jeffnz

On Xbox Game Pass I'm playing card games like Slay The Spire and Monster Train. I also have Age Of Empires and Civilisation VI. I'm thinking about Settlers Of Catan (real life board game) and Flesh And Blood. War Thunder is pretty good as a strategy game too, by the way!

They are pretty quick!

Dizzy effect? Please explain.

@Lion.Kanzen Ion Fury is fantastic, I haven't finished it yet because I got sidetracked with other games like classic Doom.

Grand Strategy games are extremely popular at the moment. On console you can find: Stellaris Cities Skylines Surviving Mars Tropico 6 I hope that next gen Xbox and PlayStation will have proper mouse and keyboard support, that way PC gaming won't have so many advantages. I don't run Windows on my PC but I have console for games (I prefer having a separate system for games, just imagine having your PC cluttered with games and chat apps aggghhh lol) Don't forget Spring RTS on PC which is free software.

There are too many downsides to using Steam. The worst downside is that instead of funding Steam, we could encourage more people to donate to projects such as 0AD (I know the fundraiser wasn't as good as people had hoped, but in my opinion it's worth trying it again) Anyway - things I personally dislike regarding Steam: It's too slow and it updates all the time I don't need built-in rubbish such as 'friends' or pop-up advertising It's possible that Steam causes Linux to freeze 75% sales - they are not a reason to buy games Command & Conquer 3 doesn't work on my new PC Steam games are automatically sold at their highest patch version, there is no way to go down a version I don't need Steam or Origin to play a game. I'd rather buy a disk! I deleted my Steam account 6 days ago but it doesn't delete until 30 days has elapsed. Send a message to Steam support and delete your Steam account now - so that you don't waste more money on them.

I think that these monopolies will continue, they will suddenly do something nice to draw people back, if they feel at risk of losing everyone. That's why we must persuade people with principles, not "nice things". 0 A.D. is the type of project that will keep people on Linux. So far, the Linux community is fragmented and so is support. I tried to install a .DEB package to get Steam on Debian, but it was actually an Ubuntu package. I think they also offer RPM for Fedora and a few other distros, but typically only 1-2 distros get support for commercial games. It's better if people make their own. BTW I'm a huge fan of GOG. I use Steam client but I want to option to avoid it too. Just in case Valve turns evil one day.

Hahaha I heard that if you get mum-and-dad's credit card you can get some cool cheats in Call Of Duty! Some companies offer a fair price and a good product/service, sadly not all do this. Certainly not companies with a comfortable presence and guaranteed business (ie. they have you by the balls, so-to-speak!) Gaming is pretty bad these days. Companies know that their audience is teenagers and guys who live with their parents LMAO. I'm ready to withdraw my money as soon as something annoys me. Best not to spend anything in the first place, at least don't spend so much that you have to keep going like it's gambling.

Hi folks, It seems I have passed my course. I expect to get the diploma, then I'll be off to get a job (not a programming one though, I had something else in mind). So anyway I just posted on Steam regarding fatal lag problems that I've always experienced (with games in general). Someone told me that you can host Steam yourself so long as you own the game in question. It seems many people host off their personal PC, though it is also possible to get a dedicated server. My worst multiplayer experience was a few years ago on PS4. I played Drive Club which has a challenge feature (do a drift for high points, or get a high average speed, and beat another player's record set that day) sometimes I'd drive toward a challenge, but the challenge data didn't load in time, and I was unable to achieve it. I note that in August of this year Sony decided to raise the price of PSN without adding new servers or any useful feature. It still sucks, but now it costs more. When I used PSN I recall the name "Sony Entertainment Network Europe" so perhaps their servers are in Europe? Sony is happy to tell us the status of their servers, but they say nothing about locations on their network status page. The only way I will enjoy games is if I fund-raise for servers and host them in New Zealand (forget single player games, how many are there these days? It's all multiplayer now). We should refuse to buy any game or pay for any service unless the companies are transparent about server locations. In addition, users should have full rights to run their own servers for any game, including the ability for a person to run his/her own PSN or Xbox Live server*. Trans-national corporations take money out of countries and do not pay tax, and we receive very little in return. * in some elitist gaming communities people will say that PC gaming is heaps better anyway and I'm basically an idiot if I buy a console, but that is not a reason to rubbish consoles. It is the servers that bother me. There is really nothing wrong with consoles unless you care about slightly-better graphics. The way that Microsoft and Sony behave makes me want to either buy a Nintendo Switch, or make my own games for free. I like the idea of managing communities and making games but I dislike the idea of actually working in the games industry, as a job lol. I also hate spending too much time in front of a PC - I'd rather get a basic job and just have tech stuff as a hobby, pay money to useful projects, ya know? :-)

@vladislavbelov I have a book titled The Black Art Of Multiplatform Game Programming. That guy uses a pattern but I'm not sure which pattern it is. The later chapters in that book are really confusing.

In the future I'd like to re-write this again and make a full feature game under the GPL-3 license, using proper graphics. https://github.com/jeffkiwi/cplusplus If someone here is really nice then please take a look and tell me what the ugliest part is! I'd ask on gamedev.net but I don't like the spirit of that place, it's about commercial games. I intend to release under GPL, not make money! The games industry is too competitive these days and it's controlled by lawyers and investors. I'm the opposite to them, so I post here So anyway, in my opinion the worst aspect of my program is that there is no error checking. I made an error check before but it didn't behave properly. I used a simple thing: IF(imagebitmap == NULL) THEN CloseProgramGracefully() but for some reason that didn't work and the program crashed with a random return number, instead of a nice error messagebox in SDL2. It was a few weeks ago so I don't remember it very well. I think I tried a try-catch too but I can't remember. I honestly don't know what one to use anyway - try-catch, or if xxxxxxx == NULL? Visual Studio has unit testing but I migrated this project back to Code::Blocks so there's no point in Visual Studio unit tests when they won't work with Code::Blocks. Another problem that I see: my program isn't written according to a "pattern" because I don't know what pattern would suit my program. I doubt that my program needs a pattern. It'd be nice though. When I do an error check and the CloseProgramGracefully() it's nice to be within scope, that way I don't need all the parametres like so: CloseProgramGracefully(graphicsobject, inputobject, soundobject) PLUS delete all block objects, PLUS delete all enemies, PLUS delete all players - another 3 lines each time I wish to close the program, and there are many points where it might need to close due to an error. It's great that I can write in c++ but I'd like to be better at it. I like the teamwork part of programming, but not so much the programming itself lol. I've been doing programming since I was 12 and I made my first game when I was 15. It's the only job I want, yet I feel embarrassed about my ability. ps. If anyone else has a project to share then please do share your program (or your experiences in writing the program).

I've tried OBS and it isn't working. First I had a problem that was easily fixed - it wasn't recording video. Now it does record video but with very odd results. I tried to record 8 bit armies and there was no movement on the screen. I could see the mouse pointer and in the game I was clicking on the mini map and I was moving the mouse to the screen edge to scroll. Somehow, the OBS recorded stuff did not render the scrolling of the map. Also I could hear shooting and the voices of my units, but in the recorded video the units are not moving or shooting. They are stuck still.

Nvidia seems to think that my graphics card is junk and doesn't want to install the recording tool. I'll buy another PC next year and try this out.

I've got a budget card worth only $50 so I am guessing that this feature only exists on more expensive cards?

So these things pickup the HDMI data that goes through the system and it records to the hard drive? How does it link with other PC components?