Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!wyse!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Game vs Multitasking Summary: vi, editor from hell (just had to get that in) Message-ID: <1990May30.091809.4942@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 30 May 90 09:18:09 GMT References: Distribution: comp Organization: SF Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 182 [Poaching on Devon's article because he formatted the questions so nicely!] In article deven@rpi.edu (Deven T. Corzine) writes: > >On 29 May 90 00:05:35 GMT, mt87692@tut.fi (Mikko Tsokkinen) said: > >Mikko> 1. Should game be HD-installable? >Mikko> 2. Should game multitask? >Mikko> 3. Should game detect extra memory/diskdrives/processors? >Mikko> 4. Should game be exitable? > >Mikko> And I would like also to know how many of you people really >Mikko> play games while doing something else? If you do, do you really >Mikko> like those every now and then updating games with poor graphics >Mikko> (thanks to memory shortage). > 1) Not only HD installable, but also Rad: installable for even faster performance. "It Came from the Desert" is a simply fabulous Amiga game, but even though it is HD mountable, it is not Rad: mountable. [Guess who spent his $.05 on memory instead of a HD? ;-) ] As mentioned by others, listening to the floppy drive grind its heads flat accessing the same data over and over, when my machine has plenty of resources to copy the game into memory and never see the floppy drive again, sets my teeth on edge. Ditto copy protection schemes that abuse my floppy drives. --- Copy Protection, a Digression --- I absolutely refuse to buy any more of the (very nice) Psygnosis games because of the damage their copy protection sounds like it is doing to my floppy drive on startup. In fact, since copy protection schemes just challenge my hacker friends (and me, too, pretty soon, I'm starting to see red on this subject) to see who can be the first to get a "broken" copy on the street, forget copy protection altogether. I promise, if your game is in anyway accessible (including reading it as raw MFM data off the floppy) somebody out there knows a way to beat your copy protection scheme, and will get a big ego boost out of putting it on the street with his/her "hacker ID" on it. If you feel you must copy protect, unlike the many game manufacturers who think thay can survive by treating their customers like possible repeat customers rather than known criminals, go with "word in the manual" schemes, or better, data from a large, hard to photocopy map like Starflight I uses. Do _not_ use a keyword sheet that is physically difficult for a large part of your potential customer base to read. Once I have isolated the group printing black ink on purple paper (you listening Electronic Slime?) that makes my 46 year old eyes hurt so much to read tears start flowing, they go on my list of companies never buy from again, too. Never, never, never make me turn off my machine to use your game. I keep lots of valuable stuff in Rad:, ready to use, and if you can keep from trashing it and don't make me power down, I can be up and running 30 seconds after I finish with your game, even if you make me warm boot. In general, if you cannot find a copy protection scheme that doesn't actively irritate your customers in normal operation, _don't_ use one. We _won't_ be back. We _will_ tell all our friends the game is a bummer, and with the net, we have a _lot_ of friends listening. 2) Yes! My favorite here is POCO, a really nice set of puzzles that takes very little CPU time while I'm staring at the screen, and so I can safely do a download while I'm working on one of the puzzles. I bought a multi-tasking machine, and loaded it down with memory, because I WANT TO MULTI-TASK -- ALL THE TIME. Don't think or plan that your game is the most important thing going on within my very large, very capable machine, even when I'm playing it! I might be raytracing a picture that takes several days, and want to play your game once in a while while this more important background task goes on. I might have left a job going, and told the kids they could use the computer for game playing while the job runs. Guess what? That means your game _has_to_ start from the Workbench without a reboot, it _has to_ mind its P's and Q's about resource acquisition and release, it _has to_ return to normal Workbench status when it is done, it _has to_ obey screen flipping so I can reach past the kids and check the status of my background job, it _has to_ leave some cpu cycles for the background job(s) [and if it runs on both an A1000 and an A3000, it is absolutely criminal to tie up all the resources of the latter machine when you need only the resources of the former machine. Don't busy wait, don't fidget. Do exactly what it takes to make your game run, and sleep the rest of the time]. Let _me_ decide if the game performance is too doggy to multi-task with the job I have running; let _me_ pause my background job if I want better performance from your game; do _not_ make that decision for me. Maybe I'm running the background job deliberately to slow your game down to the point where my older reflexes and more jangled nerves have a chance. Don't second guess me. 3) If there are extra resources available, _ask_ me if you should use them! If I'm running stand alone and I can get more screens in memory, I'll say yes. If I've got something else going on that is going to choke and die if you grab all the memory, I'll say no! This is an Amiga! Put the choice in a menu, _tell_ me how to get to it _and_ what it means, and let _me_ decide. The more controls you give me, the better use you make of my machine, the better you treat me and my machine, the faster my friends will hear about your great game (see Poco above, nearly the ideal multitasking game), and the more likely I'll be to buy your next one. 4) I've already said it, but of course you should exit! Give up the paranoia! Poco isn't copy protected, it multitasks, the game is completely described on the screen so you don't need a manual, and it is lots of fun and full of wonderful puzzles. I tell my friends to _buy_ a copy; I want the folks who made this game to be encouraged by lots of cash return to write another great game that is completely compatible with me and with my computer. --- Abusive Posting Material Follows --- Contrast that with Dragon's Lair, which wipes out the operating system, is impossible to back up, grinds the disk drives to death, isn't in standard format so I can't load it into Rad: (where it would fit easily except the idiots decompress their data during the hard disk install so it takes 10 meg instead of 5.28 meg if it were installed compressed and decompressed for each use like it is off floppies); if I had the skills to take that game apart and make it work like an Amiga game, it would be on the street in a flash, and I wouldn't have an iota of guilt about it. I hate spending $50 to be abused like that, and I get angry at the manufacturer. [Someone in my tenuous state of sanity can justify all sorts of nastiness when we feel put upon, and there are a lot of us out here lurking in wait for your abusive game, so don't abuse us.] [At the rate I'm going, I should have the skills to take this game (and its descendants) apart by this time next year, if somebody doesn't beat me to it. Watch for "DL.unprot.zoo" on a BBS near you! ;-) ] n) One last little note: don't lie to me! I just bought Aquanaut. They lied through their teeth! Guess what my response will be? From the manual: "A special data format was used on the disks in order to accomodate such a large program. This means that you cannot make backup copies of your master disks using standard disk copying procedures or utilities...Send $7.50...". We're talking ripoff here! This is total BS! I copied all but one crucial file onto a backup set of disks by saying "copy df0: to df1: all". There is _no_ special data format; the files compress about 40% apiece if you zoo them, which means if they have a compression scheme, it is a really lousy one. Since I just wrote a directory walker for a whole disk (just to get out a set of full path names so I could do a quick inventory of a couple of hundred disks with an output format much more useful than "dir all" provides), it shouldn't take too long to find out how they hid one 200 block file. If they couldn't figure out how to do file compression, they aren't to likely to have developed a really challenging copy protection scheme. Watch for "Aqua.unprot.zoo". ;-) [On the bright side, the game is pretty fun so far, and the "Operation Wet Feet" manual is a (perhaps unintentional) riot to read.] Since my main project right now is improving the existing Arithmetic Data Compression algorithm for speed and effectiveness, and it looks like it is especially good at compressing image files, maybe I'll send them back their game running from one disk, just to prove that they could have been telling the truth, if they had been willing to do the work, instead of just saying they had (and if they didn't think their customers were trash suitable for such abuse). ;-) Kent, the man from xanth. (xanthian@zorch.sf-bay.org)