@Liam, I would be curious to see the figures. How many new users, how much of an increase is this compared to the previous userbase? Compared to the usual account creation rate? :P

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This really is a mixed bag. I think what I would be OK with would be:

- If the game already has multiplatform support when you buy it, you should get cross-compatibility included in the price
- If a new platform comes up after you bought the game (there, we could say more than 2 months, for example), you have to pay for it (possibly and preferably at a discounted price, because the first option includes the port + the game, and the second one only the port).
I think I could discuss at length why it makes sense to me.

I guess they are also using it as a way to track the buyers, but I don't think that's the only way they could do it.
I think that one of the call of duty games had to be bought separately for Mac as well, for the record.

Regarding what you wrote, Liam, I would argue that I wouldn't be against paying more and getting a game that works across ps, xbox, PC, etc... I've dreamed of it, even. But that's not coming soon :P

Small rant on economics (feel free to skip, I wrote that a bit impulsively)

Spoiler, click me

Now, it is also a question of how developers see you: some will see the cashcow you have to milk to its blood, other will see a member of a community to conquer by making small sacrifices. Usually, the second are the ones that fare well with a reduced number of games, and the first ones are big corporations with lots of titles; but that's not always the case.
I thought a bit about this (I am not an economist), and tried to draw parallels with how economy works in other domains. I think that the problem is, like most artistic content, that the product is not a commodity. If you want a carrot, you have tons of producers to choose from, all selling more or less the same products. There, you can negotiate your products, weight the quality against the price. That's simply not the case with art products, or games, since they are individual products.
If you want *that* game, you have to talk to _this_ publisher. The only thing they have to do is to make it good enough so that you will buy it for its price, that they choose according to the quality of the product. Now, that's pretty similar to the previous case, excepted for the fact that you can't go buy it elsewhere if you don't like them.

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To answer my own question, it seems from your video that vortigaunts still have trouble aiming properly :P

That makes the game *a lot* easier.

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I personally prefer to use the magnum to deal with the black ops. One bullet, hitscan (infinite bullet speed for this weapon) as far as I know. It's one of my favorite weapons, actually. You just have to keep some ammunition.

I did encounter those issues as well, I am a bit disappointed that they aren't fixed yet. Especially the crash near the dropship. I guess they are focused on Zen right now (lat time I heard about this, they were planning for a summer release). The one that was pretty annoying and that they fixed was the movement code, though. I was always getting stuck in the pipes, and had to resort to noclip on several occasions.
Did they fix the vortigaunts' aiming? They couldn't hit you reliably 3 meters from them, standing in a corridor, making them ridiculously less dangerous, last time I played. And, by the way, they are by far the most dangerous enemies of the original game, in my opinion, if only because of the damage they deal.

I really enjoy the remake. I've been following its progress since 2 years before it was out, and played it day one on its original release (non-steam, but I still have screenshots in my steam library). I'm still a bit disappointed some features didn't make it, such as randomized NPC models. Didn't see any "WD-43" sprays as well in this release :P (but we have a Tux mug!)

The game can be a bit hard at times, especially the sequences with a lot of marines. I finished the game on hard, and I agree, the enemies can be a bit too much on the bullet-sponge side, especially the marines and the helicopters. (Thankfully, it looks like they put a lot more tau/gluon ammunition than in the original game).

The multiplayer is pretty fun as well, with some classic maps such as crossfire. But the experience still seems a bit light at the moment; I guess they are still concentrating on Xen. I wonder what will come next, once they are done, though. Cooperation? They abandoned the idea some time ago, but could pick it up again. They also stated that they were not interested in the Gearbox extensions (blueshift and opposing force), but another modding team is working on it, IIRC.

