Quoting: pb

Quoting: stormtuxWhen a restructuring company splits in two it is usually because they want to keep the "good" parts and put the "bad" parts in a "bad company" that can be left to die. This is a little different, why 3 companies? The "AAA" company is probably the profitable one, the one they plan to keep milking. But the other two? Two different levels of risk of investment?

One for board games.
One for AAA computer games.
One for Indie computer games.
One ring to rule them all... sorry, wrong story.

and in the darkness Embrace them?

Ha, Middle-Earth as a game franchise should probably just die off. They've either made all the relevant games for it (some RTS, strategy games make the most sense), broke with the lore a lot (the Mordor games were really fun, but definitely weren't bound by any of the lore), and then we had Gollum... which should have been an awesome game, if it had been executed correctly.

Granted, I still think The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is all that was ever needed for it.

Their board game division irritates me, since I was looking to get some of the Star Wars RPG books that Fantasy Flight games made a while back, but they're now all out of print after Embracer / Asmodee bought them.

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Quoting: Eri

Quoting: SiinamonThis was always my "Early Access means forever" example game

You can fill the void with Project Zomboid, great game but is also taking forever.

Quoting: Eri

Quoting: SiinamonThis was always my "Early Access means forever" example game

You can fill the void with Project Zomboid, great game but is also taking forever.

Weird, I swear I'd seen that Project Zomboid had left early access, but I just confirmed it's still in it. For the most part, I've stopped buying games that are in EA, mostly due to 7 days to die... some of them along the ways have had full releases, but some of them basically just grab the money then flounder...

I bought one game (A VR RPG) where the single developer actually died after he released a really sweet demo...

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: slaapliedjeA lot of the original work on Mesa started on an Amiga...

Are you sure? I don't remember this being the case, and I don't see any mention of Amiga on the project's history page.

EDIT: Found this, written by Mesa's original author here:

QuoteMesa was originally designed for Unix/X11 systems and is still best supported on those systems. All you need is an ANSI C compiler and the X development environment to use Mesa.

Others have contributed drivers for the Amiga, Apple Macintosh, BeOS, NeXT, OS/2, MS-DOS, VMS, and Windows 95/NT. See the README file included with the Mesa distribution for more details.

https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~joshagam/archive/cs574/1-mesa.html

QuoteThe first attempt at bringing OpenGL to Linux was in the form of Mesa, a software-only OpenGL implementation originally written on the Amiga. Its creator, Brian Paul, needed to use OpenGL on platforms which didn't have ARB members or any commercial OpenGL support, and so he implemented a Free version on his own.

The story I'd read (ages ago) was that he wanted to implement a free version of OpenGL for other Unix systems, as he worked at SGI back then. But didn't have a Unix box at home to work on, so he started writing a software version on the Amiga. Kind of weird that the site doesn't mention that. I'd have to go digging again to see if I can find the full story about it, but it was something along those lines.

Vim is another one that started on the Amiga. Then again, when you start looking at the history of software, you see things like Logic started on the Atari ST, and was later bought by Apple... which they now call Logic Pro... because everything Apple makes needs to be marked with 'Pro.'

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Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: FremenThis is bad news. Can likely lead to the Noveau Driver not being developed properly anymore. Perhaps its Nvidia's way of "shutting down" development on the open source driver with seeming like it is.

Why would they send lots of patches then?

I also lean to them enabling the free driver at least for good AI performance. Don't know if they care for graphics performance here in the same way though.

Yeah, these weird conspiracy theories need to stop.

Uhm, am I remembering incorrectly here, but I thought Noveau was a more or less dead project and there was another open source driver initiative for nvidia that was coming about a while back? Like one sponsored by them?

I had to switch to AMD a while back when I ran into an nvidia specific bug that the devs refused to fix... And then for the computer the 3080 went into, I ended up getting another AMD card because it worked with passing 3d rendering to a VM better :) (I should probably write up an article on how to get FoundryVTT onto 5 screens with one computer and 5 keyboard / mice...)

They still have six people in their team and are actively pushing and comitting. Nvidia indeed maintains their own(less popular one) and since it's Mit licensed they can use parts of it if they think it's useful.
Not everyone feels comfortable relying on the goodwill of a company that in the past has actively hampered such open source efforts and Nouveau is simply the oldest most entrenched project.

The history of 3d acceleration on Linux / Unix is pretty interesting, as I believe the original stuff was called Utah-GLX and mostly only worked on nvidia cards. It wasn't until a decent amount later that nvidia closed up their stuff. A lot of the original work on Mesa started on an Amiga...

Granted, back then I hated nvidia hardware because it sucked at 2d and the screens were always blurry, so I used my beloved Matrox cards, and they were awesome for Linux... until the Parhelia, still was good, but they only released a binary driver for it :(

Now that I've shown my oldness... At least it seems we're getting some progress on the Nvidia side... I still hate that we're still mostly a duopoly if you want decent performance. I would love for a third or fourth party to spring up, but at the same time I don't want Intel to really leap forward into the GPU market... like any body else, please???

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: FremenThis is bad news. Can likely lead to the Noveau Driver not being developed properly anymore. Perhaps its Nvidia's way of "shutting down" development on the open source driver with seeming like it is.

Why would they send lots of patches then?

I also lean to them enabling the free driver at least for good AI performance. Don't know if they care for graphics performance here in the same way though.

Yeah, these weird conspiracy theories need to stop.

Uhm, am I remembering incorrectly here, but I thought Noveau was a more or less dead project and there was another open source driver initiative for nvidia that was coming about a while back? Like one sponsored by them?

I had to switch to AMD a while back when I ran into an nvidia specific bug that the devs refused to fix... And then for the computer the 3080 went into, I ended up getting another AMD card because it worked with passing 3d rendering to a VM better :) (I should probably write up an article on how to get FoundryVTT onto 5 screens with one computer and 5 keyboard / mice...)

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy"Metal Slug 4" . . . OK, why were there four games about a slug made of metal? I guess it's a sort of interesting superhero concept, like Earthworm Jim, but four games?

I don't know, but there is an amazingly impressive port of the first one being worked on for the Atari STe.
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/322794-metal-slug-mission-1-for-atari-ste-complete/

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Quoting: Vortex_AcheronticCanonical in 2014: Ah Linux is too niche, we do not need any kind of review how bad can it be?

Canonical in 2024: Oh Snap!

No software distribution model is perfect... that being said, the Snap Store has had this happen continually for more than 5 years. You know what happened after the repos for Debian and RH were compromised? They locked that down, created new ways to sign packages, enforced the build servers to sign everything and do some automated checking for things, etc. That is the correct response to something like this. Canonical waiting so long to, 'oh, I suppose we should check these, eh?' is pretty sad state of affairs.

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Quoting: whizseGetting both some early GTA and original Postal vibes from this one.

Postal was what I was thinking.

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Quoting: redneckdrowSelf extracting archives?

I still have nightmares about those things! 15–20 years ago, they were a huge deployment method for all manner of worms and viruses!

I caught one in high school when I noticed one of our teacher's computers behaving oddly.

My high school had a contract with McAfee, and I remember having to explain along with both computer skills teachers, why said 'antivirus' hadn't caught a teacher's infected e-mail attachment before it had reached the school's network and why John McAfee's product was absolute snake oil! Thankfully, no one else opened the attachment!

From a bootable USB drive I always kept on me, I ran Malwarebytes and several other programs, and found 122 actual bugaboos and only 2 false positives on the initially infected machine. Apparently, it was pandelirium in the computer lab for the next couple hours!

Anyone who uses a self-extracting executable/zip of any kind these days should be shot, hanged, and shot again!

Well, a perfect example of why self-extracting archives are a requirement... The Amiga standardized for the most part on LHA/LZH files... but because that wasn't written by Commodore, much like pkzip wasn't written by MS, they can't include it with the OS. Being able to grab a self-extracting archive of it so that you can then open not-self-extracting archives is kind of a requirement. But yeah, I didn't like the ones outside of the use case of the actual compress/uncompress program.

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Quoting: pb

Quoting: Marlockthose "good uses" were called "Expansions" and the wider catch-all name "DLC" was coined to put "bad uses" under the same umbrella and slap extra DRM-control on them

the oldest expansion i'm aware of... probably "Hellfire", for "Diablo 1"

Much, much earlier there were "data disks" that gave you a set of new levels for the game. ;-)

Yeah, these weren't 'DLC' because you couldn't download them. :P That's why the concept of 'pay for new stuff to expand the game and download it only' concept mostly started with Neverwinter Nights.

Earlier examples of expanding the root game would be like CivII Test of Time (though I can't remember if that could be used standalone, maybe). Powermonger had a WWII expansion, etc.

I think even Gauntlet on the Atari 8bit had an extra data disk for 'deeper dungeons'. Ha, Boulder Dash had tons and tons of custom maps made that were released through PD magazines, or on BBSs, etc. I guess those would be closest to 'Downloadable Content.' But they were all free, so I still maintain NWN was the first with all the markers of 'pay for, download only, and being worth while usage.' before DLC became a bad word, like sound tracks, and short story addons they try to get an extra 5-10 bucks out of everyone who isn't paying attention. I mean, some sound tracks are quite excellent, but back when CD ROM based games first came about... the hybrid CDs would let you already listen to the soundtrack!

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