The undeservedly little-known Planet Explorers¹ has a rather nice voxel engine and is using it well. Mine anything, dig tunnels in any shape, modify terrain, etc.
It's just silt churned up by high tides. When you're on the river, you can easily see that bits shielded from the turbulent flow, where the silt has a chance to settle down, are crystal clear. You can also see eels, seals, cormorants, kingfishers, seagulls of all kinds, and lots of life generally. It's great.
> This section only applies to Datomic 990-9202 and lower. Newer versions of Datomic Cloud will be free of licensing related costs, and you will only pay for the hardware that you use to run the system.
Well, whatever the repackers (e.g. Fitgirl) use seems to work a lot better than what the game publishers use (often no compression at all).
Original Size: 93.1 GB -> Repack Size: from 35.5 GB [Selective Download]
Original Size: 3.1 GB -> Repack Size: 844 MB
And these are lossless, bit for bit reproductions. In many cases assets (audio, video, images/textures) could be using lossy compression for even greater reduction in size with no significant loss in perceived quality (but maybe some loss of advertising/bragging rights).
That depends. If you're on a slow connection, the 40 minutes to unpack something are nothing in comparison to the week it took you to download it. If used by the game publisher, the decompression could happen during download (I believe this is how steam does it).
If you're on a metered connection (common in many of the more forgotten parts of the world), the bloated download costs you real money or is simply not possible (or you have to spread it over several periods of data allowance).
I've relearnt keyboard layouts once and know I can do it, but I also remember how long it took to get fast on the new one and how I don't want to do that again.
Not to mention all the other issues with getting your new fancy layout to work in every operating system and app and then being really thrown when you try to type on any other "normal" person's keyboard for a minute.
It's already hard enough spending 15 minutes in every new computer game to change the default WASD keybinds to the superior ESDF.
I use several keyboard layouts and styles in parallel. Not a coice but I am forced. It is a bad thing having so many variants. Different number of keys, layouts (laptops, desktops), national variety. I can say that I am almost as quick in typing as I was when I was less experienced but used a single layout (full size international english 104 keys, Windows). All and every changes decrease the efficiency!
(role of Fn keys, placement of Fn switch key, shape of Enter, size and positioning of cursor keys, placement of simple symbols like slash/backslash, greater/smaller, @, #, [, ], `, etc., availability and placement of Ins/Del/Home/End, all can change just a bit with a new computer/keyboard system. All this without 'creative' regrouping or arrangement of the physical keys itself (like MS ergonomic keyboard). If we add the complication of shortcuts where keyboard plays an essential role and which changes constantly from one approach to an other inside and accross software (not improving! just changing.) we can see that the problem is too big already, no need to aggravate the situation further along questionable and marginal efficiency claims. There are other parts of personal computing that can use improvements if someone is bored.)
