Honestly, it might be better to just do a new, similar game in the same genre and theme. NOLF is pretty long in the tooth now. Hard to compete with current shooters.
The Operative: No One Lives Forever (abbreviated as NOLF) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive, released for Windows in 2000.
That’s a quarter-century ago now.
It was followed by a sequel in 2002, entitled No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way.
Almost as long.
I mean, I don’t think that the actual IP from those games is necessary to make a similar game to scratch the itch.
While that’s true, GOG also is intended to let you download an offline installer. If GOG dies, you still have the game, as long as you saved the installer. If GOG changes the terms of their service or software, they have little leverage.
There are ways to archive Steam games, but it’s not the “normal mode of operation”. If Steam dies, you probably don’t have your games. If Steam’s terms of service or software changes, they have a lot of leverage to force new changes through.
Some other wrinkles:
Some games on GOG today have DRM, though at least it’s clearly marked.
I also agree that Valve has and continues to do an enormous amount to support Linux gaming. I used Linux as my desktop back in the days when Valve wasn’t doing Linux, and the gaming situation on Linux was far more limited. It’s hard to overstate how radical an impact Valve’s support has had.
N++ is a platform video game developed and published by Metanet Software. It is the third and final installment of the N franchise, which started with the Adobe Flash game N. It is the sequel to N+. The game was initially released for the PlayStation 4 on July 28, 2015, in North America, and July 29, 2015, in Europe, and was later released for the Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems on August 25, 2016, and December 26, 2016, respectively. The Xbox One version was released on October 4, 2017.[1] The Linux version of the game was released on May 31, 2018.
N+ is the console and handheld version of the Adobe Flash game N, which was developed by Metanet Software. N+ for Xbox Live Arcade was developed by Slick Entertainment and published by Metanet Software. Unique versions of the game were also ported separately to the PlayStation Portable[1] and Nintendo DS[2] by developers SilverBirch Studios and Atari.[3] Metanet Software licensed their N IP for this deal, provided single player level design for both versions, and consulted on the project.
The Xbox Live Arcade version was released on February 20, 2008, and three expansion packs were released later that year on July 23, September 10, and October 15.[4] The handheld versions were released on August 26, 2008.[5][6] N+ was followed by N++ in 2015.
N (stylized as n) is a freeware video game developed by Metanet Software. It was inspired in part by Lode Runner, Soldat, and other side-scrolling games. It was the first of the N series, followed by N+ and N++. N won the audience choice award in the downloadables category of the 2005 Independent Games Festival.[1]
Kind of divering from the larger point, but that’s true — RAM prices haven’t gone up as much as other things have over the years. I do kind of wonder if there are things that game engines could do to take advantage of more memory.
I think that some of this is making games that will run on both consoles and PCs, where consoles have a pretty hard cap on how much memory they can have, so any work that gets put into improving high-memory stuff is something that console players won’t see.
checks Wikipedia
The XBox Series X has 16GB of unified memory.
The Playstation 5 Pro has 16GB of unified memory and 2GB of system memory.
You can get a desktop with 256GB of memory today, about 14 times that.
Would have to be something that doesn’t require a lot of extra dev time or testing. Can’t do more geometry, I think, because that’d need memory on the GPU.
considers
Maybe something where the game can dynamically render something expensive at high resolution, and then move it into video memory.
Like, Fallout 76 uses, IIRC, statically-rendered billboards of the 3D world for distant terrain features, like, stuff in neighboring and further off cells. You’re gonna have a fixed-size set of those loaded into VRAM at any one time. But you could cut the size of a given area that uses one set of billboards, and keep them preloaded in system memory.
Or…I don’t know if game systems can generate simpler-geometry level-of-detail (LOD) objects in the distance or if human modelers still have to do that by hand. But if they can do it procedurally, increasing the number of LOD levels should just increase storage space, and keeping more preloaded in RAM just require more RAM. You only have one level in VRAM at a time, so it doesn’t increase demand for VRAM. That’d provide for smoother transitions as distant objects come closer.
OP didn’t expand on it, and his photos didn’t show it, but this mouse apparently has a bunch of thumb buttons, which is a legitimately-rare feature (though it’s not the only mouse out there to have a bunch).
EDIT: Amazon has 786 “gaming mice” with 10 or more — a bit arbitrarily-chosen on my part — buttons, so I guess that there’s a reasonable crop out there.
Looking at their dev guidelines page, they don’t have any texture resolution limit other than “don’t use very large textures on very small objects”, so I doubt that the project has any really hard caps.
Do not use large textures for small objects—this wastes video RAM.
If they are concerned about distribution size, if the game supports it or could support it, might be possible to have a separate high-resolution-texture package, package those separately.
I doubt it, seeing as it looks like it’s still being actively developed. I’d expect anyone who wanted to have higher resolution textures or whatever to just add an option for that to the main game.
EDIT: It does look like they have abut 500 “addon” tracks, and I suppose that some of those might have higher-resolution textures than the tracks in the base game.
EDIT2: Also, it’s not SuperTuxKart, but you’re looking for more-realistic open source racing graphics and haven’t seen it, there’s TORCS. That might do what you want.
EDIT4: It doesn’t look like you can sort the add-on tracks on the website by size, but you can sort by upload date, and I’d assume that newer tracks are probably more likely to have higher-resolution textures.