posted 03-11-99 12:32 AM ET        

Read about how much of a bastard I am. It'll make for enlightening reading, I tell you. Oh, and make sure you read the part near the end, where he admits to it not being a parody, but what he really thinks.

posted 03-11-99 01:49 AM ET            

I will not use any sarcasm or smoke and mirrors in this post.

I have a feeling you do your job really well. Just the other day I ran into a problem with my Internet connection. You can imagine how that put my life in peril. I tried everything. I messed with modem drivers, modem settings, reinstalling almost everything (I stopped short of re-installing Windows, thank God).

Out of desperation and with no real hope of getting help, I ask our resident computer guy about my problem. He said casually, almost like he was saying 'good morning,' "Go under Internet Options, Connections, and Proxy. Enter this and this for the Proxy and this and this for the Port."

And then he was gone.

Well, I've gotten my hopes up too many times working with these machines to think he was actually right.

My God, it worked! (sorry, because that means I have Internet access). In all honesty, I was in awe of that guy. No way in a million years would I have thought to enter anything in the proxy and port area, let alone know what numbers to put in. He didn't even have too look a notes. Just BANG! Gave me the numbers.

I'm sure you've done the same for many people and they probably never thanked you for it. Just to let you know, help like that is akin to a blood transfusion.

Please, please, please don't misunderstand me. Knowledge like that bestowed without judgment or second guessing how I was to blame was manna from heaven.

Sure, I wish the computer took care of all that crap on its own 100% of the time, and I hope that's where the future will take us.

posted 03-11-99 10:12 AM ET            

The software industry is very strange. When technical people fix something, we are treated like gods. When we screw up, we're the worst scum that ever crawled out of the ocean. I'm not complaining -- just explaining, so bear with me on this post.

There is a reason for this dichotomoy. The reason is that computers allow you to do things that you could never do with paper and pencil, faster and more efficiently. Entire segments of the world economy are based upon computers (think banking, software, accounting, consulting, shipping, etc.). This is when they work. When they don't work, they prevent people from doing that work, and most people don't understand how to fix them, and that is extremely frustrating. It's a love/hate relationship, and those feelings get transferred to the people who actually work in the industry.

What makes it harder is that computer hardware and software suffer from the same poor design choices that happen in any industry. We have faucets in the bathrooms of our office building that require you to press down on a knob to get the water to flow. When you let go, the knob pops back up and the water stops. Think about how ridiculously hard it is to wash your hands when you have to keep one hand pressed down on the knob! The point is that bad design happens in every industry, but the love/hate relationship people have with computers makes that bad design much more frustrating.

Unfortunately, programmers, consultants and such are a little like weather forecasters, in that the systems they deal with are so complex, it is impossible to know exactly what is happening in every circumstance. They get by based on a combination of experience, raw skill and intuition (more of the last than you might think). Salaries for good technical staff tend to be high because of that.

The caveat to that is that skilled staff are expensive -- and therefore so is software development. Margins are not as high in the software industry as you might think. I am not BSing when I've said in other posts that sometimes you HAVE TO SHIP SOFTWARE, even if there are bugs in it. Many software companies have gone under because they failed to ship. Profitability is not enough for a company. You have to have cash flow to meet expenses, including the salaries of your expensive programmers! The market price for new computer games sits between $30-$50. That is what consumers expect, so a project has to be able to recoup development costs using that as a price guide.

The economics of the gaming industry are actually very poor. To produce high quality games consistantly, the prices would probably have to rise into the $80-$100 range, with the same volumes, and the market just won't handle that. That's why you see gaming companies getting swallowed up into ever larger companies like Sierra and Interplay, to try to make a profit using economies of scale.

The only reason we have so many great games out there is because there are people like Sid and Brian who like to write games that are fun to play. A lot of mediocre products come out because the developers didn't care about the product -- and so it turned into something that was very average. That is why people are so vehement in their defense of games like SMAC.

posted 03-11-99 11:01 AM ET            

Good post.

I happen to be one of those people who by and large are in Yin's camp. Here's why.

Many people in the aforementioned industry act like computers and the associated technology are something so special that only an anointed few can comprehend. This leaves the unwashed masses like me to muddle through our everyday existence with solutions that we can't understand, let alone problems that we can't understand. In short, what seems to be an easy fix for some is like doing brain surgery for others.

