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Latest Comments by 14
Steam has a Digital Tabletop Festival starting October 21
3 October 2020 at 2:24 am UTC

Quoting: LungDragoI might as well ask - is there someone here that's in Gloomhaven's Early Access and could talk about the state of things? It's in my wishlist but I haven't been able to keep up at all and have no idea how good or bad the adaptation actually is.
I have the same interest as you. I can tell you that someone I used to work with is on my Steam friends list and they appear to have been in the game quite a lot lately. I haven't asked what they think yet but eventually will since I'm curious as a player of the physical board game.

I am fortunate that one of my friends bought the board game and has all the table space required for the physical game. I like board games a lot, but I have a hard time picturing myself spending $100+ on a single game. My interest in the computer version is 1) eliminate arduous setup time and space and 2) cost. My wife likes playing board games, but, with kids, we just can't commit to an epic game. Maybe she would play the computer version with me... however, she usually says, "it's not the same."

There is also a more normal size version of Gloomhaven now called Jaws of the Lion that is half the cost and a lot less setup. I might get that one.

Unity Technologies announce 'Open Projects', building games in Unity that are open source
2 October 2020 at 2:54 pm UTC Likes: 2

This is great news! I love it.

If someone asked if you wanted a dish of ice cream, would you cross your arms and refuse because they didn't give you the whole carton? Let's get real here. This is a positive move whether the game engine is open source or not. Are you next going to say that a game isn't open source if it only runs on Windows or Mac OS? Next step is open hardware. What's next after that, cooperative, non-profit utilities in your home?

It's very easy to be cynical. It is a LOT harder to do good work, be positive, and get others working alongside you. Cheers to the folks who can.

Amazon announces 'Luna', their own take on cloud game streaming
26 September 2020 at 7:02 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: kuhpunktKinda worried about the future honestly... so much fragmentation, everybody wants its own thing.
Eh, that's temporary. There will be 2-3 real players in the end and the others will fail or get purchased by the bigger guys.

I wonder which cloud provider Nvidia uses. The other three game streaming services also own their own "cloud." I wonder if Nvidia is using their own data centers or if they're utilizing one of the other guys'.

On to my opinion of this new service: No thanks. I'll pass. Amazon is already too big and it's starting to get sickening.

Reminder: Update your PC info for the next round of statistics updates
26 September 2020 at 6:51 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: PhiladelphusFigured I'd take a look at the trends since I haven't done so in quite a while, and point out anything that looks interesting.

Distributions mostly hold flat with some minor wiggles, other than what looks like a long slow decline in Ubuntu and a remarkable doubling in share for Manjaro, from 7.58% in February 2019 to 15.18% today.

8 GB of RAM and 32 GB of RAM have basically traded usage share (with 32 GB on the rise), though both are dwarfed by the 16 GB share, which has held between 51% and 54% the entire period plotted. (I'm in the somewhat-odd spot of having 24 GB myself, due to half-upgrading when one of my four 4 GB modules failed a few years ago.)

Intel and AMD usage has been steadily converging, with Intel at 52.32% and AMD at 47.68%—a rough calculation puts the slope at about ±0.95% per month, which suggests they might reach parity or even cross over in about 5 months if the trend holds. (I'm considering going AMD at some point in the future, but given my computer still works fine and that would require a new motherboard I can't really see myself justifying it anytime in the near future given my current financial situation as a poor graduate student. )

Similarly, Nvidia is slowly dropping while AMD is growing (and Intel holds pretty flat) for GPUS, though the difference between Team Green and Team Red is still 19.22 percentage points, so unless the trend changes it'll be years before they reach parity. And didn't I hear some news about Intel releasing new GPUs or something recently? So who knows how this'll go. (I'll probably go full AMD whenever I do that motherboard switch mentioned above, which means…not for the next year or so at least, probably.)

Proprietary vs. open source GPU drivers are trending similar to Nvidia vs. AMD, I'm guessing because people using AMD are generally also using the open source driver, maybe? Oh, yeah, the next two plots show that roughly 97% of Nvidia users use the proprietary driver (I'm in this camp), while roughly 95% of AMD users use the open source one.

