29-07-2003 10:09									#121
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quote: Originally posted by 13Matt13 Youll excuse me if i question your objectivity.

You'll excuse me if I don't care. Luckily, neither of us reports to the other.

quote: For the love of God in Heaven, get your facts straight. Stormhound was teh one that came and made the post about layoffs. You really have a problem with knowing whom you are talking about, dont you?

It was a ****ing typo, dude. I type 110 wpm. I don't usually bother to edit.

Are you always this easily bent out of shape, or is this some special issue for you?

BTW, while you can't hold someone responsible for what gets done after they're gone, you can hold them responsible for what happened before that point. Which seems to be the crux of the issue. Now if Hasbro (at the time) made a specific commitment of resources and a schedule allowance, in terms more businesslike than "build the greatest game ever" than Hasbro (or whoever did the hosing when reality finally set in) can take the majority of the blame for changing conditions.

I work with clients who are unrealistic about budgets and goals, and I have learned the hard way that the more vague and undefined the client or senior managers (I do a lot of subcontract stuff too) are, the more likely they are to try to screw me down the road. So I force definition, and don't start the real work until the client has, one way or another, agreed to concrete goals, design intentions, budget, and resources. If I don't do those things, and the project blows up because the client finally gets a sense of realism I never enforced from the beginning, it's my responsibility, because even if the client didn't have a clue, I did.

	29-07-2003 16:03									#122
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Can we please, please lock this thread and move on. While no single posting may have crossed the line into unacceptable abuse the whole thread has just deteriorated into a meaningless flame war. Lets shut it down, gain a bit of perspective and move on.

	29-07-2003 16:30									#123
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quote: Originally posted by 13Matt13 No, the Navy took care of that for me quite well. Whats YOUR excuse? Or is getting drunk and flaming people anonymously the only thrill you have in life?

No, I like interesting discussion and learning something. Just not getting it from you.

	29-07-2003 16:31									#124
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quote: Originally posted by 13Matt13 Youll excuse me if i question your objectivity. For the love of God in Heaven, get your facts straight. Stormhound was teh one that came and made the post about layoffs. You really have a problem with knowing whom you are talking about, dont you? I never said either way, but i did say that you cant hold a man responsible for what goes wrong with a project, after it is out of HIS hands, and HIS design is cut all to Hell. Here: And here: Basically, when you started speaking for him and explaining what he was doing and why. Although, one has to wonder how you can speak to anothers motives.

I hate people who cut and paste like this. Especially when it is not even about the argument, but about the evil way of argumentation (ad hominem and flames and such).

	29-07-2003 17:59									#125
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quote: Originally posted by 13Matt13 Thats a double-edged sword.

I mean we would agree that uncreative people brought nothing on its four legs even if they could hack together all existing cool feature from any game of the world.

But sometimes it would be graceful if the "true genius" had not to bother about features which are already made by an other true genius.

It seems to me, Admiral PJ has a reasonable and realistic approach, - and although I do not like the practice in MMORPG of monthly or yearly fees -, the idea to conceptualize open products with regulary upgrades and enhanchments pleases me somehow. I think hereby at Ultima Online (other exemples might be better, though that is the one which just came in my mind).

	29-07-2003 20:16									#126
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quote: Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat The problem is those tool sets can only take you a fairly short distance in game coding compared with commercial software coding.

Would you mind to explain what you mean with "short distance in game coding"?

	29-07-2003 22:11									#127
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quote: Originally posted by AminMaalouf Would you mind to explain what you mean with "short distance in game coding"?

Game development is much more performance constrained than typical commercial software. The stuff I develop is fairly high-intensity for the commercial side (data acquisition, real time sound and video and electronic documument embedding into a common database), but I have the luxury of having that occur on multiple boxes, and of specifying high-end PC's and midlevel servers for that work. So I can distribute program load across different computers, and afford to go with standardized tools like .NET because the performance hit is minor compared with the benefits of versioning, code maintainability, ease of localization for different languages, etc.

Game developers don't have those luxuries - you have to make the game work on a single box, and you can't get away with requiring the user to upgrade or dedicate a box solely to running your game. You also have the additional load from multiple AI's, whatever type of graphic treatment you give your game world (nobody wants a game that looks like Solitaire or MS word), keeping active track of lots of objects outside the player's immediate view, and you have to make things respond fast enough on whatever you've decided the "typical" user's comp will be. If somebody has an old lower-end comp, and can barely play the game, he won't be expecting great performance (stability would be nice). But the average gamer with a fairly current comp doesn't want to wait for minutes between turns.

