Yay, life on linux and death by snu-snu!

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I remember reading that bestseller. Now I feel old :)

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Thanks for the reminder!

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Quoting: M@yeulCThank you. A key like this is always appreciated :D. Great work Liam, too, I love the interface.
Could it be made accessible to users as well? Or would collect keys on some gamingonlinux webpage be a good idea? Something like a pool with a giveaway (or randomized key exchange) once in a while. I have lots of key from various humble bundles... ;)

Not sure if I'm bending the rules of mentioning it here, but instead of implementing a user driven giveaway system here, I'd rather suggest to use sites like steamgifts.com [External Link]. If you want to restrict the group of people eligible for entering your giveaway, you could link it to a certain steam group all users have to be members of.

Other than that, I really enjoy the puzzle giveaways they do on the forums there, too. Essentially, you define a hidden giveaway, that is not featured anywhere on steamgifts.com, but rather create a puzzle on itstoohard.com [External Link] that provides the link to the giveaway after solving all questions.

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My strongest reference for a game like this is Marble Blast (Gold) [External Link], although that game had lots of powerups as well, that are lacking in this new one.

If anyone here still got a Wii and is missing a great title to play: try Kororinpa [External Link]. In my opinion, this is the most immersive game, as the graphics, the sound (from the WiiMote!) and the Rumble are matching most perfectly. You can really differentiate the ball rolling over metal grates, hardwood floors or waffles (no, really). Keep in mind though, that Kororinpa lets you nudge the level rather than directly controling your sphere, so it's a different subgenre of marble roller.

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Oh, at first I thought "KeithP" would be Keith Peters [External Link] ;)

Well a few moments before when I was switching from the teaser to the article I was wondering if John Carmack or Michael Abrash were leaving Oculus after all that lawsuit crap with Zenimax...

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Wow, that nearly doubles the framerate on the lowest setting! Are there any bits of information about missing features compared to the OpenGL version? Those values seem too good to be true.

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I'm not that optimistic about Vulkan's traction, new technologies take time to get adopted and gain a reasonable market share. Sure, it will be better than a handful of titles and tech demos this year, but I doubt we will see a significant rise in applications that support it, much less as a main feature.

And that's exactly why SteamOS and Steam Machines are not terms that ring a bell for mainstream gamers. Yet. There is no revolution in the market like the transition from mobile phones to smartphones with the rise of Android. SteamOS and Steam Machines are just supporting a much older platform. A platform that has already established a solid footprint on a wide variety of hardware and lots of niches. Special purpose devices already embrace Linux at a much higher rate than Windows.

On the other hand: should Microsoft decide to develop into a walled garden by restricting access to software only through their self controlled channels, then this would equal another big transition. That's why I don't think MS will chose to do this.

A few years ago there was a push to establish Android on game consoles, Ouya is most probably the most well known one. But right now Ouya is considered a failure, despite the media coverage. You can't enforce success, it's decided by the audience.

At least that is true for commercial success, and Steam Machines are the commercial choice when it comes to Linux gaming. If you want to see a type of hardware succeed, buy it. Especially if you are a fan of the operating system.

And now we are back at the Steam survey. I don't really care for the hardware survey, I'd be happy to know the ratio of Steam connections by operating system. Real OS fingerprints of user logins, not the flawed numbers aggregated by the broken hardware survey. Plus maybe the number of games run by platform, not the number of games sold per operating system. But that is not reliable as well as there are Windows games that get run by Linux games by using another executable outside of steam, just using the downloaded data.

Never give up, never surrender. Keep doing things you enjoy.

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It looks very interesting indeed, but I doubt non native speakers will get the most out of it. Some challenges seem to be done under time constraints and some words could be hard to grok. And I somehow doubt such a game can be seamlessly localized.

On the other hand, it offered a rare opportunity to use the word "grok" :)
Gets on my "watch playthoughs on youtube/twitch" list.

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I had a hard time casting my vote for the favorite FOSS project. I probably spent most time with Rebirth over all those years and it was my first impulse to chose it here again. But Dolphin made some pretty amazing leaps the last year so I finally changed my mind. Please put Rebirth up again this year so I can even it out ;)

On the other hand I was surprised to see Wine take the lead. Sure, it is a great project and they manged to surprise everyone with lots of high quality updates last year, but we are finally in a position that lots of games run natively, so I thought this community would show other projects some love.

Regarding the favorite porter, I think we should award Icculus with a lifetime achievement.

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