Quoting: Drakker

Quoting: ValckI wasn't going to comment on this article in any way at all, but after this, I feel I have to present the obverse of the coin….............

What the...? Tasharen is a Canadian company based in Ontario.

I'll accept that as fact, in all honesty I can't be bothered to go and look them up. I may have misremembered, or I may have originally been misled by the developer's name, it's been such a long time; my apologies if I got that wrong.
What matters to me is not where they are based, but how they act and interact, and all I can say is that *my* personal impression was abysmal. That does not mean it has to be the same for everybody else, obviously it was not for Kuduzkehpan.
All I intended was to present a different angle, and even that was probably already too much for a thread I got myself involved in against my better judgement.

My apologies if anybody felt offended.

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I wasn't going to comment on this article in any way at all, but after this, I feel I have to present the obverse of the coin…

Quoting: Kuduzkehpan"Tasharen" is amazing company that cares about Linux users. i bought anything from them. Sightseer windward and so on. Love their game mechanics. i hope to get windward horizon soon.

Funny you should say that, since my impression was the exact opposite. Not only Linux though, Tasharen in general struck me as a company I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them.


I didn't play Windward, but I bought Sightseer and noticed spurious connection attempts to some servers in Russia (the company *is* Russian AFAICT, so probably not too surprising… but I still don't like being watched every second I play) that were clearly originating from the game with no way to opt out, I stopped playing and threw it in the bin – I may even have force-removed the game from my Steam library IIRC, it's been quite a while and I honestly can't be bothered to check. I seem to remember they were also integrating RedShell, but that's purely from memory, so please take it with a grain of salt.
The reviews and forum discussions I read, and I *did* read up on Windward too, painted a bleak picture with no communication from the company, no updates or fixes for known issues, and basically the impression of 'got their money and went dark'.
I haven't looked back, feels like it must have been five years or more, and I'm surprised they still exist and even have the gall to get out a new game.

This is all from my personal experience with them of course, maybe it's different if one actually speaks Russian and is able to visit their Russian forums, I don't know, and frankly I don't care.
I for one won't touch anything from Tasharen, be it with a pole or anything else, no matter how long.


Oh, and by the way, since neither the article nor tags mention it – Windward and Sightseer were both Unity games; I'd be surprised if they didn't pick Unity again for Windward II as well. Just in case anyone cares.

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Looks like a nice time waster.
Double bonus points for being on itch and not using The Engine That Shall Not Be Named.

Quoting: razing32Hmmm I wonder what RFCs they implemented.
Do we get to setup BGP confederations ?

TL;DR: No ;)

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Quoting: AnanaceThe thing that I like the absolute most about this, is that there's not a hint of Electron in the new code, instead just regular C# and Avalonia (which has Linux as a first-class citizen)

Yay, no Electron, invented at GitHub, owned by Microsoft. Instead, a first class .NET citizen. Nothing to see here, move along.

:D

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Game looks nice, and being on itch is always preferable to Steam if there is a choice. Even greater happiness was had when the itch info stated the game was not made with Unity ;)

Warning: Rant ahead
TL;DR: Caveat emptor as always, I guess.

Spoiler, click me

Recently, I have become more concerned about games publishing on itch initially, and when a certain publicity has been reached, switch over to Steam, and Steam only. Sometimes as a gradual transition, sometimes as a hard cut, and sometimes even with all previous hints and traces vanishing from itch entirely.

QuoteShare your mods using the game's Steam Workshop integration
Install mods from community members to enhance your gameplay

QuoteAbout Purchases on itch

When purchasing Tiny Life on itch, access to the game and all future updates will be linked to your itch account.

Please note that the most recently released version may be a preview build. It's recommended to install the itch app to select the game version to use. For more info, see the documentation article.

For a limited time, you will also receive a free Steam key for Tiny Life along with your purchase.

Maybe as somewhat of a deal sweetener, the version you get on itch.io comes with a Steam key, but to me that feels almost like a threat – just short of other games that published on itch.io initially, then pulled from there to become Steam exclusives after the fact.

