Quoting: TheSHEEEPIs there any reason to go with "official" wine instead of wine-staging? I always use the latter and never had any problems.

I would suspect only if Wine-Staging had a patch that included a regression for a program you considered important to use.

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Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: wvstolzingLooks nice, but why did the 5.25" floppy have to enter the drive backwards?

It is getting more and more likely that the current generation of devs have never actually used floppy disk or even seen one in real life.

They also got the disk slot right; but forgot to add the latch.

I feel so old.... :(

Jebus this all makes me want to file a bug report.

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Quoting: WorMzy

This could easily be the best colony building simulation available on Linux right now.

I honestly can't see any game ever taking that title away from Dwarf Fortress. :P

That starts to depend on your definition of "best". I can see it going either way, it really depends on what people think about user interfaces at that point.

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Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnice

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Comandante Ñoñardo

Quoting: BeamboomThe whole problem here is that we call these releases "ports", when they in fact are "wrapped". Nobody expects a game run in Wine to be on par with Windows performance. We should apply that same expectation on these games.

They are not ported, the source code is not "translated" to run natively. They have had added an extra layer so that they don't NEED to be ported. This is a crucial difference.

And from THAT perspective, these releases are pretty damn impressive. They are like Wine on steroids, with a 100% smooth experience and pretty darn good performance.

They just are NOT ports.

Sadly, the actual Linux gaming porting scenario consist in legally crack a windows port of a console game for to make it work on a Linux machine.

Now, I don't want Linux game porters/crackers, I want true Linux game developers.

If someday I have a game "porting" company, my method will be this:
1. Get the publishing rights
2. Get the game assets and code
3. Develop a game using those assets that must look and behave identical to the original console/windows game.

The result will not be a Linux port of a Windows/console game; it will be a Linux version of that Windows/console game.

This method will take more time, but the result will be better and indeed it can be done at the same time of the console/windows development stage.

And, unlike a Linux port of a Windows port of a console game, a Linux version can include features that the original Windows/console don't have, such as better textures, better physics or even extra levels to play.

The cost in time, and money, involved in doing all of that is just basically far too much to build a viable game porting company out of. For smaller, simple type games it might be ok, but not for anything more complicated. And ultimately, it doesn't matter: if the game runs, and runs well enough, then what does it truly matter?

While it might be a nice idea to be able to rewrite entire games each time, that is unfortunately wishful thinking unless porting games that already use engines capable of cross-platform play (unreal, unity3d, etc).

A lot of these people who talk about doing the ports "the right way" have probably never tried to port anything or translate to a different programming language before for any kind of project that actually has to ship and make money. Once that becomes true, you start to worry about things like deadlines and cost. You start asking yourself questions like, "If it passes the tests, does it matter if the performance is worse?"

I've been there. At my work, I had to translate embedded assembly, which is not fun to implement in a higher-level language. I know the translated version performs worse, but it's much, much easier to maintain, and it behaves the same. Well, it DID behave the same, until we started extending the code, because it was easier to do. And then, y'know, we eventually started cleaning it up, but that's only because it's a code-base we intend to use in future projects. If there wasn't the promise of future income, our company probably wouldn't be bothering to clean up the old code. Sucks, I know, but making something that currently works correctly be as nice as it can be doesn't typically feed you as well as making a new thing.

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Quoting: GrazenI bought it but frankly after reading this I'm going to run it in Windows. I have a GTX 1060 and based on this report it will run closer to the performance of a GTX 950 in Linux. I see no reason to suffer through horrible framerates and crappy performance just to support Feral's crappy port.

I see no data to support these wild assertions.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Colombo

Patches cannot objectively be both free and not-free at the same time.

Here, there is the logical error you are making.

How can it be a logical error to essentially quote one of the foundational axioms of symbolic logic? I can imagine it being an error, but not a logical one.

I've already reminded him that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

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Quoting: Colombo

Patches cannot objectively be both free and not-free at the same time.

Here, there is the logical error you are making.

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

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Quoting: BrisseAs much as I love these games, I despise Paradox for their DLC strategy, which is designed to milk every last penny out of us. The base game currently costs 39.99€ on Steam, but that is just a shell of what the game should be. To get the full experience you have to throw another whopping 279.74€ on DLC. It's the same disgusting thing EA did with The Sims.

Edit: They don't even have the decency to sell a complete expansion. Instead they split every expansion up in two pieces, one with gameplay mechanics, and another with art assets. How disgusting is that!?

Quoting: Things no-one ever saidIt's launch day, and wow, this Paradox grand strategy game is massively incomplete! It'll take them six years and a ton of DLC to make it good!

I bought Europa Universalis IV shortly after launch, before any expansions had been released. It sucked me in. Over the next week, I spent more time playing EU4 than I did working. Over the next year, I poured well over a hundred hours into it. That's, what, less than a dollar per hour of entertainment? If that's an "incomplete" game, then a "complete" game is impossible to achieve.

If Paradox had left off there, had never done anything except balance patches and bug fixes, EUIV would still be one of the best grand strategy games of all time. By no means was it "incomplete" at launch. If I have a house, and I live in it, and I think, "Hey, this is a pretty nice house, there's nothing wrong with it," the house is not incomplete. If I then add a front porch, was the original house incomplete? Another bedroom? Re-do the kitchen? The completeness of the house is down to how acceptable it is to live there. Wanting a bigger garage does not make your house incomplete. Wanting to change your kitchen does not make your house incomplete. Wanting to add a fireplace does not make your house incomplete. Not having a bathroom makes your house incomplete. Not having a bedroom makes your house incomplete. Not having a kitchen makes your house incomplete. Not having a roof makes a house incomplete. The metric for a house's completeness is it's livability.

