wdotool exists, and global hotkeys are a thing under wayland, but is desktop dependent. KDE allows it by default, Gnome can be made to do it as well with an extension.

Based on the website they're banking on people thinking they were always a brand, and thus a lot of artists use their speakers?

OpenTTD has had entirely their own assets for 15 years.

But OpenTTD itself isn't a clean-room implementation of the game, it's a branch off a decompilation of the original game.

If Atari was really out to copyright the project into oblivion, they're likely to succeed in a legal sense*.

Within the confines of the current laws and known history of the game, and being a fan of both works, I think this compromise is fair.

*NotALawyerClause

You're correct. It's part of the Steam Publisher Agreement that basically, you can't remove your game from users who have paid for it.

And if you push an update that deletes the files, Valve can, will, and has rolled back the update.

Of course, there's also situations where Valve has assisted in removing titles at developers request, but it was a situation Valve was involved in - Specifically, a game called "The Ship" had a Multiplayer version, and it was built on Source, but they could never quite get it to work correctly, even with Valve's help. Wouldn't sync.

Valve helped them remove the Multiplayer version. (but you still kept the single player.)

Steam deleted my perfectly working Arma3 2.x for Linux with no option to return it back, so I stopped to use Steam.

As someone who has been involved in OpenRCT2, which is another Chris Sawyer/Atari game, from what I can tell, Atari has a very hands off approach to these things.

We know they know about us - We saw their Head of PR giving away keys for RCT2 on Twitch while playing OpenRCT2, prior to the release of RCT World (What a terrible game sadly).

As far as we can tell, it's basically a "don't cause us problems and we won't bother you" situation.

> As far as we can tell, it's basically a "don't cause us problems and we won't bother you" situation.

In this case, the "problem" seems to be "we want to lazily cash in on an existing IP and you providing a better product for free on the same shelves as ours makes that difficult", with the "solution" being to agree to have the better (free) version bundled with the lesser (paid) version.

I suppose it's better than banning distribution of prebuilt executables outside Steam or suing the devs into bankruptcy (a lawsuit Atari would likely win), but at that point we're just comparing starting with a shakedown to starting with breaking kneecaps.

> In this case, the "problem" seems to be "we want to lazily cash in on an existing IP and you providing a better product for free on the same shelves as ours makes that difficult", with the "solution" being to agree to have the better (free) version bundled with the lesser (paid) version.

At least they want to "lazily cash in". A lot of gamers like to talk about preserving history, yet are critical the moment businesses preserve that history doing it the way businesses naturally do things (i.e. by selling a product).

Besides, we do not know what went on behind the scenes here. It could be anything from the open source developers voluntarily pulling their game from the store, to the publisher requesting they pull their game from the store, to the publisher threatening legal action. Heck, the publisher may have even paid the developers of OpenTTD to bundle their engine with TTD. While some scenarios are more likely than others, we are too quick to attribute actions and motivations based upon non-existent information.

I don't think anybody is blaming Atari for putting TTD on sale for money. Heck, I was even planning to buy it until they pulled the obnoxious stunt of removing OpenTTD.

And even that could've been okay if they actually explained what was going on, but it's all very hush hush, which does not instill trust and understanding. If they were transparent about motivations and reasoning, they'd likely catch a lot less flak for what's going on right now.

I think most people who still buy RTC only do so to get the assets for OpenRTC2.

Atari is in a really weird spot, the rights have changed hands so much.

It would be nice if they offered a paid version of OpenRTC with the assets bundled. Ohh well

You can just legally get the ones from the demo file in ZIP format.

Naw.

That's disrespectful to the spirit of Atari looking the other way.

I've own RC2 for a very very long time. Either way it's like 10$

The original one at home came with a PC gaming magazine, but sadly I lost that CD. Also if any I'd pay $5 for the OpenTTD authors and another $5 for the original creators.

> As far as we can tell, it's basically a "don't cause us problems and we won't bother you" situation.

Seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Respect for Atari.

I remember reading an interview some years ago where they basically said they wouldn't try to shut them down, but they also did not appreciate the projects existing.

If I recall that correctly, Atari didn't want to do anything about it because it drives sales for TTD and RCT (in the case of OpenRCT2, it drives sales for 2 games even, since you need the assets from 2, and can also import more assets from 1, and even further, you can also use Classic as your base, so like, many many options), while Chris Sawyer didn't particularly like their existence, but not enough to go and force Atari to do anything about it.

You're assuming Apple is going to continue even supporting HFS+ long term. They already convert volumes to APFS opportunistically.

APFS is generally not appropriate for HDDs, so yeah, I expect they'll keep supporting HFS+ for as long as they keep supporting non-flash storage.

In any case, if the situation changes, I expect there'll be enough lead time for me to adjust my strategy -- the failure scenario is completely different than rotting physical media.

I think their point is more along the lines of the energy availability of Fossel Fuels allows for the Mass Farming and Construction that we do, not so much that we can pour it on a fire in place of wood.

40–50% of the nitrogen in our bodies come from fossil fuels via synthetic fertilizers.

To be fair - it SUPER does. Being down frequently makes your competition look better.

Of course, once you have the momentum it doesn't matter nearly as much, at least for a while. If it happens too much though, people will start looking for alternatives.

The key to remember is Momentum is hard to redirect, but with enough force (reasons), it will.

Few companies (and none of the companies I worked for) are “momentum”-based. The typical company grows because incoming cash flow allows to hire more salespeople and develop new features attracting new kinds of customers.

If people tolerate 10 monthly github failures, they can most likely tolerate one hypothetical hour of downtime from one physical server failure for some random Saas product you're selling to them.

...Yes. We're all fucking nerds.

/s

Just a heads up, Fireproof Safes are not failure proof, you should have that key securely stored somewhere else as well.

Thanks, it's also available via my 1password cloud account, so it'd have to be a joint fire at my home and the 1password data center (and my phone, for that matter). Pretty bad day I feel.

Unrelated note: this was the first time I've linked to my static generated docs for this project and it was really fun watching the grafana dash of my fly.io nginx proxy pick up all the scraping traffic. Thanks for warming my cache :) I work with this tech all the time at my day job but this is the first time I've hosted something from my home, it's genuinely made my afternoon to see it light up.