Quoting: fagnerlnWe really need a massive adoption of appimage/flatpaks/snaps...

Completely agreed but not sure which of the above issues that solves? Properly stable and updated application on all distros will be awesome though (AppImages aren't auto-updated by default so the argument applies to the other two better). I try to do some work on snapping applications and participating in snapcraft forum discussions but it's time-consuming and I really need to get on with university work... If anyone else would like to learn, to me it seems a tad easier than Flatpak (though they haven't got round to proper support for distros (tons of other features they're working on) doing different stores yet so it's not as distro-agnostic - also having one central store does seem to make it a bit easier for the end-user, developer, and snapcrafter) because (nearly) all the packaging is in one declarative `snapcraft.yaml` but I'm not much of a developer so I've only been able to help with bits and bobs rather than actually produce a working snap. The tutorial for snapping is here [External Link] and you can use the Discourse forum [External Link] to get help and to see what people are working on. Also fork this repo [External Link] and use it to get a snap released.

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Lack of games was one of the biggest reasons that people gave for not switching to desktop Linux. Desktop Linux still has problems when it comes to many things - doesn't support much specialist software that people need (though there's great native alternatives and Wine supports some of it), not compatible enough with certain non-Linux software (e.g. MS Office), software updates are problematic (snappy/Flatpak will hopefully fix that, but they're still in rather heavy development and in the process of being adopted - also there's two 'universal' standards, which is problematic in itself), not pre-installed on many PCs, not promoted enough - but whilst by no means have all Windows games been ported to desktop Linux, such a sizeable chunk has that that's much less of a reason to not use desktop Linux than it used to be. I'd be happy with few games, to be honest, but having access to all Valve games, Civ V, AoE II HD (via PlayOnLinux and a couple of custom tweaks), The Pokemon Trading Card Game Online (via PlayOnLinux, works out-of-the-box), Undertale, etc = very cool. (Yes I have a weird taste in games and tbh I don't game *that* much, but still, I think it's cool and very helpful for desktop Linux in general).

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I'm more than happy for Feral to promote themselves with this, hopefully they act on the feedback!

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Age of Empires II HD [External Link] is now £3.74 (75% off) and with the DLC included it's £9.96 (72% off). Great RTS with a very active competitive community. You can get it running with PlayOnLinux but with two caveats: you have to rename the launcher and you have to reinstall AoE (not Steam) on every patch (and rename the launcher after every reinstall). Full instructions below:

Install PlayOnLinux (POL). Install Age of Empires II HD from that (you may need to check the Testing checkbox when searching for the installer in the program). On the Age of Empires II HD entry in POL, hit Configure, then the Miscellaneous tab, then Open program's directory, then rename Launcher.exe to Launcher.exe.bak and rename AoK HD.exe to Launcher.exe. Then you should be able to launch AoE II HD from POL.

Every time AoE is patched, you'll need to reinstall AoE to install the patch properly and get multiplayer to work. Going back to Configure for AoE, click 'Make a new shortcut from this virtual drive', then click Steam.exe or whatever Steam's launcher is, then Next, then 'I don't want to make another shortcut', then Next. Launch Steam from that new POL entry, right-click on AoE in your library and click Uninstall. Then install it again. You'll probably need to rename the AoK HD.exe launcher as I described every time you reinstall too.

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Quoting: Ads20000Normally I wouldn't think it would work but those rules seem pretty generous for noncommercial use!

Having said that, what's Halo Online and why did it get shut down?

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Quoting: razing32This looks too much like Halo.
Wonder what MS and their lawyers will do.

Well they reckon it's fine under this: http://www.xbox.com/en-us/developers/rules [External Link]

Normally I wouldn't think it would work but those rules seem pretty generous for noncommercial use! Perhaps Microsoft didn't have in mind people making entire good-quality free games out of it but can you see anything specific in those rules preventing Installation 01 from doing what they're doing? I don't think they're doing reverse engineering, for example, just recreating?

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Also, making someone's Gravatar their avatar by default instead of the blankish one would be nice (just enabled it manually, but many sites do it by default, would be nice if this site did too!)

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Ideally you need a way to sort comments (imho a new intelligent formula that balances putting good comments (enabling up and down votes) and putting new comments at the top since, at the moment, comment systems that sort according to score are biased towards older comments) instead of subjectively restricting 'toxic' comments they could simply be downvoted by the community so that less people see them.

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Quoting: Mountain ManI'm waiting for the game to actually leave alpha. It has been in development for nearly a decade, which is notable in and of itself since open source game projects tend to be abandoned after a couple of years, but I'm still suspicious that it will never really be finished.

There's just so many improvements that can be made, they're not planning to go into Beta until they've finished with all the feature development (they're planning to just bugfix in Beta, so maybe Beta would be quite a short stage? Imho once they reach Beta you can bet on a release fairly soon, relatively speaking) which could take forever if they keep on thinking of new stuff yeah, but I can understand that it is nearly impossible for an open-source project (as awesome as this one is) with little funding to keep up with current proprietary game quality. Perhaps they should just jump to Beta, release, and patch from there (they could do fairly big gaps between releases (other than bugfix and balance updates), longer than between Alphas so that a metagame can develop over the course of each release) but perhaps they don't feel that it's really release quality.

I know they were planning to do a sequel once they've finished this game but imho they should release a Beta for 0AD sooner than they seem to be planning, ditch the sequel idea and just focus on making 0AD a great AAA-quality competitive game with regular balance updates and much less regular big feature releases.

Imho they should go something like this:
Whenever-its-ready: Instead of releasing Alpha 22, release Beta 1 (package version 0.1)
Every month: Release a new Beta (package versions 0.x)
When vast majority of bugs gone/bug-wise it's release-ready: Release 0AD Season 1 (package version 1.0.0, use semantic versioning for future releases)
Over each Season, make bugfix releases as (x.y.z) z updates and balance changes as y updates (if both in one release, release as a y update)
Every year or every two years - make a new Season (x update) with all the non-bugfix/balance changes they couldn't include before due to release policy. This should be forked off the master branch of development (where all these changes should've been pushed) with a few Betas and RCs released for stability (as x.0.0-beta1, -beta2, -RC1 etc)

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Quoting: EmazzaThey might have patents implementations that they have to work around (because they have integrated them under NDA) and specific optimizations for games, basically loads of secret sauces they don't want to open yet...

Patents implementations yeah (I'm guessing relating to the graphics cards themselves and the manufacturers of those graphics cards?), but specific optimizations for games? They're not charging for these drivers are they? So why not open them (if the latter reason is the only reason), unless they're planning to charge for them in the future?

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