Quoting: BOYSSSSS

Quoting: TheSHEEEPYour argument is based on an eventuality that will simply never happen. You think police will kick down your door and arrest you for using a copy of a game you bought some time ago, but no longer "own"? Come on!
Might as well argue that you can't play your GOG games any more if you get abducted by aliens and they only have an old Commodore lying around.

Preparing for such an eventuality makes about as much sense as never using ROMs to play old games, as you are actually only allowed to play ROMs of games you own (and afaik only if you made the ROM yourself).
That's the very essence of tinfoil-hattery. Why waste valuable lifetime to prepare for something that will never happen? Just so, that in the 0.005% of it happening you can point and say "Told you so!"?

Very well said. I've been wondering how best to respond to people crying about Valve's TOS, because it doesn't include text that says you can keep your games you bought that run without the Steam Client, even if Steam closes shop.

According to steam support [External Link], you can keep playing games after deleting your account if that game doesn't require a steam account. I expect this to apply to anything that doesn't require the steam client to run after it has been installed.

Legally speaking, I expect you are allowed to play anything DRM-free that you have paid for in most countries even if it's against the TOS of the store. That is, as long as you haven't transferred the copy legally or illegally to anyone else first.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If they are not confident a platform will be supported then they shouldn't announce it. At least a lot of non-linux customers are complaining about lack of steam support so we are not alone in this.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This video [External Link] showcasing the universities in-game is quite promising. I thought I didn't want it two days ago because I have played it too much already, but I am reconsidering at the moment.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This game gave me my money's worth during early access. I haven't played it for a while, but it was good for what it was.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It has released now. The later ones require the host to know 3 steam friends to join in as you cannot progress unless 4 of you do the same task.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Train fever(94 hours) -> Transport Fever(5 hours) -> Transport Fever 2, transport fever was basically what train fever should have been. I never really got into transport fever because the difference between the two first was too small, and they didn't fix enough of the shortcomings in the first releases of transport fever. I wonder if the next game will bring something new to the table so I can get into it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It looks like a quite decent game, with better gameplay than tropico 5. I haven't played it enough yet to say for sure though. On a technical side, on some maps, or maybe in certain eras, FPS drops quite a lot. The 4th tutorial gives me 5-15 FPS on recommend graphics, and 10-23 on very low. I'd say it's playable on 10+, but is too annoying when it drops below that.

In the other tutorials FPS is fine. The 4th tutorial is fine again on recommended graphics after finishing the 5th, without me really doing anything to fix it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Sir_Diealot

Quoting: silmeth

Quoting: Sir_DiealotSo you are not willing to download 50 GB for a weekend but to download 50 GB for two hours of streaming?

Oh and don't worry guys, I'm sure Google has more plans than just data collection, oh no.
This is going to be an entirely new advertisement platform. Your games will become billboards, just like web pages are today.

I would. Cause that’s 50 GB (well, more like 20 GB for two hours, if 25 Mb/s is true) during playing, without waiting for 50 GB to download up front. That’s just more convenient.

Yeah I didn't do the math before, it should be about 11 GB per hour. That's still plenty, way more than you'd need for a regular online multiplayer game and it will be needed even for single player games. The longer you play, the worse it gets, 5 hours and you've used up more bandwidth than the 50 GB download.
Other services like Steam are also wasting huge amounts of bandwidth (always update everything by default), but this is something else.

And then you'll have to ask yourself what for?
I see a lot of benefits for Google (total control, data collection platform, ad delivery platform).
I see mostly drawbacks for the user.

I have multiple games I have bought with less than 2 hours of playtime. I'd say 15-30 minutes is enough to decide if I want to download it.

I don't know which video codec they are using, but I wouldn't be surprised if they choose AV1. The 25Mb/s figure is slightly higher than what the Wikipedia page of AV1 codec [External Link] says 1920x1080@60 on main profile should be, but if you are bandwidth limited, then you should be able to reduce to a lower resolution and rate to reduce it significantly.

According to those AV1 figures it actually looks like their 4K alternative at 30 Mb/s [External Link] is 3840x2160@30fps, while their 25Mb/s figure is for 1920x1080@60, or possibly an older version of it. AV1 can scale down the resolution quite a bit if you are bandwidth limited, although I suppose most games are unplayable before you reach the lowest resolutions.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If you don't know if you will like a game, I think streaming is a great option. I definitely won't download a 50GB game for a free weekend, but I would be willing to stream it. You will obviously need audio and video codecs suited for real time, and I expect you will want a smaller buffer than most live video today use. This will probably cost something in terms of graphical glitches during playback, but I do believe it can be done. A new video codec might be required for a great experience though. You will obviously never be able to reduce the input lag to below the ping, but assuming your uplink is reliable enough, and has enough capacity I don't think you will have to multiply your ping by much.

As others have mentioned, this could bring great games to low-performance laptops. Additionally, I do think it will be more efficient to have high-quality hardware for a fraction of the users, rather than regular quality for all users. Say I play 2 hours a day and that I use a GTX 1060 today. I would expect there would be benefits sharing a single RTX 2080 with 11 other people, rather than giving each their own 1060 that is idling most of the time. If the company is global, and people from all over the world are using it, then you can reduce the idling quite a bit without compromising the quality of service. Taking into account that not all games require the best hardware, you could share hardware for the less demanding games without degrading the service too much, reducing the total costs even more.

All in all, I don't think this service will be good enough for hardcore gamers who are willing to spend a lot of money on new hardware, but it could bring more games to the casual gamer growing the gaming industry.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This is definitely one of the best linux games out there. I don't remember exactly when I started playing it, but I found a savegame using version 1.3.14 from October 2008 in my archive of old stuff.

View this comment - View article - View full comments