Well the Sims 1 was also kind of crap in actual gameplay terms once you removed the novelty. Or how about Black & White - the strategy element just didn't work. But they were still both amazing and important games. I'm still glad they made it, and I found it very entertaining for a while.
Frankly I'm impressed that Spore was made at all, and that it worked as a game to the extent that it did. It hasn't had any lasting appeal for me, but it did have me grinning like an idiot on a few occasions. I hope that, having made the technology and broken new ground, they will take it further.
I'd be quite interested to hear more about these template machines.
First PC game I owned was Magic Carpet 2, which I have very fond memories of. It had an interesting blend of shooty action and strategizing (mana collection, upgrading your castle), cool world deformation, and a gorgeous art style. First PC game I played would have been at a friend's house...I suspect it was Johnny Dash's Monster Bash.
A potentially interesting use for minor races, and an extra incentive for diplomacy (of both the bullying and negotiating kinds). I like it.
I don't understand the point of racking the speeds up and up if it just means you can burn your usage away more quickly.
If you're doing random map generation, you should really have a chat to ToadyOne who makes Dwarf Fortress. His world generation, in fact his procedural content generation in general, is mind bogglingly amazing. Edit: To some people, the DF world generation is a game in itself.
I think an iron man mode can be fun, I'm for it.
Small sleep statement in an infinitely polling loops? Sounds exactly like the first every multi-threaded application I wrote :D. There is, in concurrency, the concept of a latch. This allows a thread to wait for an event without scalding the groins of laptop users. Whether either of these strategies is appropriate for games, I don't know. I would guess for a turn-based game a latch should be fine.
I don't think Elemental in it's default version could possibly have the amount of different stuff that Master of Magic did, because it is a multiplayer game and so will need to be reasonably balanced. Master of Magic had a number of game-breaking strategies, and that was ok because it was a single-player game. They just threw the kitchen sink into the game. By contrast, everything that Stardock puts in will need careful testing and balancing because they are essentially making the canonical v
I'm always a bit suspiscious about cloud computing stuff, partly because networking is very often the bottleneck in real life, and partly because latency is a fundamental limit which is not going to go away. But anyway, interesting, good luck to them and we'll see how it pans out.
It sounds very ambitious - everything will take much longer than you are expecting. I would recommend working on something with a much smaller scope first. A common indie developer approach is to rapidly make a series of prototype games based on ideas that you think could turn out fun. Then you one which has worked well and expand upon it. This is also a good way to learn if you're new to programming or to a particular set of tools. But anyway, if you're determined to go 3D then
I do agree that PC games are dying at retail - when I go to have a browse in shops the PC section is very often ten-year-old games being sold at 3 for £10 (is there really anyone left that still needs to buy a budget box version of Theme Park?), plus of course the ubiquitous World of Warcraft. But I hate shopping, so I don't care. If I can have something to delivered to me off the internet it's less hassle and often cheaper. Also I would have thought that .Ne
Absolutely agree. Actually I've just been having a moan to people on IRC about the same thing. I don't mind having to register for Steam, except that I would like to play without first having to download a huge patch. Also, my internet connection is flaky, and getting Steam to actually sign in, let alone actually download anything, is a real chore. Meanwhile Empire Total War also uses Steam's installer. This means it doesn't bother to ask about shortcuts, install for all users or inst
You guys could just, you know, buy a book :P
I understand the good feeling of getting a bunch of stuff in the box and a nice thick manual, but that stuff costs and I would rather not pay the extra. Games seem to be about £25 now if you buy online, which is cheaper than they were when I was younger. It's also hard to compete based on extra stuff in the box, because it's well, inside the box, where you can't see it. And putting 'comes with cloth map' on there somewhere is probably not going to sell you extra co
"Sometimes a player finds an item which is beyond his capability to utilize its power yet" I may have misunderstood, but if you are suggesting a MMORPG-style level requirement for items then I have to say I don't think I'd like that in this sort of game. I don't like the arbitrariness of such restrictions anyway. Other parts of the suggestion look very interesting though.
I have a 'Dinovo cordless desktop for notebooks', which is a lot cheaper (about £50) than the Dinovo Edge. Still quite pretty, still convenient, and the numpad is separate. Doesn't use Bluetooth, but has some other means of wireless. The mouse that comes with it is the worst mouse I have ever used. Personally I don't like the shallow laptop-style keys. I'm sure I typed much faster on my old clicky bog standard Microsoft keyboard.
When I think of phantom warriors, I think of the bit from the beggining of A Wizard of Earthsea where Ged weaves together the words from two spells to distract and confuse invaders. I can't really do it justice in this post, but IMO the best written spell description I've seen. I think illusion has a lot of potential for really interesting magic, and I hope we'll get (or perhaps mod?) some cool stuff in there.
Arcanum would be the most recent good turn-based RPG I've played, and it is really very good (and very large). If you are able to endure dated graphics and UI then it is certainly worth a go. Temple of Elemental Evil bored me. I didn't suffer from any bugs, but I didn't finish it. The combat works very well, but the story is a bit naff: not bad as such, but lightweight bogstandard stuff intended to get you to the next fight sequence quickly. Others may prefer it that way. Also, Fed-Ex
I don't mind if underwater cities are in by default, but I would like for it to be possible to mod them in. I guess this would mean that terrain properties would need to be accessible.
I wouldn't want to be clearing up after disease all the time, in the same way that I hate it in the Total War games when I'm constantly struggling against rebellion as I approach the 50-province mark. Or the stupid stack of workers automated to clean pollution in Civ 3. I'm not saying that this is what anyone's suggestions are leading to, just that it needs to be kept in mind.
Are technology tree and spellbook selection tied together then? I can't help but think it'd be better to allow us to choose each independently, so we can try out different combinations.
When you talk about diseases being life magic, you're assuming that the world of Elemental would use the germ theory of disease. Maybe, in Elemental, disease is caused by miasma, vapours, the humours being out of balance, bad chi, evil spirits, or magic.
A couple of things I picked up on. How do you know if the Windows source code is bloated when it isn't open source? Consider that Linux is also a monolithic system, not a micro-kernal + modules setup. I would agree with a more limited version though: Windows certainly is held back by having to support/provide consistency with choices made in previous versions in anumber of cases. Also, having a separate UI layer apart from the kernel is a good thing. The second thing: "So, how do I re