🚀 go-pugleaf

[Poaching on Devon's article because he formatted the questions so nicely!]

In article <DEVEN.90May29214958@netserv2.rpi.edu> 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)