Bellum's forum posts

#1 Posted by Bellum (2944 posts) -

Haven't played Diablo 3, but I remember thinking Diablo 2 was a step down from from Diablo in terms of atmosphere. Maybe the gameplay was better. I don't know. I was too busy breaking my mouse to pieces in Diablo to take the time and figure out if I was actually having fun or not.

Anyway, I really got no respect for someone who reacts that way to criticism, no matter if it was meant to be a public statement or not. At the same time, it isn't my business one way or the other. Blizzard is not the company it once was. The days of Warcraft 2 and Starcraft are long gone. But they still do some decent work.

#2 Edited by Bellum (2944 posts) -
#3 Posted by Bellum (2944 posts) -

@jakob187 said:

I'm not a hipster.

I'm an overly critical, opinionated asshole.

When I find myself getting angry at people who are wrong on the Internet, I find it is sometimes helpful to take a deep breath and watch Who's Line is it Anyway? clips on Youtube.

Ahhh, I feel much better...

#4 Posted by Bellum (2944 posts) -

"Hipster" is the new emo, and it's still stupid as fuck. :D

#5 Posted by Bellum (2944 posts) -

@TheHumanDove said:

I'm not hardcore enough for Linux. I'm just a simple man with simple wants

You can watch porn on Linux, too! :D

#6 Posted by Bellum (2944 posts) -

@SmilingPig said:

Linux is for crazy tech ultra nerds.

Not necessarily; though it's certainly more useful than Windows if you are!

#7 Posted by Bellum (2944 posts) -

I actually use Linux exclusively right now. :P

I play some games on WINE.

#8 Posted by Bellum (2944 posts) -

@Shivoa: Interesting. Thanks for the clarification. :)

#9 Posted by Bellum (2944 posts) -

@Shivoa said:

@Bellum said:

As far as business sense goes, I feel like it's probably a lot cheaper to develop games for Linux and Mac and port to Windows than the other way around. OpenGL is portable, and you can make common wrappers around the few similar-but-different system calls you need. Actually, if you avoid Cocoa, you can probably just about compile your Mac game on a Linux machine. Translating DirectX to OpenGL is much more expensive, IDK why so many people do it.

Valve don't seem to have your problems with writing an engine with D3D calls and then porting those to their OpenGL equivalents. They did it a few years ago when they embraced MacOS X and spoke about it then. Obviously the ideal it to have an implementation agnostic interface for rendering and then you link that to the D3D or OGL implementation depending on the platform (or even give Windows users the choice - remember the old days when we'd barely weaned gamers off Glide for Voodoo cards and so Unreal Tournament would ask you if you wanted software rendering, OpenGL, DirectX, or Glide as your rendering API) but Valve didn't seem to think they were having any performance issues with calling their Direct3D style functions which actually did the equivalent OpenGL calls.

Because Windows is the lion's share of the gaming market for PCs and DirectX (render, audio, input, etc) is the industry standard (baring those few outliers like id software) and also the hardware standard (Direct 3D feature level being how hardware vendors sell and even develop their graphics products and drivers - see Intel and how they messed up OpenGL feature parity in their integrated solutions in the last few years while genuinely chasing the highest DX feature level they could) then it makes sense to target that platform first. Cross platform then you've probably got a good reason to target OpenGL ES on PS3 due to the less standard nature of the CPU design but that's not really a renderer reason but a wider engine building choice and that isn't the same thing as having an OpenGL 3/4 code path for Mac/Linux.

It's not about performance, but development and maintenance costs. It's not impossible to do, but seriously, why try to maintain a wrapper talking to two APIs when you can support as many platforms just using the one API that is multi-platform? At least for something as complicated as 3d rendering! I understand DirectX also has other useful components for game developers.

#10 Posted by Bellum (2944 posts) -

@coribald said:

@Khann said:

@Jams said:

@iAmJohn said:

@predator said:

I thought RMS was surprisingly lenient on this subject. I would have said we don't want Steam on GNU/Linux at all, but he makes a good point.

Why do you think all software should be free?

Because they're so blindingly selfish, that they'd rather everyone give them stuff for free than actually work for it, or even steal for it. They just sit there grotesque maw agape sucking in anything that's been made available to them for free. Feeding off of everyone else's hard labor. Whilst exhaling, they spit nonsensical complaints about things they cannot even fathom or presume to understand.

Free and open source software is about the spread of knowledge and information for all. It is the complete opposite of the retarded bullshit you just spewed.

Oh. That's nice. So all the game developers and designers can go home to their free and open source houses, serve free and open source food to their families, and sleep in their free and open source bed.

Where does the money come from in this hippie commune of a world?

The "Free Software" movement (that I disagree with very strongly. I believe in the sound usefulness of open source, but I don't believe granting people the privilege of using your copyrighted code is more ethical or grants more "freedom" than the alternatives) isn't about software that doesn't cost money, but software that can be modified and re-distributed by anyone. How you can make money off of a product when your neighbor can then repackage a slightly better version of your product is never quite made clear. :P

Many Linux companies get by selling corporate support contracts. I'm not sure how this benefits the average volunteer hacker, though.