Quoting: TheSHEEEPEpic just has the better deals for developers.

My hope is that Valve will wake up from its slumber and starts giving developers better deals as well. A cut lower than the absurd 30% would be a very good start.

Concerning the game at hand, it does suck for Feral I imagine, but I was never interested in the "Saga" series to begin with. Too limited in scope.

I wish more devs would dual launch on Itch and Steam. I just bought Space Grunts 2 by OrangePixel that way. They wanted $10 on Itch, I ended up throwing them $15 through the tip system (which matched was slightly more money than the pound-sterling price on Steam, but only by a bit), but which is a 50% mark up from their perspective. And I get a Steam key anyway, so win-win.

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Quoting: psy-q

Quoting: kuhpunktRelease it on several stores then. It's not like it's complicated.

Last I heard it's very complicated. Each store has its own toolset for uploads, its own publishing requirements, its own system for how updates and patches are handled. An indie dev once compared the experience between GOG, itch.io (the easiest) and Steam (the most complicated), but that was before EGS existed and I can't find the article now. But the conclusion was "think carefully before adding another store", so it seems it isn't something you just do on a whim.

But this isn't an indie - and regardless, once you've done it once (as they have), it's really not complicated. Besides, the comment wasn't about technical complications, it was about the argument itself - "we don't want to be tied to one store", all the while tying themselves, via exclusivity, to one store. It beggars belief.

I'm sure they'll also launch on MS Store though, then use that as a bogus claim of non-exclusivity, as if anyone cares, or indeed buys from the MS Store...

This is purely about vilifying Steam. What Epic don't seem to realise though is that every time they steal a publisher for an exclusive, they glorify Steam as the good guy and vilify themselves.

God I hate Epic.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: elmapul"sidestepping the actual Windows API. "
how is that even possible?

So, again, just as I understand it from reading bug reports about a game I'm vaguely interested in rather than from any in-depth knowledge, most programs will use some kind of library when they need to make some system calls to make something happen - libc or ntdll.dll, say - but it's also possible to just make system calls directly: libc and ntdll.dll need to be able to make their own system calls, too, of course. Windows and Linux both use the same mechanism for this (I think it's a processor instruction and registers?) but they use different numbers in the registers: that is, they'll both have a system call number 12, but there's no reason for it to necessarily do the same thing. In fact, which thing gets done by each number changes between versions of Windows, so the developers doing this need to check the version of Windows and use a look-up table to generate their numbers.

Exactly this! on i386 you put the syscall number in the eax register and some other data in other registers depending on the syscall and then you raise the $80 interrupt. On x86_64 they implemented a pure syscall instruction on the CPU.

Here is an old "Hello World" example that calls the sys_write syscall (syscall 4) to write the "hello world" string to stdout and then it calls exit (syscall 1) to let the kernel terminate the "application" with a proper exit code.
 
.data
    s:
        .ascii "hello world\n"
        len = . - s
.text
    .global _start
    _start:

        movl $4, %eax   /* write system call number */
        movl $1, %ebx   /* stdout */
        movl $s, %ecx   /* the data to print */
        movl $len, %edx /* length of the buffer */
        int $0x80

        movl $1, %eax   /* exit system call number */
        movl $0, %ebx   /* exit status */
        int $0x80

Jesus, I'm getting wild, unwelcome flashbacks to the mid-80's and trying to learn 68020 assembler to get a simple text message scrolling smoothly across the screen! I got there, but I paid for that in blood and almost literal tears. Never again!

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Super helpful, CatKiller. Now you mention the benchmarks, it's obvious that they've rolled their own prior to submitting a patch for wider adoption. Thanks for clearing that up.

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I'm a bit confused as to why they pushed this patch at all. If they only need to establish whether something is happening in Wine, or in Windows, can't they simply apply their patch to a locally-compiled kernel and test a few of the offending games/apps with that custom kernel loaded?

Presumably it's far wider-reaching than locally debugging a few system calls though. Perhaps this does lay a low-level foundation for future work, like anti-cheat, or just general stability or better compatibility.

I don't know much about this stuff though (which should be obvious from my rambling above). Always interesting to see what happens under the hood!

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Quoting: Pangaea

Quoting: scaineIt's free, and I got over 30 hours out of it. I didn't even stop because of any of the "restrictions" you mentioned (which I didn't notice), I just stopped because there was a free weekend of Grim Dawn and I ended up preferring it.

PoE is a bit "skill-less" after about 20 hours. You spam your big spells and mostly everything on the screen dies a fiery death. But Grim Dawn scales far better and does a better job of showing you when a powerful enemy really is a powerful enemy. You can pick it up for about 75% off on sale - I wouldn't pay full price for it, but it's a cracking game.

