Quoting: ajgpI am currently playing a modded campaign in Stellaris; definately one of my favourite games.

I was reading through the forum, and was quite surprised that nobody was playing Stellaris - and then, the last post ;-)

I'm back at playing Stellaris too. Not modded though. I wanted to try Necroids without any mods first. I wonder what makes this game so captivating. The AI is objectively bad, the events are repetitive, and still I play it over, and over, and over again...

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Quoting: ArehandoroStill a long way ahead, at least another year for proper delivery, but people willing to get off Google in their smartphones could look into the Librem 5, or PinePhone if someone isn't a heavy phone user because the performance is still under par. Real Linux smartphones are around the corner, and we all know they're the future.

Just saying: I'm posting from a Sony XPeria XA2, running Sailfish OS. If that's not "real Linux", then I don't know what else.

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Quoting: nepoHow is the actual state of the game? Does the "old" crises now work flawlessly? What about the many, many bugs and the overall game performance (especially in large galaxies)? Even more interesting - desyncs in multiplayer, are they fixed? I really liked the game, but before I buy DLC after DLC the old content (and the base game!) need to be fixed...

The old crises have seen some improvements, but are still not always working flawlessly. However I haven't had any real major crisis issues recently.
Performance has been improved in the last few updates, but is still not good. The developers have narrowed down the cause of the issue to the pop-simulation, and are planning to re-tweak the economy to get it working with a lower total number of pops. (If I were in charge, I would probably just drop the simulation of individual pops... However that would remove a feature that some players seem to enjoy, so I guess that's why the devs at Paradox can't actually do that...)
Bugs. Well, it's a complex game, and of course there are many of them :tongue:. Some got fixed, a huge lot remains.... I'm currently getting annoyed by my subjects' fleets bombarding an enemy habitat that's currently colonizing. The colonizing progress should go down due to bombardment, but it doesn't move in either direction (independent of the bombarding fleet strength).
I can't say anything about multiplayer, because I've given up on the topic a long time ago, due to the frequent desyncs...

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Quoting: BielFPsAnd for anti-piracy protection, I haven't see any successfully case with Denuvo since the Chinese had their first success of crack them.

Bus Simulator 18 took more than a year to crack: https://crackwatch.com/game/bus-simulator-18 [External Link]

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Quoting: const

Quoting: soulsourceNot surprising.
The Xbox One is just a desktop Windows machine with a fancy console interface and mandatory cryptographic signatures for all executables. The PS4 is just a regular BSD with a fancy console interface and similar restrictions. Why should the Atari VCS be much different?

Thanks for your in depth analysis of current console architectures and software ecosystems. Will you hold a talk on next CCC, showing us how to run PS5 games on BSD? Looking forward to it. Year of BSD desktop.

Thanks for the nice and polite reply.

Of course it's not that simple - especially since the Xbox and PS4 make heavy use of AMD's HSA, and of course the cryptography is implemented in both ways - the executables built ny the respective toolchains won't launch on a system that fails to authenticate properly. But that was not the point I was aiming at.

I just wanted to point out that also the big console manufacturers are not reinventing the wheel but build on top of existing technology.

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Not surprising.
The Xbox One is just a desktop Windows machine with a fancy console interface and mandatory cryptographic signatures for all executables. The PS4 is just a regular BSD with a fancy console interface and similar restrictions. Why should the Atari VCS be much different?

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: prosoorAbout Gentoo and some less common like Mandriva or even weirder package system I should rather not. I have no time even to read about them, less to try them.

I used Gentoo many years ago when I had more free time to invest in maintaining my system. Since everything is compiled from source code, the initial install was an all day (and overnight) affair. Even something as simple as installing an office suite could take several hours to download and compile the source code. Of course this was on an older, slower single core CPU, so things may not be as painful these days, but I really didn't mind it at the time until I was in the middle of a college course, and a routine update completely broke my system (not an uncommon occurrence for Gentoo). Since I didn't have the time to recompile an entire Linux install from scratch, I used Kubuntu as a temporary solution to get back up and running quickly and was so pleased with how fast and easy it was that I've never looked back.

Strange, my experience was the exact opposite. Ubuntu was rather great, until they started shipping Unity. Then it became comparable to Windows 95 regarding stability - frequent crashes. The LTS versions remained somewhat usable, though still noticeably worse than any Ubuntu version before, but the non-LTS versions turned into a crash-fest, with the X11 session dying every second minute or so.
That drove me away towards Debian, and I never looked back.
Since 2016 I'm running Gentoo - mostly because I wanted to try it and got stuck because its Rolling Release scheme never required a re-install, so I had no incentive to switch ever since. Gentoo has been an extremely smooth ride for me - except some minor things that could be fixed by a simple package downgrade.
(To be honest, I had one more involved issue with Gentoo, but that was because I had some ~arch - untested - packages unmasked, so it was clearly a user error.)

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: soulsourceI wonder if granting demands still _lowers_ the AI's opinion of you, or if this has finally been fixed?

Hm. :)

Of course it doesn't make sense from a tactical point of view, but if I - which I herewith do - demand a hundred bucks from you, and you would actually grant it, it would really lower my opinion of you. :D

Also if I would make a smug comment like Süleyman frequently does: "I suppose I can do this in the spirit of almsgiving."
:tongue:

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I wonder if granting demands still _lowers_ the AI's opinion of you, or if this has finally been fixed?

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Quoting: Micromegas

Quoting: soulsourceThere is an important piece of information missing regarding Ubuntu: People should imho only use LTS versions. The non-LTS versions are horribly unstable (bordering being completely unusable), and will only lead to frustration.

My personal recommendation would still be Debian Stable. Apart from the installation process (Debian has by far the superior installer) it's like Ubuntu, but a lot more stable. And I really mean _a lot_ more stable.

It seems that it's always a trade-off between latest drivers and updates (and the freedom to install newer software versions) versus a very reliable, stable computing environment. For me Mageia hits the sweet spot here as a very stable distribution for the non tech savvy user with lots of testing by the distribution maintainers and with major upgrades every 1.5 years. But I totally see that users have different needs, like a user of Void or a user of Debian (very) Stable. :happy:

Yeah, personally I am using Gentoo, which is for me also right at the sweet spot between stability and usability. The stability of the stable packages is amazing, in my opinion much better than what any Ubuntu release since 2012 offered, while untested packages (~arch) can be enabled on a per-package basis, allowing easy installation of the very latest graphics drivers and such.
However I would certainly NOT recommend Gentoo to a beginning Linux user - it's either for people who want to spin their own distribution based on it (*cough* ChromeOS *cough*), server admins who want 100% control over which version of which library/program is installed, or tech enthusiasts.

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