Andcarne, on Jun 5 2005, 07:04 PM, said:
Also, if you don't have Tiger yet, upgrading to it should improve your performance.
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... but not nearly enough with 1-2 fps at the yard level. The addictive gameplay won't keep you from finishing it (or trying for hours) anyway.
Is there already something known about the release date of the update? I'd love to play trough Darwinia again :).
Andcarne, on Jun 6 2005, 02:00 AM, said:
The update will be very soon.
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um.. in terms of hours, days or more like month?
darwinian, on May 9 2005, 05:54 AM, said:
Though the question was not directed at me, I will give it a go none the less.
I have no real problem with Uplink. I think that it is a great game, and I go back and play through every once in a while. However, I must agree that it really does not have a great deal to offer on the second time through, and it does not have all that many extras unless you are |337 enough to decode everything.
Once you finish all of the plot missions, missions start to repeat themselves, and once you get good at them, there is little challenge. There is also a fair amount of mucking about with no tools at the beginning of the game, which is also kind of repetitive. Again, it is a great game, but I have found that it requires a fairly long 'cooling off' period between play throughs.
And even the story missions offer little variety. It seems to me that there are only about two ways to tackle the game: the Arunmor route, and the ARC route. And it is just about always possible to jump over to the Arunmor route.
xander
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In addition, at a certain point the game becomes very easy.
Once you have enough money to buy:
Moniter bypass
Proxy Disable
(Firewall disable)
You can basically pwn any comp in the whole game...
Gamerman, on Jun 8 2005, 02:45 PM, said:
In addition, at a certain point the game becomes very easy.
Once you have enough money to buy:
Moniter bypass
Proxy Disable
(Firewall disable)
You can basically pwn any comp in the whole game...
View Post
True, though the LAN tools help too. Of course, I am generally getting close to the end of the game by the time I can afford all of that stuff (i.e. the end of the story missions). The only times I have that much money early on are when I go after banks right off.
xander
SammyJames, on Jun 8 2005, 08:45 PM, said:
I'm sorry -- but did you say Dr. Sepulveda? Um...how did you actually write the code? Did you use #@#$%! BASIC?! Or maybe VISUAL Basic...?!
No, I believe it was written in C++
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Jeez Louise. I mean, seriously people -- everyone knows that the ONLY way to create a video game (that will run properly) is to use MACHINE LANGUAGE ONLY.
I don't know where you came upon that idea, but it's indicating to me that you have no clue whatsoever about what you're saying here. All games made nowadays are programmed in a higher-level programming language like C or C++ since it would be so amazingly impractical to do everything in Assembler.
The remainder of your post appears to be just an illogical jumble of ideas, spoilers and ranting. (Rather in the same vein as those first two quotes)
Anyways, there will be a patch upcoming for this game. Give it a try then, and next time you decide to complain about something, make sure you at least have a half decent idea of what you're talking about.
If you have something constructive to say, by all means post it, but comments like "because the stupid @#$!@@#$%! PROGRAM SUCKS..." and "Stupid me. I will NEVER buy ANY game for the Mac, again" are illogical and a pointless waste of bandwidth.
Andcarne, on Jun 9 2005, 05:41 AM, said:
Anyways, there will be a patch upcoming for this game.View Post
you say this 'patch is coming' since quite a long time. as far as i understand the patch is alredy there for win and linux. so what is needing so long?
how do i become a beta-tester?
and to answer the threads question: NO, it's not worth registering the way it is now. you can play the demo without problems and the you register to get stuck in the next level because the performance degrades to an unusable degree.
(is that the reason that you have level 1 & 2 in the mac-demo instead of the mine-level?)
this might change with the patch, as i am not a beta-tester i have no idea if this will be so.
and yes, i want my money back until the patch shows worthy improvement.
i am really sorry for the current implementation this fantastic game idea!
SammyJames, on Jun 9 2005, 12:51 PM, said:
Dear Andcarne:
Okay -- NOW I'm pissed. Before I was just irritated.
I spent MY money on YOUR program. YOU OWE ME SOMETHING. I don't care what it IS, as long as the final result is that
a) I get my program to WORK AS PROMISED, OR
B) YOU REFUND MY MONEY.
Nothing else will make me happy.
Thank you.
- Sammy
P.S. Also, would the person who is in charge of this board, who is above this Andcarne person, please sit him down and tell him how to properly deal with angry customers?! I spent about ten years working in customer service -- for companies like J.C. Penny, Barnes and Noble, and KayBee Toys. There are reasons why those companies still exist. Your company won't make it if this is the way in which you teach your employees to behave.
