTERM, Steam will now gracefully exit when logging out of a session

By all that is FOSS, finally. That has been such a pain in my side for the past 5 or 6 months.

Is this the thing that makes it so if I don't absolutely totally and definitively shut down Steam (not just close it), then when I turn off my laptop it takes like five minutes to get shut down? If so I'm definitely happy they fixed it.

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So if these guys went out of business, that'd be Karmageddon.

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