A single monitor remains the overwhelmingly most common option, but it's actually trending down very slightly over time. Very interestingly, the slack is not being picked up by 2 monitors as I would've thought (that's stayed more-or-less the same), but 3 monitors. Though we're talking like 1 percentage point here, so it's not huge. (I'm *sigh* stuck with 1 monitor for now, though I've had 2 in the past, and am eagerly looking forward to an eventual 3-monitor setup of my own in the future for increased productivity. )

Resolution-wise, 1920×1080 remains the most common by a country mile, at 56% currently, though that's dropped from just under 60% in February 2019. It looks like most of the gains have been made up by 2560×1440, which went from 10.12% to 14.84% in that same time. 3840×2160 (4K) also seems to have gained ~2% over that time, up to 7.78% now. (I think my next monitor upgrade [to accompany this mythical general computer upgrade in the misty future] will include jumping from 1080p to 4K on one of those two or three monitors; I kinda held off before as I didn't have the strongest GPU, but I've realized since then that most of the games I play are really not that graphically demanding anyway, and I expect the extra space will help with productivity as well. Plus I'd like to get into videography with stuff capable of shooting at 4K, and there's not much point in making it if I can't actually see it on my screen. )

There's more, but that's the stuff I find interesting, or which had interesting-looking trends.
I've noticed similar with less precision by eye-balling the changes over the last year or so. I find it worth mentioning that the GoL folks who enter their system specs into the survey have a very different hardware base than Steam statistics.

Challenging turn-based RPG 'Stoneshard' has a huge overhaul update out, price rising
26 September 2020 at 6:44 am UTC Likes: 1

Like others have pointed out, the ease of dying and lack of being able to close out of the game and return where you left off are huge detractors. If it was a little annoying to travel to a certain location and save there, that'd be one thing. But people are saying it can take several minutes to travel to a save point... ugh. I know myself pretty well (duh) and know that I hate redoing stuff in games. Going back 10 minutes is about the most I can stand. The only exception is playing perma-death in Fire Emblem games. For some reason, I am willing to restart a battle to avoid character loss, and battles are often around an hour long. Otherwise, games like Red Dead Redemption II, I save after every mission.

It's too bad because the art style and gameplay look so nice. The price is nice, too.

SteamTinkerLaunch is a huge all in one Linux wrapper tool for gaming
26 September 2020 at 6:19 am UTC

Quoting: DMGI watched github page and not really sure, how simple that too is for regular user. Does it sets best settings for every game by default or it just gives option to set everything on my own? Because from screenshot of settings it looks so complicated
Well, that's why it was suggested for people who like to tinker. If you don't, then move on. I will probably not mess with it myself. I may be an Arch user, but that doesn't mean I have no limit to the amount of tedium I want to deal with. :)

SkateBIRD gets a demo for Tokyo Game Show 2020 try it now
26 September 2020 at 6:08 am UTC

Nice, going to try it out this weekend.

Northgard hits 2 million copies sold, Clan of the Lynx DLC is out now
20 September 2020 at 3:16 am UTC

Quoting: Nibelheim
Quoting: 14
Quoting: Linas
Quoting: 14Too bad my friend and I can't even get past the first campaign mission
Why not?
There is a time limit to complete the objective. The objective requires an enormous amount of food stored. One of the failures, we didn't even know how much food we needed. Another, we ran out of time.

No offense but maybe you did something wrong...

I finish the History Mode in Hard (at a moment where it was harder than now). If I remember well, you don't need food amount in the first mission... You just need to discover and get north of the map then build a Drakkar Dock. Nothing else...

Spoiler, click me
Like this then you win :
Quite.

We must not be on the first mission then. Maybe the second.

EDIT: OK, my friend and I are trying to beat a conquest. I took a screenshot. The objective requires a large amount of food to conquer, which came as a surprise.


KDE Plasma 5.20 Beta is out and it's huge
18 September 2020 at 10:22 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: Liam DawePlasma is a desktop environment for people who love both shiny looks and tons of configuration....

Speaking of customization, here is what my Plasma desktop looks like these days. I like it.

Northgard hits 2 million copies sold, Clan of the Lynx DLC is out now
18 September 2020 at 10:11 pm UTC

Quoting: Linas
Quoting: 14Too bad my friend and I can't even get past the first campaign mission
Why not?
There is a time limit to complete the objective. The objective requires an enormous amount of food stored. One of the failures, we didn't even know how much food we needed. Another, we ran out of time.