Alfonse

[quote]Q3 is fine enough for most games[/quote] BS. It is [i]functional[/i] for boxed-in FPS's and 3rd-person shooters. But it simply doesn't look good by today's standards and you can't do anything remotely approaching "outdoors" with it. Oh, and the code is hard to use. [quote]Torgue is actually good, but it doesn't do everything[/quote] No, Torque (it's a "Q", not a "G") is not good. I'm a programmer, I've seen its code. It is crap. Yes, you can ma

[quote]Suey uses as an excuse that they don't want to optimize the game for the wide variety of PC's, both low and high, and also says that they don't want to dumb down the game so people with lower spec machines can't enjoy it the way it's supposed to be enjoyed? Then they turn around and specify it's coming out for PS2, PSP, and Wii? All 3 of those platforms get eaten alive by the PC gaming market, not the general PC owner market.[/quote] I would like to point out that the non-360 and

[quote]The developers are the guys who make or decide upon the engine (don't whine about costs, the Q3 engine is perfectly good, Torgue costs little, and there's thousands of open source entities)[/quote] Q3 isn't anywhere near "perfectly good" for any modern FPS game. Torque is crap (I've see it, I own a license to it. It's crap). And those "thousands of open source" engines are ultimately weak. An engine isn't just a library that manages your game; it's an asset pipeline with

[quote]Returning prices to sane levels ($60 is not sane, nor is $90, EA)[/quote] There's this concept that you should be aware of called [i]inflation[/i]. It causes the price of things to rise over time. For a good 10 years, videogame prices were fixed at $50, yet the cost of development has quadrupled (at a minimum). That you only have to pay $60 for a high-quality game is a steal, as that would be the inflation-adjusted price of $50 from 10 years ago. By all rights, $70-$80 s

[quote]This copy protection is forcing the rest of the world to play by americas rules, not all counties have laws that say piracy and software copyright even exists. Why should we have to but up with some overseas corpoate bs when technically we arn't breaking the law.[/quote] Um, because the product was produced in the US? International products have to follow lowest-common-demoninator standards. Or, in this case, most-restrictive standards. BTW, your country almost

[quote]Let's say you have 2 games. Both last 10 hours each, cost the same, are equally fun on the first playthrough but one is also fun to replay a second time while the other is not. Does not the game that is fun to replay offer twice the value of the one that is not?[/quote] I would say that the assumption offered by the question is ultimately specious. I don't know how you can have a game that has 0 replay value yet is equally fun as one playthrough of another. [quote]Why ex

[quote]many great advances in software engineering are done in the public space and institutions we all benefit from.[/quote] I may be in the minority, but I consider the .NET CLI/CLR to be the most important software invention of the last 15 years (yes, even moreso than my beloved C++). A common compiled bytecode, standardized as an international standard, which is designed to be the compile target for innumerable languages (compared with JavaBytecode, which is designed to be compiled

[quote]Some people actually act offended when they see that a developer, whether it's a big-time company, or just some guy programming in his bedroom, puts a small price on something they spend their time working on. They will rant and rave of how great the product is, but when they see a price tag, even it's just a few dollars, they scoff at the idea of having to pay and then proceed to say how "worthless" it is.[/quote] It's a matter of expectation. Take EditPad, for example. I downlo

[quote]I've always thought it odd that next to no one would buy a game for $150 up front that had been proven to contain 1000 hours of pure fun, but happily shell out $50 for a game with 10 hours of fun, even though the latter has a "hours of fun per dollar" ratio that is abysmal compared to the more expensive game. Just because "a game shouldn't cost more than $50".[/quote] There's more to it than that. First, units of content are not "hours". I've spent far more time with GC2

[quote]People bitching about the pay-for-content model are hypoctriical if they subscribe to the pay-to-play model.[/quote] Well, there is an obvious difference. MMOs are expensive to run; this is obvious. Therefore, there is some explicit justification for them needing a continuous influx of money. You're not buying the game; you're renting time and space on a server. Micro-expansions, however, are another matter altogether. You're paying for content directly; you're

[quote]If I had to guess, the people with the problem probably have the User Account Control turned on.[/quote] That's what I was thinking. Which suggests a coding/data placement issue. Most programs, even games, run OK with UAC on. It's just a matter of StarDock figuring out how to reposition their data or add some new code or whatever to make sure that the user and program don't need administration privileges to run it properly.

