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Oh, I find that surprising. I’m a pretty casual game player but don’t find the controls too difficult. Maybe that’s because I take a pretty minimalist approach and don’t use most of them. A lot of the controls are optional and you can use the context menus by right-clicking the mouse instead.
From memory, because it’s been a little while since I played, this is what I commonly use, ordered by how frequently I use it:
- WASD - moving around the map
- Left / Right mouse buttons - aim and attack
- Space - shove/stomp
- C - crouch/sneak
- Esc - cancel action
- E - interact, but I believe in most cases you can use the context menus instead, like for opening doors, so I don’t use it a ton
- V - vehicle menu
I think that’s pretty much it.
Edit: added the mouse buttons, that I had left out from my original list, moved “C” down a couple of notches, and removed “shift” to run because I very rarely do that. We have the running zombies disabled on our games because they don’t seem very lore-accurate. The regular slow zombies you can keep at bay just by walking.
I hear what you’re saying and you got a point because doing only the kind of analysis I did can sometimes be misleading; however, I think looking at relative growth instead of absolute is more informative in this case because it better illustrates a growth trend. The number of Linux PCs running Steam more than tripled in 5 years. I think that that is worth highlighting and I wanted to point it out to balance what the article had to say about Linux growth, which I really thought was minimizing how remarkable that growth is.
Speaking of Linux, this OS family’s slice of the Steam Software Survey pie sits at 3.20%, with a not all that impressive 0.15% overall gain compared to the previous month.
Not impressive when you (deliberately?) use the absolute increase over one single month to minimize how fast the Linux share appears to be growing. If you look at its increase over approximately the last 5 years, there’s a significant and strong growth trend. November 2020 to November 2025, that’s ((3.2% - 0.9%) / 0.9%), which equals a 255% increase over that time frame. Not only is that solid growth, but the graph shows that this growth seems to be accelerating. Source for the numbers: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Oh, absolutely. I was thinking more in terms of 2D doing traditional flat 2D views like side-view platformers or top-down views. I can completely understand that as soon as you try to emulate 3D with even something as simple as an isometric view it’s going to be much more work than just doing straight 3D.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
I can understand this too.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
I imagine that a lot of 2D games use these kinds of techniques.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
Got it, thanks!
I appreciate your more detailed description. I think I get what you’re trying to explain. It just seems to me (at a very shallow level, I’m no expert) that all else being equal, 2D should be able to do just about anything that 3D can, but more simply (with some exceptions, of course - trying to reproduce a 3D look and behavior in 2D would obviously be an order of magnitude more work than just doing it in 3D).
To your point, I’ve generally noticed that bone-driven 2D animations tend to look kind of janky, like marionettes, but I didn’t think that it was a technical limitation as much as just the animators taking a lot more shortcuts. In other words, why would limb tweening be inherently more overly visible in 2D vs. 3D? It seems that it would be hard to do a pure comparison that controlled for other variables, but intuitively it seems to me that in a comparison that did control for those 2D would turn out easier to produce content for than 3D.
Again, to your point, I can understand that if we compared popular hand-drawn or pixel art 2D assets and environments with popular styles of 3D assets and environments in common usage, especially across indie games, 3D could very likely come out ahead in productivity.
Sorry if I have dragged this conversation out too long. I have an interest in game design/development and game art and hope to some day get into both myself with some small games, so this is a topic that I would very much like to have a solid understanding of so I can make the most efficient use of my time.
I’m still not quite getting your point, sorry. Why would 3D make it easier to attach a hat to the character or retarget animations than 2D? That seems like a specific engine feature limitation and not inherently a shortcoming of 2D in general? It sounds like you’re comparing 3D to a primitive 2D engine where you need to manually draw and animate everything on screen instead of to a modern 2D engine with character bones, parenting, etc. Perhaps I’m actually out of the loop regarding the current limitations of 2D game engines and am thinking more in terms of a comparison between 3D and 2D animation software.
Yes, I recall that one developer saying that Linux users provided ultra-detailed, highly technical bug reports that helped immensely in finding and fixing bugs for everyone, or something like that. I think they even said that Linux users were in a way providing free QA.
Edit: ah, yes, I see you linked the positive post below. Thanks!
Yes, this is exactly the analysis that I read back then. The Windows Store presented a clear and present danger to Valve’s business model, so it seems that he concluded that the best way to attack it was to make Linux a viable competitor. That’s some long-term thinking right there, which seems to be rare in corporate leadership for a while now.
Good guess. For reference, Xbox series X without optical drive is $600 currently. PS5 Pro without optical drive is $750 currently. The specs on Valve Machine seem more similar to PS5 Pro, I think.
Right. I don’t believe they’re hurting for profits, and at the same time, having Linux and specifically Steam OS become much more widely adopted would greatly benefit them (for breaking out of the Microsoft jail they still find themselves partially in). Also, hardware is not their primary business. It seems that they could sell this to cover their costs and reap all the rewards from that besides immediate profit.
Awesome, you’re welcome, and I hope you enjoy it! People who mesh with it tend to get pretty deep into it and put in hundreds or even thousands of hours of play. I’m not a dedicated gamer, but I have more time in this game than any other. It may be worth watching some trailers and tutorials for it too.
I don’t know about heavy hitters, but I just noticed a couple days ago that someone has been regularly posting on [email protected] the links to the weekly videos that StayAtHomeDev posts highlighting 5 new Godot games at a time. Here’s the YouTube channel if you want to go directly to the source: https://www.youtube.com/@stayathomedev
Some of the games look great.
Haha, I hear you, although it could just be down to being an early adopter!