The obvious answer is to have a cross-platform sandboxed runtime enviroment that doesn't suck. It does not to be bundled in the browser, but it could be.
If it is supported you have extra guarantees that it will run right without having to mess around configurations, also if it is supported and it doesn't run for reasons that are not your fault you have the legal basis to request a refund.
I believe you can, as long as the game does not use the steam DRM or its own DRM that depends on steam being running. If the game uses steamworks for some kind of feature either that specific feature will not work, the game will crash when you try to use it, or the game will crash when you try to launch it.
Steam distributes and sells non-DRM protected games. Steam is not DRM, steam is a service that sells games like GoG, but unlike GoG it supports DRM-protected games and provides its own not so invasive DRM for companies that don't want to use other, more intrusive, DRM alternatives. If steam did not provide this kind of DRM more companies would want to push their own, broken DRM (like ubisoft does with uplay).
Really, this isn't much different than Firefox support DRM video. Who knows, maybe in a few decades there will be no more DRM protected media, but until then Steam is the most sane option that we have available.
Really, the only reason (for now) to have steam machines using Linux for the OEMs is to reduce the price. So the high-end steam machines are probably going to come with windows anyway. At least for now the low-end is where the Linux will be and it will stay there until more games (especially the more demanding, tripple-A games) support Linux.
In other news, anyone knows if these alienware machines are coming with steam and boot straight into big picture? The default settings is pretty important you know.
Who knows, maybe Intel will license some of the ARM instruction sets and have processors that can run both x86 and ARM code (and its extensions/variations.) I don't think that ARM wants that, but to prevent a monopoly they may be forced to license their instruction sets to their rivals.
It is quite funny how the experience is usually the reverse for everything except video cards. I still need to get my wifi drivers using a USB flashdrive when setting up a Windows box. In linux my wifi just works out of the box. I had similar situations with ethernet drivers and webcams in some machines.
Of course the stuff that don't work out of the box in linux it is usually better to not even try to get working.
How fondly I remember the sheer horror of seeing a player name in red text on the edge of my screen while my miner was full of ore and ingots on his bag. How people with gray names were essentially free loot to be gang banged by the blues. Summon a Daemon in the middle of a though dungeon battle to kill your "allies" so you could rob them blind without incurring the dreaded red status.
Hm, auto-pushing to a private remote branch would actually be useful in case of a hard-drive fail. But to actually be useful I would also need to have a copy of my working directory.
But then again, I rather risk losing 1~3 hours of work once in my life than setting up this kind of environment.
Re:IDE autocommit?
on
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Why would anyone want to autocommit possibly broken code?
Some noSQL allows for hybrid schemas (have part of the record be structured and optionally with indexes, but also allow any other data to be added to the record) and that is what I am using. Personally I have not used other persistence layers other than hibernate, but my time with hibernate left me very bitter.
But anyway, that was not the point I was trying to make, the point is that whenever people say "database" they think they need the absolute most efficient thing ever. But there are a myriad of cases where performance is not that important, some noSQL databases are plenty easier to use than the conventional JDBC/ODBC/Persistence library used to interact with SQL databases. People often forget to weight performance against programmer productivity.
SQL is still there because it is (almost) pure relational algebra, the math is there to prove its correctness and the math can be used to optimize your queries. You can prove that one query returns the exact same lines as another, so the DB can find and run the faster query instead of your slower one.
Just like to point out that performance is not the _only_ reason to switch to a noSQL database. For example, in my project we are switching our very small DB to a noSQL solution to have schema-less data. Other examples include: proper Object-Oriented mapping to the database (no hibernate hell,) graph databases, distributed databases with auto-sincronization (part of the database is on a mobile phone and when it connects to the internet it syncs with the remote server automatically.)
Sure you can do all that with a traditional relational database, but it brings a whole lot of pain.
Well I am not a specialist in this kind of development so I will take your word for it, but it must be hard to build up the architecture to maintain this kind of environment, for some reason this kind of approach is only taken in games that were meant to be moddable from the start.
In most applications only a really small part of the code actually yields a significant overall performance gain from having all these optimizations available. Unfortunately many times writing an application is an all or nothing game, either you write everything in language A or everything in language B. The reasons vary, but in the old days things were a little better in this regard, you could write C/Pascal and put assembly code right in the middle of it to get the time-critical parts handled better, these days doing interoperability between languages is a lot harder.
Many games in fact take the hybrid approach, graphics and basic infrastructure is written in C++, game logic and UI is written in a scripting language like Lua or Python. Civilization 4 for example even does all the AI in Python. This approach however is costly since the languages itself were not made to talk with each other. Well Python was made to talk with C code and that helps a lot but it is not very natural, you end up needing to write lots of wrappers, plus you now need to have specialists in both languages on your team.
I am no specialist but I believe that code size these days is negligible compared to data size (unless we are talking about low-memory embedded systems.) Even if you keep multiple copies of the application code around, you only keep one copy of the application data.
I personally hate using voice command with eletronics because they can't talk back to me but some people like it, couldn't they have left the mic in? How expensive even is the mic?
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Almost, a OS that runs sandboxed inside a application. Kind like java but without the huge runtime and with proper UI framework.
The obvious answer is to have a cross-platform sandboxed runtime enviroment that doesn't suck. It does not to be bundled in the browser, but it could be.
If it is supported you have extra guarantees that it will run right without having to mess around configurations, also if it is supported and it doesn't run for reasons that are not your fault you have the legal basis to request a refund.