Where we react badly is when those self annointed experts hide behind the technology issue and then throw out patches and fixes and expect terrified people to easily implement them. We then really blow our tops when we are made to feel stupid when we can't do this for ourselves and when we are told to be quiet and not rock the boat to make it better.

This is the main focus of Yin's and my arguments in the various threads and it seems that Brother Greg and Omnidude are our foils on the other side. Yes, perhaps we've been a little sarcastic and maybe a little mean sometimes. However, trying to make someone feel inadequate is just as humiliating for someone on the other end.

Brother Greg,

posted 03-11-99 01:22 PM ET            

I understand that kind of frustration. It's like going to a doctor who won't tell you what's wrong. He just gives you a perscription and a pat on the head.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that only a relative few do comprehend computer technology. Even fewer are actually good at it. I am not trying to be arrogant. As evidence, I point to the ever-rising salaries of technical staff (think stock options :-)) and the help wanted section of any major newspaper.

In an ideal world, every technical person who has to deal with the public would have excellent interpersonal skills. In the real world, that obviously isn't the case. As a matter of fact, the rarity of talent in the field means that sometimes companies employ difficult people, or people who aren't quite as skilled as they would like. It's also sometimes difficult for somebody who knows A LOT about something to explain it to someone who doesn't. Some things are hard to translate into layman's terms.

OK, so sometimes the fault lies with the computer guy. From the other side of the net, I want to iterate the fact that sometimes end users are the most frustrating creatures in existance. You can spend weeks writing a computer program, test it thoroughly, and install it at a client site. If it doesn't work on one user's machine out of five-hundred, then suddenly that person thinks your work is crap and that you're over priced. Everybody has read those Internet posts from help desks about foolish end users who staple floppy disks and use their CD-ROM trays as cupholders. They are true. Even if they are not true in their particulars, they are very true examples of end users who don't use common sense.

Another frustrating thing is that people (not necessarily the people on this forum, just in general) will buy a computer and expect it to be as easy to use as a toaster. Nobody in their right mind would buy an automobile or a gun and expect to be able to use it without learning to do it properly, but they expect to be able to sit down and magically produce work without any learning curve on a computer.

Finally, if you know something about computers, then suddenly everybody expects you to be an expert on any computer topic they happen to bring up. My fiancee will blithely ask me to explain random error messages to her from any program she happens to be working on, and her response when I answer "I don't know," is usually, "HMPH, some computer person you are!" :-)

posted 03-11-99 01:56 PM ET            

Another great post.

I have to take issue on one point. Vent! How dare you vent. You have your nerve placing a well thought out constructive series of arguments on this thread. What's the world coming to.

Now on a more serious note.

As a former army officer I had to educate and train many young people with little or no life experience and in some cases very little education or intelligence. I'm sorry if I burst any bubbles, but the US Army, while much better educated than in the past, still has to assimilate a large number of recruits that barely qualify with high school credentials. As such, if properly handled and trained, these aformentioned recruits learned to handle some of the most sophisticated equipment known to man. I seriously contest whether a PC game is any more complicated than a fire control system on an Abrams tank. As a result, I'm still having difficulty understanding how computers can only be understood by a special group. Some people are better at design and some are better at end use. Yes, and some are better at service. Therefore, I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in the ability to bring together the various disciplines and make them work together.

That is why I have focused my points on the issues related to the responsibilities to meet the needs of the end user. That group is the one that needs to be served best even if the other particpants need to make sacrifices to do it.

Case in point is my 70 year old mother. She has a license and knows how to drive. However, she is terrified of driving and I have to take her anywhere beyond the corner market. I don't like it, I think she should be able to do it for herself, but I drive her where she wants to go and I leave it at that. Why, because she's my mother and I owe her that. No, it's not written on the box or any contact. Yet, I owe it to her just the same.

As a result, the industry needs to slow down if they are leaving their users behind. The problem to me is that they don't want to do this for fear of being left behind. Am I right?

BTW, loved the toaster analogy as I have experienced it countless times.

posted 03-11-99 03:52 PM ET            

I can agree with you in terms of ABILITY to learn. Motivation counts for a lot, though. I have gotten the impression that the army is very good at motivating people to do things. :-) People need to start assuming that using a computer takes effort, and balance that against the benefits of owning one. Hopefully, both computers will eventually become easier and the advantages of having one will become overwhelming, but I don't think we've hit that point yet on either count.

