OT = How Does Shrapnel Stay In Business

[Atrocities]

Indeed, hats off to you guys. With the word of mouth spreading about the quality of game play offered by Shapnel published games, and the customer service and positive feed back, one can only pray that Shrapnel, and indeed all of its game developers, will continue to profit from all the hard work that is being done. Again, I am glad that I was fortunate enought to get into SE IV, and am thankful for having a place like this forum to BS with other game fans.

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"We've made too many compromises already, too many retreats! They invade our space and we fall back -- they assimilate entire worlds and we fall back! Not again! The line must be drawn here -- this far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!" -- Captain Picard STNG
New Age Ship Yards

[dmm]

Pssst! Have you heard the rumor? That Shrapnel is secretly bankrolled by Bill? Because he likes good games and can't get them from his own company? And he likes pretending to take over the universe?

[geoschmo]

HEHEHE. And I heard he even Posts here from time to time.

But it's not me...I swear.

Geoschmo

[Saxon]

Let me state my qualifications, I got a C in Computers 11 and the most advanced programming I have done is to add words to my spell checker. As such, I am perfectly placed to comment on some of what is going back and forth. I am the person Windows was invented for!

Sure, bloatwares sucks and I hate having to upgrade my computer every couple of years, but I sure like how easy it is to do things in a Windows environment. Plug and Play, hit the Install icon, hit the Uninstall icon, look for that little label that says Windows compatible and life is good. I don’t have to, nor do I want to, mess around with anything more complicated.

To me, the operating system or the programming language is like the plumbing in my house. As long as it works, I don’t want to know much more about it, I just want to live in the house. This is why Windows sells and why it, or something like it, will continue to dominate. We, the mindless masses, want our toilets to flush and we don’t care if it does it elegantly or not. My computer is about entertainment and Windows lets me be entertained without messing about. Maybe Linux is cool, but it takes away from my entertainment if I have to worry if this game or that game will run on it.

So, I don’t know if programming a game is better, easier or more elegant in any given system, but I do know that if it doesn’t run well on Windows, I won’t buy it. And if I don’t buy it, several million other people won’t be in the market for it. If you want to program in another system because it is more elegant, go for it, but gear yourself to a different way of thinking. Your rewards will be those of a poet or a performance artist, those of fame within a circle of appreciative peers, admiration from other artists and a few outsiders who like the style.

As a final thought, Windows is democracy. Everyone can use it, it is simple and you don’t need much special or elite knowledge. Whatever else may be said about The Bill, has his system and company not placed a lot of power in the hands of the people? Was it Ben Franklin who advocated that everyone should be involved and that if they couldn’t be, steps should be taken to ensure they were? From where I sit, openly ignorant of many things, it seems that a system that allows me, my mom and my 3 year old niece all to use a computer is a brilliant thing. How it looks behind the interface is immaterial, it gives us all access to the machine. The ugly bloatware that I don’t see is what makes the system beautiful, just as the ugly pile of rock chips is what makes the marble statue beautiful.

[dmm]

I hear you, Saxon.
Although I know a fair bit about computers and programming, I still prefer ease of use over power. That's why I do scientific programming in Fortran and interfaces in Visual Basic, instead of using C++ for everything. That's why I've always preferred DOS/Windows over Unix. The mantra of Unix Users is "But it's SO powerful, once you figure out how to use it." Well, I don't WANT to write a script just to find my misplaced file, "paper.doc"! I want to use something simple, like "dir/s paper.doc" or the Windows file finder utility. How is anyone supposed to remember Unix stuff like the following, which will search for the file "paper.doc" by name, starting from the current directory, and print the results to the screen?
find . -name 'paper.doc' -print
And why don't you get help in Unix when you type "help"? (And "man" is NOT a proper substitute.)

Out of curiosity, is Linux any more user-friendly, or is it basically Unix ported to PCs?

[capnq]

Saxon, your Windows experience has little in common with what mine has been. I've heard Plug and Play referred to more often as "plug and pray", and it's one of the numerous Windows "innovations" that other OSes had earlier and working better. I only see uninstall work properly about half the time.
To me, Windows seems more like a fascistic "you will do things Our Way or else" setup than a democracy.

It seems like people are finally catching on that upgrading hardware every two to three years isn't really necessary, though. PC sales are generally flat or even declining, depending on the manufacturer.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[This message has been edited by capnq (edited 07 August 2001).]

[Nitram Draw]

Saxon hit the nail on the head. Most consumers don't care how it works, why it works or if there is a better way of making it work. They want something simple to use that works with the programs they want. Do you care how you toaster works? I played DOS games, what a nightmare compared to Windows games. KISS to the consumer and you have a winner. All others are doomed to runner up status.