Quoting: nitroflow

Quoting: KlausThe logic behind forcing a cut of in-game payments is quite understandable really.

Treating in-game payments any different from the intial purchase would encourage a business model, where the game is given away for free, and income is generated solely by in-game purchases.

The most straight forward model would be a game that serves as a "free demo", with the "full version" being obtained by unlocking the content as microtransaction. Without forcing the use of Steam-Wallet for the Steam version, Valve wouldn't see a dime, while paying the infrastructure costs. The same already applies when customers purchase games outside of Steam, but use Steam for downloading and updating them, but so far this is apparently treated as a trade-off, speculating on a sufficient percentage of players purchasing the game directly through Steam.

The same concept is applied on other download platforms, specifically Google Play and the iOS Appstore. The latter is the strictest about it and forbids even links to out-of-app purchases – which makes sense, for the same reasons, but results in awful user experiences for content-reseller apps (eBooks, Video- and Music-Streaming). 30% of the purchase price might be more than 100% of the net-earnings, while having the customer pay extra for in-app purchases would make the feature pretty much useless.

Except this has been done before on steam, just search any F2P game and at most what you find for sale are starter packs, while the game's premium currency is bought through the game's own site.

Got a point there. In the past, it has also been done on iOS though. Then apple cracked down on Amazon over it.

We'd really need clarification here on whether Valve's handling has changed, or if it is a safety measure by the developers, who prefer to stay within the stated terms of the contract rather than trying to sidestep it.

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The logic behind forcing a cut of in-game payments is quite understandable really.

Treating in-game payments any different from the intial purchase would encourage a business model, where the game is given away for free, and income is generated solely by in-game purchases.

The most straight forward model would be a game that serves as a "free demo", with the "full version" being obtained by unlocking the content as microtransaction. Without forcing the use of Steam-Wallet for the Steam version, Valve wouldn't see a dime, while paying the infrastructure costs. The same already applies when customers purchase games outside of Steam, but use Steam for downloading and updating them, but so far this is apparently treated as a trade-off, speculating on a sufficient percentage of players purchasing the game directly through Steam.

The same concept is applied on other download platforms, specifically Google Play and the iOS Appstore. The latter is the strictest about it and forbids even links to out-of-app purchases – which makes sense, for the same reasons, but results in awful user experiences for content-reseller apps (eBooks, Video- and Music-Streaming). 30% of the purchase price might be more than 100% of the net-earnings, while having the customer pay extra for in-app purchases would make the feature pretty much useless.

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Quoting: Kimyrielleappealed to a tiny fraction of MMO players. Most present day MMO players wouldn't have touched Ultima Online or Everquest with a ten foot pole. And yet they bring back all these hardcore features that died for a reason.

I wanted to refute your claim, because I remembered fun evenings of making Wizards hats for pushing my Tailoring skill. Then I repeated that thought and dropped the "refuting" part >_<

This kind of thing stops being fun once free-time is a bigger premium than the monetary price of a new game.

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Quoting: qptain NemoNothing will show the naked emperor that is Windows for what it is like losing its vast library of "legacy" software and games. I really wish they do this.

Currently, there is a lot of effectively Windows-only software. E.g. GIMP and LibreOffice are great for private and light-weight use, and have use-cases where they are superior, but for professional use compatibility with the customers, colleagues and business partners, and all the other proprietary software is far too important to drop the likes of Photoshop and Powerpoint.

It really comes down to support from the makers of defacto-standard commercial software. As long as those will rather port to UWP than to Linux, Microsoft will only lose niche customers.

I'm pretty sure they are not going to make moves, that remove software developers from the equation, though it is entirely possible for the features needed by these niche audiences to require an upgrade to a "professional" version, were previously "home" would have been fine.

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Quoting: MaCroX95Windows 10 S is almost outdated, MS is already planning the "Windows Core OS" that is supposed to replace x32_64 with UWP architecture and their Store would be the only place to get sofrware from.

Given Microsofts history of being unable to sell backward-incompatible changes well, part of the modular approach will likely be a compatibility layer (though I can imagine it becoming restricted to Pro or Enterprise versions). I guess that's essentially what the optional Win32 module will be.

Generally I'd say that they have little choice about this move. They NEED a version of Windows suitable for mobile devices.

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Related yet offtopic: Are there stats for the operating system distribution on GamingOnLinux.com?

I'd just be curious how many other people read the blog despite not actually gaming on Linux. (In my case out of a mixture of interest in the technical aspects of Linux support, and in how the Linux-requirement seems to emphasize interesting/well-made indie games.)

Though I usually read the blog on iOS/Android.

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I agree that the game requires more polish for prime-time. But some of the remarks in the article struck me as odd.

• Though the camera CAN be controlled by holding the shift-key, but it can be controlled by middle-mouse (holding for panning, scrolling for zoom). Shift+Left/right-mouse is probably more of a fallback. Right-mouse is currently reserved for "send dwarf here" and "cancel order", though I'd probably prefer if they switched that.


• When I last played it, I always used the "1" hotkey of the top-level menu to select ALL dwarves and never had to fiddle with the selection rectangle. It seems like that menu entry is broken right now though.

