Hmm. I did back this but somehow completely ignored all the updates that have been coming out on Kickstarter. I think I am just going to wait for the final product.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Nov 30, 2020, 08:18:

yuastnav wrote on Nov 30, 2020, 05:14:
I buy my games on Steam because it is incredibly easy to play Windows games on Linux.

This is true for me as well. CDPR gives less than zero fucks about any platform not Windows. Moreover, Steam has the Workshop where it is easy to source mods from whereas GOG does not. I expect a ton of CP2077 mods in the future.

Oh yeah, that too! I think the workshop is an a amazing idea. Just scroll through the mods, click subscribe and - done! And Steam keeps those mods up to date, too.

Steam is the oldest and the most mature client there is. They are extremely slow when it comes to developing new things or fixing something because everyone at Valve can do whatever they want but it still has a ton of awesome features.

I would love to buy more games from GOG but the lacklustre Linux support is what really puts me off.

ForgedReality wrote on Nov 29, 2020, 15:34:
I don't understand how the hell anyone could buy the Steam version over the GOG version. Like, what's the point? I bet if it's #1 on Steam, it has to have sold WAY more on GOG.

I buy my games on Steam because it is incredibly easy to play Windows games on Linux. This year I switched completely to Linux because it's amazing how many of my Windows-only games on Steam run out of the box on Linux without any issue. It's just for comfort.
Also I don't have room for my gaming PC anymore but I can run it with an HDMI dongle and can stream almost all of my games to my ten year old laptop which does not have a dedicated video card.
Years ago I wondered why they even developed these features but nowadays I am really thankful for that.

With games like these I always wonder how realistic they are.
Example: Bus simulator 2018
The bus physics were horrible and unrealistic, every time you broke the law the police IMMEDIATELY saw this and if you went over the speed limit the passengers were like "Woah, not so fast duuude."
I wonder whether these people ever drove in a bus before. I've never heard anyone complain if the driver went over the speed limit, people were just glad to be there on time.

I have similar fears concerning this game.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Nov 18, 2020, 23:32:
Talked to some engineering friends that are still at Intel and it isn't pretty. Some think Intel will become an IP based company, like AMD, others believe that Intel will make a node transfer faster than advertised, and one believes Intel is going to use ARM as a basis and build out from there. I disbelieve the latter entirely.

Were I a betting man, I would bet that if Intel fumbles a node transition again, they'll swap over to being an IP based company and "lease" their existing fabs to TSMC. I say this because of the fact that component level manufacturing has become just as commodotized as PCs themselves. Nearly everyone uses Realtek for on-board audio solutions. On-board NICs? Intel has the largest market share there and it's on all but the cheapest MB (barring Dell who has a hard-on for Broadcom) including servers. Wifi? Intel again unless you're buying cheap laptops. In the wlan and lan space there is Realtek and Atheros but those are much smaller players than Intel. I could go on and talk about hard drive controllers and memory but I am sure people get the point.

So why wouldn't the commodotization continue and go down to the actual manufacturing layer? If it's cheaper, and it presumably is given how many people are farming things out to TSMC and Samsung, why maintain your own fabs at billions of dollars per year? Especially when you lack the engineering skill and agility to compete with those that do?

I think the downfall of Intel, like IBM before them, is when they placed Craig Barrett, a marketing drone, in the CEO slot. Someone who had zero engineering experience and therefore knew nothing about leading an engineering company. Then they continued by either buying or "creating" technologies outside of their core business. Intel owned McAfee, for example. What the fuck does a CPU manufacturer know about AV? Then they got hammered by vulnerability after vulnerability and had to rely on software mitigations which created a massive performance hit. Why? Because they stopped innovating and let marketing take over.

I firmly believe Intel is in a death spiral and I do not believe they can pull out of it as their corporation is currently structured and operated. Let's see if they learned from IBM's mistake and pull out in time. I wouldn't bet on it, however.

That is sad news. I always went the Intel/Nvidia route because I heard that AMD video card support on Linux is utter garbage and I remember my last AMD CPU, a AMD Athlon 2000+ XP. My computer was rebooting A LOT because that thing would reach temperatures upwards of 100 ℃. After reapplying thermal paste. After installing new fans. After playing with the case open. Yeah, fun.

