The Epic launcher is supposed to be more dev friendly by taking a smaller cut of the sales, along with other benefits. I might end up getting it because they look to be pursuing actual competition with steam. Most other launchers are myopic in scope by just looking to cut out the middleman.
The Epic store is also friendlier to devs by virtue of not having some of Steam's more contentious mandatory elements: Steam user reviews are tainted by constant mass review-bombing and joke/troll reviews, Valve does next to nothing about community groups and curators that are devoted to trolling or are a front for outright hate groups, and the Steam forums are almost universally toxic to the point of unusability.
Every significant improvement in Steam itself over the last 5-ish years has been forced on Valve by a third party either directly (in the case of the refund policy) or indirectly (improved Linux support, which was a response to the clusterfuck of Windows 8, and the Steambox initiative, which they killed off as soon as they figured that they didn't actually need to worry about creating an alternative to Windows PCs). The market desperately needs competition for Steam, if only because Valve increasingly needs to be forced to act like they give a fuck.
What!? There's an X4? Did not even know they were working on it. I honestly assumed they tanked after Rebirth. I'll have to check out some streams. Even then I'll probably wait awhile to let them iron out bugs.
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
It's actually been decently smooth sailing, I had that unmoving escort target upthread, but that one can be bypassed by simply going to your home base and talking to the guy in person. Though I just noticed a bit of an amusing bug, that started as 'oh dammit I just accidentally gave one of my automated traders a fly to this point order', then went to 'wait, this isn't even my ship.' Couldn't give the ship any actual orders, but I could drag waypoints off of its travel line.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Yeah, if you don't have Steam taking its cut, you make more per individual sale. But you know what sells a hell of a lot of games? Steam. Better to sell 100,000 on Steam than 10,000 on your own platform no one wants to use.
Ten percent of nothing is, let me do the math here, nothing into nothing, carry the nothin'...
Big enough exclusives are the only way you can grow your platform sufficiently to be a competitor though. I mean, it worked for GoG, Origin, and Uplay (though granted at least the latter places plays nicely with other stores instead...but who the fuck uses Uplay alone?)
GoG did it right by offering a lot value to their service without strong-arming people with it and Ubisoft does the same thing. You can still get their games via Steam. Epic's launcher needs to follow suit by offering better value than Steam to the customer without playing the exclusive game or it's just going to piss people off. For instance, I'm hype for RGO but I'll be happy to wait to get it if Epic is going to use these sort of tactics.
I agree Steam needs competition because Valve has gotten lazy as hell, but I don't like companies fracturing the market.
When GOG entered the market, they were offering two services that you couldn't get on Steam: old games that were updated to work on modern computers, and DRM-free games. The only way a Steam competitor can actually compete with Steam is by having exclusive services that Steam can't or won't offer, and the only customer-facing exclusives that really matter are the games themselves.
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Remember that Steam is only a thing because Valve forced us all onto it with their own releases--exactly like what EA and Blizzard are doing.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
I feel like offering better deals, customer service, features and not having a store front littered with garbage is a solid enough way to compete with Steam.
I'm probably in the minority here but I barely tolerate third-party exclusives on consoles and I'm certainly not going to put up with it on PC.
Don't get me wrong, Steam needs a competitor and I feel like Epic can deliver, but exclusives are not the way.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I've sunk 24ish hours into the first rebel galaxy so getting the next one is a given. However my backlog is massive, by the time I get round to it, the next rebel galaxy will already be on steam
I feel like offering better deals, customer service, features and not having a store front littered with garbage is a solid enough way to compete with Steam.
You would think that, but GOG have said not being on Steam really hurt Thronebreakers.
Personally I try to buy my games on GOG these days. The fact that thier old games are not just the old files, but have actually been tested to see if they work with modern windows is a no brainer on buying old games from them.
I was okay with battle.net having all the Blizzard games, but I don't think I'll buy any activision games on it. Destiny 2 being a trash fire helped me stick to that.
I stay away from the windows store, which has kept me from trying a few games. I don't trust Microsoft to not fuck it up very soon.
It sort of makes sense for Epic to ride the Fortnite succes and make thier own store. I don't play Fortnite and never will, but if people need to launch the store anyway to play it, I think it might have a chance.
On fire
.
Island. Being on fire.
