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So You Want to Compete with Steam

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Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#211

Post by SolarNet »

throwanem wrote: post #188
SolarNet wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean. Based off of his posts, he implied he took an image from a physical machine with Nvidia hardware and put it in a virtual machine (on an unspecified system with out guest additions anyway). Are you claiming a disk image of an OS running with Nvidia hardware (that used the acceleration) - with that shim installed - is not going to have that package added anymore if I just stick it in a VM? If so what mechanism…

If your concern is with making Linux on the desktop more appealing, it may be worth your while to consider whether your discursive style, in the role of (presumably self-appointed) community representative, might make it more likely or less likely that people will want to participate in the community you claim to represent. As it happens, my own experience with the Linux community suggests that you do not accurately…

I never claimed to be a member, let alone some sort of representative, I'm not nearly nice enough. It was more of a "leave those nice people alone with your trolling" than a "leave us alone".

Surprising is, that no one seems to have a problem with the technical side of what I posted. Just the fact I said a bad word. To wit, I have news for you, the guy who runs linux swears all the time at all kinds of people. I wouldn't touch the stuff if I were you.

Also still waiting to hear how a disk image looses a package when placed in a VM.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#212

Post by pbhjpbhj »

watwut wrote: post #199
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discovery seems good on Steam to me - shows games your 'friends' have and are playing, search by tags/keywords, stream of game suggestions you can work through, easy to browse library ... what's it need extra IYO?

I would prefer games I might like instead of those my 'friends' (virtually non existent on steam and those who are having different preferences) have. I am mostly unable to find puzzle games that are not rpgs nor adventures. No matter what I do I see same most popular games I don't happen to be interested in.

Like Portal, World of Goo, Talos Principle? Or are those too RPG/adventurey?

Seems most people want puzzles in a context, rather than just raw?

If I go to search and put "puzzle" I get pages of puzzles and can choose a tighter genre to narrow it down. If I go to Portal 2, say, I get "more like this" (Qube looks interesting).

What's your best puzzle game?

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#213

Post by throwanem »

SolarNet wrote: post #211
throwanem wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your concern is with making Linux on the desktop more appealing, it may be worth your while to consider whether your discursive style, in the role of (presumably self-appointed) community representative, might make it more likely or less likely that people will want to participate in the community you claim to represent. As it happens, my own experience with the Linux community suggests that you do not accurately…

I never claimed to be a member, let alone some sort of representative, I'm not nearly nice enough. It was more of a "leave those nice people alone with your trolling" than a "leave us alone". Surprising is, that no one seems to have a problem with the technical side of what I posted. Just the fact I said a bad word. To wit, I have news for you, the guy who runs linux swears all the time at all kinds of people. I woul…

Torvalds doesn't represent the Linux community to current or prospective users. He doesn't even represent the Linux community to devs who aren't on LKML. So pleading his style doesn't help your case here. As for

> I never claimed to be a member, let alone some sort of representative

Earlier, you said:

> We are not your tech support

Whom, then, did you mean by "we"?

And as far as the technical side, well, who knows? You're very quick to assume you understand exactly what's going on, but I don't see why that means I should be likewise.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#214

Post by jasonkostempski »

dleslie wrote: post #22
kgwxd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants a game that requires a "platform", they just don't realize it or care enough to boycott over it.

Gamers love relay servers, NAT punching, automatic updates, matchmaking, friend lists, achievements, community forums, screenshot sharing, streaming and more. Gamers love platforms and what they provide at least as much as they love games themselves.

Those are all features a platform should provide. Nothing about those features require that the game itself becomes unavailable should your Steam account be disabled or if Steam disappears, or that the game cannot be moved to another PC based platform. Creating a platform that allowed for/encouraged that would be a serious competitor to Steam in my opinion.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#215

Post by drb91 »

chungy wrote: post #97
drb91 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you transfer from movies anywhere to eg your itunes account? Because otherwise they seem like just another walled garden.

You can connect your Movies Anywhere account to Vudu, Amazon, Google, and/or iTunes. Then your library shows up on those services.

Wow, I stand corrected, that actually seems pretty useful!

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#216

Post by dleslie »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #214
dleslie wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamers love relay servers, NAT punching, automatic updates, matchmaking, friend lists, achievements, community forums, screenshot sharing, streaming and more. Gamers love platforms and what they provide at least as much as they love games themselves.

Those are all features a platform should provide. Nothing about those features require that the game itself becomes unavailable should your Steam account be disabled or if Steam disappears, or that the game cannot be moved to another PC based platform. Creating a platform that allowed for/encouraged that would be a serious competitor to Steam in my opinion.

