OT = How Does Shrapnel Stay In Business

[Suicide Junkie]

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Something similar happened to me too with StarCraft. I could not play SC for nearly 6 weeks until Blizzard sent me a new game...

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I couldn't play Starcraft when I opened the box, either.
My problem was that I didn't have the right OS on my PC, and the laptop didn't have a CD drive

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Originally posted by Saxon:
A few months back there was a article in PC Gamer called “Where does your gaming buck go” or something like that. It broke down all the costs of a game and why we pay what we pay. One of Shrapnel’s secrets is that they don’t pay a lot of those costs.

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They can not possibly be paying those costs and feed Aaron. Back in 92 the breakdown went like this :
1) Retailer marks up from distributer by 50-100%.
2) Distributer marks up from marketer by 50-100%.
3) Marketer pays developer a "very generous" 5-10% of what they get. The rest goes for manufacturing, advertising, and paying the staff overhead.

So a $40 game at the store gets the distributer maybe AT MOST $26.50, the marketer maybe AT MOST $17.50, and the developer AT MOST $1.75 BUT ONLY FOR THE UNITS ACTUALLY SOLD. A game was considered to do extremely well if half the units manufactured were sold, with the distributer and marketer eating the returns from retailers. How that split broke out varied, typically the retailer would get half what they paid back and the distributer would get half what they paid back. The developer got a "generous" say $2000 when the first manufacturing run occurred (5000 units). Then if the game sold well he would get a check for the latest run's sales just before the next run. But if a run was a bust the game would be closed out and all his effort would go down the drain. Back in 92 I was told that for my effort my game would be considered a HUGE success if it sold 20,000 units and the retail price would be up to me, but not to expect more than maybe $5000 in the first year. I said **** THAT, and quit working on it right then and there.

One thing to remember is that the number of computers has increased by a factor of 100 in the Last ten years alone. So instead of $5000 I bet Aaron is getting $50,000. But that still SUCKS because at a real job he could get $50-75 an hour if he is a decent programmer, which he probably is even though his engine seems to be optimized for memory rather than execution time.....

[Richard]

Well I can't get specific but needless to say we pay a LOT better than your 92 figures . Actually we pay our developers monthly based on previous months sales.

This really is the wave of the future and if we can get just a little more success this will start to wake other developers up to the fact that there is a LEGITIMATE alternative to retail. And if you have a decent game it is can be a lucrative alternative to retail.

Just depends on the game...

So if you know any developers .

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Sarge is coming...

Richard Arnesen
Director of Covert Ops
Shrapnel Games
http://www.shrapnelgames.com

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Originally posted by Richard:
So if you know any developers .

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I have not written any code since 93, but in a year or so I might develop a new 5th generation strategy game concept which takes advantage of the capabilities of 1Ghz 256 megabyte memory machines. By the time the engines are written that size machine should be in most households. It would use text files like SE IV for all the data so that players could mod it. Back in 92 there was just not the processor speed OR memory to support run time text parsing, but the better machines have changed the landscape as much as going from teletypes and punch cards in the 70s to video monitors changed things back then.

It will be 3d galactic and lower level maps with 32bit coordinates, zoom in to see particular stellar sectors, star systems, planets, and cities, which will have astronomically and geographically correct features. Research trees can be very deep and very broad, generated from seed categories and cost curves by a configuration engine. Abilities, Resources, Rates, Facilities and Components to match will be generated by the same engine using cost, size, and ability curves. So a player could modify the seeds to be shallow and narrow, or as wide and deep as he can stand on his particular machine. Instead of going to a particular level (galactic, sector, system, planet, city) and specifying what task he wants done, the player's job will be managing his AI managers to develop broad strategy rules of his own or to vary the defaults where they are tactically incorrect for the local situation. In other words, he gets to play general/emperor instead of footsoldier the way you must in SE IV and the other current generation games. Economics would be modeled as aggregates at each zoom level based on various factors, with the possibility of localized booms and crashes....

I estimate somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 lines of code, same as before but at a higher level of direction. IE what is written will be code to write code, not what actually executes. The generated code would be the engines to parse the text files produced by the configuration engine.......