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
My trade fleet continues to do its work, I have traded my way up to the second rep level with several factions at this point, which unlocks an (expensive) license you can buy that gives you trading updates on ALL of their stations, regardless of sat coverage.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
My trade fleet continues to do its work, I have traded my way up to the second rep level with several factions at this point, which unlocks an (expensive) license you can buy that gives you trading updates on ALL of their stations, regardless of sat coverage.
So that's what that does.
It's pretty easy to set up a satellite network from the map so I think I'll just continue to do that..
I bought X3 a long time ago, but never got around to play and about a year ago I bought Starpoint Gemini Warlords and have been just about to play for all that time.
I have a feeling that SG Warlords is a bit lighter than X4. Would any of you recomend that I play that before X4, to get into the feel of space simulators again?
Also, I have been wanting an excuse to buy a Logitech X56 Hotas for some time. Is there any point to that in X4, or is there to much that need a mouse?
Big enough exclusives are the only way you can grow your platform sufficiently to be a competitor though. I mean, it worked for GoG, Origin, and Uplay (though granted at least the latter places plays nicely with other stores instead...but who the fuck uses Uplay alone?)
It's how Steam got started in the first place: the Half-Life franchise and the Source engine spin-offs.
The different being that Steam was really, really terrible when it was just getting implemented. Valve was still figuring a lot of these things out of course. The other platforms have the benefit of hindsight.
Can we drag the Epic Store/Steam Sucks discussion into another thread please?
+10
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Hrum, dunno if it'd fall under bug or poorly defined feature, giving autotrade orders to a ship seems to exempt any preexisting cargo it was carrying from consideration. Noticed some of my ships sitting idle, they had autotrade as their behavior but were sitting around doing fuckall because their holds were full of stuff from previous autotrade orders.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
yeah thats been a thing since at least x3, I think it is supposed to be so you don't accidentally sell something you didn't mean them to, even though its like bro these are just commodities, please blow through them all.
Mon-Fri 8:30 PM CST - 11:30 PM CST
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Hrmm, well THIS is feeling like an actual bug at least: if your miners manage to pick up resources that aren't the one they are specifically mining for, they're too dumb to drop it off, so it accumulates until it fills it and then they just sort of lurch around forever trying to mine but they're full.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
edited December 2018
I kinda wish that production modules didn't insist on only having connection points on the underside, because it leads to some fugly.
Ought to go sniffing around, see if there's missions that let me figure out what that asteroid thing is about or if it is just Unknown Module forever.
:edit: Spotted another bug, bought some Large gas miners, when assigned to mine for a base their auto-orders fail to queue up a ware transfer when they fill.
:edit: or hmm, maybe there's just an oddly long delay before it kicks in? Attempting science at it.
:edit: Ok yeah, it's not 100% of the time, but something is making gas miners just sit around on the 'automine' default behavior when they fill up rather than dropping off. Can't tell what gas they'd been assigned to harvest because the job for that vanishes when they fill up.
:edit: and now that I'm paying attention, they aren't doing it anymore, though it DOES feel like the delay before dropoff is rather long, considering I've got SETA going.
:Edit: caught them at it again, I wonder if it's somehow specific to Hydrogen, because I just found all four of them wandering aimlessly while full of hydrogen
:edit: oh hell, I think I cracked the mystery of my gas traders: station's storage is full, but the interface will happily let you queue up transfer orders that would put it over capacity so I never caught on.
:edit: and while I'm at it, looks like miners do in fact clear out other resources automatically, they just don't queue up the job right away so it shows as 'will be left over after jobs' when you select them.
NEO|Phyte on
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
+1
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
EgoSoft video about patches and upcoming features:
NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Update since last post: Through the wonders of having SETA active over long stretches of AFK, I got super rich, and went around and bought up all the blueprints from the assorted factions. I also bought a big boy ship and discovered that
1) That particular ship (if not all Large-sized ships, I haven't tried other ones) was missing the interface for setting turret behavior.
2) There are no keybinds for giving orders to subordinate ships, nor can you do it from the interaction menu, if you want to tell the tiny ships you assigned to your big ship to go shoot mans, you have to do it from the map.
3) Assigned ships, despite nominally being there to defend the ship they are assigned to, are super bad at doing things like attacking hostile ships on their own.
