I picked it up. Good game. Thanks for telling us about it.

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Quoting: loggfreakreal voxels aren't that far away, look at the voxelfarm engine, it's being used in the upcoming everquest next and uses opengl, and looks increadibly good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xZTk2hDAEQ [External Link]

Indeed there have been some nice advancements but I believe in the TSG interview from Humble Miguel stated that the engine EQ is using is a hybrid. It does use voxels but not everything is a voxel. A pure voxel engine is still a little behind the performance of polygons right now but there are tricks to make it faster by using a hybrid system. Things like the marching cube algorithm, calculating which voxels need to be computed vs which ones are hidden. I believe you could also use GLSL to handle a lot of the work but I think most people are using the CPU for voxel calculation. You also have to remember that engines similar to MC are probably storing data for every voxel in certain range, even if it isn't being displayed. It comes to a memory and CPU constraint at that point when you need to calculate off that much data.

Either way I'm a fan of voxels and there are people much smarter than myself finding tricks to make it work. For now I believe that a hybrid system is best for performance.

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Voxel looking games is just a hot art style (after MC became popular). I highly doubt they are using real voxels. They are probably emulating it with cube primitives. Real voxels require volumetric rendering. Look at Voxel Quest http://www.voxelquest.com/ [External Link] that guy built his graphics using real voxels. We likely won't see a lot of true voxel games for a long time because modern GPUs are designed for polygons not massive voxel data.

Anyways it looks interesting. I'll probably pick it up when it comes out. I'm a sucker for pixel and voxel looks. I should say good pixel and voxel art. A lot of mixed reviews on Steam about performance. Which is probably right because even emulating voxel data with cube primitives requires a lot of data that has to be looked through. Probably more of an issue of how the data is stored. I'm working on an emulated voxel engine for fun and I've see what happens with all the data required for proper voxel emulation.

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@Skully Yes Intel has great chips, but that wasn't always the case. If AMD didn't come in and kick their but in the P4 era they would have never innovated to where they are now. You also have do your research and buy what feel is best for you. Don't just buy based on price. AMD is still working to become profitable and the PC market doesn't help that. Intel has the money and power to buy their way into computers. They can pay companies money to use their chips so their user base goes up. It's all politics.

I'm not entirely sure what kind of games people are playing lately that you need an i7 extreme to get good game play. I'm still using my Phenom II x4 low powered CPU from 5 years ago. Out performs the i5 I have in my laptop that's only a couple years old.

As far as the FX line goes, they haven't put a lot of love in that because they are focused on the APU line. HSA is where they want to be and I believe that is the right direction. Leveraging the GPU for more stuff will make their chips outperform Intel. It's just going to require time for wide spread support.

Once AMD can star to generate a consistent profit they can work to hire on more people to improve their drivers and product line. You want them to get better, then you have to support them.

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Read this article http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_kernel&num=1 [External Link]

Basically there are no current plans to port Mantle to Linux. AMD is tossing around the idea of refactoring their Catalyst driver to hook into the FOSS driver. They would continue to enhance the FOSS driver but then allow all the extra stuff when you install their driver. It will allow them to get KMS support with the Catalyst driver so things like Wayland work.

If their plan works it would be a big boon to open source and Catalyst.

I will continue to buy AMD even if their drivers aren't the best because no matter what, when my hardware gets old I have the FOSS driver to fall back to. I don't have to worry about trying to figure out which driver to use or anything like Nvidia does with legacy drivers.

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Discoverability is always going to be a problem. It doesn't matter what platform you use. Steam is so entrenched in the mind of gamers that not releasing on Steam is just bad for business. Unless you use the Steam API heavily, making a game that you can release on multiple channels is your best bet. Desura is good but I don't think it has anything remotely close to the same user base as other channels. To cover all bases you'll want to at least hit GOG.com, humblebundle.com, use the humble widget to sell on your site, and Steam. Secondary concerns should be Desura and Gamers Gate. After that it might not be worth the effort the list on other sites.

The thing to remember is that for every update and release you have, each of the channels you sell on, you have to push it out. There is no do all end all store to sell on.

Personally I feel that the humble widget and store are the best (at least until GOG has Linux support).

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I see the point of asking for more money for both genders. First each gender has different parameters that define how they interact with people. Unless you treat every character in the game as unisex you have to define what each gender can do with each gender. Obviously if you want to play as a girl you can't go and hook up with another girl and get her pregnant. That isn't possible. By adding another gender you basically have to double your interactions code. It would have been wise to do it in the first place but an after the fact thing requires more time and money.

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For the "I hate flash" crowd:

Some of those game still require Flash and or Air even if they are built with tools that give you the option not to output to Flash. This was a decision the developer made for one reason or another.

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I love to support open source but I fundamentally hate anything involving Flash. The fact that more than one of the games in that bundle requires Adobe Air or Flash makes me angry. I'm sure they are great games but I hate Adobe with a passion.

I know some of these guys have been working on their stuff for so long that Flash and Air once sounded good, but what happened is Adobe proved they don't stand behind their products.

Hope the devs make some money on the sale but it won't be mine.

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I preordered this game on GOG back when I had a Windows install running. I never played more than a couple minutes because it ran like crap. I don't know if that was their first step into OpenGL or what but I don't think it was very optimized. I kind of wrote it off after that. The first one was fun.

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