Nothing? Steam provides these features in order to maintain the network effects; losing the library exclusivity would be a crushing blow to that strategy.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#217

Post by mmjaa »

mehrdadn wrote: post #209
mmjaa wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you don't know what "DLL hell" was. >The part I find mind-boggling is that Linux users are obsessed with package mangers for the initial installations themselves, not merely updating. Yes, because it keeps the system functional and operating and - if you use it properly - package management is a hellaciously great way to build a system. > Do they really only ever want to install FOSS software blessed by…

> I'm guessing you don't know what "DLL hell" was. I do. And like you said: "was" . That's why I asked which version of Windows parent is talking abomut. Why are you bringing it up so many years later when you explicitly acknowledge it "was" rather than "is"? > Don't blame the tool if you don't know how to use it properly So many of you are baselessly claiming this yet none of you are telling me what I could have pos…

When you say you told it to update everything, do you mean this:

    $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
FWIW, Steam has a long and chequered history with regards to dependency hell - and there are gotcha's with using it on 32-bit systems these days, so it could be that. Your package manager was protecting you from this issue, not limiting you, and I would suggest that the problem you ran into, was more related to Steams' requirements than to your package manager being borked somehow.

The reason you're getting so much push-back on this issue, I feel, is that there are far, far more benefits to package management than disadvantages, and in your special case you managed to get into a state that led you to the wrong conclusion, alas. Your package manager was protecting your system, as it is designed to do - what you needed to do was identify which package had the foul dependencies, and either decide to override the package manager, or uninstall the original app - which I believe was Steam.

Steam on Linux does have gotcha's - one of which, the designers of Steam also don't want to have to maintain a package repo or play nice with distro's efforts to keep peoples systems clean and well-maintained (too expensive to actually play along) .. so the fact that you were being tripped up by Steam, and subsequently blamed Linux-worlds' package management, is double-frustrating for those of us who have been using package management for decades and consider it one of the principle advantages to being Linux users, over the hell of Windows installation that has cropped the industry for decades.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#218

Post by Maken »

mehrdadn wrote: post #141
Maken wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have run into this kind of package dependency lock-down sometimes when installing updated graphic drivers and build systems (usually from non-official repositories), and I have been able to solve it by reverting the problematic packages to older versions until I hit a well-formed dependency tree. I only hit a similar problem in Windows once, when it hung up installing a new C++ runtime, and since then I could neith…

Thanks! Yeah, this is a great follow-up to what I've been saying. Right, Windows isn't perfect either. What it does have going for it, though, is that on Windows there are comparatively very few external shared libraries -- in fact, the only ones I can think of are in fact the C, C++, .NET, and SQL runtimes. So, as you confirmed, it means application updates rarely break your system globally. (OS updates can still wr…

They are just different approaches, "bundle every library with the binary" vs "make every binary load the system library". And I think it's mostly a distinction of a system designed for final users (Windows), where your priority is making sure the program works with as little unknowns as possible, vs a system designed for production (Linux), where the people in charge wants to know exactly what is running.

Answering your question, I hit that problem on a Windows 7 machine, it was not a suspicious update, just the usual "install C++ redistributable 20xx to make this program work", but it crashed halfway for some reason. After a while I just reinstalled Windows (it was almost a clean install, so nothing starting anew was simply faster).

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#219

Post by hellbanner »

kasbah wrote: post #207
hellbanner wrote: post #65

We sell our game on itch http://QuantumPilot.me Developer chooses what cut to pay to itch, which is nice. DRM free, easy to setup -- 5 minutes compare to 5 hours with Steam. Itch supports indie game dev by letting community manage "Game Jams": http://itch.io/jams Their site + client is open source: https://github.com/itchio

The client seems to be open source but their site doesn't. https://github.com/itchio/itch.io is just an issue tracker.

My mistake, thank you

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#220

Post by majewsky »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #157
majewsky wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You guys really have less trouble with package managers than Windows installers? Hell yeah. I remember when I had to set aside entire weekends to reinstall a Windows machine. These days, when I need to reinstall one of my Linux boxes, I just fire up the Arch installer, and instead of installing the "base" package group as the manual instructs you, I install my configuration package for that machine which pulls in a…

One wonders why you have to rebuild your "better than reinstalling Windows all the time" system so often as to have invested the time creating a metapackage of your configuration.

1. Because the package acts as a backup, and the commit history explains why I set up stuff the way I did.

2. Because it's really convenient to just link people to its Github repo when they ask questions like "how do you configure MPD to use PulseAudio?".

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