4) If you assign a ship to defend a station, it will go patrolling through the sectors rather than sticking near the station it is assigned to, and will eventually aggro something, chase it into a hostile sector, and valiantly suicide against Xenon defense stations.
Given that my money worries are functionally over, I probably ought to go poking at some of these faction missions, see if there's any actual questlines to be had aside from that Boron I rescued early on.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Anyone else think X Rebirth's graphics are significantly better than X4's? Game is undoubtedly more solid and more of a true X game all around but man, the cap ship battles and FX in Rebirth were pretty damned cool. Some really neat looking sector designs too.
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Patch day for X4, looks like Ventures are now active, and it's a multiplayerish feature where you can send your dudes into other peoples' worlds to do stuff.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Its time for the next Freespace 2 Megamod! For a crew of developers you can count on one hand, they've really done a bang up job converting a pure space sim into something more Wing Commander-esque in terms of cutscenes and immersion. Yep, it's Wings of Dawn Episode 2. Embrace your inner weeb, don't worry, you're in a judgement free zone.
Its time for the next Freespace 2 Megamod! For a crew of developers you can count on one hand, they've really done a bang up job converting a pure space sim into something more Wing Commander-esque in terms of cutscenes and immersion. Yep, it's Wings of Dawn Episode 2. Embrace your inner weeb, don't worry, you're in a judgement free zone.
I believe it's fully independent, you just download and run Fs2_open_Wings_of_Dawn-EX17-SSE2.exe .
You can download it however with Knossos, which as long as you have a copy of FS2 from GOG or Steam will allow you to play dozens of other custom, and awesome campaigns.
Do all the side missions. All of them. Earn as much money as possible to upgrade armour, shields and turrets. I prefer the pulse turrets as they have a great range.
In terms of broadsides, I use the one with the longest range (name escapes me right now). Flak guns for secondary to cover me from missiles.
My advice, unfortunately, boils down to "earn all the money to upgrade your ship". Also, do not forget to upgrade to the next ship where possible.
Oh and early on in the game, you need to take direct control of turrets to deal with fighters. You don't have enough guns to let the AI handle it at that time
I haven't done that many side missions, I've been getting rich trading and going after a random pirate groups.
Really capitalizing on my terminus, fallout 2, freespace, pubg strategy of joining in one sided battles and profiting off the loser and sometimes winner
Posts
The Epic store is also friendlier to devs by virtue of not having some of Steam's more contentious mandatory elements: Steam user reviews are tainted by constant mass review-bombing and joke/troll reviews, Valve does next to nothing about community groups and curators that are devoted to trolling or are a front for outright hate groups, and the Steam forums are almost universally toxic to the point of unusability.
Every significant improvement in Steam itself over the last 5-ish years has been forced on Valve by a third party either directly (in the case of the refund policy) or indirectly (improved Linux support, which was a response to the clusterfuck of Windows 8, and the Steambox initiative, which they killed off as soon as they figured that they didn't actually need to worry about creating an alternative to Windows PCs). The market desperately needs competition for Steam, if only because Valve increasingly needs to be forced to act like they give a fuck.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Ten percent of nothing is, let me do the math here, nothing into nothing, carry the nothin'...
GoG did it right by offering a lot value to their service without strong-arming people with it and Ubisoft does the same thing. You can still get their games via Steam. Epic's launcher needs to follow suit by offering better value than Steam to the customer without playing the exclusive game or it's just going to piss people off. For instance, I'm hype for RGO but I'll be happy to wait to get it if Epic is going to use these sort of tactics.
I agree Steam needs competition because Valve has gotten lazy as hell, but I don't like companies fracturing the market.
I'm probably in the minority here but I barely tolerate third-party exclusives on consoles and I'm certainly not going to put up with it on PC.
Don't get me wrong, Steam needs a competitor and I feel like Epic can deliver, but exclusives are not the way.
You would think that, but GOG have said not being on Steam really hurt Thronebreakers.
Personally I try to buy my games on GOG these days. The fact that thier old games are not just the old files, but have actually been tested to see if they work with modern windows is a no brainer on buying old games from them.
I was okay with battle.net having all the Blizzard games, but I don't think I'll buy any activision games on it. Destiny 2 being a trash fire helped me stick to that.
I stay away from the windows store, which has kept me from trying a few games. I don't trust Microsoft to not fuck it up very soon.
