I'm guessing AC has never even glanced at this game, or is basing it on his experiences with Cities XL, an entirely different franchise by an entirely different company that has absolutely no connection with Skylines?

Cities:Skylines is a successor to Cities In Motion, though the developers seem to have listened to users and greatly improved everything they could. Right now, it's rated at 96% thumbs up, with over 10,000 positive reviews.

I don't think anybody in their right mind could say Cities:Skylines "sucks"

Cities XXL, on the other hand, the latest chapter of Cities XL that just came out in February, doesn't seem to be getting a very receptive review (though it still might be better than EA/Maxis' Sim City)

Well, you can always grab some of the 40,000 mods they have for the game to make it more difficult or more fun.

It's a sandbox game with tons of mods. At this point, you can make the game pretty much any experience you want, by either using other people's mods (as simple as clicking a button in Steam) or creating your own.

That's kind of the point of the article.

That's what this is really about, litigious companies like Volt Pictures have formed the Voltron of Copyright Trolls and now are complaining that they do not have enough fodder to feed their ambulance chasing lawyers to send out threatening (and misleading) settlement letters too.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm sure you are a bit crispy after being exposed to the Slashdot crowd in full force ;)

ClanLib would have been awesome 20 years ago, when I was playing around with some game ideas, and I kind of wish I had known about it when I was writing Xbox homebrew (MXM, X-Marbles). These days, the library is kind of secondary to the tools and frameworks for building games, and more often than not, decent games require a team to build.

That said, ClanLib might not be a bad base if a group of motivated individuals wanted to expand it into such a tool. Open source projects are always welcome (My Media X Menu was the first "open source" dashboard for XBox in the scene and helped lots of other projects with code, including XBMP/XBMC/Kodi in the early days).

The only real beef most of the slashdotters here had was with the bold comparison to Unity and Unreal Engine and the faulty claim. Just dial it back next time, emphasize the open source aspect, and maybe put out a call for more developers to get involved?

Target a high-level goal - a framework that can create a game with minimal lines of actual code, and a visual tool (perhaps leveraging an existing open source IDE) to tie in elements and generate some code behind the scenes. More importantly, get somebody to put a few games together and offer them up on Desura or a similar Indie outfit, to show what can be done.

Unity has a web player, as well. It also supports C# scripts in all of those environments (Javascript being the other scripting language it can use).

The other thing I didn't mention is that ClanLib simply cannot be as robust as the major players - who absolutely have to respond to bug reports and have literally millions (billions?) of hours of real usage in complex games.

Oh... and let's not forget third party support. Tools and plug-ins provide smoother workflow management, whether it's a single developer or a 100-member team. Last time I checked, my tools didn't have "Export for ClanLib" options, but they usually have "Export for Unity" or "Export for UDK" options.

Really, I can't recommend enough that Rombust should go out, download Unity 5 and give it a whirl. It might be disheartening, but Rombust should not go through life ignorant of the competition, developing ClanLib. I hope that doesn't become a show-stopper, because developers should have choices; perhaps it will put the developers of ClanLib down the right path to make a "5.0" that DOES include the elements needed to actually compete.

Obviously, the rombust and the developers of ClanLib have never worked with a real game engine. It's already been noted that the claims in the summary are ridiculously ignorant (or outright shameful lies).

Let's examine the issue in details:

1. The Examples page for ClanLib seems like a joke. At the very least, this seems incredibly immature and unprofessional.
2. Not a single example of a real game written with ClanLib can be easily found. 16 years, and all they have to show for it is a feature in an old book on C++ game development.
3. No IDE... for game engines, the IDE is far more than a tool to write code - it's a way for a team of professionals to tie in their elements visually, in an organized way. It provides immediate feedback, which increases productivity.
4. ClanLib requires in-depth development before you see anything remotely operational in a game. Real game engines allow you almost immediate results, and even better, support scripting at a minimal level to create actual games (while allowing in-depth programming at the same time), because they already have a framework in place.

ClanLib has to deliver a LOT more than it currently does to be taken seriously. Unity, UDK, Corona, Adobe Air... all have options that allow developers to create games with no investment up front, and often no royalties at lower sales levels (and if you reach $100k sales, the fractional cost of the game engine is not really an issue). To be perfectly honest, I find it a bit insulting that this was presented on Slashdot the way it was. Slashdot-worthy? Questionable, but to tout it as a real competitor to Unity and UDK is downright wrong at every level.

Musk knows that to reduce the cost of EVs, the cost of making batteries has to go down, and the easiest way to do that, AND the best way to build up infrastructure, is to ramp up production.

That's what this is all about - not about making money, at least in the short term. Tesla just needs to have sales drive (and justify) the increase in production, and when the price of making those batteries drop, EV sales will become more attractive to a larger customer base, thus ramping up production more... rinse, lather, repeat.

Peter Brady nods his head sagely....

Hopefully, the exports will be off the charts. California needs the economic growth.

Audio-based watermarking that survives a variety of attempts to process it, and even overcomes being recorded second-hand. ...and yet, all it requires is somebody digging into a Blu-ray player's firmware to determine the detection algorithm.

There are claims by products $$$$ that it has been cracked, but all of those methods involve a database for specific films to apply their "fix".

Some I know have issues calculating the age of the earth, usually off by a few orders of magnitude.

...and what part of my comparing it to what my son's typical usage are you unable to process? My post infers that he regularly uses 3GB of data monthly on BoostMobile (see the part about him exceeding his data cap), which costs him $40/month and uses the same network as Google's Fi service. As a bonus, he doesn't have to use a specific, single model of phone.

Under Google's Fi service, basic service $20+ 3GB data $30 = $50

I guess math and reading comprehension is difficult for you?

I told him to use the library of music he already has, which is quite extensive (he's 22 and out of the house), but being young and lazy about stuff like this, things probably won't change.

$20 (basic phone service)+$30 (3GB data) = $50

At least, the last time I checked, 20+30=50.

Maybe you should stick to homeschooling.

The problem with the rollover is that my son listens to Pandora... and often hits his cap every month. He'd never have rollover, and instead of throttling, he'd just get cut off.

Also, he'd have no choice in the devices he used.