b0rsuk

[quote who="rendari" reply="2" id="2137324"] Secret checks in a game to see if it is pirated. If it is, corrupt save, config files, limit resolution, crash game etc... [/quote] Terrible advice. It reverses the usual effect piracy has - spreading word of mouth and increasing interest in the game. Your potential customers are going to talk to other gamers online, asking for opinions etc and they'll respond "This game is crap, it crashes all the time, I lost X hours of

I don't understand the premise here. [b]Why[/b] would you want to shut down software piracy ? Copying allows unlimited supply. Digital information is fundamentally different from physical goods in that there's almost no cost to copy it. Why make so much effort and try to put shackles on it ? To delude ourselves and think it's physical property ? It's not. Selling software and anything that can be accurately represented in digital formats just doesn't make sense. Not from economic point

In general, it's much harder to prove that something doesn't exist than to prove than it exists. I say Invisible Pink Unicorn exists. How do you disprove that ? Furthermore, I can quote two proofs: [quote]Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible an

I'm a bit skeptical of this 'leadership ability'. They described it as a sort of micromanagement reduction. I believe this kind of thing should be default. Players who don't spend xp on certain skill will have to click more ? I don't like where it goes.

Speaking of 2D games and 'getting away with it', I have an excellent example of a great-looking, modern 2D strategy game. Harvest: Massive Encounter. Just watch the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE7xhB0EjoI One of best-looking 2D games ever. The graphics are rendered. You could fool many people that it's actually 3D. (Especially that game menu and title screen is actually in true 3D)

[quote who="Ron Lugge" reply="24" id="2126582"] I can't imagine making a strategy game without strategic zoom. Too bad the rest of the industry doesn't agree with you there![/quote] Haha, exactly. I know two other RTS games that use strategic zoom: Supreme Commander, and Homeworld2 before that (I haven't played other HW games). The world is so conveniently primitive without strategic zoom. I'm particularly baffled by Starcraft fans' attitude. For SC2, they

[quote who="Nesrie" reply="1" id="2122460"] Right now we have consumers who steal games insulated from the consequence of their action (whether or not they think that because something is cheap to reproduce it has no value therefore they should not pay for it, it's still stealing), game [/quote] Please stop this misinformation. Theft: you take something from somebody. You: +1. Owner: -1 Copyright infringement: you copy without permission. You: +1. Copyright holde

I don't want to come out as a jerk, but back in the good old days of 2D graphics world size like this would impress no one. Here's the world map from Ultima 5: http://members.fortunecity.com/cartographics/big.gif No, I have no idea what the dimensions are (in tiles). I googled for half an hour and couldn't find anything about dimensions. I wonder if someone admits the elephant in the r

Here's a thread "Save/load mania", concerning the free TBS Wesnoth. It supports my argument that adding save/load option has many downsides. Last time I played an early version of Wesnoth, I think it didn't have an option to save mid-game and I had to finish scenarios in one go. http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6321&st=0&sk=t&sd=a </

This is what I see: 1. DRM device. I bet their primary goal was to make sure the game can't be copied. 2. The end of game mods

Level/world generation is something I'd like to try myself. Will players be able to create maps with external tools and import them into Elemental ? I like to play around with Python...

[quote who="Vicente" reply="17" id="2123434"] The thing is that if you want to play in Save/Continue mode, you can do it in Save/Load, while the opposite is not easily possible. So you are impossing how to play for some players who may not like it.[/quote] As I said before (for reasons mentioned) I disagree save/load and save/continue is just a matter of a simple switch. Many games can't be balanced for both. About imposing - this is perfectly fine. Some Dominions (1,2,3)

I fully agree with getter77 and won't repeat his points. [quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="15" id="2122407"]What doesn't make sense about the save/continue argument is you can do the exact same thing with save/load as pointed out by Zubaz and others.[/quote] This is red herring. Yes, technically it [i]can[/i] provide the same functionality. That's not the point. Game design is not 100% technical affair, you have use some psychology too. Choice of save/load or sav

[quote who="the Gorgon" reply="1" id="2120605"] Two human factions could indeed be programmed with the same statistics as a human faction and an orc race. But the game would feel completely different playing the orcs, because fantasy is about your imagination, living in another world for a few hours - and games are about enjoyment (not mathematics, for the players at least!). Being a real "Sauron" leading an empire of drooling, screaming orcs is a very different thing from being just a n