Motivation is an issue with your 70 year-old mother, too. You do it because she's your mother and you care about her. People write games for two reasons. First, they like to write games. They do what they can to make games as fun and as stable as possible because they like the fact that people enjoy playing them. Second, they write games because people pay them to. If people didn't pay for computer games, you would never see anything published above the level of shareware (certainly no 5 CD games like Baldur's Gate!). Both motivations have to be satisfied.

Firaxis could fix almost every bug reported to them. I say almost because some bugs are really not correctable without rewriting the program, although those types of bugs are rare. They could dedicate a staff member to resolving each person's problem individually, and even make site visits to people's homes to look at problems. I think you can agree that such an approach would be ridiculously expensive for the company.

As far as slowing down the pace of technology, that will never happen. Every time new computer tech is introduced, people come up with new requirements. People actually have requirements lined up that we don't have the power to process, yet! As soon as a new tech is created, it gets appropriated for Hollywood special effects, NSA decryption, home publishing, corporate data warehousing and decision support, CAD, weather forecasting, particle physics research, etc.

Furthermore, companies like Intel and Microsoft are going to keep pushing new tech, because without upgrades, both hardware and software companies would have no source of steady income. Thus in ten years we will be running Pentium XX processors with 50 terrabyte hard drives and 32 gigabytes of RAM. I'm probably underestimating.

Really, companies are producing what people want to buy -- if you keep in mind that the primary consumers of hardware and software are businesses and government. These customers, as my examples above indicate, actually have uses for more, better, faster.

Let's face it. Gamers are just as succeptible to the lure of more, better, faster. There were people on Interplay's Fallout 2 forum complaining that it didn't support 3Dfx. A 2D roleplaying game! Jeez. How many people bought GPolice because it was pretty?

posted 03-11-99 03:56 PM ET            

The computer industry is one of the most cut-throat in existance, product life-cycles are shrinking to the point of obselecent at release date. Every one is creating their own widgit.

Thus, the only way to recover the R & D cost is to get as good of a product as possible and then send it to market before your competitor.

Case and point. SMAC and CTP. The first one to market will invariably capture a large percent of the market share simply because it is first. Now, I know alot of the people of this forum will end up purchasing both, but the average consumer who purchases a game once a quarter will have to choose.

I have said this several times, but it bears repeating, the computer industry will never get away from pathces and bugs. The market cycle simply does not reward deligent behavior.

From a project management standpoint, there are three variables (simplified) that affect any project. Cost, Quality and Time. You can only fix one of them. The other two will then adjust to match.

For example, I want somethign cheap It will either be:

Low Quality and Fast
High Quality and take forever.

The computer game industry has settled around the $50 dollar range for computer games. Therefore cost is set. Now we can play with quality and time. However time is set to some extent (there is some give and take here)by the competitors. This leaves quality pretty much getting pegged into a value.

The only way to ensure better quality games is to ensure that your resources are as good as possible, therby getting better quality for a fixed time.

Hopefully, this helps to see where companies are coming from in a project managment viewpoint.

posted 03-11-99 04:35 PM ET            

Case in point: the whole VIC 20 thing that supposedly pissed Yin off. Now, being in the middle of an argument, Yin used the VIC 20 as an example of how computers can be stable, and games run reliably on them. I counter with reasons why the VIC 20 is so much easier to write programs for, how the architecture is standardised, and so on.

Then Yin takes that as me belittling him.

If he tries to argue with people that know what they are talking about, he shouldn't whinge when they set him straight. And let me point out here, that nowhere was he riduculed, put down, abused, or anything by me. I was quite civil in the argument. Now, if he chooses to take a normal discussion as belittlement, is it my problem?

Of course, how STUPID of me, I should have realised that anyone that disagrees with him, or dares to argue with him is in fact belittling him. And of course that that gives him the right to abuse me whenever he feels like it.

THAT is the issue of this whole post, the fact that he feels entitled to slander me from pillar to post for merely partaking in a discussion with him.

posted 03-11-99 06:43 PM ET            

Add to this Derek's point about program changes alongside the documentation, and you have a nightmare in paper in your hands. Uncle, I'm pretty sure, that given similar quality instructions, your army trainees wouldn't have a hope of getting your tanking moving, let alone be able to fire anything.

