Seems to me that even if they are worried (whether accurately or not) about the consequences of not defending their trademark, they could say to the fanfolks "Tell you what, we'll license the trademark to you for a buck." All properly licensed, problem solved.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'd like to note that I run Mint 18 on both my desktop and laptop, and it behaves differently on the two of them! On one of them, hitting close just minimizes to the taskbar. On the other, hitting close "closes" it to the tray. So I'm not sure anyone can be confident that "Mint" or "Ubuntu" or whatever does a particular behaviour just because it has been their personal experience. It seems more variable and idiosyncratic than that.

When it closes to the tray it's still not really closed; in effect it's just even more minimized. Click the icon and it doesn't launch from scratch, it just pops up, and as has been mentioned if you go to shut down the computer it takes forever as the computer hesitantly shuts Steam down for real.
So I'm not totally happy with even the minimize-to-tray behaviour; call me old fashioned, but when I hit the X on a graphical application it's because I want the bloody thing to shut down.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The sort of "figurine base" thing makes the people look dumb. Hard to tell from the trailer whether it's all that good, but I like the music. And the title itself; just calling it that tells me it's being made by people who want to do the culture well.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: cprn

Quoting: LukeNukemThe Tux icon is fucking hideous though, and scales down like a lump of cow shit does to a rabbit dropping.

Quoting: AnxiousInfusion

Quoting: meggermanI have to admit the logo doesn't scale well. It also looks a bit childish, but what else can we use, a stallman avatar ?

A silhouette of an actual penguin, perhaps?

It's recognisable without a mistake, that's what matters, certainly not looks. And if Valve really wants to, they can style it to whatever extent, as long as it remains a cartoonish penguin that makes it clear it's Linux.

Tux as a logotype is wrong from a marketing standpoint but for an entirely other reason. It has a face. Windows has a cross-frame window, Apple has a bitten apple, Linux... has a face with googly eyes. It's way too complicated, not symbolic enough, reminds too strongly of the actual penguin stealing focus from what it is supposed to represent - it's a mascot, not a logotype.

So is being a face in specific considered wrong for logos, or is it the level of complexity implied more generally? If it's being a face in specific, why? If it's the level of complexity, that might be somewhat mitigated by the fact that human brains are wired to recognize faces better than, like, anything else. Babies can grok faces before they learn to interpret anything else, sight-wise; there is serious brain hard-wiring for dealing with faces. One would think tapping into that primal stuff would be a good thing.

Secondarily, one doesn't find things out if one isn't willing to ask (and googling gave one possible answer but not an authoritative one, and one that didn't seem to quite work with your statement)--what's a logotype?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Hmmm . . . seems like things are really switching around. But what's the time frame here and how solid is the expectation? When will we really be able to say AMD cards and drivers work, work well, maybe work better/more reliably than NVidia?
Because let's face it, for a long time now whether we like it or not NVidia cards and the NVidia proprietary blob has been the practical approach to Linux gaming. And I'm a bit vague on it, but I have the distinct feeling that there have been a couple of occasions when AMD prospects, like for good open source drivers, have looked good but not really followed through. Things look good again right now, probably better and more solid than on such previous occasions, but I am not knowledgeable enough to tell how close to a sure thing that is.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

That environment is amazing. So much detail, so much interactable stuff. Plus it's refreshing that, how to put it . . . a lot of game environments are sort of, I dunno, symbolic (and often sarcastic/satirical). They don't try to make a real place, they just give you the key stuff so you have an impression of a place, with a couple of over-the-top humorous details so you know "This is a Dilbert-esque office setting" or "This is a somewhat gritty dystopia" or whatever. And that's fine, I often enjoy that.
But it's interesting that it looks like for the most part here, they're working really hard to simulate, like, a real place, with all the things in it that an actual space station with offices people really worked in and so on might have; not streamlined and not parodied, just there. Makes a nice change.
There is something about the office clutter that seems oddly . . . clean, though. Edges so well-defined, or something. It's like all the effort to make it real has caused it to fall into a sort of artifact version of uncanny valley. Still, really cool.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

When you said "thanks to the game store itch" I thought you meant some kind of gamer condition where you get a yen to rummage around in game stores. :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiT

Quoting: gojulI now hope Feral will release TW Rome 2, Shogun 2, Napoleon for Linux (and possibly Rome 1, but not essential)

Without cross-platform-support? Thanks, but NO thanks! They should fix the linux and the windows client alike to make it work.

Au contraire, should such things happen I would be saying thanks and thanks. Not everyone is into multiplayer. I'm not, for instance.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: edddeduckferalThanks for the suggestions regarding MP, however any changes need to be merged into Windows (and Linux and Mac) easily and without effecting Windows (and Linux and Mac) performance and stability in any major way. It's not really the network layer but the maths used throughout the game engine which is then used to keep games in sync. We've tried many maths library replacements (which is how we got Linux/Mac working on many titles) however we're yet to find a solution that works on all three platforms, is easily implemented and has no performance or stability impact on all platforms.

We won't give up looking into solutions but this isn't easy, between all the games we've investigated these problems on we've easily spent months heading towards a full year of investigation on the problem. It's disarmingly complex and a single byte out of alignment and the entire house of cards fall down.

This post (linked to previously in this discussion) has a good overview of the problem.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/maclinux/discussions/0/528398719787800607/ [External Link]

Note: I am ignorant. But it seems like a weirdly fragile way to do things even on a "single" platform such as Windows 7,8,8.1,10 . . . I know computers are supposed to be deterministic in how they work, but I've had too many occasions of performing the exact same action and getting different results to believe that holds reliably at current levels of complexity. Depending on things staying precisely the same (as opposed to say expecting they will occasionally diverge in some way and having mechanisms to re-synch) seems lacking in robustness.

Obviously this isn't you guys' fault, you just have to deal with what you find. I'm just wondering why this would be the way developers would do this stuff. Is it always like that, is that really the only way?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: sarmadWell, we have to admit. Valve tried to make Linux a viable gaming platform but they failed miserably at execution and it seems none of the major players in the industry is taking SteamOS seriously. Very sad. Though they did give Linux gaming a great push.

All in all, looking at responses, I'd say it's clear we don't have to admit any such thing.
And really, although I have a critique of Valve's execution and marketing of the Steam Machines myself, this seems an exaggeration painted with a too-broad brush and not that relevant as a response to this particular event.

View this comment - View article - View full comments