I don't follow hardware developments so I hope things are better now.

I wasn't a fan of the third one. I absolutely loved the first two games but going 3D didn't win this game any favours.
Furthermore the game was somehow unfinished. I am not sure whether they changed that but when I played it shortly after it was released the game just ended after one particular boss fight and I was like "Wait, what?". It came rather unexpected. I think you had to find three things or had to defeat three bosses but after the first one the whole game was over. It was weird.

I didn't even buy the fourth one but that is more because they didn't release a Linux version. It probably works great with Proton (almost all of the games that I've played so far work great with Proton) but money's tight and if they don't want to make a native release I can wait for a good sale.

Secretly I hope they are working on a new engine for their next game. I love ETS2 and ATS but the engine is getting quite old. Hopefully they actually do something like this so they can add weather effects etc.

I played the first two Assassin's creed games for about 15 hours each and found them to be okay. Did I miss out on any other AC game? Is there a really good game in this series that I should try?

Beamer wrote on Nov 10, 2020, 15:18:
I played a LOT of the Quarantine demo, and considered it a favorite game, but did not buy it. Never played the full version, oh, well.
Another game where technical limitations created an emptiness, and that emptiness created an atmosphere.

Same here. I played a lot of the demo but never got around to play the real game. Only after watching a video about that game from the guy who makes "Freeman's mind" I realised that that game had a story and progression and everything.

It wasn't the best game but it was okay. This looks dreadful. It would have been much better to make a crossover with the Taxi driving from the fifth element movie, like Cloudpunk but a proper game, with guns etc.

Ah, I remember My Time at Portia. Played the early Kickstarter demo and backed the game at a beta access level. Not going to do this this time, though, since I barely even touched the early versions. Didn't want to spoil the game. So I'll probably just back at the normal "get the full game at release" level.

Shame about James Randi. :/

I liked the very first open beta (or whatever it was) of Lawbreakers. After that the game became worse, unfortunately. :/

MeanJim wrote on Oct 19, 2020, 02:12:

J wrote on Oct 18, 2020, 10:01:
Okay, could someone clarify?

wtf_man replied stating that there's privacy apps and regedit.

Then, later on, MeanJim talks of settings which can turn it off, which jacobvandy and Zanderat1 confirm.

Are the options clear in the settings? Why do privacy apps need to alter something that's in the settings?

Go to the Settings, Update & Security, Windows Update, Advanced options. Turn off "Receive updates for other Microsoft products when you update Windows" and "Restart this device as soon as possible when a restart is required to install an update."

Burrito of Peace wrote on Oct 18, 2020, 12:43:

MeanJim wrote on Oct 18, 2020, 00:23:
I just both Windows and Linux (since '94), and to be fair, dumping hundreds of config files in /etc isn't any less clunky than the Windows registry. It's basically the way Windows 3 did things.

What distro are you running that has "hundreds" of .conf files in /etc? I just checked and the distro on my desktop has 19 (Manjaro). Compare that to a Windows registry entry count. Pretty much everything not Gentoo or Devuan (or some other anachronistic, throwback distro like Devuan) are using systemd which has replaced much of what /etc used to contain. Even so, the amount of systemd unit files is exponentially less than the entries in Windows' registry while also being easy to read and quick to modify if necessary. Then all I have to is restart the service. I don't have to reboot the whole machine.

I'm running Linux Mint 20, and it has over 2000 files in /etc and its sub directories. Not all files that contain settings are .conf files. Then you have the config files in your home directory (.local/, .config/, .whatever). And before you say something like "every file in /etc doesn't need to be edited by the user," neither does every entry in the registry. And you don't have to reboot a Windows machine after editing the registry, just like Linux you can restart system services or restart the program.

I'm not bashing Linux, I'm just being honest. Windows has it's problems, and so does Linux. When software plays by the rules/standards, it's just as easy to find settings in the Windows registry as it is on Linux. When software doesn't play by the rules, then on either system you have to play the "where's that config file" game.