Which comes back to Yin's point about the proxy. If he DID have access to well written manuals that explained the system in detail, and so that the required information could be access quickly, I'm sure at least half of his grief towards the computer industry would vanish overnight.

I find that one of my natural advantages in using computers is that I have a good deal of mental agility - i.e being able to solve problems and work out how systems work MYSELF. There is no way in the world that you can make those things requirements for mass market success, given the average person's ability or inclination to play around with something and find solutions (case in point - programming a video).

posted 03-11-99 06:57 PM ET            

Don't do it. Technical Writing is one of the most boring, least respected jobs in the computer industry.

I know, I did it for 1 year (had a minor in it from school)

Manuals are often times inaccurate because of the lead time in printing them. Typically 1-2 months before release date.

At some point, code is "frozen" (ha ha) at this time the documentation is printed and distributed for review. The Review cycle occurs and then the changes are placed in. A final copy is then generated. This time it is not reviewed for content, but spacing, page layout etc. Changes are then made. Finally, it is sent to the printer.

They make a "blue" copy that is sent to you. YOu review it to ensure that what was printed matches what was sent to them.

At this time, printing really begins.

So as you can see there is a large gap in time between when the documentation is completed to when it is finalized.

Changes from documentation closure time are then placed in the READ.ME file which is looked at even less than installation manuals.

Finally, most small software shops cannot afford to hire a tech writer since they are somewhat pricy (About 40k per year)and people think that they can write. Thus getting to your point Shining.

posted 03-11-99 07:04 PM ET            

Now to address the level of detail that would make users like yin "happy".

sorry to Say, ain't going to happen. There is simply no way to document how every dll is going to play on every machine. Sure you can document what is going to be placed onto a users machine, but that buys you little.

Great examples of this are the Microsoft Foundation Classes. There are substantial changes from build to build. One program wants build 1082 but another wants build 509. They have the same file name, but different structure. So which program wins....generally the one requireing the later file date.

Finally, the average user is not going to want to read a thesis on the architechure of SMAC, they are there to play the game.

posted 03-11-99 07:08 PM ET            

Like programming, it's not something I would want to do for very long. But it sounds like a good introduction to other things, as well as being an increasingly necessary part of the industry.

posted 03-11-99 08:29 PM ET            

I was the first on my block to own a Toyota pick-up. I lived in Orange County then, which is where Republican headquarters are. You should have heard the comments: "Communist! Buy American!" "Hey, you're putting our people out of work!" (I bought a Harley a few months later, and that made them quiet for a while, but it broke down, too, so I sold it.)

Well, 100,000 miles later--yes, 100,000 miles--I was terribly inconvenienced by my Toyota truck. Why? I had to replace the clutch. $78. 100,000 miles cost me $78 (minus religious oil-changes and gas).

The U.S. auto industry is still trying to recover for this fiasco. Even loyal Americans could no longer justify buying crap. The industry heads all said "But nobody wants to slow down and be the loser. We've got to have new models rushed to market."

Meanwhile, the Japanese produced quality cars that to this day run 100,000 miles plus with few problems.

posted 03-11-99 08:54 PM ET            

First. Check your e-mail. If you still want to fight, get back to me.

Second. I decided to post this on my own thread as well after thinking you'd get mad because it looked like I was dodging you.

posted 03-11-99 09:08 PM ET            

The average performance increase between a 1950's car and a 1990's one? Bugger all. The reliability/safety increase? Whoa Momma.

The computer industry can't do that - yet. Performance is still increasing at a ridiculous rate. Safety and reliability are secondary concerns, still. We're at the 1930's of computer automation - things are still getting much faster every new design, and people are breaking down regularly, or getting 'killed' due to lack of safety features.

I think, with the power of modern processors, that the ceiling may soon arrive, where you can do ALMOST everything you want on you new 1000MHz rig, and that any 'new model' that comes out will reach 1950's status - new styling, more space for the kids, and "Hey, it's this years model. Now you don't want to be seen with 'last years' model on your desk, now, do you?"

And then Denmark and Australia (which, when combined, might almost be the same as New Zealand ) will come in and standardise everything so that it works. Computers will be in every home, simply because mobility of information is getting be as important as mobility of self was becoming in the 1950s. And the geeks will go off and play with their 'home genetic engineering kits'.

posted 03-11-99 09:23 PM ET            

I forwarded it. Let me know if it arrives.

