Well, when everybody is waiting for you, I can understand why never releasing a game might be better PR-wise than releasing a game that most users would find 'meh', due to the hype and long wait..

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestWasn't artifact that card game that was a complete failure that nobody liked?

Well, 1.0 was great (and need close to no mechanic changed in my opinion), but got flack for the ability to trade cards for real money.

Perhaps the game was too complex for the casual Hearthstone gamers.
For sure Valve should have created more decks for it to keep their players happy, instead they decided to 'pause' the game.
Let's see how it plays out..

EDIT: Typo

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The whole concept of software patent is dumb.

To sum up, that company first attacked Gnome, then withdraw their complaints, and then need to be praised?
Nope.

I'm glad Europe (still) does not recognizes patents on ideas, not realisations.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Can't wait!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: MohandevirThis game is great (I own it), but way too hard for my playtime and patience. I'm obviously not the target audience. I would like to see them make a more "classic" RPG/Dungeon crawler, for the casual that I am, based on the same visuals/mechanics and where you don't have to "farm for heroes" to complete the game. That would be an insta-buy, for me.

Have you tried Iratus: Lord of the dead?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestPlayOnLinux? Strange way of saying Lutris.

Well, PlayOnLinux is usable and user friendly ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

AMD >>> Nvidia by the simple fact that it supports the oss driver. That's it.
I won't repeat Linus' word here, but case in point.

With mesa and my vega 64, I can play ALL my AAA games in ultra, without problem.

The only problem I encounter with my card, is that opencl is not (yet) supported out of the box in the current blender version.
Still, I see no incentive to give money to nvidia for their ongoing non-support for more than a decade.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NanobangI'm aware that the reason for the offset keys of the traditional keyboard have to do with the natural angle of fingers above the keys, so I'm curious about how it would feel to type with the grid of the Typematrix unit.

About the offset keys, this has nothing to do with the 'natural angle of the fingers' but more about having to let the typewriter little hammers stand next to each other, instead of on top of each other. This offset hasn't been fixed for the last 100 or so years.

The grid feeling is pretty neat ; since you do not have to twist your fingers to type letters that are not on the home row.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyIt seems to me that one of the major reasons for alternative layouts like Dvorak keyboards has greatly diminished since they were invented. That is, raw typing speed is not an issue nearly as often as it once was IMO. Used to be you had lots of situations where speed was the big thing. Secretaries took dictation, people typed stuff that had started out written on paper longhand. Sometimes people even typed multiple copies of the same thing! Later there was lots of "data entry", which is to say typing things into computers because the information didn't start on computers.
Nowadays much of that is gone. People compose their own emails, they don't dictate them to secretaries. Files are infinitely copyable. Increasingly, data originates in computers (eg forms are filled out online in the first place, not transcribed from paper), or is put there by scanning barcodes or those square barcode-like things. Typing mostly does not need to happen faster than composition, and QWERTY's fine for that, so there's little impetus for change.

It's a pity because QWERTY really isn't a very good layout, although I'm not sure I believe the story that it was deliberately designed to slow typists down to avoid keys sticking.

Well, you said it better than myself ; before you could rely on specialized worker to type, now *everybody* needs to type, and shop online, to argue in forums (;)), etc.
Using a superior layout is clearly not just for speed (according to studies, not my opinion), but more about comfort. Having 70% of the most used letter in english on the home row is pretty neat for my fingers and wrists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout). Having letters in bigrams (tr, ch, etc.) close to each other is another great feature.
Also big plus for me, as a native French speaker, is that english Dvorak works pretty well with French too (I can even very easily type accentuated capitals like À, È or Ç), as well for coding, with very easy access to [], {} and numbers (where Azerty forces you to use shift to access).

Well, one way to see it, is that using a dvorak layout to type English is like using Linux instead of Microsoft ; it's superior in every way to the globally used system, but :
- people will look at you weird, and
- and if you were to try it, you'd obviously need an adaptation period when you *will* feel uneasy.

That's it :)

Anyway, to each his own !

If you are curious about how and why the Dvorak layout was created, check out that (pretty old now) fanzine : https://www.dvzine.org/zine/index.html [External Link]

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Kimyrielle100% of all so-called "free"-to-play games suck. As in all of them, no exceptions. Because all of them are designed to suck unless you dump more money into it than you ever would in an actual for-purchase game.

Well, obviously with 14k+ games on Steam only, you ought to be wrong in absolutes, indeed.

For instance, Awesomenauts is now free-to-play (after costing a few bucks for some years) ; you can just earn every-single characters and spaceships by just playing, and not the Blizzard-way-of-playing with frustration so high you crack and buy packs and stuff.
No, just by having fun with the already very large roaster of heroes.

After almost 1000 hours on it, I never had any pressure (nor need) to shell out more bucks to the game than the original price I paid.
The only sad part now is that there are only ~220 players online at any moment, so for a MOBA that's very, very low :(

EDIT: typos

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It's weird nobody mentioned the awesome Typematrix keyboard, and its Dvorak layout:


I've been using this one for about 16 years now, and I can only recommend it.
The vertical columns and middle enter key are a must-have (http://typematrix.com/2030/why.php), among other nice features.

My only wish would be that a laptop vendor integrated such keyboard directly. That would be a dream come true!

Here are other variants, like the Qwerty one:


...and the pure blank one (which is pretty handy when combined with translucent skins):

Quoting: NanobangAfter 4 decades of touch-typing on QWERTY keyboards I'll never be able to type on anything else. I'll certainly never be able to type on anything as singularly arranged as the System 76 keyboard shown above.

Well, I can tell you that the brain is a marvelous machine, since I already touch-typed on Azerty before, and while it took me about 3 months to regain (and surpass) my previous wpm speed on the Dvorak layout, this absolutely does not mean you forget how to touch-type with your previous layout.
This only happens with Homer Simpson ;)
When you learn to drive, do you forget how to ride a bike ? Well same thing with keyboard layouts !

View this comment - View article - View full comments