Lunacid is awesome - old-school dungeon crawling with slick controls. The speed and smoothness makes fighting all the old enemies new again.

The Kings Field games are… very hard to love. They’re old-school dungeon crawlers with the most awful, clunky controls that you can imagine. They’re all “pre-Miyazaki” FromSoftware games; don’t expect many Souls-like touches. Getting killed by a skeleton because you can’t turn round to face it in time, or falling down a hole because judging how far you’ve walked forward is difficult? Far more likely.

A Lunacid follow-up with a little more Ultima / Wizardry about it would be amazing. Bit more environmental variety, a few more RPG trappings, and for the love of all that is holy, a minimap. But I can’t see how that would be better done in Sword Of Moonlight rather than just adding them to their existing engine.

Scottish Gaelic doesn’t have ‘yes’ or ‘no’ - you answer with the positive or negative form of the verb used in the question.

http://www.gaidhliggachlatha.com/blog-mios-na-gaidhlig/how-to-say-yes-and-no-in-scottish-gaelic

I think even when the companies have a bit of money, they tend to go overboard. I think eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually so long that it’s problematic, I would have been quite happy with it at 2/3rds the length it is. Even worse would be something like Pillars of Eternity 2 - it’s great, but it goes on forever and didn’t make any money. There’s too much of it.

Give us more games like Disco Elysium. Not that long, tonnes of replayability, and more importantly, it’s different. Really different. And the “moral choices” actually mean something.

Kind of. It’s the Linux kernel that manages all of the controller drivers and makes them available to userspace, mostly via the evdev interface. SDL is a library for managing graphics, sounds and events in a generic way on multiple platforms and devices. It’s overwhelmingly the most common library used for Linux games - Steam used it for all of their Linux-native ports of Source engine games, for instance. But it also presents all gamepad events in a consistent way regardless of their “true source”, so generic devices tend to work with every game.

SDL3 mostly clears out all the clutter from the previous versions of SDL. It’s a mature library and gamedev has come a long way in that time. Getting rid of all the weird stuff that the API accumulated makes it easier to use and maintain. Plus there were things like managing audio generally, and pen-and-touch gestures mobile phones and tablets, that were quite the head-scratchers before. That’s all a bit easier now.

Programming a robust global date-time system and having a transparent conversation between metric and *imperial/traditional" units is just a warm-up to show that you can work with the truly demented currency system. Make sure everything is rounded off to the nearest whole ha’penny.

Well, we’ve a minimum pricing per unit on alcohol, any kind of multipack deal is forbidden, and the licensing hours are such that it’s easier to get yourself some bennies than it is to get a drink before lunchtime; need to plan your day around getting some booze in the house.

National drug policy should really be about minimising harm, with treatment and rehabilitation for addicts, but any kind of talk that isn’t about stringing them all up is anathema to our circus of bawbags in Westminster.

You can only store rational numbers as a ratio of two numbers, and there’s infinitely times more irrational numbers than rational ones - as soon as you took (almost any) root or did (most) trigonometry, then your accurate ratio would count for nothing. Hardcore maths libraries get around this by keeping the “value in progress” as an expression for as long as possible, but working with expressions is exceptionally slow by computer standards - takes quite a long time to keep them in their simplest form whenever you manipulate them.

Assuming you had a pretty decent monitor and graphics output in the 90s, it may have been 800x600, but more likely 640x480, and you’d have been using the standard issue bitmap font with no anti-aliasing, blitted to screen using software rendering. Probably in a single colour, too.

Alas, the problem with that is that it doesn’t scale. On xterm a 4K monitor, I can watch Vim redrawing the screen, paging through logs is painful. Use Kitty for the same, it’s instant, I can flip through tabs and split screens too, and have niceties like anti-aliased fonts and transparency if I want them.

Some people spend a lot of time in the terminal, so I can’t fault them for taking the time to make a nice working environment and sharing that work with others.

I’d probably go with a “kitchen” metaphor here.

The executable for a program is a list of instructions for the CPU to execute. Windows and Linux gaming machines will usually use x64. Most of the instructions are logic eg. how to add numbers together, what comparisons to make, what to copy from one place to another; and they’re exactly the same on both Windows and Linux, you can run them as-is.

