Patreon Logo Support us on Patreon to keep GamingOnLinux alive. This ensures all of our main content remains free for everyone. Just good, fresh content! Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal Logo PayPal. You can also buy games using our partner links for GOG and Humble Store.
Latest Comments by monnef
Bearded Giant Games open their own store with a 'Linux First Initiative'
14 Dec 2018 at 4:23 pm UTC

Just wondering, how such a small store will handle stuff like taxes in places (e.g. some EU countries) where it is up to a seller to pay them?

Nevertheless, I am glad to see "Linux First" in games and even own store. Sure, so far for only games from one studio (one dev?), but that could evolve. I wish them luck :).

Free to play robot battler ‘Robocraft’ has changed quite a bit with the Infinity Update
30 Nov 2018 at 5:46 am UTC

Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: TobyHaynesMy youngest son runs around with various Legendary weapons mounted on the side of his behemoth vehicles and has a great time. Multiplayer appears to be "non-toxic" too - people get on and play.
I've noticed people often play actual roles too, I've seen so many people be a dedicated healer - very nice to see.
I played it a long time ago (a year maybe or more?) and it was quite fun. Didn't even know it has a Linux support. I was usually running hybrid support or full-blown healer. Some of the creations of others were so great. Having unlimited cubes that sounds amazing, I might give it another try :).

Obsidian Entertainment and inXile Entertainment have officially joined Microsoft
11 Nov 2018 at 8:55 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Guest... These companies also only make games that wouldn't benefit at all from using apis like dx12 or vulkan, they're just not that graphically intense.

I'm not seeing their plan here, I'm not seeing a lot of their plans these days and it makes me a little nervous.
That doesn't mean they won't use DX12, vendor-lock is powerful incentive for MS.

Programming puzzle game God is a Cube: Programming Robot Cubes is now in Early Access, win a copy
30 Oct 2018 at 5:55 pm UTC Likes: 1

Not sure if render qualifies, but at least I had fun making it :).



Done in Blender and tweaked in RawTherapee.

PS: Damn, transparency with smoke are killers. This small picture took over 20 minutes to render on quite good GPU (GTX 1070).

Strategy game Epicinium where your influence on the environment matters plans an open source release plus Kickstarter
23 Oct 2018 at 11:42 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: elmapuli dont like to judge an book by its cover and an game by its graphics, but this looks poor.
by the graphics, looks like they will open source because they dont see any value in their product and expect the comunity to work for then, instead of doing an real contribution to get something in return later on.
Have you seen Minecraft? Yes, from a technical standpoint even Minecraft is more advanced (infinite 3D generated world in higher resolution [here it seems to be created from large 2D patches]), but from a graphical perspective, they are very similar. Minecraft has world put together of 1m blocks, textures of blocks with very low resolution - 16x16, models usually put together from large boxes, simplistic in-code animations. Here we have smooth pixelart animations, probably higher texture resolution, more advanced AI, support for multi-player from release.

What matters for games are mainly game mechanics and aesthetics (for some games story and other things), but definitely not graphics. IMO Minecraft rose so high because of customizability - skins, worlds, texture packs, a lot of building possibilities (even vanilla contains systems allowing to build logic circuits, ALU or whole computers) and (used to have before MS) a vibrant modding community. This game might be aiming for the same - supporting mods from the start (which Minecraft never did, class files were obfuscated and community had to develop and maintain de-obfuscation (and re-obfuscation) tools and tools enabling using multiple mods without conflicts). Minecraft had extremely basic content, limited progression, many mods would be (content-wise) worth several times of vanilla Minecraft. If they manage to find few fans with programming skills, their game can serve as a platform and I don't see anything wrong with that. Not every game is for everybody.

Jay Pinkerton, the co-writer of Portal 2 is back at Valve
31 Jul 2018 at 4:49 am UTC

Quoting: EgonautI don't expect Valve to know how to do a good game, which can get my attraction, anymore.
Yeah, I too don't like the games they are releasing lately (all multiplayer, usually targeted at hardcore players). The important part in your sentence it the "my", because they are fully capable of doing games capturing masses of players.

Quoting: tonRI think it's time for Valve making first-party + single player game(s) right how.
+1

Quoting: tonRSteam domination advantages starting to diminishing with lots of online game stores offers better product like DRM-Free (GOG, itch.io, etc) and/or ever cheaper subscription service (EA Origin, MS Store, etc).
After recent news, I am going back to Steam from GOG. GOG publicly likened GamerGame to a hate group (which was even officially by FBI proven to be a lie) and itch.io is on a same boat (tweets from owner about how non-progressive games are not welcome there). I prefer supporting Steam which is trying to not pander to political fanatics calling for censorship of wrongthink, just being a platform where I can buy games.

