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Latest Comments by Dunc
Come tell us about what you've been gaming on Linux lately
18 May 2020 at 11:45 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: omicron-bPlayed through Red Faction Guerrilla (Proton) just because I liked the first game as a child, turns out the game is quite fun.
It's the only Red Faction game I've played to any great extent, and I absolutely loved it. There's nothing quite as cathartic as smashing up Martian buildings with a big hammer. :)

Quoting: soulsourceI've been "playing" Elite Dangerous.

I would have to lie if I said I was completely sober when I accepted a tourist contract two weeks ago. A tourist contract to "Dancing with Giants", 33k lightyears from LHS 331, where the contract started.
Oops. I picked up a 6000t transport contract a month or two ago, playing solo. I wish I could blame alcohol, but my only excuse is that I hadn't played it in a while and I'd forgotten how much that is. It wasn't too far, fortunately, but that was the whole evening gone.

Come tell us about what you've been gaming on Linux lately
17 May 2020 at 11:49 pm UTC Likes: 1

After saying I'd never played it in the Star Wars Day thread a couple of weeks ago, I gave in* and bought Knights of the Old Republic (and its sequel). I can see why it's considered a classic. It's certainly looking a bit long-in-the-tooth, but the basic gameplay and storytelling still hold up pretty well, 17 years later.

Quoting: PatolaI just installed Grand Theft Auto V Premium Edition that Epic Games Store is giving for free
Wait... what? I heard the rumours, but didn't believe they'd actually do it.

...aaaand I don't have enough space to install it. 96Gb. :O That's comfortably bigger than anything else I own: almost three TW3s (plus DLC). Still, it's on my Epic account now (still all free games :D ), and it's not like I haven't played through it before, although the XBox360 version was pretty cut-down compared to PC.

EDIT: In more good news, it turns out Epic has throttled download speeds in the UK. I'm averaging about 300Kbps here. It's going to take about a week to install. I suppose I shouldn't complain when they're giving it away for free, but... :'(

*Heavily influenced by watching the OutsideXbox livestream [External Link] that afternoon. I'd bought the thing, installed it, and started playing before it had finished.

Experiment with light beams in the fantastic LIT: Bend the Light
16 May 2020 at 10:31 pm UTC Likes: 1

That reminds me a little of Deflektor [External Link], which I played near-obsessively back in the day.

Microsoft president admits they were wrong on open source
16 May 2020 at 12:28 pm UTC Likes: 8

As with others here, it's going to take a lot more than friendly words for me to trust Microsoft.

Quoting: JanneBut they are clearly a different company than they were 15-20 years ago. Companies consist of people, and as people change, so can companies.
I'm not sure they change all that much. Despite numerous changes in personnel, and even a short (second) period as a successful PC manufacturer, I don't think IBM ever reconciled itself to the fact that it wasn't going to own the PC market in the way it had with previous generations.

I see Microsoft in the same light. It's a company that was founded on the productization of software, playing its cards close to its chest, jealously guarding its source. It's trying to adapt to open source because it sees the way the wind's blowing. But corporate cultures run deep, and it's always going to be an uncomfortable fit. As others have said, I'll begin to believe it when major Microsoft projects - Office, DirectX, even Windows - go open source. I'm not holding my breath.

Cyberpunk point and click 'VirtuaVerse' is out now and looks incredible
13 May 2020 at 12:43 am UTC

The track names are great too like DDoS Attack and Keygen Assault
It gets a million bonus points from me for “My Lorraine 500”. :D

If you feel the need to take down capitalism then Tonight We Riot is out now
9 May 2020 at 3:46 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: GuestThese people are nuts, truly thinking the world would be better if it was conquered by china...
China? I think you're confusing Socialism with Communism there.
I think you are. Socialism is, by the Marxian analysis, allegedly the transitional state between “capitalism” and communism. No communist party has ever declared that it has actually “achieved communism”; it's always a sort of hypothetical platonic ideal which might be reached at some unknown point in the future. Try convincing the Chinese Communist Party that what they have over there isn't socialism (or that it is communism) and see how you get along.

