I hope Barone will embrace steam workshop for his next projects. Custom solutions are pretty much always cluncky and time consuming. Notable exception is Factorio mod portal. But Wube are the -positive- exception on pretty much everything. Even when they get review bombed is positive. Which is something I would never have thought I would say.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedjeHa, I still do not want to support them (epic, not the devs of the game launcher) in anyway.

I guess this fixation with EGS is because the steam games works all flawlessly and there is nothing to make an article with?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

They have the same stance as Epic. They want to spy in the kernel to let you play the game.

Maybe that would be a minor issue on the deck... assuming one uses the deck only for gaming and not for serious/sensitive stuff.

But for generic purpose linux it's way better if spyware remains off limit. The allegedly best solution (for the industry) is worse (for end users) than the issue it pretends to solve.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Quoting: catbox_fuguelets not forget that EAC used to work on linux natively prior to Epic buying it.

I've not heard this before, but if true, it's not a good look for Epic Games... I suspect though, that they'll try and downplay this fact, so that people don't point out the hypocrisy of refusing to support Linux-based operating systems.

link to article

Officially it was announced as a "paused support". But I believe everyone here should be educated enough to understand corporate language.

BTW, since I start to get lost here... linux remains unsupported pausesupported :whistle: correct? What we are disccussing here is just the official partial/non intrusive EAC 4 windows support for proton. Or is partial support also for linux native?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: TheSHEEEPWith all of that in mind, one thing you can decide is who you will or won't trust (knowing full well that they themselves could become victims of attacks).
So if I really wanted to play Fortnite (I sure don't) I'd just roll with it as I trust the developers to not try and build a psychological profile of me while trying to prevent cheating.

? With open source you don't "trust", you precisely know what it's happening on your machine. You know for instance if an hypothetical anti cheat module is looking only for cheats or also for what's going on in your browser. And you know which part of what is found remains in your machine and what is sent back to the corporate cloud.

It's just that. If have nothing to hide, you don't take the trouble to hide what you do. That's the issue with anti cheats. That's what makes them spyware. Were they open source, there would be far less if not no concern at all in having them scanning your memory.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: SamsaiEAC also contains a kernel-level component, which on Windows is installed as a kernel driver. This allows EAC code to run at a very privileged level and inspect essentially any and all parts of the system in order to detect tampering. This provides a very broad level of monitoring, which is also harder to bypass. Based on Sweeney's comments, this is the mode of operation used by Fortnite. It is also a mode of operation that is technically incompatible with the Linux way of doing things.

I was thinking... we can paraphrase this: "with EAC cheaters will have easier time to cheat on linux. By design." Or for the average Joe out there "Linux is the OS of cheaters to cheat". Fast forward 2-3 years and I don't like where all this is going.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I still believe anti cheat like that shouldn't exist period. And I won't shed tears if Fortnite or other games won't end on linux is the price is the privacy.

As for client side spying to prevent cheating, it might be a solution but not like it's done now. It can't be about letting untrusted corporates learn verything about who you are and what you do on your personal computer. It needs some kind of containerization. Inside you can spy whatever you want. Outside you only spy with open source stuff. And if it can't be done inside linux screw it. Windows partition for Fortnite, linux for trading and banking. Live happy and secure.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: pbI used and loved KDE 2 and 3, but version 4 pushed me towards other DEs. It will be interesting to revisit it thanks to SteamDesk.

[edit] found some old screenshot ;-)

To protect your privacy, external media requires approval to load.

Source: i.imgur.com

View cookie preferences.
Accept & Show Accept All & Don't show this again   Direct Link

[edit2] and here's KDE 2 :wub:

To protect your privacy, external media requires approval to load.

Source: i.imgur.com

View cookie preferences.
Accept & Show Accept All & Don't show this again   Direct Link

Oooh... that KDE2 screen brings me back to the uni.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I love my Canada free and pristine. :grin:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: MalThe (only) optimal way to game now, due to severe pop growth limitations, is essentially finding an effective way to steal population. Even cause disasters in foreign space to produce some hundred billions refugees to then welcome in your Ecumenopolis is legit (never trust egalitarian xenophiles).

Huh. That approach never occurred to me. I can see where it would work pretty well. Maybe I play at lower difficulty levels. I find the old fashioned approach of just exploring aggressively, maximizing Influence and such to grab as much real estate as possible and terraforming every planet in sight gives me enough places growing pop that I get handily ahead just from ordinary organic growth. In the earlier game I pretty much never do diplomatic deals or influence-costing Edicts because dash it, I have systems to claim.

Pop growth was nerfed because of performance some time ago. Now growth time increases linearly depending on your total pop. On mid game there is already stagnancy. Wide is still the way to go to increase growth, since each planet can build a pop separately and having more worlds allow you to frow more at the same time (although all those worlds will remain empty). But you will see that after a while it takes forever to build a new pop.

So, with the game centered about pops for everything how do you circumvent pop growth? You steal pops! You can straight on conquer, but if you do that you have to offset some of that pop on admin jobs to keep the governing capacity high enough (this update removed this though, so it's interesting to see what will happen). The better way is to find a way to relocate them into your worlds, so you have both the pops and low sprawl for having few systems. Which will require less administrators and instead allow to recruit more researchers for instance. Barbaric despoilers are the best one here, hands down, since you can effectively double your pop size without increasing your space size with the first war and then snowball from there. Xenophiles amassing immigration pull are also a choice if they can make open borders agreements. But only mid game when they can stack pull bonuses. If your lucky and some crisis starts to erase planets and you get a huge influx of refugees. One can mix in robots so you build two pops at the same time one bio and one mech. But aside from the x2 multiplier you are still stuck with the growth malus. Other than that it's the creative human workarounds like conquer, relocate pops and then abandon planets and systems.

To be honest I don't want pop importance to go away entirely. Great powers in all ages used to be assimilation machines, grabbing foreign pops in all possible ways. The Romans were the most infamous masters at doing this. But they also fell the moment they stopped being able to assimilate these large amount of pops. So it's also a dynamic that should come with its own risks. In Stellaris it's a little bit to convenient I think (Hello? Long awayted internal politics expansion? Where are you?). Imho in general allowing also smaller pop empires (at certain conditions) to produce more of everything is a starting point to reduce a bit the pop importance.

View this comment - View article - View full comments