As long as we're showing off cool and unusual keyboard designs, have the Keyboard.io [External Link]:

Quoting: SirLootALotSo why wouldn't I just buy a Das Keyboard [External Link] instead. Looks much more customizable, more standard and it comes with a german keyboardlayout. Its Software is also free [External Link].

That's pretty cool. Haven't heard of that one before.

Quoting: AciDIt's weird nobody mentioned the awesome Typematrix keyboard, and its Dvorak layout:
[…]

Also haven't heard of that one before, and also pretty cool! All these nifty keyboard options make me slightly sad that my Corsair Vengeance K70 I bought back in 2014 is showing no signs of needing replacement anytime soon. :P

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Philadelphus†Pun not intended.

Suuuuure.

Well, at least it wasn't when I wrote it. Then I decided to keep it. :D

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Quoting: Luke_Nukem

Quoting: Purple Library GuyLooking at that prototype . . . OK, so on a normal keyboard the spacebar is too long, I'll buy that up to a point. But, maybe my eyes are getting old here, on that prototype I can't see a spacebar at all, which isn't really an improvement. Like, down where the spacebar would be I'm seeing alt, shift, backspace, ctrl. So is one or more of those blue and orange things supposed to be "space"? I don't want to be hitting "space" with my pinky!
Also not sure if I'm seeing an "enter" key.
Still, I'll be interested to see a later prototype.

No, those two split keys where space was are meant to be assignable - so maybe you want backspace on the left and space on the right of the split (as opposed to what they are labelled as.

I think they will need to try and poll everyone for a reasonable layout to pick out what keys would be what, and offer a set of keycaps so they can be labelled.

Adding to this, I read another article about this where someone at the company said basically "The pictures don't reflect an actual product, we just took pictures of what we had while we were messing about with the layout, which is why there's no actual "Space" key on the keyboard in picture." Which seems a little odd to me, if nothing else I'd put a sticky note labeled "Space" on one of the keys so people don't get the wrong idea (as this seems to be a pretty common misconception), but whatever.

Now, I won't be using this keyboard because it has no number pad (and if you ever need to enter lots of numbers*, one-handed number pad entry beats the number keys at the top hands down†), but I kinda like the idea of breaking the space bar into two so that my left thumb can actually contribute in my typing. Having the right side be space and the left side be backspace makes a certain amount of sense to me.

*Or play Dwarf Fortress.

†Pun not intended.

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Maybe it's more to do with the Magna Graecia content pack and focus on Greek city states?

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For anyone wondering, I got a reply back from the developers of Filament:

I'm afraid at the moment the demo is only available on Windows. It was all a little last minute to put one together for the Steam Festival. I am going to see if we can sort out a Linux demo for the remainder of the festival.

Which is what I realized was probably the case about an hour after sending the email. Oh well, I certainly don't begrudge them not taking more time away from working on the main game to make a Linux demo! I just wish Steam would let me download the Windows demo so I could try running it with Proton.

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I really wanted to give the Filament demo a try after hearing about it here some months ago, but I get an error "An error occurred while updating Filament demo: invalid platform" when clicking the "Play Game" button. I tried Carrion and that worked, so I'm curious if anyone has any tips for making it work.
Edit: Hmmm, Spiritfarer and Neon Noodles both worked as well, so I guess it's just a problem with Filament. Maybe I'll send the devs a message…

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Eh, just like the Intel vulnerabilities lately, this is hardly surprising. CPUs nowadays are incredibly complicated systems, and engineers have a limited timeframe to design and test them. Once they're out in the world, however, anyone can spend however much time they like looking for unforeseen interactions and exploits. Of course people are going to find vulnerabilities and exploits in them; it'd be surprising if they didn't.

It's like Hal Clement, the sci-fi author said: an author only has so long to write a book, readers have all the time in the world after it's been published to look for errors. :)

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPNobody is saying there shouldn't be any DLCs, but there is a sweet spot here. 2-4, I'd say. Not 10-99+.
After that, a complete game package just becomes too expensive to be reasonable. And unfortunately, some of those DLCs really are mandatory if you don't want a severely limited experience. Not only limited in flavor content, mind you, but actual functionality.

