Namely gui toolkit developers, driver developers and DE developers. All of the above aren't very fond of MIR..

No inherent problems, yes. But due to current established groupthink on how games should be made only a small subset of all possible genres and gameplay elements is actually tried. And the particular way projects are managed DOES limit game's length and complexity because it involves just tacking on more art assets made from scratch on recycled gameplay elements. Lowering graphics requirement would be a good way to save money, but it's not what the companies want. Instead, bloated artwork/sound pipelines allow them to have multi-million projects that provide more bonuses to management and less interesting things for me to explore in games themselves. I'm sooooo sorry that I'm not in any hurry to fund your CEO's personal yacht :P

I'm talking about both. Level design definitely suffered from efficiency loss after transition to 3d. Gameplay design is a different issue. It didn't get much overall progress since 1990s and is treated as afterthought compared to graphics currently.

Employing a 3d engine imposes some limitations on design stemming from assumptions made by engine's author. They tend to be oriented for first person shooter games. And most game programmers don't have resources or skill to roll out own engine. Besides, requirements for artwork ARE a limitation too. They definitely limit the amount of gameplay elements allowed. Say, if you decided to avoid models and use 2d sprites instead you could save some work for artists. Which could lead to more creatures and objects and larger, richer locations. And GPU work itself isn't free either. It still requires assets such as textures and amount of those is limited by GPU memory. Reducing detail level of models and textures would lead to ability to have more different objects on screen at the same time.

All in all, AAA game companies given up on doing anything else than flashier graphics and I given up on AAA companies in response.

Having more regular geometry allows the program generate more geometry itself and level designer to specify less.

No reason except the requirement to maintain a reasonable framerate. There exist some graphics frontends to DF but they definitely don't use photorealistic graphics. And probably they wouldn't be able to get enough art assets for more detailed graphics anyway. Another option would be to move some processing to GPGPU because DF manages to kill framerates in some cases even if you use ascii graphics only.

You can never know for sure what really happened there and for what reason. But both Ukraine and Russia make themselves known as democratic states. I have no reason to believe one of them is more truthful than other. All people seem to have different visions of what democracy and freedom is so any such statement is close to being a truism. Even China has People's democratic dictatorship.

But it's evidently true that Ukraine repeatedly failed to establish a government that satisfied both eastern and western parts of it. Both of those parts want democracy and freedom. They profess their love for democracy and freedom to implicitly assert that the other side isn't democratic. This is bullshit sophistry.This conflict isn't about democracy and freedom but between two groups that hate each other and have different pet political ideas, and it just got violent. Russia would never get an opportunity to meddle like that if not for this conflict.

It's quite obvious that a level based on tiles is easier to design than a level based on arbitrary geometry. Designing levels in Blender or whatever is definitely not the way to go. Too much workload.

How about the entirety of, say, Dwarf Fortress? It allows infinitely more complex gameplay systems just because it's based on tiles that are displayed by ascii characters. There are compromises possible too, say you settle for graphics complexity last gen but focus on making huge worlds with complex and interesting rulesets. Nobody is trying to work in this direction much. It's only matter of time before people will get tired of glorified interactive movies. I already did, and that's the reason I ended up becoming a retro gamer. When some game weighs dozens of gigabytes, takes ages to start up, provides less not-trivial gameplay than some similar titles of last millenium I really feel cheated.

Pushing the limits of platform like that will not give you that much of a competitive advantage. But it definitely will require more work that would be better spent focusing on game mechanics proper. The only progress games as a whole have lately is pushing more triangles per frame. All other aspects get shafted. Due to nature of those worlds built of millions of triangles it becomes harder to design levels which results in shorter games. And game design is an afterthought too. There weren't much progress with it. Power of modern PC could allow huge virtual worlds with complicated,interesting mechanics, but in practice all that power is spent on making world models less efficient for sake of more triangles per frame.

It's not that simple. There are many actions that can be attributed to Putin. Crimea issue is just one of them. And his stance on it definitely gives him more support. The only news from Ukraine Russians get is frequent coups, horrible economic situation, squabbles about discounted gas prices and Ukraine's failure to pay for it in time anyway. So you pretty much can expect that yet another Ukrainian coup followed by period of anarchy will get little sympathy in Russia.

I wonder if such situation would be thinkable if wife's and founder's genders were reversed? Would it considered to be normal for some random guy to hang around the building and interfering with company's operations just because he's one of high level manager's husband? Perhaps it was just allowed in case of wife due to stereotypes of women being meddlesome meddlers of little practical importance..

What makes you think so? Not a single autonomous oblast/sub-SSR was allowed to be independent state by the dissolution. Only SSRs were, and ALL of them. The thing is if Soviet Union didn't dissolve and instead elected to become democratic loose federation, but still a single state, then many post-soviet conflicts could have been prevented. What really happened is a lot of fails due to there being not enough skilled statesmen and too many ambitious people wanting their own toy state.

This is not a fact but some moron's fantasies. And if it were true it wouldn't justify Georgia's fail either.

And what does it have to do with Vova? Are you insane? Disagreeing with your lunacy doesn't constitute dick-sucking to Putin. Your double standard against current Russian Government is ridiculous. And I would know it for sure because I'm not a Putin supporter, I merely agree with this particular action. So why do you emphasize Russia's fails over other former Soviet republic fails and diminish Russia's successes? What's the point?

You're just a troll. Most of former Soviet Republics were so much of a failure that it's even problematic to justify their continued existence. Russian Federation is not an exception. But response to Ossetia issue WAS a success for Russia, one of few cases in recent history when army was actually employed to save lives rather than to control oil or something. And ignoring this and making up excuses for Georgia instead IS blindness.

Yeah, Georgia and Ossetia are in long term conflict just because some clown in old Soviet Union placed them in same republic. Georgia failed to establish relationships with Ossetia so hard that this ended with incursion by Russian army which was even NOT condemned by international community. I bet Russian government expects similar fails by Ukraine based on this experience. Given you're not in any hurry to congratulate Russian army on this feat of Humanism and instead link to wikipedia edit wars based on mistranslated sources, I can only consider you biased. Everyone deserves credit for saving human life, no matter for which country they happen to fight. If there are people like you in Ukraine any people of Russian descent DO need protection.

This is not WW2 definitely. The only reason there's no outcry from world community is that 1: no annexation was done, 2: genocide was prevented. I'd even say Putin pulled off a reverse Hitler here. This was an epic fail for Georgia. If Ukrainian government tries to pull off something like that too another epic fail will follow.

Local governments have levels of their own too, provinces and what-not. Many of them were independent principalities in the past.