With the performance constraints imposed by everything the game does, developers can't go to things like "Rapid Application Development" languages like Delphi. .NET framework has too many performance hits. Languages like Java would give you the ability to run on Linux with more or less the same codebase, but Java performance for serious games is laughable.

Standard class libraries for C++ (and there's a billion tools out there you can buy) often have fat in them since they're intended to be general purpose tools.

In the end, with most game development you have a mixture of "code it from scratch" and some use of low-level third party tools like MFC. The more performance driven the game (like FPS games), the less reliance you have on even the low level tools like MFC, and the more effort you have on basic engine development to run the game.

	30-07-2003 14:55									#128
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I think Grumbold made the only valuable comment in the last.. uhh.... 20 or so posts in this thread

Lata
Krait

	30-07-2003 18:14									#129
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Will all of you STFU

This is stupid, one side is saying that the game sucks because the designer leafed the the game. and the other {for god knows why}is saying that the game sucks because the designer who design the game in the first place, would have made the game suck more if he was still designing It........... will you all please STFU.

	31-07-2003 03:18									#130
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My first computer was than Timex 1000 (ZX-80) with 16 kilobytes of memony which I make programs in basic. I have to find short cut in one program as it would need 24k of memony to run. I fround you didnot need to have different RAND fundion to make different type of dice roll with DM , you can make one gerneral one with variable in place of the data it need to run right.

	31-07-2003 09:38									#131
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quote: Originally posted by krait23 I think Grumbold made the only valuable comment in the last.. uhh.... 20 or so posts in this thread Lata Krait

I tend to agree. Looks like we need a moderator here.

	31-07-2003 10:55									#132
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Supposedly, we have one.

	31-07-2003 11:53									#133
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I know. I was just trying to be subtly sarcastic.

	31-07-2003 13:22									#134
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quote: Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat From a gamer's perspective, I'd rather have given the money I spent on MoO3 to a charity. From a software developer and software company owner's perspective (which is what I primarily do for a living), given the choice of two bad situations, I'll take the one that is less bad. Terminating an overbudget, out of control project, and absorbing all of the costs, plus getting bad press for failing to produce anything on an already PR-hyped project is far worse than getting to market in some form, and recovering some of my costs and being able to at least attempt damage control from the PR aspect.

Yes, the economists would say to ship what you have and cut your losses. But games like this do put a bad taste in gamer's mouths. And MoO3 sure didn't help Infogrames already tainted image. Oh, I mean Atari's image.

I can't blame these big publishers pushing shoddy, half-baked games out the door- we keep buying them.

Is there no end to the cycle??

	31-07-2003 13:32									#135
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Believe me I for one will remember when it comes time to buy something else from them. Names changes won't make a difference, I'm not as dumb as they think we are. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.

	31-07-2003 17:31									#136
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quote: Originally posted by Vince278 Believe me I for one will remember when it comes time to buy something else from them. Names changes won't make a difference, I'm not as dumb as they think we are. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.

This game design problem are not Infrogame fault it is basely Hasbo who brought either Micropose or the right to the name
and ask Alan who was with than other company deside Quick-Silver to make the biggest and best game of all time with no benchmarks to meet or any realism goal to meet that isnot clearcut. Then QuickSilver took other trying to figure out what some part of the code does as somepart are docoment porper from the other companying.

	01-08-2003 06:36									#137
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What has communism got to do with it?
must be some red neck american thing, if its not about greed and right wing americanism it must be communist and bad.
You shouldn't look at things so black and white, without leftwing socialism we'd be in an even worse state with lots more Enron corruption problems. The US has a serious problem with its general obsession with greed based nationilst right wing politics.
If all you care about is money, then we'd just have endless game extensions of MOO1 and no technology advancement, we don't want the games industry to end up like the US film industry.

micheal:
I think games platforms are aimed at pretty high end machines, gamers need more powerful computers nowadays than the average small business user. If your talking about different hardware compatibility problems then your point is well made.

Admiral PJ
coding on the high C for over 10 years

	01-08-2003 09:07									#138
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I thought Microprose was the greatest!

	02-08-2003 14:43									#139
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quote: Originally posted by Vince278 I thought Microprose was the greatest!

Micropose want to quik games designing and game programming to just publishing games only. So alot of their real talent left the company to other companies or start they own companies. It they onlt published games only they would make alot more money by cutting out the overhead of gameing designer, games programming, in house game testing. It was faultly reasonly on mangenting part.

It remain me of what some cost accountant was saying about
New York City sending 3 million dollar to paint the Booklyom Bridge on it 100th birthday of being built. The cost accountant was crying that NYC was wasteing taxpayer money by sent more money on the painting the bridge than it
orginal cost of 250,000 dollar. Those cost accountant iinogre the historal cost is alot lower than the cost of builting anew one it the thing fell down it they sent no money taken care of it.