Shiny,

Good points, as usual. But I DO think the computer business is being run by morons because they, too, think they have to come out with new models just to survive--reliability and compatibility be damned.

They are simply drunk on Moore's Law. But in the process they are also making Murphy's Law standard fare. Hey, I love the monumental increases in processing power. It's a great time to be alive, in my opinion.

But when I can't play "Spank the Naughty Nurse" on my 450 Mhz PII because of a page fault, I become, well, less than dazzled by it all. Don't you?

posted 03-11-99 09:39 PM ET            

It's just lag. Cellphones are a great example. First come out - massive. New model - big. Newer model - small. 1997 model - "where the hell did I leave... oh, it's in my back pocket".

1999 model - cheap, comfortable size, very popular. And companies are concentrating on adding internet style features to the rich phones and making contracts cheap and avoidable for the poor phones.

Industries just takes time to catch on to the fact that one trend is over and the next is beginning. I'm betting in five years time there'll be companies promoting a Quentium1000 - 16GHz MMMMMMMMx processor for home use - when the smart people have got their congolmerate friends together and are talking about internet security, reliability and 'what colour next years model will be' (Steve Jobs is a legend).

posted 03-11-99 11:09 PM ET            

I see some good points. Hope you're not billing me for that hour. You have helped me figure out a good idea.

I'll dress my darling Mum up in army boots and threaten her with a court martial if she doesn't drive herself to the store! I should have thought of that sooner. On second thought, if I tried that you all would be reading about an uncleroggy who got the crap kicked out of him by an old lady. Knowing my luck there'll be some paparazzi around to record it for posterity. Think I better scratch that idea for now.

Shiny,

I'm not sure I understand your post. American car companies were doing pretty good until we hit this little thing called the Arab Oil Embargo. As such, they were making big cars that everyone loved and people didn't mind the acronym FORD to mean "Fix or Repair, Daily" (OOPS! now someones gonna come after me for my big mouth). Now, a lot of attitudes changed when gas prices doubled and they had plenty of time to think about it waiting in lines. Still, it was several years and a crafty fellow named Toyota who finally built an edge that Japan could Enjoy. Also, it didn't hurt to have a Japanese Yen that whooped up on the dollar in the mid 80's either. Other than that, the rest of your and Yin's points ring true.

And yes, you finally see how many parallels can be drawn to the auto industry. Hail Caesar!!!

posted 03-11-99 11:34 PM ET            

Uncleroggy: The Oil Embargo. Yeah, but I remember reading some critique of American manufacturers of the time who even THEN couldn't really bring themselves to make small cars.

Anyway, the point I was making is that cars reached an upper limit at which the safety/reliability issues took over from the performance (okay, speed) issues. This happened around about the 1950s. Previously, you had cars doing 35 miles an hour at top speed, which was okay, but everybody was still trying to make them go faster, rather than safer.

Computers match that so well I don't even know if a metaphor is required - it's just a natural comparison to make.

Eventually, the computer industry will reach a level where extra performance is no longer necessary to requirements - for instance when you can switch to your game of 30 player Starcraft 3D while your spreadsheet is busy compiling a 100 000 entry non-linear optimisation, and still have plenty of power left over to take a video mail message from your spouse and run the 100 or so system agents essential for everyday living (like the one that calculates the best way to drive home through central park during rushhour). The point being that, eventually, with all these things going, you're going to be more concerned that absolutely nothing goes wrong with your system rather than how fast the thing runs.

However, it's also clear that this stage has not yet been reached, and so the computer industry is only marginally interested in system stability, and is still enamoured with system performance.

So Yin's dream of a consumer revolution against the industry has a while to go, because the consumer is still in the bigger/faster/higher stage, and not the better/safer/tougher one.

Clearer?

posted 03-12-99 11:13 AM ET            

I think we're making the same point for different reasons. In reality, the car manufacturers were making exactly what the public demanded. No one wanted to buy small cars and you were laughed out of town with the first Honda's and Toyotas. Americans were still living in the macho world of big, fast and powerful. The hormones were litterally dripping out the tailpipes. Don't you see the same thing today with computers? If I have 100 Gigs, 10,000ram and 1,000,000,000 Mhz it makes me a "better" man. My equipment package is better! But in reality, most people, will probably use only 1% or less. I'll bet you an Aussie Beah that computer companies could stop upgrading features for 3-5 years before the software companies would find that they were maxing out systems. Any takers?