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Quoting: liamdaweNote: All future give-aways will only be open to accounts older than one day, to prevent mass sign-ups to take keys :)

Welcome to the new people though, hope you do stick around ;)

I was expecting this, to be fair. Has the spike been that big? I don't expect so, there weren't that many keys.
On the other hand, it might have decided some regulars (lurkers) to finally register on the site :)

Edit: just had a look at the newsfeed for this game on Steam, I must confess that this bit made me laugh:

We've been very keen to translate the game into Chinese, but unfortunately, we can not find people who would help realize our desire. All our translations are done by activists, if you want to join them and help translate the game into Chinese, write to us, please - [email protected]

Good luck trying to find some Chinese activists to translate your game! :D

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Thank you. A key like this is always appreciated :D. Great work Liam, too, I love the interface.
Could it be made accessible to users as well? Or would collect keys on some gamingonlinux webpage be a good idea? Something like a pool with a giveaway (or randomized key exchange) once in a while. I have lots of key from various humble bundles... ;)

Now, onto the topic of the game: it looks great, and that's a nice gesture from the developer. I'll try it out, and spread the word if I like it (as I always do, anyway).

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Deponia. I started playing it again during an internet outage that lasted more than 12 hours. It's quite fun, and I am enjoying this point-and-click adventure game as the first in a long time. Plus, no internet=no cheating. It's way harder, but I finished chaos on Deponia that way. I'm now onto the third opus, but I'm still torn on the main character, Rufus. He's not your standard hero; he can even be quite despicable at some times. But he can also be kind and likeable at others. I'm waiting to finish the series to formalize my opinion, though.

Other than that, I've been enjoying some garry's mod with some friends (playing some prop hunt, murder, hide and seek and others while in a vocal chat can be hilarious). I still think a lot of mods are of quite low quality and could be improved substantially. People are getting lots of error (the big, flashing, in-game giant error models) from unknown (to them) player models, weapons, cars, props, etc when I'm hosting, plus extremely long waiting times due to having to download lots of (unneeded) stuff from my computer. A lot of improvements can be made there (I also miss the small icons jumping around when downloading stuff, that was more useful than the progress bar that fills over and over, as it gave an idea of the overall progress). So, a mixed bag for that one, but it's still fun (when we can finally connect!).

That's about all, I haven't been playing *that* much recently, as I'm trying to balance it with work, social life, and sleep :P

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Quoting: chepatiOther than The Talos Principle, is there another game (Steam or GOG hosted) I can try now, not in the future, that has a working Vulkan renderer? I just set up Vulkan on my PC (NVidia card) and want to verify that it works. It's akin to learning to play the piano, without the piano, at the moment :-)

Well, DOTA 2 has a Vulkan renderer as well, and I think that's all for now. (There are some games that use the experimental Unity Vulkan renderer, I think, but I don't know which ones, and that's still experimental).

Now, I really like Stardock games. I hope they will start porting them!

I wouldn't mind a wine port for their older games as well. Sins of A Solar Empire runs quite well with it, if I recall correctly.
Could you ask them in a follow-up, Liam? I guess I could also do it myself...

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Invert gravity, and you're off to very bad thing.
Invert electromagnetism, and you'll have your limbs splitting off. At least you may still have planets and stars...
But that's nothing compared to what happens if you Invert the strong force...

And that's just talking about forces.
There are some theories that proclaim that our universe works that way, with these constants, because it makes life more likely, thus more likely for us to be sitting into it.

But that was nitpicking, I'll grant you that. The game looks gorgeous wand the color scheme reminds me a bit of no man's sky. It sounds quite relaxing, I'll probably check it out once I finish my current backlog.

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Quoting: ArdjeIn the FortressCraft Evolved forum, a linux guy was asking about why fortresscraft demanded 400MB/s throughput on his SSD. While he did not notice any slow downs he was wondering about that.
Turns out he had no swap partition. So after adding the swap his SSD almost went silent.
So even if you are on SSD, always, *always* use a swap partition. The swap is used to swap out not frequently used anonymous allocated memory. Every bash you start, any program linked to gcc will start out initializing memory it will never use.
In his case, his anonymous memory usage (i.e. the memory used by the game) made the kernel continously page in the static game data at a rate of 400MB. Adding swap made it possible to swap out a large part of the almost static allocation of unused memory.

There are a few things I didn't understand in your post:
1. Without a swap file or partition, how could the kernel page to disk (aka swap)?
2. Why would a swap partition reduce swapping to disk?

The only thing that could reduce it is to create a swap partition on an other disk, delete the swap partition or decrease "vm.swappiness".
Interesting read: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/do-we-really-need-swap-modern-systems [External Link]

Of course, every use case is different.
I keep 4 gigs of swap in case my system needs to page some background apps.

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