[quote]That said, I WANT to be able to keep working on games I like working on without losing money on it.[/quote] Like I said; have a go at it. If people kick and scream, they kick and scream. I mean, the applications you describe in your initial post weren't destroyed by online criticism. I'd bet they're even making a decent bit of money off of them. Though this is true regardless, it counts double online: just because you get hate mail doesn't mean you're doing something wro

[quote]we have or would intentionally cripple the core game to sell the packs later on.[/quote] Oh, I don't think StarDock has done so in the past. But past behavior is ultimately no guarantee of future behavior. And ignoring a possible 30-50% increase in profits is pretty difficult. For a publicly traded company (which SD admittedly isn't), it's almost impossible, which is where a lot of the fear comes from. The point is that you should not dismiss the concerns of the other si

For those who don't see the problem in Vista, do any of you run non-administrator accounts?

[quote]So people are forced to buy optional content?[/quote] Yes. Let's assume that "content" is a reasonably measurable quantity. Let's assume that GalCiv 2's initial release has 100 "units" of content. Adding up all the patches and expansions, let's say that GC2 has 180 units of content. So, GC2 costs $40 for the base game, with each expansion costing $30. It's clear that GC2 is a bargain; it's $40 for 100 units of content, thus giving a content-per-dollar (CPD) rati

[quote]Actually Shareware, before the term was utterly bastardised, was software that was free to copy for other friends. Usually the program was feature complete, but the programmer asked for donations, but wanted it copied and spread. Hence the name "SHAREware". The term began being butchered in the mid 90's and lost all meaning. What is known as shareware these days is more accurately nagware or crippleware. I get tired of the misrepresentation of the term shareware, since when it first start

[quote]Whats generally a good fac/eco/lab ratio on an average planet, say, PQ 10?[/quote] Zero. That's not how you should build your stuff. Each planet should be specialized to its needs. Never play on a small galaxy unless you massively bump up the number of planets, stars, and habitable planets. Otherwise there just won't be enough tiles to go around; victory in such cases is decided through luck (who gets nearby good planets), not skill. If you're looking for practice, go fo

[quote]This might be an example dependig how balanced the new character would be. If it was so overpowered that you had to play the new character yourself to not being bashed all over the place by other players, it would be almost like forcing everyone to pay $10 to continue playing. Now would you want that?[/quote] Actually, the TF2 example is an example of the [i]wrong[/i] kind of paying structure. It's a perfect example of how games are not Legos where you can freely remove one piece

[quote](it never did do that successfully, nor was it designed in a way that COULD do so), it is a trick to force customers to purchase the same product again and again.[/quote] Huh? First, DRM isn't one thing; it's many things. So you can't make generalizations as to what it does or does not do. Second, I have yet to see a videogame DRM scheme that wasn't clearly designed to stop piracy. Even StarForce, as maligned as it is, is generally removed after 6 months by late

[quote]Do you really need to ask what my point it?[/quote] Yes. The article basically talked about piracy being the death of PC games. And it was not just Crytek was saying that. [quote]The problem with many PC games/devs these days, at least the games/devs that are jumping the PC-ship, is that there's little incentive to purchase the game.[/quote] Wait, what? The incentive in purchasing the game is that [i]you get to play it![/i] You don't buy the game, you don't get

[quote]read this:[/quote] Your point being? First, they refuse to actually release internal numbers as to how much the game is being pirated, so their commentary about it is suspect. Second, particularly for [i]this[/i] game, a pirated copy is not necessarily a lost sale. If I were less scrupulous, I might pirate the game just to see if it can run on my hardware. God knows I don't want to spend $50 on something that might not even function. Third, if they want

[quote]To anyone who said that Crysis sold bad EA said it reached a million copies just in Febuary and it's probably going to sell 2-3 million by the end of the year most likely and continue selling on for years because it's seen at the graphical benchmark that everyone will get when they get a new PC.[/quote] Super Smash Bros Brawl. It was written for a console who's hardware was mass produced in 2001 (Wii is a GameCube with a little extra kick). It was written using the Super Smash Br

[quote]I don't know if it can be applied to this specific example.[/quote] I'm not saying it necessarily does. But that's the [i]fear[/i]. And we won't know if it applies or not until we see how StarDock does with their first game to use this system. The thing about hidden price changes is this. I don't mind adjusting the price of something. I know inflation exists, and I know it has to happen at some point. On some level, I expect to be paying more for GC3 than GC2. However, w

[quote]But people who yell and scream at the very concept in an attempt to deprive others of the OPTION to buy this content are the ones I really can't stand for.[/quote] I think you're misunderstanding Desmond's problem. His problem isn't with you charging for something per-se. It's a matter of trust. When GalCiv 2 game out, there was an expectation that it was a "finished" product. Yes, there would be updated and gameplay fixes. But the expectation was that if you bo

[quote]I heard a biologist once talk about something called irreducible complexity- the idea that a body part, such as the eye in humans and animals, is so complex that were even a single, small part of it to be taken away it would be rendered entirely useless. It makes me wonder how something like that could evolve.[/quote] If you want to understand how "irreducible complexity" isn't a problem, watch all of [link="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html"]this.[/link]