Quoting: stretch611I can not agree with this philosophy of code not needing comments. IMHO, that is horrible advice. I doubt anyone who believes in it has ever written code with any real complexity. They surely have not gone back to old code six months later, (or someone else's code) and tried to figure out why something is happening.

I suspect that many like the advice of not creating comments because they are too lazy to do it in the first place and are not advanced enough to recognize the significance.

I am a damn good developer. With that knowledge, I realize that I still make mistakes. I want to ensure that when I go back and look for those mistakes that I have every tool available to me to help find them in the quickest way. Comments help... a lot.

Well, I have seen the opposite too: a developer write the initial code and uses a fair among of rather simple comments. A second developer touches the code (years) later, does some refactoring but leaves the (no longer matching) comments as is, cause it seems nice to have comments and because comments aren't touched if you use some tooling for refactoring (Jetbrains and friends). A third developer has to work on the code later again and gets utterly confused cause the comments are sending him into a completely false direction. All sort of comments are fine if you are the only developer of a piece of code, even over time. Though comments can have side effects if the team changes over time.

In my opinion comments should be used to explain assumptions, algorithm or describe a public api. Most basic comments though should rather move into variable name, method extraction and methods names etc. One of the important rules in software engineering imho: You never write code for yourself, but for your team members.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BrisseAt one point it had a bug which caused Steam to do 'rm -rf ~/' which caused some peoples entire home folders to be removed. It's proprietary software, so can you really trust that it doesn't do anything it's not supposed to?

Do you scan the source code of every software you run on your machine for this kind of mistakes before executing something? ;)
Don't get me wrong, this is a bad and serious error that should not happen, but please don't assume that open source software does not contain any not yet known serious mistakes just because it is open source.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: chancho_zombiethen you think I'm just going to shut it off so it stops and it won't let you (please don't turn off your computer).

When Windows, I think it was Windows 98, started to tell "You can shutdown your Computer now", I was joking one day the computers would tell us we must not shutdown them. Well, here we are... ;-)

My machine at work had just recently an empty bios battery and refused to turn off. Every time I initated a shutdown it just rebooted, even after a hard power off, only pulling the plug helped. Thought I had lost all senses, how difficult can it be to turn a computer off ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ShmerlI'd say they failed pretty badly at pushing supported gaming consoles with Linux. Their effort of Steam machines was underwhelming.

Depends on what they wanted to achieve in the first place. If they wanted to create a PS4 like thingie, sure, they failed horribly. But, this is what I believe more, if they wanted to mostly give a hint to other competitors that they can move into other directions if they want to, I guess then it wasn't too bad.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: appetrosyanI don't care anymore. Steam doesn't care about Linux, no surprise that the statistics drop.

They do care, but unfortunately they can't do magic.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestIt was actually me who made Codemasters aware of the problem. However, the game was also available for purchase from us as a standalone release. However we sold practically no copies of this because Linux players said "I'll wait until it's on Steam, I already paid for it".

Do you know what the current situation is for studios like VP or Feral? Does Steam works well for porters, I mean do you get the share you deserve when titles are sold on steam that where ported afterwards?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Whitewolfe80There are so many problems in getting developers bring a game to linux part of the problem is perception of how hard it is to port games to. The second problem is us the community collectively we are the least welcoming group on the internet and that is saying something. New users to linux are attacked instead of helped and lastly the community members that buy windows games in the hopes of playing the game in wine.
They are a pretty bad road block to a native port, why would a studio pay for a port or buy in the skills they need if your just going to use wine to play the game knowing you cant get a refund because you are playing on platform they do not support.

Yes, I guess this is indeed one of the reason why e.g. Feral is very selective with the games the port to Linux. They have much more Mac ports in their portfolio. Wine is really a double-edged sword. One the one side it is a blessing for people that want to still play some of their older games and thus is for a lot of people the reason to abandon Windows. On the other side wine is taking market share from studio's like Feral that want to bring some big titles afterwards to Linux. I avoid wine completely for gaming. Day one releases would solve this issue, but no sane publisher would risk their release day for the really big titles with customized engines etc. for the 1% Linux users.

Quoting: Whitewolfe80Yeah which is why i kind of think we have come as far as we are going to in terms of the Big triple A games. Not sure why Aspyr appear to completely abandoned linux save for their own IP that they act as publisher on. For now it seems we have Feral and vp when it comes to triple A ports. Growing linux gamer share is going to take a further push from someone with money be it Valve or another Linux friendly development company but it seems unlikely as you said large risk for a potential return.

I don't think that there will be another big push. From now on I guess it is constant slow grow for the Linux user base. Lets hope that at least at some point we will grow a little bit faster than Windows or Mac users.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: jens

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, that or a huge marketing push by a very big corporation with enough muscle to line up the big publishers and content providers behind what they can convince same is a not-to-be-missed opportunity for big profit. Valve doesn't seem to want to do that, but even if they did there are questions whether they are in fact big enough and whether their organizational style is capable of that kind of fast push requiring forceful action on a group of fronts at once.

Well, yes. But that would involve some serious money ;). I don't know, something like GTA5 exclusively with superior performance for Linux three years in row for a start. I'm doubting too that Valve could pull such a trick. But even if they are capable, why should they take such a risky and expensive step? They spend enough and keep spending to establish Linux as a stable third platform next to Windows to not be completely bound to Microsoft and have something for political pressure at hand. I guess that is mostly what Valve wants to achieve in the short term.

Sorry, misread your comment slightly. You were talking mostly about Valve or somebody else trying to align the targets of the big houses to support Linux together at at certain point. Here you would need to make several very big egos (may be not as big as the egos in the Linux community, but still .. ;) ) to partly skip their own agenda and work together. I would say this is very very difficult, usually nobody would want to take the risk and everyone wants to take the biggest share of the win, if there is any.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Grabbed the Arma3 base game from Steam (-66% off). Runs much better than expected for an unofficial port. Very cool!
I hope that the steam magic works and it counts as a Linux sell.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestMankind Divided for what reason? everyone else said it was a disappointment and cashgrab.

I liked it a lot, including the extra missions. I guess it has to do with expectations, this was the first DE game for me.

View this comment - View article - View full comments