Kyan

Overall feedback is always nice, but more importantly, does the setting feel forced onto the story, or would there be a better setting to go to.

First of all, I greatly enjoyed reading that.  Nicely done!

Secondly, I should mention that I'm chock full of anti-cough related products and operating on a low amount of sleep; if I say something that isn't coherent, my apologies.

Thirdly, I really like the idea of the setting.  That said, you might go into further detail about various setting related items.  For instance, what specifically does the tinkerer do and what kind of specific guns were the guards using (i.e. how Steampunk is this?)?  Similarly, what kind of architecture is the church and town in comparison (High Renaissance or early 15th century or maybe an older style that's somewhat out of place with the new for suspicious creepiness?)?  Blending Steampunk and Renaissance can work well but the locations in the story seem somewhat generic; there's nothing to suggest a "gap" because a lot of the action takes place in very time independent locations (inside a dark church, etc.).  It feels like, despite your intent on the Renaissance, you could potentially transplant the story all over history with the only requirement being after the advent of gunpowder and it would work well.  There's nothing wrong with that, per se, but I feel like it needs something to make it unique to the Renaissance period itself.

Where I'm a bit lost, however, is the main character.  In my opinion, you need to answer the question of why a thief would do what he or she did; that is, change from their life of crime to seeking redemption after a single event.  A true criminal would just run away and save themselves, why does this one choose to stay and fight?

I just wanted to say that I've seen this project - off and on - for many years now and that y'all have done, and continue to do, a great job.  Keep up the good work!

Hockey is that game that Canadians play on ice with ice skates and brooms, right?

For some reason I thought "No, that's Quidditch."

Which, of course, is preposterous; Canadians can't fly unless they use Air Canada.

This seems like a very dumb question, but every laptop, desktop I've seen comes with Windows or Mac pre-installed. Then who cares to switch to Linux?

People who use Linux are those who care to use it; mainly, individuals who know how.  It's not hard to add, either as a separate partition or on a secondary drive of some kind.  These days you can wedge a lot of them on thumb drives and use those instead.

And yes, I use Linux as my primary development environment and Windows for media related things (movies, games, etc.).

The other problem I see is lack of third party hardware support, a lot of the drivers are reverse engineered, and while they work, they are sometimes hard to set up (depending on the distro of course), or lack a lot of optimization, and some of the official drivers are still lacking some features (I still can't get my Official NVidia drivers to get along with vncserver for some reason).

Agreed.  Hardware support on Linux has always been very hit or miss.  If you get lucky it's amazing but if you strike out it can be a truly horrible experience.

Also, yes, games on Linux are usually pretty solid if you manage to avoid the various driver-related pitfalls.  Wine itself has come a long way.

• Please use source tags (hit the button on the second row, far right side).
• Have you actually ascertained that this is a problem?
• If it is a problem, why not chunk load using threads? There are a myriad of transition schemes - such as keeping the world (nxm tiles) in memory with an additional +1 tile offset in each direction so the player can "move" and give you time to chuck the area they moved away from and preload whatever [non-visible] map they might be near. Even if you did this in a single thread I don't see it being an overly large problem [for you].