I wish the Linux sales would at least be half of the MacOS sales. *cries*

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It might be time to try this game out again. It's sounding pretty good.

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Quoting: GuestClick baity nonsense title on that article but it does raise the very valid and very worrying point about how reliant we are on Steam. It is something I have been uncomfortable with for a while, being someone who really dislike monopolies.

Surely, you meant to post this here...?

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Quoting: Beamboom... And written by a female tech journalist, who's also a Sci-fi author and pretty cute too. Oh hello there, every geek's dream! <3

Hmm, her mini-bio says

and she strives to tell human stories within the broader tech industry.

That makes me think of Patrick Klepek [External Link]. If you like reading gaming news from a human nature angle, I suggest you check out his stuff. He used to be an editor at Giantbomb.com

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: MaathIt is unfortunate the level of ignorance and animosity exhibited by the general public regarding Linux gaming.

Regarding Linux in general, it would seem. I went to the article, read the comments (with difficulty--that site handles comments a bit weird) and there was a lot of hostility based on really old ideas, from people strongly resistant to the notion of changing them.
But I'll disagree on one point: Those comments aren't from "the general public". The general public has either never heard of Linux or doesn't know, doesn't even think they know, enough about it to have much of an opinion. Most such people didn't bother to read the article, much less comment, because it wasn't about something they were interested in. The hostile people are the opinionated Windows power-users who are invested in Windows and their knowledge of it--computer-oriented people for whom Windows is their "team", who know enough to know there are other, enemy, "teams" out there. Those are the people who would see an article about Linux and consider it important to read it, or at least a bit of it, and go put in their few cents' worth to smack down the enemy.

Generally speaking, I think you are accurate here. I will add my cents' worth. While there are many people comfortable in their ways who become highly defensive of that comfort, there will be some who actually give Linux a try. Obviously, this doesn't happen to everybody, but I think that some who try Linux forget the learning curve of Windows or MacOS when they were in their computing infancy. They forget the initial learning curve and, thus, deem the effort to get used to Linux unworthy. Once they have made that decision, they burrow into a position that Linux is too hard or doesn't work well enough. And, it's easier to yell when you know "your side" is larger than the "other side."

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Quoting: jury

Quoting: 14I'll probably pick up a couple. I wish GOG would say how long their sales are going to run. :(

I have never seen GOG not saying how long their sale goes on. And if it goes for their latest sale, this is what they say:
"The Lantern Festival Sale lasts for one week until February 25th, 11 PM UTC."
Its a last sentence of the sale description from here:
https://www.gog.com/news/lantern_festival_sale_200_deals_glide_over_gogcom [External Link]

OK. How did you get to that page? I don't see how to get to a news page. When I click on the sale image on the main page, it brings me to a list of games that are on sale.

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I'll probably pick up a couple. I wish GOG would say how long their sales are going to run. :(

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Sweet improvements.

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Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: 14I don't enjoy having a 50 GB game backup eating up disk space.

50 . . . gigs. For one game. I've had hard drives way smaller than that. I've had adventure games I plugged away at for hours and never finished that were 16K. OK, I didn't finish them mostly because they were badly designed, but still. What is the excuse for a game taking up 50 gigs?
Sorry, my old curmudgeon is showing, but really . . . 50. gigs.

Some games are impressively large, aren't they? I can't speak for the detail of why any particular game is the size it is, but I can give you some indications as to why.

The first thing to understand is that games are always trying to do more than the hardware computational ability will allow. A lot of developer time is spent in finding ways to get a higher quality or accuracy, but with the same or lower computational cost at runtime. Almost all of these techniques boil down to pre-computing "stuff" and storing it in data files ( usually image-like texture files ). Then, at runtime, the game just fetches the pre-computed values using a simple algorithm rather than using expensive calculations every frame.

If you compare games of, say, 15 years ago with today, the largest textures have increased in size from 512x512 to 4096x4096, which is 64 times the number of data locations per texture.

A typical character model 15 years ago may have used textures with fewer than 10 data values per location, most of which would be 1 byte each. A modern game renderer could easily need 10 times as much data.

Pre-calculation to data files is also used for non-character models ( buildings and other "placeable" props ) as well as light-maps and shadow maps if circumstances allow ( typically indoor environments with mostly static lighting ); in fact, whatever the ingenuity of games developers can come up with.

This explosion of texture data has partly been offset by better compression algorithms. GPUs implement the read of compressed data in hardware, so it does not cost much processing power.

Alongside this, the geometry data describing the shape of models has increased in like fashion, animation based on curve calculations has been replaced by data-intensive motion-capture, and there are now often multiple copies of everything at different quality levels to cater for the broader range of modern player hardware.

This is a generalization and simplification, but I'm sure you get the gist of it. Modern games without lots of immersive 3D models are much smaller, on the whole.

In the case of Divinity: Original Sin 2, another factor might be uncompressed or very little audio compression. There is a lot of voiced dialogue. I'm just guessing here, but that's what came to my mind first.

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Does anyone else have the problem I do where Steam deletes all of your Proton games if you change Proton version in the main Steam settings? I have had to download Divinity: Original Sin 2 at least three times now, and it is a huge download! It's very aggravating. I have a local backup now, but I don't enjoy having a 50 GB game backup eating up disk space. It's also not any fun to restore that backup from one disk to another. It's faster than downloading but it's still a PITA.

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