I believe you can, as long as the game does not use the steam DRM or its own DRM that depends on steam being running. If the game uses steamworks for some kind of feature either that specific feature will not work, the game will crash when you try to use it, or the game will crash when you try to launch it.
A quick google search yielded these two lists of games that can be bought on steam and played without it:
http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/T...
http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/Li...
You can launch a non-DRM protected steam game from outside steam on as many machines as you have it installed.
Full Throttle had hovercars and they were definitely uncool compared with the bikes running on wheels.
Steam distributes and sells non-DRM protected games. Steam is not DRM, steam is a service that sells games like GoG, but unlike GoG it supports DRM-protected games and provides its own not so invasive DRM for companies that don't want to use other, more intrusive, DRM alternatives. If steam did not provide this kind of DRM more companies would want to push their own, broken DRM (like ubisoft does with uplay).
Really, this isn't much different than Firefox support DRM video. Who knows, maybe in a few decades there will be no more DRM protected media, but until then Steam is the most sane option that we have available.
It is available, but it is not supported. People that use Linux should know there is a big difference between the two.
Really, the only reason (for now) to have steam machines using Linux for the OEMs is to reduce the price. So the high-end steam machines are probably going to come with windows anyway. At least for now the low-end is where the Linux will be and it will stay there until more games (especially the more demanding, tripple-A games) support Linux.
In other news, anyone knows if these alienware machines are coming with steam and boot straight into big picture? The default settings is pretty important you know.
Well thank you for the only sensible technical explanation on the subject so far. Just want to leave this link here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Who knows, maybe Intel will license some of the ARM instruction sets and have processors that can run both x86 and ARM code (and its extensions/variations.) I don't think that ARM wants that, but to prevent a monopoly they may be forced to license their instruction sets to their rivals.
It is quite funny how the experience is usually the reverse for everything except video cards. I still need to get my wifi drivers using a USB flashdrive when setting up a Windows box. In linux my wifi just works out of the box. I had similar situations with ethernet drivers and webcams in some machines.
Of course the stuff that don't work out of the box in linux it is usually better to not even try to get working.
You talking to me?
Has been down that road before it was cool.
How fondly I remember the sheer horror of seeing a player name in red text on the edge of my screen while my miner was full of ore and ingots on his bag. How people with gray names were essentially free loot to be gang banged by the blues. Summon a Daemon in the middle of a though dungeon battle to kill your "allies" so you could rob them blind without incurring the dreaded red status.
That game was so broken and so much fun.
Hm, auto-pushing to a private remote branch would actually be useful in case of a hard-drive fail. But to actually be useful I would also need to have a copy of my working directory.
But then again, I rather risk losing 1~3 hours of work once in my life than setting up this kind of environment.
Why would anyone want to autocommit possibly broken code?
Can I play competitive FPSs well on this?
Even if not this is still great, I can now play civ5 on my old laptop on my bed. Any information if this works well over wifi or do we need ethernet?
Some noSQL allows for hybrid schemas (have part of the record be structured and optionally with indexes, but also allow any other data to be added to the record) and that is what I am using. Personally I have not used other persistence layers other than hibernate, but my time with hibernate left me very bitter.
But anyway, that was not the point I was trying to make, the point is that whenever people say "database" they think they need the absolute most efficient thing ever. But there are a myriad of cases where performance is not that important, some noSQL databases are plenty easier to use than the conventional JDBC/ODBC/Persistence library used to interact with SQL databases. People often forget to weight performance against programmer productivity.
SQL is still there because it is (almost) pure relational algebra, the math is there to prove its correctness and the math can be used to optimize your queries. You can prove that one query returns the exact same lines as another, so the DB can find and run the faster query instead of your slower one.
Just like to point out that performance is not the _only_ reason to switch to a noSQL database. For example, in my project we are switching our very small DB to a noSQL solution to have schema-less data. Other examples include: proper Object-Oriented mapping to the database (no hibernate hell,) graph databases, distributed databases with auto-sincronization (part of the database is on a mobile phone and when it connects to the internet it syncs with the remote server automatically.)
Sure you can do all that with a traditional relational database, but it brings a whole lot of pain.
Well I am not a specialist in this kind of development so I will take your word for it, but it must be hard to build up the architecture to maintain this kind of environment, for some reason this kind of approach is only taken in games that were meant to be moddable from the start.
In most applications only a really small part of the code actually yields a significant overall performance gain from having all these optimizations available. Unfortunately many times writing an application is an all or nothing game, either you write everything in language A or everything in language B. The reasons vary, but in the old days things were a little better in this regard, you could write C/Pascal and put assembly code right in the middle of it to get the time-critical parts handled better, these days doing interoperability between languages is a lot harder.
Many games in fact take the hybrid approach, graphics and basic infrastructure is written in C++, game logic and UI is written in a scripting language like Lua or Python. Civilization 4 for example even does all the AI in Python. This approach however is costly since the languages itself were not made to talk with each other. Well Python was made to talk with C code and that helps a lot but it is not very natural, you end up needing to write lots of wrappers, plus you now need to have specialists in both languages on your team.
I am no specialist but I believe that code size these days is negligible compared to data size (unless we are talking about low-memory embedded systems.) Even if you keep multiple copies of the application code around, you only keep one copy of the application data.
I personally hate using voice command with eletronics because they can't talk back to me but some people like it, couldn't they have left the mic in? How expensive even is the mic?
Really, comic books having been doing this for years...
NANOMACHINES