ckessel

[quote]mythical doesn't equate to magical if you ask me. I would also guess that they live in Europe if trolls were real.[/quote] That's a good distinction, though trolls are frequently considered are at least partly magical given they can regenerate to fully healthy even when dead, unless burned. Dragons probably fall under mythical as well though, unless you're considering in some mythos they can cast spells or glamours or some such.

[quote]Imperium Galactica 2 is a classic and combines 4X and RTS much like Sins of a Solar Empire did. Skip IG3, though. I recommend hitting the indy scene, games such as Dyson - a very unique take on RT S - can prove to be a worthwhile distraction.[/quote]

[quote] The Battle for Wesnoth[/quote] Yep, got it, played it a bunch :). This thread is both encouraging and saddening. Folks are mostly mentioning games I've already owned and played (sometimes a hell of a lot). Nice to hear the games have some universal appeal. Sad because I'm not seening much new :(.

Give it up pigeon. NTJedi is so invested in his position at this point it wouldn't matter if he understood your position.

[quote]Hmm...well, what do you like...what do you want to play?[/quote] Primarly TBS and the occasional RPG. I hate RTS with a passion bordering on irrationality, so while Knights of Honor has some good mentions here, I know I'd hate it. I played Dominions 2, but I might check out 3. Played GalCiv I&2 and Space rangers. Good stuff. Sadly, I've already played Armegeddon Empires and now I'm looking forward to Vic's next game later this year. Played a lot of Blood Bowl, proba

Yea, got it, played it (single player, I hate multiplayer games and generally hate RTS) and burned out on it.

I keep browsing the Impulse store for strategy games, looking for something to entertain me while I wait for Elemental. Any suggestions? I actually picked up Sid's Pirates, but it didn't grab me all that much. I was really looking for a strategy game rather than a more adventure/RPGish game. What are TBS folks playing out there now?

[quote]On the other hand, those here are by definition those most interested in the game, and thus the ones who would be most likely to complain about a later release if at all. Those not here are probably not following the game closely and are probably less concerned.[/quote] True, but the game isn't really created just for those most interested or there'd be no sales justifying bothering to create the game. It's all a shade of grey I guess. You don't want to be Duke Nukem Forev

[quote]That's actually not true. All function calls in Java are pass by value not pass by reference, the difference lies in what value it passes. For a primitive it passes the assigned value, but for an Object is passes the value of the pointer. Basically a Java function which has the signature[/quote] I didn't see much point in getting into the details of the difference between a pointer and an Object Reference and how that's handled... Seemed sufficient to compare it to pass by refe

[quote] can't help but feel like we're 'getting it wrong'. Those participating in game forums at all, I'm told, account for a small fraction of a given game's overall player base. Those that express strong interest in participating in Q&A and pre-release testing are, I'm told, an even smaller sub-set.[/quote] Yea, I had the same concern in my post. The answers here are going to be completely atypical of what the actual consumer audience would say. I'm cert

It's not "a single archer" conquering a city of 5000. That archer represents a unit with lots of men. It doesn't take a lot of armed soldiers to occupy or take over a fairly large population. I don't like conscription idea for various reasons. It's biased towards helping those that leave defenses thin or non-existant. It's a game mechanic that can easily be replaced by always having an ultra-cheap 1-turn unit that can be produced. Or, perhaps be

I'm not keen on the idea of conscripting an army, but I like the idea of pulling leader figures from citizenry. Hinterland had a neat tradeoff between having a guy at home in his house doing something useful (alchemist, blacksmith, whatever) versus bringing him out into the field with you to adventure. I think Age of Wonders might have had something along those lines as well where someone sitting in a city could cast spells that affected the overall board, but I can't recall.

