Hmm . . . kind of looks like it's going to be MOO 2 with a modern UI and, presumably although it looks like that part isn't finished yet, some spiffed up graphics. I can work with that. I kind of wish Civilization: Beyond Earth had just done that with Alpha Centauri . . .

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Well, people can say sure, there's quantity but what about the quality.
But when you get to this kind of numbers, quantity has a quality all its own. If you've got 10 games and only 10% of your games are any good, you've got one good game. If you've got 1800 games and only 10% of your games are any good, you've got more good games than I can play in years.
Basically, it seems like in the course of a couple of years, Linux gaming has gone from ridiculously marginal to vague parity with Mac. That's hard to believe when I think about it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: neowiz73sounds great, I hope they learned a lot since moo3. moo1 and 2 were great games though.

They were. People sell moo1 short. Moo2 was great, but I sometimes think that in the rush to kind of jump on the bandwagon of "Civilization" style, some good ideas from the first game got lost. Like, in moo1, your planets could work on different things at the same time and it was about balancing them right; same goes for your tech research. In moo2 they'd picked up the Civilization paradigm and your planets were suddenly like a city from Civ, with a list of "buildings" you could make which you worked on one at a time, and the same for technologies--research this technology, then that technology. This had its advantages but I couldn't help feeling something had been lost. Also in moo1 automating ship movement felt more intuitive somehow. Things like that.
Still, moo2 was great. Every so often I'll find me a 4X space game to play, often touted as cool and all, and find myself thinking "Hmmm . . . Moo2 is still better."

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: runeIf the game is rather demanding in the first place, then you will definitely notice a difference (if it's a DirectX game). Rewriting an engine, and optimizing the code takes time, and time is money. I guess that they (Feral, Aspyr, etc.) can not afford to spend that much time optimizing the code.

Unless you have optimized code, you can not compare DirectX to OpenGL. I don't believe that the games we're getting now are 100% optimized, not even close.

In a purely theoretical world (read perfect) OpenGL and DirectX might perform the same but, as we have seen, that is not typically the case in our practical world. Code is never 100% optimized. Currently ports seem to choke especially when it comes to multithreading due to technical differences between OpenGL and DirectX.

Simply put, you cannot write DirectX in OpenGL and expect it to perform well

I suppose one issue is that we never see it working the other way. Lots of things written in DirectX get half-assed ports to OpenGL. But if something was written in OpenGL in the first place there is no point porting it to DirectX because OpenGL is already cross-platform. So we don't see what the performance of half-assed ports from OpenGL to DirectX would look like, performance-wise.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Stupendous Man

Quoting: BeamboomI must say I'm surprised about Cities: Skylines receiving that many votes. Apart from that it all looks fine although only one of my favourites won. :)

Me too, I recently bought the game, made a large city, and grew really bored; the game has close to no difficulty as is really just a sandbox. Oh well, to each their own.

It's a city builder. Surely it's supposed to be a sandbox. If people like city builders at all in the first place, surely most of them won't be put off by it being a sandbox.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NyapI personally think that this news is good ~ I came to linux for privacy. By attracting attention, and making more people use linux, we are making it more vulnerable from government wishes to implement backdoors.

Uh . . . what?
. . . I was going to do a takedown of the idea of secret back doors in open source code and stuff, but--are you really someone who dislikes the idea of games being on Linux, coming to explicate your point of view on a site called "Gaming on Linux"?! Or are you just a common or garden variety troll?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

People clearly think differently from me. I'm kind of surprised--very few of the, what you might call "strategic" articles, made the list. You know, like stuff about the Steam Machines and controller coming out and how they were selling and stuff, or about Vulkan (I think I saw one Vulkan article on the list), and so on. To me that kind of thing is more important than news about any particular game, because, like, one game is one game, but movements of Linux as a gaming platform as a whole could mean the difference between thousands of games in the future and very few, between good performance and crappy performance, etc.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: kibblesAnd ignore all the people above playing this game that need to state just how above playing this game they are. God you sanctimonious puritans invade literally everything...

So you're . . . posting just to state how above, being above playing the game, you are? God you sanctimonious "Everyone must be pseudo-edgy" types invade figuratively everything . . .

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KelsWhy shouldn't we call it controversial? Being controversial is the whole point of the game and all its marketing. If it wasn't controversial, nobody would have bought it to start with.

Very true. Which is why my basic reaction to articles about this game has been, "Yawn. Don't care."

View this comment - View article - View full comments

To me the questions revolve around the controls. OK, the AMD thing is a little worrisome, but let's imagine someone has gotten drivers much more better by the time it comes out. But the Steam Controller took Valve ages to get right, it almost seems like it was the major bottleneck for the whole project. These people are going to be doing their best to emulate the Steam Controller on this little device, but how well will they succeed?

I'm not really part of the audience for this thing, but it's interesting.

View this comment - View article - View full comments