It sort of makes sense for Epic to ride the Fortnite succes and make thier own store. I don't play Fortnite and never will, but if people need to launch the store anyway to play it, I think it might have a chance.
.
Island. Being on fire.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
So that's what that does.
It's pretty easy to set up a satellite network from the map so I think I'll just continue to do that..
I have a feeling that SG Warlords is a bit lighter than X4. Would any of you recomend that I play that before X4, to get into the feel of space simulators again?
Also, I have been wanting an excuse to buy a Logitech X56 Hotas for some time. Is there any point to that in X4, or is there to much that need a mouse?
.
Island. Being on fire.
It's how Steam got started in the first place: the Half-Life franchise and the Source engine spin-offs.
The different being that Steam was really, really terrible when it was just getting implemented. Valve was still figuring a lot of these things out of course. The other platforms have the benefit of hindsight.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
:edit: Spotted another bug, bought some Large gas miners, when assigned to mine for a base their auto-orders fail to queue up a ware transfer when they fill.
:edit: or hmm, maybe there's just an oddly long delay before it kicks in? Attempting science at it.
:edit: Ok yeah, it's not 100% of the time, but something is making gas miners just sit around on the 'automine' default behavior when they fill up rather than dropping off. Can't tell what gas they'd been assigned to harvest because the job for that vanishes when they fill up.
:edit: and now that I'm paying attention, they aren't doing it anymore, though it DOES feel like the delay before dropoff is rather long, considering I've got SETA going.
:Edit: caught them at it again, I wonder if it's somehow specific to Hydrogen, because I just found all four of them wandering aimlessly while full of hydrogen
:edit: oh hell, I think I cracked the mystery of my gas traders: station's storage is full, but the interface will happily let you queue up transfer orders that would put it over capacity so I never caught on.
:edit: and while I'm at it, looks like miners do in fact clear out other resources automatically, they just don't queue up the job right away so it shows as 'will be left over after jobs' when you select them.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
1) That particular ship (if not all Large-sized ships, I haven't tried other ones) was missing the interface for setting turret behavior.
2) There are no keybinds for giving orders to subordinate ships, nor can you do it from the interaction menu, if you want to tell the tiny ships you assigned to your big ship to go shoot mans, you have to do it from the map.
3) Assigned ships, despite nominally being there to defend the ship they are assigned to, are super bad at doing things like attacking hostile ships on their own.
4) If you assign a ship to defend a station, it will go patrolling through the sectors rather than sticking near the station it is assigned to, and will eventually aggro something, chase it into a hostile sector, and valiantly suicide against Xenon defense stations.
Given that my money worries are functionally over, I probably ought to go poking at some of these faction missions, see if there's any actual questlines to be had aside from that Boron I rescued early on.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
And there's a million missiles, beams and vroom-vrooms if that's your thing too. Release date is 12/29 on Hardlight.
Were those new ships for the iron ork like motherfuckers with no shields that blew up anything near them?
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
The other big feature, and I have no idea how this voodoo was done in engine, is customizable weapons with different upgrade paths.
One of the modders helping Spoon is Axem, creator of Vassago's Dirge, my favorite FS2 campaign of all time. So yep, definitely excited!
The first series is based on forumers from hardlight at the time.
This is an old production so everyone was weeb at the time.
But they roll fucking hard into it in ways i never thought possible!
It
Fucking
Works!
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I believe it's fully independent, you just download and run Fs2_open_Wings_of_Dawn-EX17-SSE2.exe .
You can download it however with Knossos, which as long as you have a copy of FS2 from GOG or Steam will allow you to play dozens of other custom, and awesome campaigns.
Steam | XBL
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Do all the side missions. All of them. Earn as much money as possible to upgrade armour, shields and turrets. I prefer the pulse turrets as they have a great range.
In terms of broadsides, I use the one with the longest range (name escapes me right now). Flak guns for secondary to cover me from missiles.
My advice, unfortunately, boils down to "earn all the money to upgrade your ship". Also, do not forget to upgrade to the next ship where possible.
Get laser everything and never worry about leading targets again.
Really capitalizing on my terminus, fallout 2, freespace, pubg strategy of joining in one sided battles and profiting off the loser and sometimes winner
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I always get toasted when I try that. I end up sitting back and hammering salvos of proto cannon fire.
I do
Melt faces with a Sorcerer
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Flash bastard