Quoting: Mountain Man

* A smart simulated ecology of species who fight each other over food and territory
* An engaging combat system that learns from your every move

Games have been promising this sort of thing for years. It was called "emergent gameplay" a decade ago. I also have yet to see any game fulfill any of the lofty "emergent gameplay" promises made by developers. I think the best we've seen is the NPCs in the Grand Theft Auto series reacting in unexpected but not particularly meaningful ways.

True, although I have heard some good things about Dwarf Fortress in that regard.

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Sorry for these ramblings...

Games are like entropy: provided you can always run older titles, the playable game count will always monotonically increase. And it feels more exponential than linear.

Meanwhile, my free time has not been increasing, and this shows. Technology has been lusting for our attention, lately. Those three free games are very fine ones (or so I'm told, I've only played them a little bit), and I encourage you to play them if you have time to do so, but it feels like the marketplace is crowded and games are competing for our attention.

I've been valuing shorter, more-polished, or denser games lately, as well as the ones that can be picked up and left in place with a long break in between. I guess I'm now a casual? I am even starting to resent achievements :/
It wouldn't surprise me if the industry picks this as a trend, and starts to favour that kind of games, eventually (if that's not already the case; there seems to be plenty of indies aiming for that niche. Now, I wish there was a dedicated category/gamemode for it).

On the other hand, my trying to complete games on max. difficulty and earn every achievement hasn't helped, I guess. I like to complete games, but that makes them much longer. Well, maybe I need to indulge myself with playing on lower difficulties, and not exploring every area a game has to offer? What's your take on this? Is it better to "rush" trough the main story, and redo the game later if you really enjoyed it? I'm the kind to eat the best stuff on my plate last, but it's not helping.

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Quoting: GuestI reallly like how much simpler this UI feels. I'd hope we get some customisation options in the future too - like getting rid of the ad pop-ups and making steam launcher the size of the old friends list window.

FYI you can already do both (the first in the settings, and the second in the toolbar, IIRC).
Not sure if you meant more options like these, or specifically wanted those?

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Quoting: BielFPsSomething that I miss in the current interface is a direct option to see the store page of a game in my library. Sometime I want to check the current price for a game I've already bought or if a new content was released, and I have to go to the store page and search manually.

You have a link to the store page on the detailed view + categories page:

Spoiler, click me

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Otherwise, this new design looks pretty, and useful. It's likely a lot better than what we have now, though it could likely be made even better. What I'd really like to see is an API to control the steam client from Kodi, Lutris, or any other frontend. We alreasy have steam:// urls and command lines, but that's one way communication (no library enumeration, images (official art, links, screenshot) retrieval, friend info, etc.). There would be a lot of interesting ideas to explore (cloud tags, automatic categories, etc).

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Quoting: ShmerlGreat milestone, but excitement about freesync is a bit premature. Two major parts are still missing:

1. Vulkan support (neither radv nor amdvlk support it yet). So it won't work in any Vulkan games, including Wine+dxvk.
2. Wayland scenario. Not sure if anyone implemented that in common Wayland compositors.

I've been curious about this as well. Sway developers were busy with their 1.0, but here's where to track it [External Link] (ie, not a lot for now). Actually, I re-read most of the IRC log pasted there, and it looks like I might have a better understanding of VRR than them. Oh well, time to comment, I guess? :P

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Quoting: ShmerlSounds like another lock-in. I've seen at least one developer saying they'll stop updating their game on itch.io, because they want to add multiplayer, and since it needs NAT traversal, they decided to rely on Steam's service for it. Which means they can't use it with versions released in other stores... (It's also a clear example how the lack of IPv6 is causing harm).

So I don't see this as a good thing at all. Proper network services should not be tied to stores and developers should be able to use them no matter where they release. I suppose those don't need to be free, but tying them to a specific store is simply wrong.

Hey, NAT traversal is a commodity these days, and setting up a STUN server is simple enough [External Link] (plus, multiple implementations already exist).

TURN servers are more complicated (need more bandwidth, as it's essentially a proxy), but shouldn't be needed in the vast majority of cases (again, ready-to-self-host solutions do exist).

As for the last part, most ipv6 boxes implement a firewall (mine does), so you still need a TURN server, unfortunately.
And lastly, I don't see why this developer couldn't check if the user already opened their ports on the router (or use UPnP to do so) :)

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Quoting: soulsource

Quoting: BielFPsI hope someone creates a gui application to easy activate freesync/adaptive sync

It's actually mentioned in the Mesa changelist:

util: Add adaptive_sync driconf option

If I understand that correctly, they are talking about a config option that gets exposed via the DriConf [External Link] GUI tool.

If I am not mistaken, it really is a facility to specify per-game (and system-wide) dri options trough a configuration file [External Link]. And the GUI you linked to (which I hadn't heard of, thanks) allows you to configure it. But there could be other GUIs, and you an also manually edit the xml/use a command-line tool :)

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I don't know, I never was a fan of card games, it just isn't my thing, or maybe just for a couple rounds (though tarot [External Link] is OK to me, to be fair). I sigh every time i'm offered to play gwent in the witcher.

From a business perspective, it might make sense for them to concentrate on F2P (or just plain free) games to bring players to the platform, and take a cut from other sellers. That might actually be just what they are doing with counter strike, dota, tf, alien swarm...

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So, is it a release in the testing branch, modern branch, base branch, or all of them? I'm currently sitting on modern-testing.

I'm really looking forward to the Mesa improvements (though alt+enter solves most issues I have with it). Looks like there's a black screen issue under Wayland as well, though that could be due to XWayland. I do not expect chromium 40 to have any kind of support for Wayland, as it looks like 72 is what's in the depots.

The other issue I had (and some friends playing on windows had this as well) is disappearing units after rejoining an game (due to a connection issue, for instance).

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Quoting: MaelraneStill broken for me  on mesa:

OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon (TM) RX 470 Graphics (POLARIS10, DRM 3.27.0, 4.20.11-arch1-1-ARCH, LLVM 7.0.1)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 18.3.3
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.50
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile
OpenGL core profile extensions:
OpenGL version string: 4.5 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 18.3.3
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.50
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL profile mask: compatibility profile
OpenGL extensions:
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 18.3.3
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.20
OpenGL ES profile extensions:

When that happens, I alt + enter (toggles fullscreen) to get rid of the corruption. Resizing might help as well. It's not that bad to play with, actually. I have been more annoyed with resuming a game after a disconnection/crash, and not seeing my units...

I've recently tried to work around various [External Link] bugs, and share my progress. Most notably a black window [External Link] at startup (fixed by disabling --software-ui as well as Wayland).

Edit: just tried the new beta. Unfortunately, it still exhibits the same issues.
A few screenshots (not sure I can hotlink those, so I linked the steamcommunity views as well):

Spoiler, click me

Just after starting: [External Link]


Same, after zooming on the planet: [External Link]


After alt+enter:
[External Link]


And by the way, I just upgraded to 16 GB RAM for this game. It was unplayable before, due to constant swapping, and I wouldn't recommend anyone to play with less than 12 GB.

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