But this isn't the place. I don't want to lose friends here. Let's keep this stuff on the political blogs, eh?

Unreal Engine 4.25 is up with tons of Linux improvements and Vulkan API fixes
6 May 2020 at 11:07 am UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: Ehvis
Quoting: Luke_NukemArgh. That bloody awful penguin looks out of place amongst all other logos. It needs a serious update.
What Linux could use is a logo.
The official Linux logo resembles “Linux” in a serif font, with the “i” in red. I had trouble finding it online (here it is [External Link], with a superfluous Tux), because it's rather fallen out of use, but I remember seeing it in the corner of boxed copies of SuSE and Mandrake back in the day.

The Linux Foundation has its own “L-in-a-square” logo, but that's really the Foundation's, rather than representing Linux itself. They seem to use Tux when talking about the kernel project.

I kind of like the goofiness of Tux. There's a school of thought in advertising that deliberately creates bad commercials (you know the ones; bad acting, poor dubbing, terrible jingles) because they're memorable: the thinking is that remembering the advert - and hence the product - is more important than presenting a slick image. People know Tux. Don't dismiss the value of that lightly.

Software news: Inkscape finally hits 1.0 and Krita 4.3.0 gets a first Beta
5 May 2020 at 8:39 pm UTC

I was using Inkscape just the other day, and hadn't even noticed I'd pulled in the 1.0 release since. There are definitely some nice performance improvements. Mind you, although it might be okay on widescreen monitors, the side dock was already a little too big for my 5:4 and now it's just ridiculous, taking up about a third of the screen. I can close it when I'm not using it, I guess, but it's a little annoying.

Quoting: EikeI looked up GIMP, but that had it's 1.0 in 1998. It might have been WINE what I remembered so vaguely.
Probably. Enlightenment's still on 0.23.1 after 23 years.

(In fairness, things got weird when they decided to keep 0.16 and 0.17 going in parallel. They prefer to call the current release “E23”, following a simplified Firefox-like numbering system, while E16, developed from the 0.16 codebase, officially reached 1.0 in 2009.)

May the Fourth be with you - a look over what Star Wars games are playable on Linux
4 May 2020 at 11:52 am UTC

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga works, apparently (I started this comment thinking, “I'm sure it must, since Lego Batman does”, then realised I could go and check on the Wine AppDB and ProtonDB. D'oh!). Definitely my favourite Star Wars game. Although, to be fair, I've never played KoTR and the sit-down version of the arcade game runs it a very close second.

What are you clicking on this weekend? Come have a chat in the comments
3 May 2020 at 8:42 pm UTC Likes: 2

I picked up Total War: Shogun 2 in the free giveaway last week. It's a series that's been on my radar for years, but which I never quite got around to. I'm glad the giveaway finally introduced me to it. I expected more real-time tactical battling and not as much turn-based strategy, but it's a pleasant surprise. I've thoroughly enjoyed what I've seen so far.

I've also still been taking Assetto Corsa and both Project Cars for the occasional spin. The handling in Assetto, even with a controller, is so impressive.

Quoting: TobyGornowI prefer fiddling with Godot, I had an idea in my head for some times and I had to exorcise it.
My problem is coming up with ideas. At least, ones that I might feasibly be able to achieve with my limited talent.

So far so good, I suck badly at texturing, I lack the patience needed to paint all the little detail by hand and using shaders in Blender is a long process when you don't really know what your doing...
Provided you aren't looking for anything too specialized, CC0 Textures [External Link] is a good resource. Also HDRI Haven [External Link] for CC0-licenced HDR environment maps. You probably wouldn't want to use them in a commercial game (although you could), but for a spot of tinkering, they're very good.

Having not really dabbled much since the early '90s, what surprised me on coming back to game development (*snort* :S: ) with Godot is how much of it nowadays is the creation of the art assets, compared to coding. At a very rough guess, I'd say it was about 10-20% art, 80-90% coding back in the '80s, and now - thanks both to 3D texturing and game engines like Godot doing all the really hard low-level stuff for you - it's pretty much the other way round.