alanschu

Zoraptor, thank you for reminding me that I am justified in not liking the Codex! Also, in general I found it interesting to hear the talk from the BitComposter chap. EDIT: I have to admit though, I was too afraid to go before page 25. What exactly did Logic Artists do? EDIT2: Looks extra delays and a probably Steam release, as well as general misinformation. I find it interesting. I haven't given a single cent away that I was not 100% perfectly okay with never, ever seeing any return on my contribution. A larger part of me doesn't feel too sorry for the people raging up a storm.

I got $500 back in taxes which is a nice surprise. Though as far as I can tell, mkreku, we do not get interest on our overpaid contributions (not that it'd be much money at current rates anyways). Most of my return comes from the fact that I get to claim my student loan interest rates as a tax right off, on top of a couple hundred dollars on various donations throughout the year.

Most of the Art Layouts in the game are pretty damn nice looking in my opinion. I remember in an earlier beta build when speeders weren't working and we had to run everywhere, but despite the long runs it let us see some parts of some levels (thinking Alderaan) that were just so clearly lovingly crafted. It my less than expert opinion anyways (I won't pretend to be an artist).

Given the game seems to have had a very bumpy and unclean development, I would bet "expensive"

What if Boone was in it?

I liked COH a lot. My first impressions were "Eh, I was hoping for Close Combat" but after giving it another try some years later, I was like "Oooo, very nice" Though that the pace has been upped is a bit worrisome for myself. I didn't mind the pace of the original, but would probably have been okay with its pace being slowed somewhat too.

Hahaha sees this post by Bokishi. Then sees Bokishi's thread about graphics killing the game industry

Being private also grants some level of flexibility. Richard Garriott could say "lets take our time" with Ultima because he can just go and plop down some personal investment into Origin when Origin was still private. "We need $100k to finish this. Well, I have that...." /signscheque

Again, it's about expectations. If they wanted 7 million and only got 3.5 million, they'll be disappointed (regardless of whether or not their expectations are sane or not). It's not all that relevant if the game can break even with only 2.5 million. (Although where games get made can have huge impacts on the cost of developing said game).

I understand that, I am pretty sure I was trying to say the same thing.... hahaha. I guess I said "I don't understand how the stock market works" when I suppose I actually do. My favourites are when stock goes up because a company only loses $400 million when they were expecting to lose $1 billion

The Tormentshank Redemption is where it is at.

I find a lot of it comes down to how a company does against expectations. Apple can announce that they had made $13 billion in profits over a year (same as last year), on $54 billion in revenue (up 18%), but because the expectations were higher, the stock ends up dropping and Tim Cook feels the heat Link. It gets a bit absurd, but I won't pretend to understand how the stock market works.

I'm just guessing, but I suspect Tomb Raider's "lack of success" is more along the lines of "we wanted more than we got" instead of "we lost money on it." I also think people see Tomb Raider as too much of a sole catalyst of Square-Enix's CEO stepping down.

He's making software that requires ROMs of cartridges that were never sold to the public.... He better make sure he makes zero dollars for his efforts.

Please be sure to own the incredibly rare demo units of cartridges that were typically never released for sale to the general public eh? I know two people that collect SNES games at work and dispute the notion that the games are not individually rare or hard to come by. In his own kickstarter he says "Basically if one wants to acquire any of these cartridges they'd be hard-pressed to find them, let alone afford them. Following is a list of the rarity and value of the cartridges mentioned above." The Star Fox one is the cheapest at $500. Fine, if you possess the original cartridge of a console game you can play downloaded ROMs. Unfortunately, you're not playing the original cartridge game. I've only actually played the Starfox one, and given that I was a Starfox pro when it came out, I learned very quickly that it was NOT just the same Starfox game but on a timer. (I still broke 80,000 points and got my free T-Shirt though!).

Gorth understands. +10 Approval Influence Gained: Allan

That's entirely possible. I haven't really followed the development too closely, and only preordered in large part because of their tech demo they showed.

Evidently that wasn't very clear to me, hence why I was asking for an elaboration. Ok. To me this is not "Lose the Plot" it's "Do the plot in a different way." Something I didn't find clear with your original statement. Though "plot points" still exist (you gave two). Having said that, I'm actually not convinced that step 6 is actually superior. An extreme way to look at your step 6 is to determine whether or not the plot is viable without any of the NPCs along the way. If you removed them all from the game, can the plot still be achieved? Technically yes. Does it make for a more interesting game? Definitely not. Murderous rampages perhaps work a bit in a fantasy setting because the ability to communicate and warn others of your psychosis, but where you see #4 as a fault, I saw it as a creative and setting appropriate application of a rule that prevented destructive gameplay decisions. Going around and murdering everyone in a game like Baldur's Gate and Fallout does more to remind me that I'm in a fan-servicey video game where I can achieve things that don't really make much sense. Ideally I'd prefer solutions to #4 that come across more naturally, with the gameworld reacting to the fact that you're a psychopathic murderer. No whether or not plot arcs need to be linear is something sort of touched on by #6, though I think that that has little to do with the desire to go on a rampage. As a game player exploring the world, accidentally stumbling upon a later plot point, and going from there, is very interesting. (Rather than requiring you to play through the game reaching the specific plot points in a prescribed order).

What do you mean by "lose the plot?" Are you referring to allowing the game to exist in a state where the main plot cannot be completed? (but the game continues on)

No doubt that qualifies as intimate knowledge. Especially intimate knowledge that doesn't get skewed by any sort of perspective biases at all. If I were good friends and related with people that lived in the uK while she was in charge and they said this whole trashing of her character was complete bollocks, I'm sure you'd consider my intimate knowledge to be roughly on par with yours.

It would depend. The emulator is running in a virtual environment so it has a greater degree of predictability over the memory (specifically, the addresses) allocation within the virtual machine. While the memory block can be assigned anywhere within Windows, as far as the emulator is concerned it's assigning the memory starting from 0x00000000 (or wherever it wants to start). So if you were to save the memory state, you'd either need a virtual memory controller for the game (which may or may not be easy. I have never done one...), or some way to ensure that you correctly map the reassigned memory to the correct locations. Which would probably be effectively writing a "save anywhere" feature anyways.

Do they have a dedicated writer, or does the writer also program? (on smaller teams people become multidisciplinary)

This "depends" really. While I doubt that the size of the teams of either project reach this level of critical mass, in many cases it's typically better to have half the staff work twice as long. Now, 10 people working for 2 years might not be a big difference over 20 people working for 1 year, you do start to get huge diminishing returns on adding people to a project, while the cost of adding people to a project tends to go up linearly. 100 people working for 2 years will almost certainly make a better game than 200 people working for 1 year.

I'm pretty sure they do actually.

Project Eternity!