VicenteCartas

Sadly it is true it seems :(

W7 launch was so good because Vista did all the dirty work for it. Vista was a pretty good SO, but it had to break lots of things for the future of Windows.

I would get rid completely of combat speed. Just do something simpler like DnD or Fire Emblem: units can move and make an action (attack, cast, use item,...), and that's it. Some units may "multi-attack" with one attack action (like dragons, high level fighters,...). Slow weapons are two handed, do more damage, can't carry shields. Fast weapons are one-handed, can be double wielded or wielded with shield.

Read the comments, he explains the multiplayer bit there (and probably the other issues you comment).

I'm sorry but problems with Alt+TAB are only problem of the application trying to Alt+TAB: the game. The DX API may be more or less cryptic (to each its own), but there's quite a lot documentation explaining how Alt+TAB has to be handled if you don't want crashes.

You are covered by amazon guarantee, so nothing bad can happen...

The code is for sure alive. They are using for sure a source control system and those things keep all the code that existed in the project. It may not be alive now, but it's as easy as to go to the revision when it was alive and get it. But enabling it, I see it hard, the whole combat was reworked to be played in turns, I doubt the old code will even compile...

They can't win in every market :p They continue owning the PC market with Windows, the productivity apps with Office, they are doing great with all their server offering (Windows Server, Sharepoint, SQL Server, Biztalk, Exchange, ISA, and the other million things they have here), .NET is going strong, Xbox360 is a good contender in the console market,... Seriously, MS makes a lot of money from companies, and companies aren't going to start running on iPads any time soon :p In

Congrats :)

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="99" id="2711577"] There was a beta 5. It just wasn't public (for, I think, obvious reasons but clearly not obvious to some). This is such dejavu. Anyone here remember the Sins of a Solar Empire beta? Same conversations.[/quote] Well, I don't know if it was obvious (it isn't for me), but I don't remember that fact said clearly when it was announced that pre-orders would be able to beta test the game. Nor looking at the early dev journal

[quote who="dragoaskani" reply="72" id="2711123"]Most beta's don't have you beta test the "final" version...[/quote] Well, I don't agree with that. My current computer has run W7 Beta, Office 2010 Beta, and VS 2010 Beta, and it has now XNA 4.0 Beta on it. I run CTPs and betas of Microsoft constantly and they are things that work. You can have a technical feedback about performance, crashes,... with a more finished product that allows you go get feedback on many other things. A

Nowadays there's no reason except lack of funds to make an ugly game... Graphic cards are there to be used :p

Duel: The Mage Wars ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_and_Mayhem ) was a fun game that was totally about magic :) Lots of different strategies depending on how you used your spell components.

Moving to Mac and Linux is something that would cost Stardock a lot of extra money and effort: training people, setting three environments to test for their releases, using a worse tool-chain,... Unless it's crystal clear that they will earn more money, it's hard to make the commitment to that.

The Overlord DLC for ME2 is pretty good :)

I love Mass Effect 2 companions, some of the best cast of characters and stories I have ever seen. ME1 was nice in his own way, and ME2 is nice in a different way. But I think Bioware continue to do top-notch games.

[quote who="delphizealot" reply="1" id="2670690"]Will the mod tools include XML schemas to allow for Intellisense in tools like Visual Studio?[/quote] +1

Reduce graphical options, but yes betas are expected to be slow in general.

I have played Elemental on a HP TX tabletpc (a convertible). I love that thing.

Age of Empires for DS is not very good, you have to scroll and doing mistakes while moving is pretty common, very frustrating. Fire Emblem DS is very bad :( But the GBA versions are pretty good, I would try to get those if you can. About Advanced Wars, I like more Advanced Wars: Dual Strike than Days of Ruin. FFT:A2 is nice too.

Not sure if XML Editing is modified in Visual Studio Express compared with Visual Studio Ultimate, but if it is not, VS is a very good tool too.

[quote who="tejondour" reply="4" id="2665492"]Point 1: pretty trivial compared to the rest of the engine, especially since most of the existing code can be adapted. Point 2: many editors support Lisp. Even if they don't, the only critical function is parenthesis matching. Point 3: S-expression validation pretty much IS parenthesis matching. Yes, it would take a little more work... a little more time spent building your own tools. But that seems to be par for

I think the problem is more how they decided to represent things in XML rather than XML itself (like you said, not using attributes for example). Either way, I think you are missing three points: I suppose most modern languages come with XML parsers and not with S-expression parsers I suppose there are more XML editors out in the world than S-expression editors, something that also eases the pain of using it. Last, you can validate XML with XSD very

[quote who="Tridus" reply="5" id="2656908"] Quoting VicenteC, reply 1This is a beta, code is probably running in debug mode, lots of unnecessary things around,... Performance will improve. If performance worsened between beta 2 and beta 2a, that is definitely worth bringing up.[/quote] I don't really think so, I would not expect performance to be very good until much closer to release... As they enable things, like the full graphics, they will be able to get more reports and

This is a beta, code is probably running in debug mode, lots of unnecessary things around,... Performance will improve.