The Steam Linux market share for June was 0.52% as Steam is still growing rather rapidly
2 Jul 2018 at 11:30 am UTC

I am very sceptical about Steam's survey. It popped up 3 times on Windows and only 1 time on Linux (I am dual-booting). Does it mean I got counted 3 times as Windows user and only 1 time Linux user? Does games I play/buy and on which platform count? Or is it simply "randomly show survey" and then count me as a Windows user, even though I spent most of my time in Linux? Still confused about this Steam survey, from my POV it seems quite biased against Linux.

Reverse engineered source code for Diablo is now on GitHub
21 Jun 2018 at 12:41 pm UTC

There is a lot of disinformation about D3. Yes, I would too probably not say it's better than D2 (if ignoring graphics, and also I am probably rating D2 too high because of nostalgia). But a lot of critique here is plainly false.

Like I can set down my controller and leave the room and that is the only way I die, easy. The way they balanced it is ridiculous, and my brother and I were playing on the hoghest difficulty allowed.
There is many difficulty levels - https://us.diablo3.com/en/game/guide/gameplay/game-difficulty [External Link]

In D3 I am forced to use pets as tanks and do the damage myself.
There are summon builds - https://odealo.com/articles/helltooth-gargantuan-pet-witch-doctor-build-diablo-3-ros [External Link]

In D3 you can't even assign any skill points and the spell system
I personally hated how few wrong clicks can ruin your character in D2 (before adding reset through end-game quest). I recommend watching a GDC talk about D3, they mentioned quite a lot of down-sides of D2 skill tree (analysis paralysis, only illusion of choice - illusion of skill system depth, unintuitive/arbitrary synergies, lack of any visual [and for most part even game play] effect on spells/skills).

Blizzard calling the first run a "Tutorial" is just ridiculous since after that you already know the whole story, so why bother playing the game again in higher difficulty when there are hundreds (sic!) of other games in my steam library waiting to be played?
That's the definition of a Diablo game. You quickly level and get through tutorial (story) and then the meat of the game is actually gearing up, trying builds with build-defining unique/legendary items (this aspect was quite weak until itemization patch which landed before expansion). In my opinion, if you don't like the grind, then you really shouldn't have bough a Diablo game. How long was D2 on easy difficulty? I am pretty sure just a few hours.

Diablo games start at high/top levels when that build-defining gear starts to drop. That's why story is labelled as tutorial. I am a filthy casual (no leaderboards, no theory crafting or obsessive min-maxing) and yet I managed to spent I think 150hours playing it (long pauses, usually going back after half a year, usually when new season starts - new content is added).

Microsoft acquires GitHub for some loose change
8 Jun 2018 at 4:13 pm UTC

Quoting: Rybladehow the hell do you "like" a comment on here? I see buttons for Report, Block, Bookmark, Link and Quote. I do have some extensions that block like buttons from third-party social media platforms... maybe they're hiding the button thinking it connects to Facebook or something. Anyone else having this issue?
It should be a last button after a quote button. It has quite generic CSS classes (li.like-button a.likebutton span.icon.like), so it might be the case something is blocking it.

Valve are easing up on what content is allowed on Steam
8 Jun 2018 at 4:08 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: rkfg
Quoting: monnefI don't agree with censorship and my opinion is, that only a game (or any other medium) literally exciting violence in concrete context (e.g. "kill the man A today around 12" ) should be illegal and censored/removed from distribution platform like Steam. That's the sane definition of hate speech
Ever played Hitman?
Oh yes, I did play some older ones. What I mean is doing a game where is used real person's name, place, date and time when they are going to be there and organizing a group IRL to attempt to kill him/her. IMO that should be illegal, since it's essentially planning a murder.

Honestly, it always seemed silly to me trying to censor "adult" games (those affected anime games on Steam don't even show anything, so label "adult" isn't probably right), but at a same time we have in so many games/movies brutality, murder, gore, litres of blood. It just feels arbitrary, to try to censor nudity/sex while violence is on every corner. In this case even more ridiculous, since it is all drawn, it is not even showing real people. I guess it is a work of "progressive" neo-puritans. If the trend continues (e.g. cancelling swimsuit part in some US miss show, firing grid girls and booth girls) US could live to see a law forbidding women to wear to indecent clothes. Such people should not be called liberals.

The corny argument "think of the children" is invalid in my opinion. It is responsibility of parents to shield children from such content, they have enough tools to do so (ratings, recommended age stickers, game descriptions, trailers, videos of gameplay). Nothing should be banned for adults/teens because of children.