20-30 hours probably isn't enough tbh. These issues are a lot more present when you have gone through the "campaign" and are trying to fill out maps on the Atlas. I've not played for several leagues now due to what I talked about, but from updates it looks like they have continued down the path of zoom-zoom and right-click and kill the screen.

Wouldn't call it skill-less either to be honest, as it does take skill to zoom around the screen and kill maps in a few minutes, and get into a rhythm with flask usage without looking at buttons or timers. That said, though, a great deal is decided on what build you go with, and the gear you're able to get. Either from lucky drops, or (ab)using the market.

It's one of many games that are moving in the wrong direction, and back when I played that view was pretty rampant in their forum, especially among players that had supported the game in the early days and had seen this development for several years. Many had already left, and I know several "whales" that have left since then too. I wish they went back to the roots a bit, but it is what it is. Ultimately I'm glad I stopped playing that game, because it simply wasn't fun. Felt more like monotonous and punishing work, which is not something I want to spend my free time doing.

Nice for those who still enjoy it, mind you, and in any case it's good that games, any games, will be supported on Linux, or are easier to play via DXVK and/or Wine.

I guess it does annoy me a little when people complain about free to play games because of grind. I'm not sure what those people were expecting? That a good sized dev studio will just, year on year, rattle out free content for the masses? Of course there's grind! Of course you bypass it with money!

That doesn't stop you enjoying tens of hours of free content?! This is how Guild Wars 2 works, for example. I download it, choose a character and play around 40 hours. I get to level 38. I think... wow, I love this game and I've unlocked about 20% of the map and I'm nearly 50% through one of the 9(!) playable classes. Do I keep playing, or do I pay the £26 to unlock the full game and all its expansions and boost my character to maximum level (80)? I paid, and I'm still playing weeks later, but I think I might try the Ranger class next and I doubt I'll pay another £26 to boost that character. That's... okay. It's a model that works for ArenaNet and its players.

Similarly, Warframe. Similarly, Path of Exile. And probably many others. I don't think you get to complain about end-game content in a free to play if you haven't actually spent any money to support the developers.

Or, well, sure complain away. I'm just not really going to pay it much heed.

And none of this is really aimed at you, Pangaea. The only bit I really disagreed with you on was the word "technically" in your original post! It's definitely free to play and I got an enjoyable 30 hours on it before moving on.

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Quoting: PangaeaIs the game still a zoom-zoom speedorama and right-click and the screen dies kinda game? It was fun for a while, but all that grinding and headache inducing game got boring.

Nice if it's eventually properly supported on Linux, though. Worked perfect for me with DXVK a year or two ago, mind you.

It's technically free to play, but that isn't going to be a very practical solution for very long. Too much loot, different 'currency', and loads of stuff from different "leagues", and very small stacking sizes for most things. UI design is geared towards selling extra stashes, and of course there are more microtransctions than you can wave a very large stick at too.

Oh well, it was fun for a while, but that kind of gameplay simply wasn't for me. Not enough Pavlovian genes :P

It's free, and I got over 30 hours out of it. I didn't even stop because of any of the "restrictions" you mentioned (which I didn't notice), I just stopped because there was a free weekend of Grim Dawn and I ended up preferring it.

PoE is a bit "skill-less" after about 20 hours. You spam your big spells and mostly everything on the screen dies a fiery death. But Grim Dawn scales far better and does a better job of showing you when a powerful enemy really is a powerful enemy. You can pick it up for about 75% off on sale - I wouldn't pay full price for it, but it's a cracking game.

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I like the look of this and it led to review other ShotX games on Steam. None of them jumped out at me (not even their TD effort!), but in the recommendations section for Danger Gazers, I came across a game called Mana Spark looks amazing. Bought it and downloading now. I'll keep my eyes peeled for Dungeons of Clay though - lovely visuals.

I'm not sure if Mana Spark will cure my Noita addiction, but it's worth a shot.

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Quoting: michaThe game looks nice, especially the core concept!

( Also in case anyone is interested doing a similar commit graph viz: https://gource.io/ [External Link] )

That's very cool. I wonder what happened on October 13th! :)

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Quoting: KayKay91

Quoting: BladeforceNever heard of it but it sure looks like a rip off of worms

Cept this game has nothing to do with Worms, the combat is not turn based and it's basically ya pick a weapon you wish to start with and ya go around killing, using your mouse to aim.

Can only presume the comment was aimed at another article - the Shellshock one, maybe? Even then, not really anything like Worms in execution, but at least the gameplay concept in that is vaguely similar to Worms? A little?

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