Some instructions ask the operating system to do things, like open a file to read. Windows and Linux do these quite differently, but you know how one works then you can change it to the equivalent ask for the other machine. Making the translation takes a moment, but some things are faster on Linux than Windows, so it’s not very easy to generalise as to whether it’ll be faster overall to do certain things. The really important operating system calls for games tend to be messages to pass to the GPU, and the Proton team have put a lot of work into making these as fast as possible.

If you think of it like following a food recipe, then given the ingredients you’d expect that most people would produce exactly the same meal by following it. Most of the steps will be exactly the same for everyone. However, if a step requires a piece of equipment that you don’t have, then it might take longer to follow the recipe if you’ve got to make do with different stuff. Similarly, you might be able to prepare things quicker if you’ve got a whole pile of restaurant-level gear and can do some of the steps differently.

Flightless Mango used to have some good comparisons, but they’re about four years out-of-date, now. Even then, you’d expect between 10% worse and 5% better on Linux. https://flightlessmango.com/benchmarks/

Forbes article here is from this year; expect between 5% worse and 25% better when running on Linux. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux-scores-a-surprising-gaming-victory-against-windows-11/

General experience is that generally there’s no noticeable difference at all; some games that use new features might have bad performance until the new features are implemented. Last game I really had a problem with was Horizon Zero Dawn. Elden Ring had bad performance on launch day, but was fixed the next day I think.

IVEBEENUSINGTHISKEYBORDFORWHOLEMONTHNDMMOREEFFICIENTTHNIVEEVERBEENBEFORE

No ‘a’, so it’s perfect for ordering some piss.

Yeah. Doesn’t take much optimising of disk writes to make things run much better on a Pi; they’re quite capable machines as long as disk i/o isn’t your limiting factor. Presumably the devs have been doing some tidying up.

My workplace is a strictly BitBucket shop, was interested in expanding my skillset a little, experiment with different workflows. Was using it as a fancy ‘todo’ list - you can raise tickets in various categories - to remind myself what I was wanting to do next in the game I was writing. It’s a bit easier to compare diffs and things in a browser when you’ve been working on several machines in different libraries than it is in the CLI.

Short answer: bit of timesaving and nice-to-haves, but nothing that you can’t do with the command line and ssh. But it’s free, so there’s no downside.

Ah, nice. Had been experimenting with using my Raspberry Pi 3B as my home Git server for all my personal projects - easy sync between my laptop and desktop, and another backup for the the stuff that I’d been working on.

Tried running Gitea on it to start with, but it’s a bit too heavy for a device like that. Forgejo runs perfectly, and has almost exactly the same, “very Github inspired” interface. Time to run some updates…

Nah - Doom (DOS): and Doom Eternal are on there, as are Baldur’s Gates 2 and 3.

Most common example would be a bicycle, I think - your pedals tighten on “in the same direction the wheel turns” as you look at them. So your left pedal has left-hand thread, and goes on and comes off backwards.

The effect of precession also means that you can tighten the pedals on finger tight and a good long ride will make them absolutely solid - need to bounce up and down on a spanner to loosen them.

Annoys me that “less” is always correct, which makes “fewer” completely redundant, and yet it’s a short word that could be valuable in conversation if opened up and reused for something everyday that has a long name.

“Before I leave the house, I always check that I’ve got my keys, phone, and fure in my pockets.”

Yeah, it’s always had really strong art direction - still holds up, and you don’t notice missing shadows so much in the middle of a frenetic sequence anyway.

Good to see ray tracing coming along. You could get the same shadows and lighting in a modern rasterising engine now as demonstrated in the RTX version, but at the cost of much more development time. Graphics like that being available to smaller studios and larger games being feasible for bigger studios would be great. HL2 is massive compared to modern shooters, and not having to spend forever tweaking each scene helps with that.

When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that “raw disk” mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you’d want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don’t require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.

Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM’s disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn’t erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can’t see the bootloader from within the VM, it can’t fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn’t have particularly high graphics requirement, too.

I was also able to just “restart in Windows” if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.