Hi I wonder how is Elemental going to be designed in regards to Save / Load feature ? Current trend in games is Save/Load rather than Save/Continue. To clarify, Save/Continue allows player to save the game at any time (to continue later, to help against power failure etc), but only reload it once. Roguelike games and Dominions 3 (turn-based strategy) are known for having permanent death. Once something dies, it stays dead. Some players accuse this approach of being unnecessari

[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="17" id="2120737"]b0rsuk: You're concern is based on the idea of 'player-activated respawning'. [/quote] No, I gave an example of respawning just to illustrate various forms of grinding. And the Warcraft3 example I gave occurs with finite number of neutral creatures. For me, the definition of grinding is: Any repetitive low risk activity that results in a (often small) reward. Especially in presence of more rewarding (and moderately challengi

Interesting. But about grouping: is more always better ? Is a bigger unit always better than smaller ? It would be interesting to have some limitations, narrow swamp/mountain passes which have limited bandwidth and only allow smaller units to pass. Or a path on a frozen river or lake, which can't be crossed by a big squad. It shoudln't be too common or it would become an interface/logistics nightmare. Fantasy General had an interesting concept - it distinguished

Once again, I'd like to oppose the usage of term 'grind' in positive context. Grind is something like entering an area, killing a weak but risk-free creature (and possibly get the treasure), exit area to make it respawn, rinse and repeat. I mean, ideally leveling up your channeler or whatever should be more like [i]adventure[/i] rather than grinding . It should encourage taking progressively harder challenges. No challenge, no fun. Essence of grind is repetition with lack of challenge.

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="21" id="2119400"] Quoting b0rsuk, reply 20... But what do you gain if you use up some of your essence on creatures ? Do you get an ability to recruit some special creatures, or a one-time recruitment of X creatures of type Y ? The former seems more fair. The latter would sound like a shallow option for rushers. Why do you think those are mutally exclusive possible ways essence might work? Perhaps when you imbue specific territories, one of the thing

[quote who="Zubaz" reply="9" id="2117842"] To make things more colorful, it's been developed by Microsoft, which is notorious for accidentaly making their technology incompatible with everything elseHuh? What's being developed by MS? Not Goo or Elemental.[/quote] Ugh, sorry ! Apparently I was confused by an article somewhere else which mentioned "Stardock" and "Microsoft" in the same line. It was something like "Microsoft and Stardock come up with new anti-piracy blah

[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="3" id="2119126"] Want to grind your sovereign into an unstoppable Knight of awe inspiring might? Totally cool. [/quote] Just please don't overdo it. There's myriad of games where monsters aren't [i]guarding[/i] the treasure but [i]are[/i] the treasure. This has many unpleasant side effects, such as basically forcing player to play a janitor and mop up all the monsters on the map. In Warcraft3 in particular, you often see players kill groups of m

[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="17" id="2119138"] If you want to horde your essence and be one-man force of destruction, then yes, your armies will probably be more mundane with typical knights and bowmen serving as your cannon fodder. On the flip side, if you imbew various creatures with magic and twist them to your bidding, thats when you'll see the great fantasy armies rise up (at the cost of your personal might). [/quote] Interesting. So if you hoard your magic

[quote quoting="post"] I have downstairs an old Dell Dimension from 2003. It wasn’t state of the art, not even back then. It is running a Pentium IV running at 2.8Ghz. My office machine, powered by a Core i7, is 15 times faster. So the question is, is it possible to make this machine still useful today and if so, how much and how much work would it take? [/quote] At the risk of starting a flamewar... Install Linux on it. Seriously. Many Lin

I'll reply to [i]3[/i] first to get it out of the way, so I can focus the next few hours on [i]1[/i] [quote] 3. MoM had a huge spellbook of over 100 spells. and again they were not just lame "ice bolt does 10 ICE damage and fire bolt does 10 FIRE damage" stupid essentially duplicate spells. Thre were some really well thought out and different spells that just seemed to fit the school that they came from. So far, it seems like the spell selection is going to be much less deep

I agree with the general idea that realtime is overrated. Think about formations, synchronized attacks at 2 points, using terrain to your advantage etc. When was the last time you've seen something like that in Warcraft3 ? War3 doesn't even [i]pretend[/i] to have formations of any kind. And it's deliberately designed to encourage single strong army rather than splitting your forces. (easy to use Scroll of Town Portal, heroes etc). As for multiplayer, it can be done right. Many people