Merry Yuletide, tomorrow when the Yule Goat comes I hope you all have been good (no Windows dual boot)!

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Quoting: Anza

Quoting: slapinHow come early access launch can fail?

I would assume that early access is both important for feedback and funding. That Kickstarter funding alone doesn't last long with team of 35.

Less than £6000 per person, that would be roughly one month pay for a highly skilled dev over here. Yeah that won't last long.

edit: and the studio is really from "over here" as well.

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Quoting: ObsidianBlk

Quoting: LoftyWhat this small list of games show is that you don't need a mega expensive GPU to enjoy quality games.

And Honestly it's not all that bad in some ways, If we keep seeing this as a trend then we can expect some really creative titles to come out that run on lower spec systems that optimize and take advantage of the existing power available.

Not to be too tangential, but I've felt, for several decades now (maybe since Windows became the OS for most people) that there's been a loss to the art of optimization. As our technology gets larger (in storage, not size) and faster, I hear a lot more developers (game developers, especially) kinda shrug off optimizing in many areas because "space is cheap". While I understand that mindset, I just wonder, if developers still nickel-n-dimed every bit and byte of their code-base like they used to with 8-bit and 16-bit machines of yester-year, how much more we might actually be able to pack into our games today!

Just look the first game of any console generation and compare it with the last game of any console generation. In general the hardware doesn't change, but the latter games tend to be far more sophisticated than their initial counterparts. So many optimizations to processes and compression of resources to produce greater effects with the limited hardware! Imagine if we kept up with that mentality!

I know this is an oversimplification, but I still wonder...

Well the answer, as usual, is both yes and no. On the one hand, yes many devs today are lazy and use frameworks that are layers upon layers upon layers. But on the other hand, modern software also have to move a LOT of more data around than what we used to do back in the 8-bit days, on the C64 we could rewrite the entire screen by writing just 1000 bytes while a modern 4K screen requires 35389440 bytes for the same operation, and then you have to do geometry calculations (since 3d), light tracing and so on and on.

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Quoting: denyasisYep, had a knock off of the 1996 Microsoft mouse from beack then, IBM actually.

Also had a 1980's mouse... Basically was the IBM one pictured but with one large central button. Not sure on the brand, Leading Edge maybe.

Right up there with the Microsoft sidewinder 2 button joystick that plugged into the soundcard, iirc. Lol.

Ah yes a Game Port, usually came on Sounds Cards since it could double as a MIDI interface :)

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Quoting: ArehandoroThe design is directly from 1989.

For us that where around in 1989, they did not look anything like this. They looked like this:
!Microsoft Mouse [External Link]




That slight bend that this one and all modern mouse have is from 1996, first mouse with a scroll wheel also came out 1996 (because it was the same one):

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Quoting: TheRiddickYeah so they don't want to update to the latest EAC SDK which would offer them better protection against cheaters.. Instead they prefer to use older versions which basically do nothing to stop cheating....

If I had to guess I would say that the dev that implemented the EAC SDK last time is no longer on the team an no one knows how it works, or EAC have some really horrible upgrade paths (never used it so cannot say).

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Quoting: toorAlso, when people are forced to use Linux in some countries, like in Germany or in France for police or administration, the workers are usually not happy about it from what I heard, Linux was and still is built on a non-mainstream philosophy which is… tech passionate and open source.

AFAIK those not happy workers only existed in a few places in the LiMUX project and it was way overblown by the Microsoft proponents, the switch back to Windows was political (the new Mayor promised to get Microsoft to move their German HQ to Munich, which they did) and was not due to any real objections by the workers.

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Quoting: GuestJust being preinstalled on machines is not enough. It needs to be preinstalled on the brands that people actually buy (Acer, Asus, HP etc), available in the stores people actually buy from (Argos, PC World, Currys etc) and priced comparatively or cheaper than the Windows variants.

As Nate says in his blog post, linux desktop marketing should be focused on hardware OEMs rather than end users.

Problem is that this won't happen without a new "Canonical from 2004" coming from nowhere and greasing the wheels. Our problem with the big OEMs is that we cannot offer them anything, Microsoft gives them extremely cheap licenses so that they can sell their computers with a rebate, not to mention the amount of bloatware that they put on from Norton and Symantec for a real kickback.

Given the OEMs a free license to Mint and a free version of LibreOffice is not really giving the OEMs what they want :) hence why when they have sold Linux preinstalled, it has always been on their cheaper hardware as the budget choice.

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Quoting: tamodolo- It needs to keep backward compatibylity! Linux cannot break software because you update a lib that dropped legacy support.

This point is seriously a library developers problem, and users should force them to solve this, not Linux. The way Windows solves it (and how "modern Linux distributions" like Flatpak, Snap and AppImage) solves it are just plain awful with bloat and hidden security exploits waiting to happen.

The only lib that I know of that takes this seriously is glibc, they version every function when the ABI/API changes and keep deprecated functions hidden but versioned so that the old applications that linked to them still works. This way an application written for an old glibc still works with a brand new glibc.

Moving this burden over to distro maintainers would increase their workload exponentially, but for the libs devs it would be just to manage backwards compatibility for the one libs they already maintain and in worst case scenarios they could instead of holding on to much old bloat just write a wrapper from the old to the new, e.g SDL should have done this when they moved from SDL1 to SDL2.

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Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: F.UltraWow that is a lot of memory mappings. I assume that Windows doesn't limit this or have a higher default, the default on Linux is 65535.

A lot is relative. For Star Citizen the value is upped to 16 million. :grin:

Honestly, it feels a lot like the max open files where the default remained extremely low even though it was completely not necessary for current generation computers.

Well there are a lot of default limits in Linux to prevent things like fork bombing, comes from being a multi-user system at heart.

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