- Many business owners, when faced with the task of maintaining a computer system for the first time, would likely have to hire a Linux system adminsitrator for $30k-80k a year for even a single Linux system.
Does that same small business hire an auto mechanic full-time to care for its delivery van? Even when the business needs help, they're more than likely to have a consultant support them occasionally if they just have one or two machines. And my experience is that a Linux machine doesn't need a lot of support; it just hums along doing its job.
I also haven't found Window boxes to be quite as easy to deal with as you've claimed. I have had a user-friendly install-script trash my machine, so that it wouldn't boot. In fact, the Windows98SE upgrade, which seemed to go so smoothly, left me with an unbootable machine!
One thing I've noticed the last couple years is that the commercials have become, themselves, a form of entertainment. When the sponsors make them visually appealing (i.e., the Target ads), people will watch them even when they don't have to.
I like to make comparisons between the games industry and book-publishing. Imagine how great it would be if your favorite author announced that he/she would no longer be writing novels, but instead, would compile fan fiction based on their previous stories.
The trouble with games like UO isn't that they're online, but that they don't have plots. I don't want to spend my time talking to a bunch of computer geeks like myself! I want to be entertained by someone who writes better than I can, and has different thoughts and ideas.
I'd say those two represented a 'sweet spot' in game technology. You could walk through an almost-3D world and interact with loads of items. But the engines ran fine on a 486, and left enough spare CPU cycles for the NPC's to have fairly involved schedules. Walk into a bakery, and the shopkeeper would be going through the motions of baking bread. At 6:00pm, he/she would head to the inn for dinner, then head home to sleep.
Plus, the relative simplicity of U7's engine (compared to today's 3D games), and the lack of voice-actors, made it possible for the developers to create huge plots, with almost a novel's worth of conversations. If you disassemble Serpent Isle's 'usecode' file, you get around 10Mb of plot and text.
...I worked for a manufacturer of word processors back in the early 80's, when a word processor was a box, and wrote one of the first spell checkers in about 8K bytes of Z80. Yes, that's 8000 bytes. Disk space was about 1Mb.
The product also had mail-merge (from an ASCII list, or the wp's own built-in BTREE-based database), and quite a few other nice features. It just wasn't WYSIWYG.
You probably didn't have a Voodoo card. Ultima9 was in development for such a long time, that it was originally designed for the proprietary Glide (3dfx) library. The DirectX version was added later, and doesn't seem to have been particularly well-done. My system was a modest K6/333 with 64Mb and a Voodoo3/2000, and U9 performance was generally okay.
I played Gabriel Knight 3 on this same system, and had far more crashes, and about the same performance, for a game that didn't look 1/4 as good.
Thanks. It's nice to know that I'm not the only Ultima fan who liked the game. Sure, it had its faults, and didn't have the complex character development of Ultima7. But I liked the plot (which was more like an adventure game than an RPG), the dungeon puzzles, and even the ending. And technically, the 3D engine was truly amazing.
One other thing: Many people complained about the game's bugginess. But for me, it was quite solid, with only a handful of crashes, and those to the desktop.
Yes, the Underworld's, especially the first, were excellent! I generally don't even like 1st-person games, but I found the creepy atmosphere of UW1 enthralling.
Ultima7 was the first CRPG I ever played; and starting out, I didn't even know what it was. My previous game-playing experience was with Sierra's adventures, so I thought that Ultima7 was just another mystery adventure, with Trinsic as the 'universe'. It was quite a shock when I found that Trinsic was only a tiny part of Ultima's world!
I don't think Ultima7 had anything to do with Origin's financial problems. They were more likely due to the huge expenses incurred developing Wing Commander 3 & 4, as actors like Mark Hamill don't work cheaply.
When I interviewed at Microsoft about 12 years ago, the manager said that MS products were bug-free because the programmers were required to put self-tests into the code.
But I must admit, I never got to actually see the bug-free software.
Exult has been using SDL for over a year, and is over 70K lines of code, so it probably qualifies as a 'large' project. Generally, there are 4-5 developers working on it.
For ease of use and porting, SDL is about as perfect as I can imagine. Exult was originally written using Xlib (that's what the "Ex" represents). Switching to SDL took less than an afternoon, and the code became much simpler. Soon, contributors did ports to Win32 and BeOS. And more recently, others have ported to the Mac, BSD, and SGI. Yet, #ifdef's have been kept to a minimum, mostly for determining #include's.
Performance has also been great. For graphics (2d in our case), SDL provides the application with a frame buffer, just as I got with MITSHM/Xlib. So there's essentially no overhead in rendering. Event handling in SDL obviously means adding a level above the OS's, but it's not enough to notice. And audio performance seems fine, even using Timidity to create.wav data from Midi in realtime.
Yes, it was called "cinerama", and was a predecessor of Imax. I first saw it at L.A.'s Cinerama Dome shortly after it came out.
Sure, it seems slow and dated now. But at the time, when most science-fiction movies had rockets that looked like tin cans, it had the same effect on people that Star Wars had a decade later. I think my brother must have seen it 5-10 times.
And lots of us youngsters believed it might come true.
When first learning Unix on a VAX, I was really impressed that one could have filenames with spaces. So I created a few. But, not knowing about quoted names, I couldn't delete them. I had, however, learned about wildcarding, so, very cleverly, typed:
This was an area that Microsoft stayed out of. I wonder how this, along with the Xbox, will affect their relationship with the big PC manufacturers, who've always had a symbiotic relationship with MS?
It used to be that everybody was Microsoft's friend, back when MS was an OS-and-tools company. It didn't matter that they controlled the OS, because everybody was making money with the growth of the PC. Then MS moved into the applications area, and suddenly, companies like Lotus and Corel (and Netscape!) were history.
All along, the PC manufacturers were happy with MS's domination, because it made life easy and profitable to them. Why bother installing other OS's or applications, as long as they could keep moving boxes?
I wonder how Michael Dell feels now, with MS poking its tentacles in his direction?
It was Babbage's in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. If I recall, they put the Linux versions of a given game on the same shelf as the Windows boxes, so it wasn't especially surprising that buyers would make mistakes.
The nearby EB used to carry Linux games, but I think they stopped recently. Or maybe they just sold them all.
Slashdot Mirror
Wing Commander 1-4, Privateer
King's Quest 4-7
Dagger of Amon-Ra, Gabriel Knight 1
Loom, Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max
Ultima 4-7
Now I play... almost nothing. Where are the modern equivalents? Now I spend all my 'gaming' time trying to reverse-engineer Ultima7.
Does that same small business hire an auto mechanic full-time to care for its delivery van? Even when the business needs help, they're more than likely to have a consultant support them occasionally if they just have one or two machines. And my experience is that a Linux machine doesn't need a lot of support; it just hums along doing its job.
I also haven't found Window boxes to be quite as easy to deal with as you've claimed. I have had a user-friendly install-script trash my machine, so that it wouldn't boot. In fact, the Windows98SE upgrade, which seemed to go so smoothly, left me with an unbootable machine!
Why? It's because I recently bought the Windows98 upgrade, but couldn't get it to install. And the store doesn't take software returns.
One thing I've noticed the last couple years is that the commercials have become, themselves, a form of entertainment. When the sponsors make them visually appealing (i.e., the Target ads), people will watch them even when they don't have to.
The trouble with games like UO isn't that they're online, but that they don't have plots. I don't want to spend my time talking to a bunch of computer geeks like myself! I want to be entertained by someone who writes better than I can, and has different thoughts and ideas.
Plus, the relative simplicity of U7's engine (compared to today's 3D games), and the lack of voice-actors, made it possible for the developers to create huge plots, with almost a novel's worth of conversations. If you disassemble Serpent Isle's 'usecode' file, you get around 10Mb of plot and text.
However, the interview had nothing to do with technical details.
The product also had mail-merge (from an ASCII list, or the wp's own built-in BTREE-based database), and quite a few other nice features. It just wasn't WYSIWYG.
Total RAM in the best model: 750K.
It's been slashdotted!
I played Gabriel Knight 3 on this same system, and had far more crashes, and about the same performance, for a game that didn't look 1/4 as good.
One other thing: Many people complained about the game's bugginess. But for me, it was quite solid, with only a handful of crashes, and those to the desktop.
Ultima7 was the first CRPG I ever played; and starting out, I didn't even know what it was. My previous game-playing experience was with Sierra's adventures, so I thought that Ultima7 was just another mystery adventure, with Trinsic as the 'universe'. It was quite a shock when I found that Trinsic was only a tiny part of Ultima's world!
No kidding! Just reverse-engineering one is a big task!
I don't think Ultima7 had anything to do with Origin's financial problems. They were more likely due to the huge expenses incurred developing Wing Commander 3 & 4, as actors like Mark Hamill don't work cheaply.
But the computer press will give them credit for it, just like they heralded Windows95 for its 'multitasking'.
But I must admit, I never got to actually see the bug-free software.
For ease of use and porting, SDL is about as perfect as I can imagine. Exult was originally written using Xlib (that's what the "Ex" represents). Switching to SDL took less than an afternoon, and the code became much simpler. Soon, contributors did ports to Win32 and BeOS. And more recently, others have ported to the Mac, BSD, and SGI. Yet, #ifdef's have been kept to a minimum, mostly for determining #include's.
Performance has also been great. For graphics (2d in our case), SDL provides the application with a frame buffer, just as I got with MITSHM/Xlib. So there's essentially no overhead in rendering. Event handling in SDL obviously means adding a level above the OS's, but it's not enough to notice. And audio performance seems fine, even using Timidity to create .wav data from Midi in realtime.
Sure, it seems slow and dated now. But at the time, when most science-fiction movies had rockets that looked like tin cans, it had the same effect on people that Star Wars had a decade later. I think my brother must have seen it 5-10 times.
And lots of us youngsters believed it might come true.
A few times, I've looked for fixes for Windows95 problems, and only found the same questions.
I write every piece of software I run on my machine. I, too, am prepared to run X, and hope to have an implementation done next week.
When first learning Unix on a VAX, I was really impressed that one could have filenames with spaces. So I created a few. But, not knowing about quoted names, I couldn't delete them. I had, however, learned about wildcarding, so, very cleverly, typed:
"rm * *"
Unfortunately, I don't have broadband at home. But if I did, I could do the same in a couple ways today.
In KDE:
Click on "home PC" icon.
Click on document to edit.
Anywhere:
"telnet myhomePC"
"emacs mydoc"
It used to be that everybody was Microsoft's friend, back when MS was an OS-and-tools company. It didn't matter that they controlled the OS, because everybody was making money with the growth of the PC. Then MS moved into the applications area, and suddenly, companies like Lotus and Corel (and Netscape!) were history.
All along, the PC manufacturers were happy with MS's domination, because it made life easy and profitable to them. Why bother installing other OS's or applications, as long as they could keep moving boxes?
I wonder how Michael Dell feels now, with MS poking its tentacles in his direction?
No, I didn't make that up.
The nearby EB used to carry Linux games, but I think they stopped recently. Or maybe they just sold them all.