Quoting: metro2033fanboyIf that ever happens, Ill go full PS4,PS5 and STEAM indies

goVEGAN

Completely off-topic, but I was 100% vegan for 1 year and 2 months.

Learned a lot, like how to make main courses that tasted good without meat or dairy, where to find good tofu in town. But one word of warning for heavy all-day coffee drinkers like myself, it hampered with my ability to absorb elemental (plant) iron - more than my vitamin C intake was making up for.

Now I'm a partial vegan, I still make all my vegan dishes, and I can go pure vegan for a 1-5 days on occasion. But I also swear by sardines and herring added to that, along with skim milk and eggs. And once in a great while going full "suicide by food" mode with brats/pizza/bacon etc - mainly out with friends.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: laghMh.
Mojang bought by Microsoft -> multi-platform support no longer a priority...

Surprise. No one saw that coming.

Yep. Thanks for stealing my post before I could make it X-)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Hey, I love Linux as much as anyone, and would love to see Linux take over the home PC market.

But also, you gotta give Windows credit where it's due.

http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/software/286148-the-rise-of-dos-how-microsoft-got-the-ibm-pc-os-contract [External Link].
http%3A%2F%2Fforwardthinking.pcmag.com%2Fsoftware%2F286148-the-rise-of-dos-how-microsoft-got-the-ibm-pc-os-contract
EDIT: Not my fault link is broken, proper URL encoding ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It would be too simplistic to really say something like MS's OS was the original OS for the IBM PC. Or that IBM PC's are the only type of PC hardware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_the_IBM_PC_on_the_personal_computer_market [External Link]
etc.

But, having said that, MS DOS and IBM PC were far and away the biggest players during the seminal years of widespread adoption of PCs. So they earned their right to stick in the collective consciousness. Even though the concepts are ever in flux, people tend to stick with traditional meanings even if those terms become a little outdated.

I know we're a minority group and would like that to change to less of a minority group, but I also am advocating for us not to become one "of those types" of minorities. Extremely thin skinned about the least little perceived slight in casual words.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CheesenessI have a mostly comprehensive list of Stuff I've Done over here [External Link], but it's probably difficult to put into a chronology. Here's a quick rundown on the stuff that seems relevant.

I first started programming in the 80s. My family got an Amiga 500 when I was 7 or 8, and my Dad and I learned to program together by copying examples out of computer magazines. Mostly I messed around with AmigaBASIC and AMOS at the time.

Later, when I got the laptop mentioned at the beginning of the article, I made a bunch of dumb stuff with QBASIC, VisualBasic and some other junk that I can't remember (maybe some Delphi thing? I have no idea).

I continued doing programming at school, but didn't really learn anything I hadn't already discovered on my own. I picked up Pascal, Python, Java and C/C++ along the way.

In the nearly 2000s, I put together a small team and started working on some Half-Life 1 mods. I didn't do much programming on those and mostly focused on game design and asset creation. It was around this time that I decided that making games was something I wanted to do (note, porting isn't making games).

I switched to Linux a little while after that and started contributing to Neverball [External Link] in my spare time. The goal was to use my day jobs (I did pizza delivery, retail, helpdesk, sysadmin, app dev and embedded dev) to get stable enough to start my own game dev studio, but that never really happened.

Around 2011, I started being more visibly active in Linux gaming circles, started tracking Humble stats [External Link] and helped form the initial SteamLUG community that grew out of the long running SPUF Linux [External Link] thread. I was also prominent in the Desura community and became a Desurium contributor when the client was open sourced. I feel that all this sort of platform advocacy and community engagement stuff has been helpful in having other developers take me seriously.

From this point on, I started making myself available to assist developers who were interested in supporting Linux as a favour. I never really thought much of it at the time and never kept records. Mostly I was just giving reassurance, offering advice on how to package things and helping identify bugs and stuff. I think between then and now, I've helped in that manner with maybe 50 titles?

Around this time, my friend flibitijibibo (Ethan Lee) did his first port, and ended up getting working with Humble to help cope with the increased demand for Linux support that their "must be cross platform" requirement drove. Linux porters seemed to be in high demand (everybody was busy). I was approached to do some Linux ports, but turned them down (some trivia: Bohemia were among these - I'm really happy to know they finally got Arma3 onto Linux!). They weren't titles I was interested in, and I wanted to make my own games, not other people's.

I started making my own games again in earnest in 2012 after recovering from a repetitive strain injury. I ended up in a small team working on a game [External Link] for the first 7DFPS. From that point forward, I have had at least one game development project on the go at any given point in time.

When Double Fine launched their crowdfunding campaign for what would eventually become Broken Age, I became active within their community, organising backer meetups [External Link], community development projects [External Link] and taking over Game Club [External Link] when it became too much for DF's Greg Rice to run on his own. I was motivated to do all this stuff by the company's enthusiasm for and commitment to Linux (and because their games were cool). As time wore on, I eventually made friends with a bunch of people who work there and was asked to help do informal pre-release Linux testing on a few projects.

When I heard that a simultaneous release for DotT Remastered wouldn't be possible, I offered to help out in any way that would make it easier for them, and eventually negotiated to help with QA. Toward the end of March, I was offered the port, which coincided with timeframes I had for looking for contract work to boost my savings so that I could keep doing my own game dev. By the end of April we had agreed on contract terms, and I started work on May 1st (not including the time I spent looking over the code before signing the contract).

Hope that helps!