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At first I thought you were just annoying. Now, I think you are an idiot. Andcarne is the moderator of the board and beta tested the game. That, so far as I know, is the only connection that he has to ASW. He is not a paid employee of ASW. It is not his job to make you happy, it is his job to maintain civility on these boards. Frankly, he was far more kind to you than I would have been (which, I suppose, is why he is a moderator).
As andcarne said, your comments were largely incoherant, and rude in the extreme. If you have a problem with the game, fine. If you want to discuss it, fine. If you want to vent, this is probably not the place. If you want your money back, you are not going to get it by cursing at the members of this board and ASW. While I think it is unlikely that you will get your money back (ASW making no warrenty &c. &c.), acting like a 5 year old child certainly does not help your case. Why don't you try sending a polite email to customer services? As I said, I do not think that you will get your money back, but it can't hurt to ask politely.
Furthermore, as to your comments about ASW 'making it', I would say that they have already proved you wrong. After, what, at least 15 years, they still seem to be in business. While the business model has changed a bit over time (either that, or the definition of shareware has changed a bit over time), they still seem to be doing fine. They are still making and selling games, and they are publishing games from other companies.
Finally, IV and ASW are working their asses off to get a patch out (speaking of which, how are things progressing, andcarne?) which will hopefully fix many of the problems. It will be out when it is out, and should help a bit. We are all (im)patiently waiting for it. What makes you think that you are so special that you need to come here and bitch? We are all experiencing similar problems, and we are all waiting for the patch. So stop being such a f-cking muppet.
xander
This post has been edited by darwinian : 09 June 2005 - 08:42 AM
atze, on Jun 9 2005, 04:45 AM, said:
you say this 'patch is coming' since quite a long time. as far as i understand the patch is alredy there for win and linux. so what is needing so long?
There were a couple issues remaining with the mac version of it. We're waiting on word back from Introversion right now, but it should be close.
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how do i become a beta-tester?
At this point, I don't think ASW is planning on taking any more beta testers for Darwinia, but for testing in general, just keep your eyes peeled around the boards, and check the upcoming games page every so often.
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and to answer the threads question: NO, it's not worth registering the way it is now. you can play the demo without problems and the you register to get stuck in the next level because the performance degrades to an unusable degree.
(is that the reason that you have level 1 & 2 in the mac-demo instead of the mine-level?)
This is definitely not the reason for the level change. Since Ambrosia uses a shareware method of registration, the 'demo' part makes sense to be the first few levels, since when you register you will then carry on from there.
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this might change with the patch, as i am not a beta-tester i have no idea if this will be so.
and yes, i want my money back until the patch shows worthy improvement.
I am unable to do anything for you about this. You'd have to talk to someone at ASW directly.
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i am really sorry for the current implementation this fantastic game idea!
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I think we're all really hoping it will improve soon, but I think a lot of the problem must stem from Apple's OpenGL implementation, which seems to cause problems for other games as well.
I would just like to go on the record saying that though I was once interested in darwinia, my enthusiasm was hampered by performance problems said to be fixed in an upcoming patch "soon." This was 3 months ago. I love ambrosia, but I must say that after 3 months of waiting for a patch, I have lost virtually all interest in Darwinia. I really hope that Ambrosia will facilitate speedier releases of important patches for their games in the future, because I remember a day when ambrosia staff members would eat real bugs for each bug found in their products. Perhaps if they started doing that again they could be reminded of how much it sucks to download buggy software 
themage, on Jul 1 2005, 05:33 AM, said:
I would just like to go on the record saying that though I was once interested in darwinia, my enthusiasm was hampered by performance problems said to be fixed in an upcoming patch "soon." This was 3 months ago. I love ambrosia, but I must say that after 3 months of waiting for a patch, I have lost virtually all interest in Darwinia. I really hope that Ambrosia will facilitate speedier releases of important patches for their games in the future, because I remember a day when ambrosia staff members would eat real bugs for each bug found in their products. Perhaps if they started doing that again they could be reminded of how much it sucks to download buggy software
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To be honest (and to repeat a lot of what has been said here and in other topics) I doubt very much that most of the problem is Ambrosias fault per se. After all, it's not their codebase so they may not be that familiar with much of it that did not need porting. Besides, C(++) is such a low level language that large portions of the game may well be written in a highly x86 optimised way.
Darwinia isn't really that novel a concept. It's WarCraft III without the large numbers of upgrades, units, music, enemies, texture shading, serious enemy AI, terrain diversity and sadly, framerate 
But that doesn't stop it being a cute little game (I loved the spectrum tape loading rip-off - I remember when that was the norm!). If you want all the above, you can always investigate WC3 (and play on 'hard' mode) - true the 3D looks a little dated now - something which Darwinia neatly avoids by deliberately looking 'retro'.
