Quoting: Julius

Quoting: edoThe game itself is awesome (and by game I mean the engine), have you never tried the editor mode? You can do a lot of things there way easier than on a normal engine

As a sandbox and mod platform it seems quite cool indeed, but the official story campaign is very lackluster.

So, precisely the same story as Neverwinter Nights. It's always annoying when game reviews focus so much on the campaign without noting that the original campaign is ancillary to the game's true potential as a platform.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The preview pic looks like Iron Man and Spider-Man had a couple of kids together.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Liam DaweIf Valve is serious about Linux, I'd still propose charging like 5 % less Valve fee if the published game features a Linux build.

Yes. This. Right here. Whether it's a native build or some in-house quality assurance program for Proton, either way game studios could totally be encouraged to support Valve's own native platform by simply giving them a discount to do so. That would be huge.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Looks unreal 👍

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: elmapultoo little too late for us.
sure, we can play another subset of windows games, but that isnt enough reason for people to migrate to linux...

and now that ms turned linux into an middleware with WSL, making softwares exclusively for linux wont help either.

now i'm happy that i will be able to play my games on, shit, the niche stuff that i want to play wont work >.>
and GFN isnt avaliable on my country...

Unless and until we already have for other reasons market share around say 20% and many things change, from the start nobody was ever going to migrate to Linux because of games. The hope was always that games on Linux get close enough that it will be easy to migrate to Linux for other reasons and not be seriously held back by games. We're pretty close there; arguably if Proton gets anti-cheat working we'll be near enough parity for everyone except really hard core gamers.
Then if Adobe stuff works smoothly on Wine/Proton, we're golden for about everything else.

Of course no matter what we do nothing will happen if there isn't some kind of push for preinstalled desktop or Steam Machine Linux. We're not going to pass 2% on people taking the initiative to replace their preinstalled OS all by themselves. Mind you, that doesn't necessarily have to be established companies. If the likes of System76 grow to become titans of industry with massive sales and placement in Wal-Mart, that works too.

Seems to me that the real tidal shift would be companies and institutions moving away from MS Office. To this day even with Office 365 there's features that organizations rely on that can only be found inside of the native desktop version of Office (i.e. VBA macros in Excel and elsewhere, certain media features of PowerPoint, etc.)

The interesting thing here with MS at this point is that they certainly leverage this dependency on Office to force an additional license fee for their OS, but that only encourages companies to explore alternatives. And really the amount of money they make in corporate licensing fees pales in comparison to the amount of money they could be making from app store fees if the Windows Marketplace every really caught on.

In a lot of ways they've been following Google's lead for a while: starting their own search engine, trying (and failing) to move into the mobile space, focusing on services and advertising over traditional licensing, etc.

If they ever feel comfortable enough with their success I could see them eventually releasing Windows 10 free of charge (maybe even as FOSS for that matter) simply to expand their ad network and app store presence. At that point there'd be no reason not to port MS Office to other platforms. Furthermore, what would be the point of maintaining MS Windows at all? They could just push out their own GNU/Linux distro (that they already have) and save on development cost.

Maybe one of these days we'll even just quietly see MS Windows still a thing, but under the hood it's a GNU/Linux distro. Meanwhile MS Office will be a strictly SaaS-based platform and most of Microsoft's revenue will come through Azure and similar cloud-based premium services/systems and advertising. Everybody will be using some kind of Unix-like system on their desktop, just like they do presently on mobile, but the average joe wouldn't notice or care.

Kind of a strange world we're entering.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Reminds me a lot of Wolfire has done with experimental control schemes in games like Lugaru and Receiver.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestAnother case of "if you are not familiar with linux don't port your game to linux", that will just lead to having a bad time. Developing a game for linux is NOT easy and we all have been guilty of spreading the myth that it is.

Frankly my dream is that ultimately one day the OS you run will become irrelevant and then the "native gaming" nonsense goes away for good.

There's 3 ways an OS can be technically irrelevant to a developer:

1. You're writing an app to run on a cross-platform environment like a browser or VM.
2. Every major OS adheres to some kind of set of open standards with any differences being trivial enough to ignore (effectively like how you can make a website that renders mostly the same on either Chrome or Firefox).
3. You're software interfaces directly with hardware and is effectively its own OS.

#3 is okay if your "game" is a 1980's style old school LED game on a custom piece of hardware, but otherwise completely non-feasible. It would be simpler to at least bundle your game with an OS like how routers build their firmware with a custom slimmed down GNU/Linux distro embedded that the software runs atop.

#1 just kicks the problem up another level of abstraction. Your browser/VM effectively becomes the "platform" that everyone has to use anyhow. Back in the day when Internet Explorer dominated the web and Microsoft first ported it to Mac OS you could technically make a site that targeted just one platform and have it run on multiple OSes by targeting IE... but how wonderful of a solution was that really?

#2 Gets to the real root of the issue. If every game dev used Vulkan/OpenGL, OpenAL, and other cross-platform FOSS technologies in tandem with and part of a cross-platform game engine, then it would be incredibly trivial to make your game available on another OS. Hypothetically it could get to the point where clicking "Export" in Unity or what have you would truly work without issue. And we are closer than ever to getting there.

This is the same reason why it's more important to advocate for people in general to use more FOSS technology in general. The average EU is more concerned about what apps and games they can run on a given platform than anything else. So if you recommend to your friends and family software that run cross-platform then it becomes a lot easier to persuade them to switch their OS and boost market share for GNU/Linux.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Now when can we get a timetable for Talos Principle 2?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I just hope this doesn't kill any potential for a Talos Principle 2 :(

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: scratchi

Quoting: GuestWine's cmd.exe command-line, which I am making a text adventure game engine in

...wouldn't bash be more appropriate for something like this? Or any nix shell for that matter

Definitely, yes, but I still don't know as much Bash as I do Batch, after 3.2 years of using Linux and trying to learn Bash, maybe some day! I would also like to make something similar in Python, but that's another thing I need to learn.

Random recommendation here, but... have you tried playing with GAMBAS? If you've had any experience with VBA, GAMBAS is super-intuitive and--unlike VB/VBA--you can make fully command-line apps in it too. If you haven't had any experience with different implementations of BASIC, it's still very easy to learn nevertheless. Easier to get into than Python at least.

View this comment - View article - View full comments