Similarly, the metric for completeness of a game is it's playability. If a large number of players are able to dump a massive amount of time per player into the game, it's hard to argue that the game is incomplete, most especially if none of the players are arguing that there are major elements of the game missing. Fallout 4, for example, suffered from major elements of the game being missing or being done vastly incorrectly, and players made note of this, in spite of putting a massive amount of time into the game. Europa Universalis IV, on the other hand, was complete AT LAUNCH. It did not need anything else to be a complete game, it already was one. But like a complete house can be expanded or re-modeled, a complete game can have mechanics or art added or changed. This does not detract from the completeness of the original.

Let's now consider another unstated part of your argument. Let's look at the history of grand strategy games, going back to last century's old standby, the board game Risk. My father has a very, very old copy of Risk. It's single-unit markers are plastic three-point stars, and it's five-unit markets are five-point stars. The fact that they aren't soldiers, cavalry, and cannons does not lessen the experience of my dad totally wrecking everyone who plays against him. It doesn't change the experience at all. To a new player, sure, it might help visualize things slightly, but I suspect a new player at Risk is going to be more focused on the rules than on the abstract representations of army strength. Risk would not be improved by having each different player's armies have a completely different appearance. It would gain nothing from it except added expense. The upgrade from plastic stars to actual representations of army units might make it easier for some players to get used to the game, but moving from that to having each player's armies have a completely unique representation gains you nothing, and may actually lose you clarity in playing the game. Appearance only matters for the purpose of achieving rapid understanding and clarity, not for having maximum prettiness. If you're playing your grand strategy game for looks, I'm not sure you're playing the right game.

So, based on that, we can remove any DLC from the price computation which makes no change to gameplay. This takes us from your stated $275-ish, down to $215. This, of course, completely ignores the regularity of Steam sales. If we factor that in, the price of having all elements which change gameplay comes down to about $113.50, ignoring bundle pricing. Bundles are, of course, regularly used by Paradox, and I've taken advantage of them before. That can drop the price even further, but honestly, I've done more legwork here than you've bothered to do, so I don't see why I should track down what bundle prices have been like during sales for EUIV.

Quoting: Brisse@ Mountain Man, Rutine and everyone else quoting me with counter arguments:

Don't want to sound harsh or pick a fight, but gullible fans like you are the reason publishers can keep up manipulative schemes like this.

You say you can skip the expansions and just stay with the free patches? I've tried this and the game gets more broken every time it's patched unless you buy the expansion. The base game is basically a demo, for which they are charging you 40€.

You say it's okay to split expansions into two or three DLC's (gameplay, graphic assets, music). Did you realize that just the gameplay package costs 20€ alone? This doesn't seem to be in line with the rest of the gaming industry. I can spend 10€ on a Arma 3 DLC and get gameplay, art and music assets and that's not even discounted. The price of EUIV expansions are not justified IMO. They aren't comparable to something like Arma 3 Apex in scope. They are more like Arma 3 Marksman or Helicopters DLC.

This is going to be somewhat related to the last section. You say they often have discounts? Looks to me like the 75% discounted prices are in line with what other companies would charge normally without any discount. If they discounted everything, which they never do at the same time, it would still be 60-70€. As a comparison, The Witcher 3 GOTY with all expansions and content is normally 50€, without discount. The latter provides way more content.

That's it for now I guess, but do you see how you are being manipulated?

Edit,
Just a little TL,DR:
They know exactly how you are thinking and what your buying habits are, and they are using it to their full advantage to make maximum profit.

You assert that Paradox grand strategy fans are gullible, but have provided no evidence of that statement. The Paradox fans, on the other hand, have openly stated their reasons for why they accept Paradox's practices. Paradox's practices are by no means manipulative. If I don't care about the art assets, I don't need to buy them. I don't tend to look at them anyway. If I don't listen to the music, I don't need to buy it, I usually play my own music anyway. If I want the gameplay changes, I typically wait for a sale. It's what I do with most games, anyway.

You also argue that the gameplay changes that EUIV expansions bring around are on the scale of the smaller Arma 3 DLCs. I contest this. Paradox grand strategy DLCs typically bring fairly sizeable changes to mechanics. Sometimes, the mechanics changes are specific to a given region or religion, other times the changes are global, but in all cases, the changes are very noticeable. In spite of this, however, EUIV remains a fully-playable and complete game without DLCs. Arma 3's DLCs, however, have historically left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Don't own the Helicopters DLC? Can't fly that helicopter we just captured, even though I'm the guy with the nice joysticks. Don't own the Marksmen DLC? Enjoy the annoying pop-over text and screen-blurring you get when you loot a gun off the corpse of a guy you just killed in Wasteland. Don't have Apex? Can't join your friends on their current server. Arma 3's DLCs serve to split the community and force you to purchase them in order to keep playing effectively and competitively with your friends. Paradox DLCs do not. Who's the real monster here?

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Quoting: Luke_Nukem"or resort to chair-throwing", cool, I'm gonna go all Steve Ballmer on everyone!

"Developers"
"Developers"
"Developers"
"Developers"
"Developers"
*sweats profusely*
"Developers"
"Developers"
"Developers"
"Developers"
"Developers"
*throws chair at Darl McBride*
"Developers"
"Developers"
"Developers"
"Developers"
"Developers"

Perfect 5/7

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