I have thousands and thousands upon configs. I've also been using Linux about twelve years less than Windows and I still think the registry is a nightmare to navigate as compared to finding a configuration file.

jdreyer wrote on Oct 16, 2020, 22:31:

RedEye9 wrote on Oct 16, 2020, 19:28:

jdreyer wrote on Oct 16, 2020, 19:20:
As tired as I am of developers defaulting to pixel art in order to avoid the expense of having actual graphics, I must say that looks quite nice. And the gameplay looks pretty amazing.

If you like a million and one ways to die.

Yeah, I'm not sure how much of this I'd play, a few hours for sure. But this kind of "pixel physics sandbox" has been among Dreyerson's most played games over the years: things like People Playground and Powdertoy. So I'd probably spend more time watching him play.

Uh, interesting. Powedertoy looks like a sand falling game that I've played years ago.
People playground, on the other hand, is something that I've seen on Gary still plays youtube channel but somehow it's not really interesting.

Noita is a cool game to sink a few hours into but there is no sense of progression. Normally that is not necessarily a bad thing. In Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, the best roguelike there is, there is no in-game progression at all. The progression is all in your head. The more you play the more you learn and there is a lot to see. There is also a lot to see in Noita but it feels shallow in comparison and there is nothing to unlock.
Noita is really fun but only for short bursts and I can heartily recommend it but going by its "roguelike merits" it is pretty weak.

They should have called it Hamnesia. :>

GothicWizard wrote on Oct 15, 2020, 14:45:
Infamous tech quotes?

This year Linux will take over as the main PC OS and be the primary gaming OS too!

-Every Linux fanboi, every yr. since ~1996

Linux on desktops in 1996 <1%
Today ~2%

Any day now I am sure.

Well, there is 100% Linux desktop share in MY home.
Game. Set. Match. :p

eRe4s3r wrote on Oct 13, 2020, 03:16:

MattyC wrote on Oct 13, 2020, 00:46:

eRe4s3r wrote on Oct 12, 2020, 22:30:
The first Outer Worlds was abysmally average, bad writing, horrible faction systems, and on-the-nose gamexplaining whenever you did anything, and best of all, if you then DID that something it had zero consequences. And oh yeah, the shooting wasn't horrible. Why this gets a sequel is beyond me...

And if someone is confused and hasn't played it.. check this

I would be more hyped about news of a Tetris remake than this.

I actually replayed Fallout 2 after recently and my god is Outer Worlds bad if you start to look back.

Oh, no worries, everyone is wrong sometime. I mean not as wrong as you, obviously. You are a special kind of super wrong. A wrongness that is palpable, one that causes every babe to weep at your approach, every woman to cry out, "Dear God!! What is that wrong thing?!?" etc, but I mean no one is perfect...

Snarky reply aside, did you forget the 2nd half of your post where you explain why you think any decision in the game has consequences beyond vending machine prices and why the writing is supposed to be good when the corporations and companions in this game are portrayed so absolutely stupidly that no sane living being would ever join them or want to be near them?

Nah mate, I am glad to be wrong in your point of view. To me this is the 2nd worst RPG Obsidian has made. ^^

What's the worst?
I've played KOTOR 2, Alpha Protocol (oh god...), PoE, Tyranny and I've yet to play PoE 2.
KOTOR 2 was probably my favourite game of the lot and Alpha Protocol could have been soo good if the PC version wasn't so abysmally terrible. It made Splinter Cell Double Agent look like a good port which is REALLY something.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Oct 9, 2020, 16:18:
Looks pretty cool, also looks like what I would have unsuccessfully tried to get all my multiplayer FPS/TPS peeps to play about 15 years ago. Aesthetically, I wish they had gone with weapons more atttached to the suit instead of a borderline illogical handheld gun, but it still looks pretty sweet.

As it is now, I probably won't ever play this.
[...]

I feel that.

Heh, I don't have the strongest machine and so cannot play everything on high but the first things I do are disabling vsync and motion blur and (most of the time) raising the FOV to the max value because it's almost always too narrow, even on max. After that comes everything else in no particular order.

Nothing particularly interests me. :/
I'll probably try Solasta, Zelter and UNDERZONE but apart from that...

Anything good not on this list?