The bottom line is that the computer business is like an arms race. It means more in bragging rights to have bigger guns even if they are never used.

posted 03-12-99 11:41 AM ET            

The players here are hardware, software, and end users. End users are attracted to products that have more features (for whatever reason), and thus there is an arms race among software vendors to provide the maximum number of features possible on a given set of hardware. It behooves software makers to use the hardware to its fullest potential (which equates to software bloat).

Think of software vendors (rather than end users) as the 'end users' of hardware products, and you'll see that the identical situation occurs with hardware. That is, software vendors, in their endless quest to satisfy end users' demands for more features, demand more power from hardware. Thus there is an arms race among hardware vendors to continually provide this additional power.

This situation happens all the time in biology. Look at the giraffe or the peacock. Both animals entered into evolutionary arms races, either with their own or another species, until one feature became pronounced to such a degree that it seems to detract from survivability. But the dynamics of evolution demand that the feature actually maximizes survivability (in a sense).

I suspect a similar trend in the computer industry. These arms races are chaotic and may seem pointless, but ultimately they are controlled by what people want. That might be just raw power but I suspect it actually is ease of use. It's just that ease of use for a computer demands, to some degree, enough raw power to have plenty to spare. (For example, it's easier to control a room full of servers when you have the high-speed networking and graphical SNMP applications to do it, but this requires the power to handle high-speed connections and run real-time graphics apps.)

posted 03-12-99 12:35 PM ET            

We're moving WAY too fast for our own good here. There is no single person to aim at. I don't think the computing industry is run by morons, I think its run by people still trying to break out of the older industry standards and styles of managing. You can compare automobiles and computers in matters of supply an demand, but really there's no other comparison possible. Most people don't really care to go over the speed limit with their cars, they want options, etc... I know I'm making a large assumption there too. A new car is WAY more expensive than a standard new computer, it lasts far longer, and has more use (well, not for me, but I'm a computer geek). But a computer can be upgraded heavily with ease (well, compared to a car)... ack, I'm going off on a tangent. What I meant to say is that you really can't compare the auto industry to the computing industry except for the fact that they both do what people want. People want better, more comfortabl, cheaper cars. People want cheaper, faster, more powerful computers. The differences after that are astounding. 3 month product cycles, changeovers, patches/updates/BIOS, upgrading, all the marketing involved with it. Its incredible. I'll admit I don't know how hard it is to drive an Abrams tank (I'm sure its beyond my current skill set), but you have to remember you had drill instructors there beating it into your head everyday. I firmly believe that if everyone was forced in childhood to take a sixmonth boot camp in the use and abuse of computers, we'd have less problems, just like if everyone had to take a six month boot camp course in driving Abrams tanks (now there's a scary thought.) Education and responsility is the key. the industry is only giving us what we want because we demand it. We demand it so much that they don't have time to prepare it and us for the full potential of the product, and we never use the full potential because the next generation is out before we now it.

posted 03-12-99 12:38 PM ET            

Each AI is a REAL artificial intelligence. It starts with a basic set of principles, and learns as you play against it. The difficulty setting you choose effects two things: the knowledge the CPs start with in terms of strategy and tactics and the rate as which they learn.

Graphics resolution is effectively the same as high-quality photography. You can magnify an image until you can see the zit on the end of your synthmetal sentinal's nose. Each unit is a 3D unit rendered to reflect all of your unit's changes. Submarines look like submarines (with foil subs being smaller than cruiser subs). You can even see the leaves on the tr...er...fungus.

Instead of being based on a grid, movement is effectively anywhere, because the coordinate system is fine enough to resolve down to individual points. Resource production is based upon a radius around the city. An area of farms produces food based upon its surface area.

City production is based upon a complicated algorithm related to total commerce, industrial capacity and population. You can build facilities to enhance production, etc.

Units are created by merging together individual components. Instead of building a vehicle, though, you get to select three squads armed with laser rifles supported by a towed plasma shard projector mortar company and three armored rovers.