[quote]This is a rare, if not unique**, opportunity to experiment with development cycles. For that, I'm curious to see the outcome. So, I would support the proposal.[/quote] It's not unique outside of games. Google is somewhat famous (infamous?) for endless "beta" projects before finally tagging them as final. It certainly is rare though, particularly in a genre like gaming where a typical non-MMO game has a fairly short sales lifespan. I mean short relative to so

[quote]In IT the learning never stops. If you stop you're dead. Probably why I do support now the past decade because I was tired of keeping up and continuing to take classes and studying.[/quote] Just to reinforce this. College will teach you how to code (at least somewhat) and some important concepts, but software is a life long education process. New languages arise, tools change, etc. Plus you need to always steadily improve your non-code skills, which means reading bo

[quote]But I would like also recomment The Mythical Man-Month as reading for any new employee coming in, Im sure you've read it and is an excellent book on large scale development cycles, if I recall it even has a chapter on bringing new people in midway through a dev cylce.[/quote] Classic book :). There's a whole bunch I could recommend, but I'll stick with Peopleware as one of my favorites. Construx, founded by Steve McConnell of Code Complete fame (required read if you haven

[quote]The primary reason that we use the prefixes for type is that it makes it easier to search for variables. It's a lot easier to seach for ulPlanet instead of planet, which will have more hits. Plus, then you don't have to go and find where the variable is declared in order to know what type it is so that you can use the same type in your for loop.[/quote] That makes sense. I've worked in Java for 12+ years, which is a different world in some ways. And the 5 years befor

[quote]I read this and went, "Amen." Just think what DG would be like if it had been able to come out in a few weeks rather then when it did.[/quote] In all fairness though with DG, it was the network code that was the issue while the gameplay itself was pretty well received. What DG needed wasn't necessarily a much longer beta, but a set of beta users more representative of the types of network connections DG was going to see in the real world. I don't want to sidetrack on wh

Hmm, a longer beta, that's a hard one to say. If a game drags to release for a long time it loses a lot of momentum. Rather than splashing onto the market, it just sort of finally plops out. Stardock might not need that momentum for sales like other companies, but every developer wants their stuff to be well received and anticipated. That's part of the enjoyment of what we do as developers. There's already been a pretty lengthy pre-release time. My concern would be there are a lo

Good stuff. Well, aside from hungarian notation. Ack, eww, yuck. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html The whole article is about creating good code, but nearer the bottom Joel talks specifically about Hugarian notation, it's original intent versus how it typically ends up being used. The original intent looks pretty good.

[quote]I find it preposterous that Tolkien is supposedly the better writer because he can describe a leaf in twelve shades of green between Point A and B. [/quote] FWIW, my point was just that calling Tolkien unimaginative was preposterous. Claiming there are far better writers, I could certainly agree with. I loved the LOTR trilogy, but the Simarillion was so dull I couldn't finish it. Children of Hurin is pretty decent though.

Javascript? *shudder* I've worked in C, C++, Java, even some PLM and Javascript was worse than all of them, except PLM :). Javascript has horribly funky ways of handling inheritance, method overriding, etc. If you're going to use a general purpose scripted language with OO support, use something like Groovy (or, obviously, Python). Haven't used Scala, but it might work just as well. I sort of wonder about Python's longevity for big projects since it does some wei

[quote]A bit off-topic, but...what we really need is for some computer scientists out there to get languages beyond the never-fully-realized promise of SmallTalk and Lisp. Someday...[/quote] They're undoubtably already out there, but having a language out there with one reference implementation of a compiler is a vast world away from having a language capable of production level work with an IDE, debugger, multi-OS support, etc, etc.

[quote]Bigger is not always better based on the preferences of the individual, however bigger always does offer more strategic options because it comes down to mathematics. If you examine a chess board and the number of pieces there's only so many combinations for the first 20 moves... and while there's plenty of options the number of options massively increase if the board itself was increased in size. [/quote] Combinatorial permutations != strategic options. Just because

Any chance at getting a sneak preview of a chapter of the book you (Frogboy) mentioned might come out around the same time?

[quote]1) The Fionovar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay will change forever how you view Lord of the Rings and most other fantasy series. It has just been reprinted and is worth the 1200 page read.[/quote] Oddly, I just could not get into this series. I read the first book and have had zero desire to read further. I can't place my finger on why as it seems to have all the components of my kind of series and author, but I just found myself dragging through it without any real attachm