I can confirm, that underground viewing is currently a bit of a sore point; This is essentially caused by the need to keep a whole untouched layers as floor, as opposed to DF's concept that just because there is a tunnel on two adjacent layers, there can still be a floor between them, which makes z-navigation easier and cuts out intermediate "floor" levels from navigation.

  Dwarf Fortress            Block-only games like Dwarf-Corp          
                                                                      
  ######                    #######                                   
  #########   ###           ##############   ###                      
  #_______   ####   Level1  #               ####  Level1              
  #______   #####   Level2  ############   #####  (unused*)                     
  #        ######   Level3  #             ######  Level2                        
  ###############           ##########   #######  (unused*)           
  ###############           #           ########  Level3              
  ###############           ####################                      
                                                                      
* unused levels become dead weight for camera-navigation and planning
  and look mis-proportioned in 3D. 

When reporting bugs on github [1] though, they are quite quick to respond, fix them, and push a new version to Steam. I can't comment on how well they handle feedback on Steam-forums though.

[1] https://github.com/CompletelyFairGames/dwarfcorp/issues [External Link]

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Quoting: razing32The question then is : Was the promised product delivered to those that supported it financially ?
If you pay me for a pizza and I bring you pizza sticks , regardless how good they are , do you feel you got you money's worth ?

No, because I ordered a pizza.

But with early-access / crowd-funding I know better by now. It is like financing a pizza-shop in return for pizza-tokens.

Anyway, when I read "Saving is an unstable feature right now, are you sure?" I felt like I should have checked the state some more first ^^'. It looks promising though, and with the development being open-source, I can check directly if it has been abandoned. ( https://github.com/CompletelyFairGames/dwarfcorp/commits/master [External Link] ).

Honestly though, I'd say with a building-game a stable save-game functionality should have been achieved before an early-access release.

*edit* The issue is apparently already known (https://github.com/CompletelyFairGames/dwarfcorp/issues/243) and related to the use of comma for decimals in some locales. Also really fast developer reaction to the bug report :)

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On the light note: I love the 3D-with-sprites aesthetic :woot:

Quoting: harshbarjLooks a bit like towns. Let's hope it fairs better than that game, which was abandoned by it's developers. Shame as it looked to be a great game. This game looks to be one to watch.

Does it matter though?

Last I played Towns, it was a fun game. It wasn't being developed anymore, but this didn't really make it any worse. If the Dwarf-Fortress developer some day drops the project (probably due to dying of old age) it will still be a unique game.

StoneHearth is still being actively developed, but regardless, if it was dropped now, I'd still recommend it.

Most of these games could be declared "finished with upcoming feature updates", and it wouldn't make a difference. Most simply are never declared finished, before the developers drops active support.

Then again, once these are no longer being developed, I tend to lose interest, as my interest requires being rekindled by new features. But that would be the same, if the game had been declared feature-complete and development had stopped for that reason.

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For your files and savegames there is XDG (like %approot% on windows

Some nitpicking first: I assume you mean %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA%? I mention it because I actually tried to google it and found no Desktop-Windows results for it.

Regardless of the detail, I find %APPDATA% to be an AWFUL location for save-games on Windows. I can't comment on ~/.config, but on Windows %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA% are directories you typically don't want in your private incremental backups. For backups you have a few choices for these, all of which are bad:

• Full backup. Will include possibly gigabytes of fast-changing cache files and tens of thousands of not-backup-worthy configuration files, slowing down the backup process and bloating the size of incremental backups. Additionally, much of it is system-installation-dependent and cannot be easily restored after a reinstall without messing anything up.
  On Windows specifically there are also many files that will typically be in use during a weekly incremental backup (e.g. database files of the Chrome, Firefox or Evernote) and will be either locked against read-access or in an inconsistent state.


• Manually include the savegame folders. Good chance not missing one. Also, a major annoyance as it requires looking up the savegame location for each newly installed game.


• Manually exclude cache files and other problematic files. Good chance... You get the point.

So no, please don't use the an eqivalent of %APPDATA% for savegames. They are essentially user documents which a user might want to back up or synchronize locally or through the cloud.

On Windows of course this is just as much a problem. Many games now put save games into ~/My Games or ~/Documents/My Games. These two conventions make sense and don't create clutter, but sadly recently some games also put DLCs, mods, cache files or machine-dependent configuration files there, which makes absolutely NO sense.

Of course there are also still programs that try putting their savegames into the game installation directory (DOS convention), which will lead to major frustrations when users uninstall a game and reinstall it later on a new device or after reinstalling the OS, only to find that their savegames have been destroyed in the process.

An important point I would like to also raise: don't expect Linux sales to make you rich. It's a smaller platform. Bringing a game to Linux isn't just about getting sales from the additional platform, you should also keep in mind all of us likely know people on Windows & Mac we will end up recommending the game to, especially if it has any form of multiplayer. The extra advertising through various Linux websites and the extra word of mouth can be useful.

I'm an example here; For sevaral reasons (gaming among them) Windows won out as my everyday work-and-freetime platform, but Linux-gaming articles still make an interesting source for games to give a look :)

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