I think we're coming at this from very different viewpoints. Let me use an analogy here:

Michelangelo took four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and whatever your personal feelings on it it's widely considered a masterpiece of art. Now imagine if the Pope came in after one year and was like: "Michelangelo, stop! One year is enough for any painting! There's no way additional time spent developing it can possibly be worth the increased cost of paying you for that long!" We'd be deprived of the final finished work due to an arbitrary restriction on the amount of time an artist is allowed to work on their product, or an arbitrary limit on how much they can sell their work for. People are allowed to sell artwork for whatever price they want, as long as someone is willing pay it, and this allows people to make a living doing it because it takes time to make art and people need money to support themselves; why shouldn't I be allowed to pay whatever price I like for a video game, if I likewise deem it worth the price?

Now, even though I quite like it, I'm not claiming EU 4 is "the Sistine Chapel ceiling of games." But I do think it's very good and still has potential for improvement, which is why your attitude personally distresses me so much: I see it as potentially cutting off something artistic before it's reached completion, for what is, to me, a completely arbitrary limit to how much games should cost or how long developers should be allowed to work on them.

I can agree with you that development probably shouldn't be stretched out indefinitely; at some point you'd like the team to wrap it up, and five or so years later come out with EU 5. But given that we've now finally reached the end of CK 2's lifespan, I think we've seen how long Paradox plans to support the games in their current system. I highly suspect that Emperor stands to EU 4 in much the same relation as Holy Fury did to CK 2. Over a year between expansions, lots of quality of life improvements, the two games are at about the same age…we might get one or two small DLCs after this (like Rule Britannia/Third Rome/Golden Century size), or maybe one last normal one (people have requested a south-east Asia overhaul for a long time and it's one of the last places not majorly touched), but I'd be surprised if we see any beyond that.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThere's also the question how other developers manage to support their games for years just as well - without requiring a yearly/bi-yearly payment of 20€.

Different development team size, perhaps? If Eric Barrone makes $5 million (just throwing out numbers) off of Stardew Valley he can probably live of it for the rest of his natural life and continue making new updates for free. If the EU 4 team makes that much money, it'll probably run the team for, I dunno, a couple of years? (Taking into account salaries for all the people involved, rent and utilities for the whole company, etc.)

Plus, EU4 is undoubtedly a very complex game (both in the sense of the engine, and in all its interconnected systems); supporting it requires pretty skilled programmers/scripters/game designers/etc., so likely has commensurately higher costs than for a simpler game.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPThe game was released 7 years ago. S-E-V-E-N!!!
Any DLC at this point, no matter if it is actually a good one or not, is milking.
When you need to spend hundreds of <insert your currency> to get a complete game, something is very, very, very wrong.

They should have been working on EU5 since years ago. Instead we got Rome... and we all know how that went.

Whereas spending hundreds of <insert your currency> on EU5, EU6, and EU7 instead is somehow better…how, exactly? :wink: I'd personally rather pay hundreds for one truly great game refined over seven years than a few mediocre ones churned out and abandoned after a year or two.

And boy oh boy, quite apart from the DLC I can hardly wait for all the quality-of-life changes in the free patch that have been mentioned in dev diaries! :woot: Some long-standing issues that are finally being resolved, and ones I didn't even know I wanted.

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Hopefully this expansion/patch really fleshes out the whole diplomacy system a bit more, which for me at this point is one of the few things still lacking in Stellaris. Like, if I could have the breadth of options that EU4 has for diplomacy between countries, that'd already be a big step forward. It sounds promising from following the dev diaries, and even if I don't use the new federations the new origins system sounds pretty fun (some of the new origins, especially!).

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1.5 already? I haven't even managed to experience half the content from the last update yet! :D

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