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

[geoschmo]

quote:

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I think your so called "hardware growth" is over rated. It's an artificial growth driven by the people selling hardware, not the people using it.

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I can't disagree with this statement, or just about anything else in your post. However your compraisons are only valid if you are comparing the Last five years or so. Yes a 90Mhz processor is just fine if you aren't trying to create the next "Final Fantasy" movie. For most end Users it's probably more than sufficent. But we weren't using 90Mhz processors when Winblows hit the scene. We were using 4Mhz pc's.

No I don't think for a minute that some smart guy wouldn't have been able to come up with a processor faster than 4Mz if "the Bill" hadn't come on the scene. But if nobody was buying computers, which they weren't in significant numbers before winblows came along, the economic incentive wouldn't have been there to get it done, and the number produced would be so low that they would be out of the reach of the ordinary consumer.

It all gets back to supply and demand. Winblows created the demand. Not that something else couldn't have, but nothing else did. That's probably going to be hard if not impossible for most of you guys to accept, because you love and live computers for the most part. But the ordinary joe-six pack and jane soccer-mom that exsist in large numbers and support the computer industry today don't. They need something on there level or they aren't going to fork over the cash.

Geo

P.S. Besides, I only brought that whole thing up as a response to the Posts early on where the guy was going on about how much he could do with today's hardware if he didn't have to put up with the bloat. My point was that if you didn't have the bloat, you wouldn't have today's harware to play with. I never intended to say, and I don't think I ever did say, that BIGGER=BETTER.

[This message has been edited by geoschmo (edited 06 August 2001).]

[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.

[dogscoff]

You seem to have misunderstood.

Windows is a crap OS. Not just from the point of view of the programmers and the purists, but for the average Users as well. Maybe you're happy with it, and that's great for you, but all it demonstrates is that MS has some outstanding propoganda going.

I fully understand and support the "I don't care about my plumbing" analogy, but the truth of the matter is, the plumbing in your system is awful and you don't complain becasue you don't know how good it could be.

Imagine if you had to flush your toilet six times to get it clean every time you used it. You'd complain, right? You'd get it fixed.

But what if everyone else in the world had the same system? What if six flushes was considered normal? You'd probably be happy enough with it, and so you wouldn't complain, because it wouldn't occur to you that something better was possible.

What's more, you'd be delighted when Bill Gates offered to sell you a five flush toilet.

That's the situation you're in now. Windows is a six- flush computer, and sometimes it still leaves crap behind that has to be removed manually. What's more the pipes make a funny noise, there's nasty smell coming from behind your washing machine, and a damp patch on the ceiling above the dining table. All your waste is stored in a big tank in the roof for 3 months before it gets piped away and half the water for your house is poured out into the street before you can use it.

The thing is, Microsoft have worked hard to ensure that this shoddy plumbing is universally accepted as the best that current technology can provide. People need to realise that better plumbing _is_ possible. Only when they do that, and start investing money in it, will we finally start to see an improvement.

DMM: Unix isn't all text commands these days you know - the unix boxes we have here at work all run HPUX mousey/ clickey/ window/ pointer type GUIs, which are far more smooth, stable and reliable than our PCs.

GeoSchmo - My Last post was an attak on you. Sorry if it cacme across like that.
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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain but, if you replace the P with an O, my name would be Oinky, wouldn't it?"

[This message has been edited by dogscoff (edited 08 August 2001).]

[Nitram Draw]

Until someone makes a 4 flush toilet and the programs I want to use for it, I'll take Windows. I'm sure there will be a better OS made that will overtake Windows but it's not out their now and won't be there for some time. If Windows is so bad then the competition will have a much easier time entering the market, I wonder why they haven't?