Nice, you are a smart programmer living a fruitful life. I started out with CGI programming for ISP companies doing company websites back in the Day (90's) and moonlighted doing QuakeC mods for the original Quake. Chasecam 2 was my claim to fame back then. I made several mods, but Chasecam 2 got me 100's of emails per week from fans all over the world. I'm 99% sure, after watching it and recognizing all the boundary condition handlers I wrote, this is my mod in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyxV5RvFZLY [External Link]

Boundary conditions, boundary conditions, boundary conditions. My sole mission with the mod was making 3rd person view work for the whole Quake game no matter what situation you were in. Back then, it was all new and mind blowing :-)

Then, I got a boring non gaming-related programming job. Now, I'm a "Scrum Master" - how lame is that?

EDIT:
To be clear, I'm not that good of a programmer - sometimes I can get on a roll. But I knew I would get eaten alive by smarter programmers if I tried to make it in the game industry. But I'm envious of you guys that are good enough to make it :-)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: STiAT

Quoting: CheesenessThis is very true, although I find that it's not necessarily that things were "bad", but often just that they weren't done in the way I like to do things.

Ye well, that would be bad in my definition ;-). Everything not done the way I like it must be bad. I've bit of a Torvalds-Attitude there, which can be a huge issue.

Nah, Linus occasionally getting inappropriately (and sometimes, just flat weirdly) upset about minor intra-Linux things is not equivalent to the quote. Every programmer who has to work on someone else's code can face this. Sometimes people think differently than you do. And if you have to make the code work now, you naturally would like it to be modeled around your style of logic, just so you can move forward easier.

There's usually 1,001 ways to go about any given task in coding, so this happens a lot.

But then there's the other side of that coin, sometimes you get code from someone else that is beautiful to look at, you want to copy its paradigms, learn from it. Improve your own style of coding by studying it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

ptr += some_fuction(&ptr);

Heheh... Yeah, that's the thing about C and C++. They give smart people the ability to make exceedingly dumb decisions.

It's powerful how much low level access in a high level language you have to memory locations and variables, etc. But with great power comes great responsibility. And so many clever programmers are prone to making "cute" little syntactical shortcuts like this, even though they don't have to. And it just makes it harder to maintain... Even for Mr Clever himself, if/when he comes back a year later to regression test or change functionality / refactor.

I've learned over the years when I hit a spot of code where I'm starting to write "clever" code... After many many times of coming back later for some kind of change or upgrade and hitting a brick wall. Just literally staring at my own code until I spent more time than I wanted unraveling a tightly wrapped train of reasoning that was only clear in my head for a brief moment in time after a day or two of working with it originally..

I've learned, man. When I hit those spots now writing new code, I stop - oh no, I know what this is. Let's step back and take our time, lots of REM statements, long descriptive variable names. As a matter of fact, let's just think about what we name the variables as long as the code we're going to use them in...

That's one nice thing about open source code, many times it's been cleaned up internally just because you know it will be judged by other programmers. It's funny reading all the apologies from coders who decide to release their proprietary project on Github or something similar. They begin to realize people will now be looking at all the "shotgun code" and band-aides they left under the hood.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'm glad it's finally released - Once I got the picture it wasn't due for eminent release for a long long while after its EA debut, I put it on the shelf. And they made good on their threat to take their time finishing it - I don't even remember the year I bought it now, it's been so long. 2013? 2014? :-)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: InverseTelecineI just went to Humble Bundle to check to see if the promised DRM-free version was available. It is! I was afraid they'd forget that they promised that on Humble Bundle too; not just GOG. But it's available!

I can't believe I'm finally going to get to play the full release (after being a bit let down by the Early Access version due to its "Early Accessiness.")

Then I saw my original pre-order purchase date... December 10, 2013. Holy crap. But hey! In this day and age I'm just really glad they didn't abandon it! It's kind of an impressive accomplishment itself to be in Early Access for so many years, and live long enough to come out of Early Access!

That's probably because Starbound was one of the very few EA games lucky enough to make tons and tons (and tons) of money while in EA. Most EA titles don't make a single percentage point of the same money Starbound did in EA. That's a large part of why many EA games fizzle.

It's not the only reason, just a major reason - I've read many of the more honest game devs post on their Steam game forums they simply weren't making enough money to finish their EA title. Or, they finish it "early", and call it 1.0 with a fraction of the content and/or features they planned initially.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I just wish Valve gave incentives to game devs who make a Linux port. Like instead of taking a 30% cut of every sale, they take a 10% cut of every Linux sale. Hypothetical, I have no idea what the real percentages are. Valve could make it a time limited thing, and keep advertising it to devs and re-upping at their discretion: "Extended for six more months: 75% off our cut per sale of any fully ported Linux Steam game! Time is limited, so act now!"

But, Valve wouldn't want to take that kind of hit to their pocketbook just to push Linux adoption forward. Greed is what greed is.

You know what the problem with having a million dollars is? You want another million dollars.
You know what the problem with having a 100 million dollars is? You want another 100 million dollars.
You know what the problem with having a billion dollars is? You want another billion dollars.
You know what the problem with having a 100 billion dollars is? You want another 100 billion dollars.
etc. :-)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Witcher 3 was the most disappointing for me. Both a really good AAA game I want to play, and a game that looked in the bag for a Linux port, for a while.

Valve giving up on SteamVR for SteamOS and pretty much giving up on SteamOS, at least for now, sure does seem like they decided to not power through and fix/try again after a poorly received Steam Machine release.

But, at least Valve has started things rolling for gaming on Linux, they are not taking away anything - the Linux client is still seeing regular patches - which I suppose of all of it, is the most important thing as a Linux gamer.

We have way more than we ever would have had before, and there are still games being ported for Linux. My only real thought is AAA titles will likely remain largely Windows only titles, if Valve never tries to make Steam Machines running SteamOS a more attractive option than they are today. Which certainly won't happen if Valve doesn't work on it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments