Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
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From: milamber@caen.engin.umich.edu (Daryl Scott Cantrell)
Subject: Re: Mike Farren Tutorial.
Message-ID: <1991Mar26.211403.8981@engin.umich.edu>
Sender: news@engin.umich.edu (CAEN Netnews)
Organization: University of Michigan Engineering, Ann Arbor
References: <1991Mar24.204206.11145@starnet.uucp>
Distribution: comp
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1991 21:14:03 GMT

In article <1991Mar24.204206.11145@starnet.uucp> sschaem@starnet.uucp (Stephan Schaem) writes:
>[...]
>	     
>	     -MULTITASKING:  Have you EVER monitored the system!
>	      Move your mouse around, moving the mouse take more than
>	      20% of the
>	       CPU time! 1%? Why do you want to multitask if you use the
>	       CPU 1% on
>		the other side! And puting the OS to sleep and waiking
>		it UP is the closest
>		 you can get to it with this kind of game.
>		  Here also make TurricanII or XENONII or OVERDRIVE
>		  etc.. true multitasking.

Of course, those of us with accelorated machines would appreciate being
able to use the full horsepower of our computers.  Even if you only
leave 1% of the system to 500 owners, that's a big plus to 680[2,3]0
owners.  If you're worried about slowdown you could run at pri 1.. But
most game designers won't even go so far asto put the system to sleep.

>			  -MEMORY: Dont you think some people apreciate
>			  to be able to buy software
>			   for their 512K machine!!! I hope so.

I can understand that no game designer wants to make a 1 MB+ game and
lock himself out of a large market.  But at the same time, making the
game only USE 512K is nothing but laziness.  Making the game only WORK
on 512K is sheer idiocy..

>			    -HD INSTALABLE: There is absolutly no
>			    barrier for that for any floppy games.
>			     Well only piracy.

Wake up and smell the coffee.. All these wonder-protection-schemes you
game designers come up with don't mean squat to 15-yr-olds with nothing
better to do.  Look at Dragon's Lair.  Supposedly one of the best-pro-
tected games published (I wouldn't know, not my kind of game..).  Not
only was I hearing about cracked versions out before it was even re-
leased, they added insult to injury by adding features to it!  The only
thing your floppy protection schemes accomplish is to bug people like
me into not buying your game because it can't be put on my HD.

>[At this point he babbles at some great length (and very little width)
>about some strange project, assembly routines, the phase of the moon
>relative to Venus, and lord only knows what..]

I think the most blatant indicator of how lazy most game programmers are
is the neato custom disk-loaders most of them use.  Even if you accept
that one track on the disk should be "messed with" for copy-protection
(I don't), trackdisk.device achieves transfer rates approaching the
physical limits of the floppy drive.  Yet game designers almost always
"roll their own", and invariably 50% of them will use a CPU loop to time
the raw track read.  Is this for the sake of "state of the art" games?
I say it's unadorned laziness.


--
+---------------------------------------+----------------------------+
|   // Daryl S. Cantrell                |   These opinions are       |
| |\\\ milamber@caen.engin.umich.edu    |    shared by all of    //  |
| |//  Evolution's over.  We won.       |        Humanity.     \X/   |
+---------------------------------------+----------------------------+
