I would be interested to know what led you to choose Python for your scripting? I have been playing with writing domain specific languages in Scala a bit recently, whereas at work I have to use all sorts of XAML stuff (yuck), Boo (nice) and Powershell (ugh), so it's a topic which is on the brain at the moment.
It seems they've changed it so that you don't get more waves of ice rain as you level it up now though? Which is sort of a shame, because you can't kill nearly as many creeps like that.
When you have queues of packets building, it is very often better to have a very short queue and throw extra packets away (and resend them) than to keep queueing them up. You may mess some connections up, but improve the overall throughput and prevent the really bad bottlenecks from happening. Every packet you have in your queue that is effectively invalid due to time-out makes the system deteriorate faster. Anyway, thanks for working to improve this and for communicating with t
Stardock have stated elsewhere ago that they intend to develop for one platform (Windows) only, because of their earlier experiences of developing for OS/2 and nearly going bust when that fell out of use.
Demigod Forums
Helping losing teams will not make the game go faster. But I agree with you, I have been arguing that picking skills and shopping while you're dead would be better ever since the first beta. I guess GPG have their reasons?
Impulse is a bit more stable for me, and quicker to start. It's also prettier - you can tell that it was designed by experts on user interfaces. Lastly, offline mode is much, much more reliable with Impulse. Which is not to say that Steam is bad: for the most part it does it's job pretty well and doesn't give too much grief. Try using it with a slightly flakey internet connection, though, and it's becomes a real pain.
I'd be quite interested to hear how it is that the turnaround times for updates are so quick. Is it just that you have very good people hacking at it in non-stop crunch-time mode, or do you have particular practices or systems in place that are a particular help here?
Made me think of Homeworld as well, but for me it's the Kadeshians with their massive short-range fighter swarms and giant carrier. Really interesting aesthetic.
Spell of Mastery? Spell Blast.
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.
If you stuck twiddling your thumbs waiting for Demigod, consider picking up Braid in the meantime. Gorgeous, amazing game. Should suck up a few days, tell you a story, and leave you feeling cleverer at the end.
I would argue that console gaming is getting stronger in many ways. Consoles now have hard disks, internet connections and voice chat systems. If you'd told a Daggerfall player that Morrowind would come out on a console they would probably not have believed you. Games that were really only possible on a PC before can be done on a console. The other thing that I think consoles are improving on is their various live download online arcade things. As with direct download on the PC, these
Thanks, looking forward to it. Hopefully I will be able to find some people to play it with at lans.
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.
Looks very impressive. I really like the new My Games view. I notice in my start menu there is now (or maybe it's been there a while and I missed it) a shortcut called 'ImpulseNow'. Is this for the tray application, or something else? Also, in My Games, you can right-click on the column headings and 'Edit Columns', which is useful, but it's not obvious - there's no visual feedback to show that you're hovering over an area that does anything.
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.
I can overclock my router's CPU :D. Of course it would frazzle. Actually I think the mod chip in my Nintendo DS is clocked higher - perhaps I should install DDWRT on that.
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.
I am curious now, since you guys are obviously the people to ask having done all this networking stuff. I have been running DD-WRT for quite a while, and it is very good, but the router itself still has rather rubbish hardware. As a result it will fall over in certain circumstances - basically it can't cope with the hundreds or even thousands of connections that peer-to-peer downloading software creates. My solution at the moment is to temporarily ban the person whose light is flashing the mo
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.
Ha, 4 year-old router here. Not replacing it though, unless someone wants to point me to a newer not-too-expensive router which will run Linux.
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.
Elemental Forums