Edit : I will not even START work on a project like that until I can be sure of 250,000 SALES by the time it is written. Once burned TWICE shy....

[This message has been edited by LCC (edited 01 August 2001).]

[geoschmo]

Uh, as long as it has a good beat and I can dance to it I'll be happy.

Geo

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Originally posted by geoschmo:
Uh, as long as it has a good beat and I can dance to it I'll be happy.

Geo

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LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL!

It was a secret, but I guess that I may as well reveal what I thought was the neatest idea of all before somebody else mentions it and I cannot get credit for being the first to think of it. I find all the tables of numbers to be boring and require too much time to evaluate. So my idea was to have brief - perhaps 2-3 seconds of musical tones looked up and played as you move the mouse across the map at the current zoom level. Coupled with texturing, color, and pattern it would allow four factors you consider to be the most revealing of how well your managers are doing to be available for evaluation without going to a menu.

As an example you might be interested only in the red pebbly triangles that play a fart when the mouse is over them....

[capnq]

LCC, large chunks of your description sound like what the developers of Master of Orion III are working towards, according to their Web site.

Personally, your audio status indicators idea sounds like interface Hell to me. I've seen people describe Black & White as unplayable because of the scarcity of numeric status reports, among other things.

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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 02 August 2001).]

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Originally posted by capnq:
LCC, large chunks of your description sound like what the developers of Master of Orion III are working towards, according to their Web site.

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I will have to check that out! I certainly do NOT want to waste my time reinventing the wheel...

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Originally posted by capnq:
Personally, your audio status indicators idea sounds like interface Hell to me. I've seen people describe Black & White as unplayable because of the scarcity of numeric status reports, among other things.
[/b]

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I suppose I was not clear. As an OPTION to get a FEEL for how things are going with your managers and also to visually check for problem CLUSTERS on the map, you COULD specify association of four different values NORMALLY presented as tabular alphanumeric data, bar graphs, or charts to be displayed as color, texture, pattern, and sound. Each of the variables would have several possible values. Depending on the value of the variable, you get something different displayed on the map. For example :
1) Color : Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Cyan Magenta, anything else in the color chart, whatever you LIKE to move the color selection bars to create...
2) Texture : None, pebbly (dot grid), line grid, crosshatch, whatever you LIKE.
3) Pattern : any set of icon masks you like : such as plain old vanilla triangle, square, 5 point star, 6 point star, pentagon, octagon, circle, nested targeting circles, whatever in the world you LIKE.
4) Any sound file of appropriate length, Bach to Wagner, farts, screams, laughs, applause, whatever you LIKE.

And of course there is the old filter standby, STROBE whatever lies in the specified Category....

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, after 8+ hours of imprisonment behind Sprintnet's f*ed-up services I can finally access Shrapnel again & what do I find? Development of new games starting in the open forums? (BTW, anyone got some good terms of abuse for Sprintnet? )

LCC, you are smoking something pretty strong if you think a game like you are describing can be done in 50,000 lines. Back before MS Windozer plowed all the competition under I was writing relatively simple things in Turbo Pascal like usenet news readers. And my simple MS-DOS newsreader ran to 20,000 lines if you include the supporting units as well as the main code. (I tended to think "object oriented" even back then before it was a buzz word and kept compartmentalizing stuff into units to make it manageable.) Anyway, this was a single-user program designed for immediate user input and output. No multi-player, no PBEM, no AI, no 'simulations' of planetary or stellar events, no combat between ships with various settable attributes.... you get the picture. I would bet SE IV or even SE III are over 100,000 lines. MOO III will probably be a quarter million or more. The latest Versions of Windozer are supposed to be several million lines. You are WAY behind the times and had better take a refresher course on programming in Windozer environments, or *IX, before you get too far along in your estimates of how much work it will be. Aaron should be back from vacation soon. I wonder if we can get him to tell us how many lines of code are in SE IV?

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 02 August 2001).]

[Atrocities]

spirit net, your only on in the after life.

Ditched them a long time ago. Now have qwest DSL. AT&T @ home is just as bad.