	03-08-2003 09:07									#140
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quote: Originally posted by Vince278 I tend to agree. Looks like we need a moderator here.

(a) Nobody has to read threads, or all the posts in them.
(b) Nobody has to respond, or participate.
(c) Nothing guarantees that you'll find every thread a font of revelation, and a dazzling display of decorum.
(d) When there's a real issue, I'll bother with it.

	03-08-2003 09:11									#141
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quote: Originally posted by Vince278 I thought Microprose was the greatest!

Microprose/MPS was the greatest for pure design and production in their early days by far, but they were extremely poorly focused and were a financial basket-case by the time Bill Stealey agreed to sell out to Spectrum Holobyte.

	03-08-2003 09:16									#142
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quote: Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat (a) Nobody has to read threads, or all the posts in them. (b) Nobody has to respond, or participate. (c) Nothing guarantees that you'll find every thread a font of revelation, and a dazzling display of decorum. (d) When there's a real issue, I'll bother with it.

I'll pick option "b".

	24-08-2003 16:44									#144
	design is everything Tired of ads?

in large-scale software packages, and designing then coding games isnt easy.. it's a huge pain in the ass in fact. I can do it but it's a lot of work.. that's why I got cardiologist and echo cardiogram certified and make about 60 USD an hour now pressing buttons on machines. Nobody really appreciates what programmers have to go through in some cases to make design a reality.

Game design has extra elements to it cuz unlike business software there is 'art' factor associated with it. Your game has to be fun, playable, and complexity is great but it has to be intuitive really to be fun for people to play as a game not a spreadsheet. The Moo3 GUI has spreadsheet written all over it..... The graphics work on Moo3 looks very, very amateurish to me. I could probably do the GUI framework/window and controls setup using VB in a few hours (nothing much would work but itd look like Moo3... hmmm thats not quite far from what we already have is it.. rofl).
U should leased a 3d engine that uses directX and mayb have pre-built 3d object rendering functions to work with 3ds max object info/animation files etc so u could speed up development. Use mayb MFC or VB for the GUI design and do basic 2d rendering using directX and use the 3d graphics engine for space combat. Or use the custom 3d engine for everything and make the game look very nice - altho that would take more time.

Anyway im starting to talk too much but I'm very disappointed for the most part with the GUI and graphics of Moo3, especially the space battles. Wtf is it with the poor quality voxels my god looks horrible rofl. Should used 3d objects and made some very great looking modles and awesome space combat. You said Alan was 3d graphics design specialist... well it sure as hell doesnt show in moo3.

The AI... urgh... well I wont get into that. Take care all

	24-08-2003 18:31									#145
	Re: design is everything Tired of ads?

quote: Originally posted by Killazer in large-scale software packages, and designing then coding games isnt easy.. it's a huge pain in the ass in fact. I can do it but it's a lot of work.. that's why I got cardiologist and echo cardiogram certified and make about 60 USD an hour now pressing buttons on machines. Nobody really appreciates what programmers have to go through in some cases to make design a reality. Game design has extra elements to it cuz unlike business software there is 'art' factor associated with it. Your game has to be fun, playable, and complexity is great but it has to be intuitive really to be fun for people to play as a game not a spreadsheet. The Moo3 GUI has spreadsheet written all over it..... The graphics work on Moo3 looks very, very amateurish to me. I could probably do the GUI framework/window and controls setup using VB in a few hours (nothing much would work but itd look like Moo3... hmmm thats not quite far from what we already have is it.. rofl). U should leased a 3d engine that uses directX and mayb have pre-built 3d object rendering functions to work with 3ds max object info/animation files etc so u could speed up development. Use mayb MFC or VB for the GUI design and do basic 2d rendering using directX and use the 3d graphics engine for space combat. Or use the custom 3d engine for everything and make the game look very nice - altho that would take more time. Anyway im starting to talk too much but I'm very disappointed for the most part with the GUI and graphics of Moo3, especially the space battles. Wtf is it with the poor quality voxels my god looks horrible rofl. Should used 3d objects and made some very great looking modles and awesome space combat. You said Alan was 3d graphics design specialist... well it sure as hell doesnt show in moo3. The AI... urgh... well I wont get into that. Take care all

There are two Alan. The first one was than Strategy Guide
writer for than gameing magine who knew nothing about programming than computer he did study system which isnot the the same as real programming. Than system can design than nice looking flow cart but it doesnot mean it will work when you program it in on than computer.

The second Alan who took over from the second Alan have graphic programming knowlege. They want to make than game where you didnot needed to have than 3d graphic card with video memony. 2-d graphic look better in most game anyway in my opion.