I've had a couple of these now, and it feels like it's becoming a trend – test the waters on itch, and when it feels right, go full Steam ahead and just ignore the hassle of keeping itch updated or even available at all. Certainly within the rights of the dev, but morally questionable and definitely not helping maintain a healthy ecosystem.

AFAIK it requires a monetary investment to publish on Steam, so in my opinion there's nothing wrong with waiting with a Steam release in addition to releasing on other platforms; but it feels like a slap in the face to me if I pay for something on itch, only to have it pulled from my hands and forced through Steam later on.

I'm not saying this is what is going to happen here, just that I've been burnt several times in a row now, and seeing the Steam carrot dangled in front of me so obviously, I was extremely hesitant to bite, although I eventually did in the end ;)

@Ellpeck, thank those 'colleagues' for poisoning the well, and don't become one of them.

@everybody else, apologies for the (hopefully unrelated) rant, I had to get that out there.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyTo smooth out these fluctuations, Valve needs to start selling Steam Decks in China!

Would it be more effective to sell Steam Decks in Australia? Only half joking, I wouldn't know how to do the maths; my gut feeling before morning coffee is you'd need to sell way more SDs in China to balance out fluctuations from China, while needing only a comparatively small number to off-balance the rest of the world via Australia :)


Also, I'm acutely aware of explosive population growth and China's decision to revert the one-child policy, but whiskey tango actual foxtrot... that can't be the reason for such massive fluctuations? ;)

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In light of recent events, it might be more important than ever to actually look at the engine that's used in a game before getting too hyped up...

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Quoting: slembckeJeez. This is the most Unity-in-202X thing I've heard yet. Remember when they bought that IronSource analytics company? (The one that had an uneasy past relationship with malware?) They released a bunch of financials at that time that made it pretty obvious that they made very little money from the game engine itself. It was all ads, services, and selling user data. This slots right in with that honestly...

Mmh... InstallCore, nice, hadn't heard of that, probably Windows only...

Not to forget Red Shell... wait, there's not even an article (any more?)! And only a single mention in a related topic? Now that's what I call spin doctoring... There was something, right? Red Shell? Unity's Spyware"ad tracking"? Big news just a couple years ago? I can't be the only one remembering that...
Welcome to 19820243

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI would love to say that this will push more developers to use FOSS engines but my faith in developers isn't that high.

It might nudge a couple indie devs in the right direction, although I too have lost confidence. For bigger studios though I somewhat doubt the developers are the ones calling the shots, as opposed to management.
And for the really tiny new ones, it probably depends on what the youtube algorithm of the day spits out for "beginner game engine tutorial"... which is probably a self-amplifying loop unless the fallout from this is really massive.

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QuoteXenonauts 2 is now in Early Access

[emphasis mine]

The first instalment (2014-ish) was quite the ride AFAIR.
I can't seem to find any mails or bookmarked links – maybe I do indeed have rage deleted any evidence, which would be quite exceptional – so this is all from memory a decade or so back, but I had paid for the game back when and they certainly screwed us over, with features missing, the promised Linux version turned out to be a Wine wrapper back when Wine was really hit-and-miss, and even at some point no longer access to download the game at all.
What I did find are two newsletter mails from GoG in June 2018, one where (to add insult to injury) they announce Xenonauts (part one) as a free giveaway for 48 hours, and another announcing Xenonauts 2 "coming this year". GoG may have their own issues, but somehow I doubt it's their fault that "this year 2018" translates to 2023...

A resounding "go stick it you-know-where" is all theyGoldhawk will get from me.


Edit:
Clarified "they" as "Goldhawk", to prevent any misconception that somehow I meant to accuse GoG of being at fault.
I also did find the receipt for the game, showing a purchase on Desura, rest in peace. That may actually be why there was no longer a way to download the game, so maybe it wasn't entirely Goldhawk's fault (although where there's a will, there's a way...)

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyLiterally reshaped the world? What, it's flat now?

Probably just continental drift. It happens all the time, and people do call it a conspiracy theory ;)

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