Sectorgame

karajorma wrote:Quite frankly I don't know why he bothered designing a game for the engine at all. It's a huge division of resources and time.

Far better to have just coded an extensible engine based on FS2 with all of the crappy coding (AI, collision detection etc) turned into much more easily managed code.

That's what Ferrium sounded like when it was first proposed and when I was interested in the idea but it seems to be evolving into Kazan's own BattleCruiser millenium and I'm certainly not interested in working on that.

I think Kazan is the type of person that can't stand to have anyone else do something he might be able to do himself....

True. And am I the only person who has found his vehement insistance that it must be user error or the users system to blame whenever someone reports a PCS bug eerily familiar?

I share BlackDove's sentiments. Let Ferrium die, so the coders can focus on the SCP.

SCP > Ferrium, and kazanworld

karajorma wrote:Quite frankly I don't know why he bothered designing a game for the engine at all. It's a huge division of resources and time.

Far better to have just coded an extensible engine based on FS2 with all of the crappy coding (AI, collision detection etc) turned into much more easily managed code.

That's what Ferrium sounded like when it was first proposed and when I was interested in the idea but it seems to be evolving into Kazan's own BattleCruiser millenium and I'm certainly not interested in working on that.

And therein lies the crux of the dilemma. When Ferrium started, I was supportive - skeptical, but supportive in theory. To an extent, I also supported the idea of a new universe for it - IIRC Kazan's original idea was to have a sort of universal Space Sim engine for both FS and Bab5 - ie. FS2 and TBP. But there are things that neither universe actually does that an ideal space sim should, and a new universe designed to capitalize on the capabilities of the new engine that wouldn't have been showcased by either of the two existing universes could have been a good thing. But then he went and posted his billion system map and I think everyone realized that that universe was not going to be the modest, engine specific thing it should have been, but Kazan's own personal ideal of what a space sim should be. And, of course, enthusiasm waned.

Really though, I don't think Ferrium is even all that neccesary any more. Freespace forever was made obsolete when the Source Code was released, and I think the concepts behind Ferrium became obsolete when the coders started making the vast changes to the codebase that used to be put in the "Too Hard" basket (Goobs docking code, Bob's new texture system, The new interface code etc.) I don;t think it's going to be that much longer before things like newtonian physics and tertiary weapons especially are implemented, after which the need for a new engine to showcase new things will be effectively moot. Personally, I say let it die. If Kazan wants to make a sellable, commercial game, then he should pay people. If he wants a better space sim, integrate stuff into the SCP. But that's just me, and I guess I'm not Kazan.

Freespace SCP is getting very very close to being what Ferrium hasn't even started to become. A platform for creating Space Combat Sims.

Quite frankly I don't know why he bothered designing a game for the engine at all. It's a huge division of resources and time.

Well he did once say that he is better coder than Bill Gates, and I think he still wants show that he can make better engine than Volition did

An engine, better or worse at the moment, would be a start

And as far as I am aware, Bill Gates was actually a pretty limited programmer by his own estimation, I think he stopped playing with code before Windows 3x came out.

Given that MS never programmed windows* in the first place, you have to wonder what he actually did write.

*it was licensed; IIRC from IBM.

Well, the whole WIMP fiasco was funny anyway, Apple sued Microsoft, then they both got double whammied by Hewlett Packard LOL

I think Bill and one other guy wrote MSDos, but then, I've heard rumours that it was nicked from another operating system written by a swedish guy, the Internet is, alas, abound with so many rumours, it's extremely hard to find out the truth.

MIcrosoft bought Quick and Dirty DOS (QDOS) from from Tim Patterson when they were talking to IBM about an operating system for $50,000. Of course they didn't reveal who their unnamed buyer was.

MS simply named the product MS-DOS and then licensed it to IBM.

Tim later quit his job and worked for MS.


As for apple considering that they stole the WIMP idea wholesale from Xerox I think they had some f#####g cheek to then sue MS for copying them.