Which still leaves the problems that those original devs are likely not the ones who had the copyrights and that these new devs are also charging for those user created levels.

It's one thing to distribute abandonware for free, quite another to charge a hefty fee for it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Not a fan of the mobilification nor of the shady situation regarding the copyrights.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, no doubt the laptop is very nice. I'm not sold by the marketing, though--all that breathless stuff about multitasking. Studies suggest that people aren't as good at multitasking as they think they are, and that switching tasks has a cognitive and time cost, so you're better off concentrating on one thing for a while.

And this marketing also ignores that the user is not necessarily multi-tasking when the computer is doing so. Not only having the pc doing stuff in the background while working on something different, but also running multiple programs to do a single job.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I took a quick peek, first impressions are very, very good with two main points:

First: the artwork and music are excellent. As close in feel to moo as can be without actually being moo.

Second: less positive, the interface's visual design. It manages to completely rub me in the wrong way with broken lines in interface elements (for example: that gap where alerts appear and the next turn button's left edge not aligning with the planet panel's), and the blue buttons from the galaxy view disappearing when changing screens. The changeover from the galaxy view to the management screens feel inconsistent, not sure if that is due to the colour change or the aforementioned buttons not being in the other screen views. I know this is the way moo1 does it, but with the bigger screen real estate nowadays I'd prefer those blue buttons becoming more of a navigation bar.

Feature request: Customisable hotkeys. I would really prefer Enter as a hotkey for next turn instead of "n".

Feature suggestion: tabbed empire management as in star ruler II.

Did I mention I like the artwork and music? Looking forward to really digging in ^_^

Running via ubuntu 20.04's standard open java runtime environment on a 1080p screen.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Appelsin

Quoting: GuestIt's intended for sensitive data (normally crypto related) for the usual purposes (e.g signed software validation and authentication). It's aimed at Windows more than anything else, but pretty sure something similar is already on AMD powered consoles.

Good/bad really - good for locking down and preventing unauthorised software changes, bad for the same reasons.

Suspected as much. I would hazard a guess at MS getting to put their chip in as part of a deal for putting more AMD in their Surface gizmos.

To state the obvious, I’m very not interested in having a Microsoft anything in my hardware. It smells of stinkowiff.

In addition to it being a descendant of xbox's "protection" against its own users, it is also designed to phone home directly ... Whatever could go wrong?

I really hope this security chip can be reliably disabled and that the the people who thought this was a good idea get a laxative in their drinking water every day to occupy themselves more usefully than by thinking up this kind of nonsense.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CatKiller

With this release you're getting Kernel 5.4, a packaging base of Ubuntu 20.04

That seems really weird. Most Ubuntu 20.04 users are going to be on 5.11 already because of Hardware Enablement. If you're going to go through the effort to make a new downstream release based on that, why wouldn't you pick up the newer supported kernel from upstream?

That kernel has been causing quite a few annoyances on my xubuntu install, from touchpad drivers stopping to function up to an 10sec shutdown time increase.

I've been able to fix everything, but it's adding up to the annoyances (snap, slow software manager, sleep problems, etc) the more recent so-called lts release has been adding on a system what was doing fine in 18.04. Funnily enough, linux mint, based on the same ubuntu version, has none of those problems.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: psy-q

Quoting: NeoTheFoxAFAIK the repo contained nothing owned or copyrighted by Take-Two, the reverse-engineering effort is clean room [...]

It wasn't clean-room, unfortunately, the team decompiled Take Two/Rockstar's binaries [External Link] to get there.

Clean room or not is irrelevant. Since it requires the original game files, it should fall under fair use.

If it doesn't, it is time to ask pointed questions to the respective law-makers on why it doesn't.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: SuperV1234Hey, thank you for the kind shout-out!

Note that there is a more recent trailer, which shows off some cooler features and levels :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06y7mEsAMHM [External Link]

Cheers,
Vittorio

Is there an option to import the original superhexagon levels&music?

Is there/will there be an android port?

Small suggestion: send a steamcode to the youtuber nerdcubed if you haven't already; he seemed to rather like superhexagon back when it released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaeK9ZTh_OY [External Link]
(that video was how I found out about superhexagon ^_^)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: F.UltraClaim 28 is quite damaging to the reverse-engineering team:

28. Papenhoff has admitted that the source code developed via the re3 and reVC
projects is not original, but rather is (and was intended to be) a copy of the original. In fact,
Defendants have bragged that their derivative source code was created by working backwards
from Take-Two’s final “machine” code to re-create the human-readable code in which GTA was
programmed:

“GTA 3 and Vice City were originally written in [programming
language] C++ . . . The compiled executables that are shipped are in
machine code. So the general task is to go from machine code back to
C++. . . . To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but
over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this
process. . . . So what we typically do is work with the output of the
decompiler and massage it back into readable C++.” Id.

If this is true and it appears to be so, then this is in fact copyright infringement and not something that any of us really can defend.

Since running the software requires the original data files, it is easily defended as a case of fair use. If it turns out not to be so in the courts, it'd be time to ask some pointed questions as to why copyright law is so broken that it isn't.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

At a guess: they discovered that they underestimated the time needed to get the switch port up to snuff.

View this comment - View article - View full comments