There are ten different categories with ten options that allow you to fine tune your government effects to the point where your socialist government can look like Soviet Russia, or it can look like France.

Diplomatic options are extremely rich. You can sign multilateral trade accords, provide loans to other factions with restrictions on what they can use it for (infrastructure only, no unit), you can sell weapons to other factions for cash, you can sign no-first-strike treaties, reach agreements for maximum military unit totals and disarmament, etc.

The planet is a true, three-dimensional sphere with realistic scale. You can adjust the scale to suit your playing style.

The game will be capable of designing randomized factions on the fly, intelligently generating appropriate quotes and behavior patterns for random combinations of characteristics, such as "passive communal nihilists" and "interventionist populist libertarians."

Any and all control options are both customizable and can be effectively automated, and the interface is easily understandable and straightforward.

OK, so we have a game that requires LOTS of short and long-term storage, lots of processing power, and lots of effort. I have described something similar to the ultimate strategy game, sort of a combination between SMAC, SimCity 3000, and Operational Art of War. The desktop computer doesn't exist that could handle all of this in a reasonable period of time. It probably will in about ten years.

The concept that most people don't use the full power of their PC's is not the most useful way of looking at the advancement of technology. First, gamers will always shell out dollars for good games that are cutting edge. Second, as operating systems get more abstracted (everything from Windows printer drivers to Java virtual machines), they will require more raw power. Third, as ease-of-use features (like power-up/power-down, plug-and-play, etc.) get better, they will require more raw power.

Another fallacy is that advancement always means increased complexity and difficulty. I'm sorry, but anybody who ever had to work exclusively at a command prompt knows that GUIs and mice are usually easier for the novice to use. Web browsers let people do things that were impossible to do online just a few years ago, because they are much easier to use than dial-up terminal sessions.

posted 03-13-99 11:45 AM ET            

Thank you for making my points better than I was able to.

We can then boil everything down into two things if I'm thinking clearly.

1) Regardless of technological complexity, anything can me made functional and useable.
The military paradigm is unskilled soldier/training/systems designed for that soldier. In the civilian world we cannot control the training aspect, so the question is who will step forward and extend the helping hand. It has to be the industry, otherwise the consumer won't buy. BTW- Military training and life is actually no different than most of the civilian world. People are treated pretty good, they just have to get used to a dress code. It's funny, but I sometimes had more trouble with people keeping a regulation haircut than anything else.

2)The computer industry is 100% scalable to any other industry like automobiles. they have reacted for both the good and bad to consumer demand. Can any of you remember when everyone drove station wagons? Now it's SUV's.

Finally I must stand my ground on this one point. To say that the computer industry is wholly unique and that traditional rules don't apply is more illusion than reality. Every product or process goes through the same evolutionary period. It doesn't matter whether it's computers, cars, lawn mowers, toasters or cotton gins. I'll prove my point with a little test. We'll put some computer guys, some cooks, some mechanics, some doctors and whatever other professions that come to mind and ask them to diagnose and repair problems associated in the other disciplines. Since I think we all know how this will turn out I won't say any more.

Keep this good thread going!

posted 03-13-99 05:37 PM ET            

The computer industry is 100% scalable to other industries? While the general, overall view may look the same, there are numerous details that conflict with this argument.

* Computer performace can increase geometrically in speed and power without endangering the consumer. This is not true in many other industries, e.g the automobile makers. A car capable of 350km/hr cannot be safely operated by the average human. But a computer running at 100GHz is just as safe and easy/hard/impossible to use as one running at 16MHz. :- there is no innate upper limit to human performance requirements.

* Computers are built from a large array of different components - CPU, soundcard, etc. And then they have to run software on top of that. This means that most computers built today take components from a wide number of companies - something that doesn't really happen in other electrical or mechanical goods to any significant degree. If I wrote to Mercedes (I wish) complaining that I had just installed a Roll Royce engine (I wish) in the vehicle I bought from them, and that it didn't go as result, they wouldn't just tell me to update my drivers (bad pun ). Instead they'd probably shout a bit and invalidate all my warrentees.

This means that the amount of cooperation and standardisation in the computer industry is much greater, and, crucially, means that innovations tend to come in small bites, to allow past systems to continue to function - e.g buying a car, I'm not really concerned about having to get new tyres for it. Buying a computer - I care a great deal that it will be able to run all my old software.