Quoting: wvstolzingI just recorded this by OBS, running on dosbox-staging; sound/video loaded from directly mounted cdrom: !Civ II advisors (early game video) [External Link]

Only fools run an empire without luxury! \o/

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Quoting: wvstolzingMy solution was to run Windows 3.1 inside dosbox -- which works surprisingly well.

awesome! thanks for the hint, I actually forgot it could run on win 3.x and not just win95!

I've done win 3.x under dosbox before and it runs totally smooth (if that word can even be used for such a clunky OS)

maybe with that trick Civ2 will be one of those old windows games that run better under linux than on modern windows, LOL

the indeo5 video codec installer is a murderous disgrace, and the game is ruined by windows xp and later versions with their new window decoration methods

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Quoting: junibegoodI guess marketing is to blame : every game must have more features and fancier graphics than the previous one so they have something to show in trailers, even if these things don't actually make the game any better... At least, with the rise of indie games, we can now have games like The Battle for Polytopia, who do exactly the opposite and go for extreme minimalism. :)

Come on, it's not "marketing", it's games! They're supposed to be fun, not just functional.

That means different things for different people, but in general a game feels more fun when you think it looks more beautiful (which might mean minimalist looks for some, realism, neon glow, hand-drawn, abstract, etc.

It also helps when it sounds nice (literally), which again may mean different things for different people, like looping techno beats, the Berlim Philarmonic Orchestra, 8-bit midi chiptunes, ...

Some people love deep stories while some rather play something where you just log in and blow stuff up gratuitously.

Gameplay can be twitchy/relaxed, short loops/saga, all sorts of modes, etc.

And the boom in indie and minimalist graphics offerings is testimony that there is no "general trend" towards any specific preference like AAA superproduction graphics, just a huge blooming catalogue of new games of all sorts for all tastes, which is great!

The only thing that is indeed "marketing" is that some big titles get advertized more widely than others, but we also have much better tools at hand to find games that are pleasant to our specific tastes now than a couple decades ago... Shareware/Demo CDs anyone?! (showing my age now...)

PS: I think Unciv's official description is perfect for it.

PPS: How do you folks get Civ2 to play nice on Linux with the City Advisors? Anyone has a foolproof recipe? I dearly miss Elvis!!! (and can you honestly say the cosplay film bits weren't pure endearing eye candy pushing the boundaries of what the technology allowed back then?)

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It reminds me of Wild Arms!

Looks simple but cute (unlike many attemps which claim "retro" but are actually just rushed graphics) and fun (funny/catchy scenes including clever motion effects, couple hints of some story depth though I'm pretty hard to please on that front).

I'll definitely give it a better look (as well as the other games mentioned in previous comments) :grin:

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More on topic, I'm glad they finally took the time to make this change.

I'm certain they got aroud to it because of the Steam Deck (popping up windowed dialogs is a PITA in gaming mode and console mindset simply demands no pre-game dialogs) though Linux users have asked for this for ages.

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Quoting: GuestWarning for everyone who relied on -no-browser and -noreactlogin: these launch options are discontinued in the current beta and will be permanently removed somewhere in January:

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/3/3710433479207750727/ [External Link]

Not like it's really worth dealing with that anyway, considering the launch options UI is also browserified now...

never heard of -noreactlogin... what did it do?

loosing -no-browser is terrible! some users actually needed it due to how horribly buggy and heavy the web UI can behave in some circumstances. A quick search for it in Steam for Linux discussions makes it quite obvious. Valve should up their game, being much more careful with their UI development choices, overall steam stability and resilience to issues before removing this!

I hope they'll at the very least keep the mini-launcher mode available for the forseeable future, as this tends to work too instead of -no-browser in most (though not all) cases where such workarounds are required.

And to be perfectly honest, I'd much rather they stop this nonsense and move to a native UI toolkit instead of webifying it. There are a couple UI toolkits that can offer webhlike css styling flexibility and are crossplatform (win, mac, linux) so UI consistency wouldn't be an issue (the main reasons most devs use web UIs in apps and iirc what Valve claimed they needed it for). Using this they could finally stop being ridiculous and use a normal window instead of a heavily customized one, to finally make the Steam app obbey OS-provided window management features correctly (eg: window snapping, tiling, gridding, decorations, etc).

Heck, even if they go with Flutter, which looks out-of-place on every OS, it's still instantly lighter and better integrated the current mess.

And even if they stay with web-besed UIs (which i'm sure is what they'll really do, they must get much better at it and start being more careful with UI consistency, accessibility, translations, interactivity, responsiveness and above all resource efficiency and stability.

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Quoting: Big_and_donkey

Quoting: EhvisI'm curious about one thing. Would 32-on-64 increase the usable memory for 32 bit software in Wine? If that is the case, then it would be a benefit for 32bit games that suffer from OOM crashes in proton. Borderlands 2 for instance.

I don't think so because I'm not sure how you would navigate things like pointers taking double the space to account for larger memory addresses. Some very low level logic could break if the program is reliant on certain types taking up a specific amount of memory.

it could become an optional (off-by-default) feature, but games being games, you might suffer the first crash during a final boss fight. shivers!

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Quoting: vengador4201

Quoting: wvstolzingand to cut down the noise in your logs, use a port other than 22 on interfaces connected to the outside world. People are quick to point out that this is not a security measure; & that's true, but it's not meant as such. You just don't want to see 10000 failed attempts per day from probes all over the world on your little home computer.

(Same with opening :80 or :443 to the outside world, regardless whether you're exposing anything of importance. There are a billion probes poking at those ports, no matter what the address might be.)

...assuming they're not just looking at all ports with a tool like masscan (think nmap, but much faster at scanning for open ports).

No. You only need to assume most of them aren't doing full port-range probing, only a few. It's for cutting down on log noise, not for making it safer. It doesn't make it actually safer exactly because of those fewer cases where all ports are targeted instead of just the default ones.

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can the same sort of thunk be used by Steam Linux Runtimes for native linux 32bit games?

also is there a performance penalty for using this instead of directly engaging the x86 CPU's 32bit mode as is done now?

joke but not joke: I can fully visualize Glorious Eggroll Linux Runtimes being distributed via ProtonUp-QT with extra patches for ancient Linux on modern Linux retrocompatibility, then Bottles, Lutris, etc pick it up as well

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Quoting: Klaas

Quoting: MarlockWeb devs are a bunch of schmuks is why...

Are really lazy and/or forced by clueless superiors believing marketing claims to use an increasingly number of bloated libraries.

Libraries that in turn could totally be browser-agnostic too, waaaaaay leaner, etc

The modern web seems to have become a whole ecossystem built on anti-patterns.

...but honestly in Microsoft's case I put this way more under the "oopsie" factor, because it's just what they do in so many of their other browser-based products.

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