I'm sad to say, but I became hypocrite. Some years ago, I've signed an oath not to buy any UEFI device. I did break this oath yesterday by buying Samsung ATIV Book 730U which has UEFI BIOS. I'm sorry. Perhaps one day there will be an open BIOS replacement or something. And of course, I've turned Secure Boot off and didn't install Windows 8 shipped with this notebook(no, I haven't even accepted EULA!).

— Zdenek Styblik 2013/09/01 17:51

Despite it may seem a as a rant, it's actually seriously meant post. I've been quite amazed by NPCs in Batman: Arkham City and Dishonored. By amazed I mean they felt alive particularly by having meaningful conversations(more or less in case of Dishonored) between each other.

Now, the space for improvement I see is these NPCs have no links/communication channels between each other. Two NPCs are having a conversation. If you kill one of them, the other one doesn't notice; doesn't investigate why the other side became silent. But we, people, would, wouldn't we? I would. I suspect this is because NPCs don't have communication channel between each other, but are rather event driven with a bit of randomness(Do I feel like replying to event I've received?). Would be something like this hard to do? To keep track of conversations, making and breaking/ending them. I think it would make games not only a bit more challenging, but it would add a bit more life-likeness to NPCs as well. On the other hand, I'm well aware making NPC AI isn't easy and I'm sure somebody from game industry could give me a handful of corner-cases where this would either break the game or would cause NPCs to go crazy

— Zdenek Styblik 2013/09/07 10:43

I've just read GoG rules out Linux support due to platform disparity and I must say it sounds to me like a lot of bulls. Why? Because I have a port of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 for GNU/Linux which still runs after all those years and it doesn't matter whether it's on 32bit or 64bit, whether it's Slackware, Debian or Ubuntu. So, please, don't tell me how impossible it's to support games on GNU/Linux. What? HoMaM3 isn't 3D game. I hear you. Hidden and Dangerous 2 then? Seriously, stop it.

Why don't you do it as Valve? Just clone wine, compile it with static libraries and off you go. I'm not exactly sure what else you were planning to do. Re-write all games to be native on GNU/Linux? I doubt it. Again, why don't you do it as Valve? Just support one distribution. Which one? I'm sad to say, Ubuntu. That's where your user-base is most likely going to be. And Debian will, or might, come along since Ubuntu is somewhat “clone” of Debian. Also, game is an application like any other, right? So, how came we have a lot of those years old applications which are still able to run nowadays. Strange, isn't it?

There are ways how to do it. I understand it most likely isn't viable right now and would be rather a money sink hole for a quite some time. Again, look at Valve. From time to time, there are news about Steam's GNU/Linux user-base thinning out at Phoronix. It could be caused by the fact nobody is going to reboot into GNU/Linux just to play Half-Life 2. I wouldn't. But don't bull people with poorly constructed excuses. You don't understand GNU/Linux, it's not viable/profitable deal for you, whatever - that's all fine and we understand. Just don't bull us.

— Zdenek Styblik 2013/09/08 10:46