Having played with the abysmal framerates on 10.4.1 as far as biosphere, I've given up for now until such time as a patch does come out or I forget to come back.
I'm pretty sure that (contrary to some other posts) the game does attempt some level of polygon culling. Checking whether vertices are within a field of view is pretty much lesson one in any 3d computer graphics class, and I would be amazed if the game did not do this. In fact, some evidence that it does can be seen (for people who have cleared it) on the 'containment' level. Use F5 to show framerates and then compare looking towards the tree in the middle with gazing into nowhere at the edge (looking away from the map). For me (1.25Ghz G4 powerbook, 1.25Gb ram and 64Mb Vram), that makes a difference between circa 12fps (tree) to ~35 fps (away). Something is happening there.
So yes, there are probably AI bugs - someone maybe turned a couple of algorithms which should have been of order O1 or On to be n-squared or n-cubed. Bad someone, no biscuit - but these things happen.
My guess is that most of the problems will stem from bad Apple implementations of either GL aspects or other stuff. Sadly Apple's coding standards seems to be slipping (if 10.4.0-1 is anything to go by - the number of outright ludicrous bugs that have crept in since panther is shocking). True, the underpinnings may be (getting) better, but basic credibility bugs like asking for my password after sleep, and then immediately asking for it again (or even going to sleep!) shake my confidence a lot. OpenGL itself has always run like a dog on MacOS. Perhaps this is because it is done 'better' i.e. there is a cleaner break with the low-level system than (say) on Windows - but then, why can GL programs lock up my display, Apple? Also, the system gcc 4.0 compiler is fairly broken, and seg-faults when compiling code that 3.3 (and even 3.4.4) handled fine.
Sometimes finding these problems and working around or fixing them just takes... as long as it takes. You cannot put a time on them - that's one of the sad things about software programming and why so many projects run over-time/budget.
So don't nail ambrosia too hard for this. Yes, they ought not to be selling Darwinia at all given how obvious it is that the game is un-playable. I would bet most of the engineers at ASW are horrified that it was allowed out of the door in the first place. However, once companies get to be a certain size, engineers no longer have any say in the matter. It's the marketing/sales departments that promise things (with or without engineering time estimates) and then contracts have to be fulfilled whether software is 'ready' or not. Everyone learns, and I would guess ambrosia will allow engineers to look more carefully at the codebase of future conversions before signing their life away to do a port... And marketing will learn to (1) ask engineering project managers how long things will take before committing and (2) double the answer. Equally project managers when answering marketing's questions should be (1) asking their engineering teams how long things will take and (2) doubling the answer.
Engineers are not liars. Patches will come - it's just that for any given bug, (especially in code you haven't written yourself) you never know whether fixing it is a five minute job, or five weeks. Even when you've fixed it, you don't know that the buggy behaviour wasn't being expected by other parts of the program (which will now need fixing) and/or even obscuring other bugs.
My thought for the day 
(and edited for some of the more obvious typos)
This post has been edited by Crono : 02 July 2005 - 01:36 AM
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwinia/...opic.php?t=2318
A beta version of the patch is out, and has been for a while. It does make great improvements, though it is still not perfect.
xander
I decided that it wasn't. It's an interesting concept and all, but the time I had taken to play the demo hadn't come close to blowing my nuts off.
The game certainly gets repetitive quick. However, enjoying strategy games, this one is a nice, simple break when I don't feel like doing any heavy thinking.
Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to play it and I like to take my time with individual levels. I tend to create my own challenges, such as beating a level without clearing all the enemies or attempting to save as many Darwinians as I possibly can, whether the level calls for a certain number or not. Or you can change things up by sneaking an engineer around to reprogram buildings in the middle of the map or on the opposite side from start and try to do the level starting from there. Or whatever other challenges you can come up with for yourself.
Personally, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the map editor. That's the main reason I registered the game.
If you haven't registered EV Nova yet, I'd reccomend that first. Otherwise, Darwinia is fun for those who have plenty of time to kill and like simple strategy games.
This post has been edited by Kidro : 13 July 2005 - 12:21 PM
Darwina is a good idea, it has an interesting plot, but I would rather spend my money on something else, like a good RPG or racing game or something that isn't a game.
I'd like to mention that the Darwinia 1.2 patch is now out. Also, on Darwinia's Website, there's a news item saying that in the next (1.3) patch, they will be adding a feature that will allow you to turn off the gesture system, and use buttons instead.
This post has been edited by Flish : 19 July 2005 - 02:53 PM