Flame War = Bad.

Talking about Computers = Fun

Let's have fun! :-)h

And just to muddy the waters:

I have used a Pocket PC as a mini laptop. I wish it had a bigger screen, though a friend of mine has the one with the big VGA screen that could pretty much do it.

I also have a Samsung Q1 which I love, love, love. It has a great screen, a great detachable keyboard, and when you install Vista on it and spend a Saturday getting the HID drivers on it, a great Tablet inking experience on it. I'm less impressed by the later Q1s, because they introduced slower processors. Also, you really have to turn off indexing in Vista to get reasonable performance out of it, but man, do I love it.

Or did. :-( I used to have a Toshiba tablet that had a discrete video card that could run the game. Since then, I have switched to my aforementioned X61. The keyboard is simply superb, the screen is great, the tablet experience wonderful. Honestly, i have never loved a PC as much as this. Except! Except....

/wipes tears from eyes

It's so small, it's blurred the lines so that I really don't use my Q1 anymore. The Toshiba was large enough that I enjoyed taking the Q1 on trips where I didn't need as much overhead, but man, the X61 is really the only PC I need. It does everything, its power consumption is great, and it's a tablet. It just breaks my heart I can't find more uses for the Q1, cause it rocks!!!!!!!!!

I still do use it around the house. Especially for reading the New York Times on one of the coolest apps you'll ever play with, built on Windows Foundation Something or Rather.

The thing about using the PocketPC (and yes, i have both an iPhone hacked for TMobile, and a PocketPC phone) is that I'm always using a different computing experience than i'm used to in my day to day work. Sure, I'm very, very familiar with Pocket PC (I had an original Phillips Velo), but IE on it is terrible, and I like my normal environment that I use on Vista. It's just a preference thing, because I admire travelling light, and there's nothing lighter than the phone.

Again, not a graphics engineer. But I know DX 10 changed a lot of fundamental things, one of which is how it reports memory being used. You know the bug where we sometimes go out to white? It's because we were checking how much memory was available on the memory card using the protocol under DX9, and under DX 10, the number would never change. So we'd keep writing more memory into it, until we'd filled up the card. Oops! I'm not sure how that's a "feature", so I've got reservations about DX10.

There are some amazingly cool things about it. For example, we had to write our own object instancing code. One of the things we found about our ships is that we originally assumed that polys or texture memory would be the big performance limiters. But it turned out that our ships were made out of many individual pieces, all of which required a single draw call. These draw calls turn out to be expensive on their own right, and we were making hundreds (50-80 is a good number). Besides re-archicteting the ships, we also wrote some instancing code so that we could write a number of identical objects with a single draw call (say, cannons). That helped tremendously, but our implementation is almost certainly not as efficient as what DX 10 has built in, because the video cards are designed with that particular implementation in mind.

So, if I had to call Friend or Foe on DX10, I'd say Foe right now. In a year or so, it'll probably be Friend.

Mac version - I'd love to do a Mac version. I think the temper of our game is ideal for a large percentage of the Mac audience. But converting over the Alchemy engine would be a huge, huge task, and that alone would probably make it prohibitively expensive. The other aspect of it is boot camp. It makes it feasible to own a Mac and play great games, but it also removes the incentive of game makers to make native Mac versions because we can always assume that the hardcore gamer crowd on that platform will be dual booting. Sorry to be a dark cloud, but that's the general view amongst developers. You have to be a company (let's call it Blizzard) that has effectively unrestrained resources and a love of the platform to get native Mac versions.

And an amusing anecdote: at DICE, Gore V. was talking about how disappointed he was with PotCO. He wanted to be more involved with it, which I think would have been a good thing. And he was also mad because he was yelling for a pirate MMO 5 years ago.

Tragically, another bout with kidney stones left me mostly in a fetal position during the conference, because I wanted to go up and introduce myself and say "Hey, guess what I was working on 5 years ago!" :-)

You got it in just as I hit Reply. Excellent timing! :-)

I'm not a graphics engineer, so I can't give you a blow by blow account of DX vs. OpenGL. I'm only aware of how things have progressed at a 10,000 foot level. Clearly, you can make a great looking game in OpenGL. You can make a great looking game without DX or OpenGL. It just takes more work.

Also, for my background, I prefer the Thinkpad X61 because it a) has an incredible battery life as well, and b) I love the Tablet PC experience. But I have bought a lot of Macs (4 MacMinis, 1 iMac, 2 Macbooks) so I have some fair share of experience with them. The funny thing is that I'm really not a fan of the OS (and there I can go into a blow by blow description of all the stupid things they do), but I am a slave to Final Cut Pro, which is so good that it feels like it comes from the future.

Actually, I blame Apple. Their default video cards are so close to being good, but are on the suck side of sucky. The rest of the hardware is so good, it seems a little sad they don't push it just a bit farther.

OpenGL seems to inspire religious passion, but not amongst people actually making games. I know the API has gotten better over time, but while it may have been a leader back in the days of DX 3, it's simply not in the same league anymore. Game companies want to reduce the cost of making the game, along with the support cost of getting them to run on player's PCs. Provide a great alternative to DX, and you'll see company after company switch over.

I just noticed, you'll want to look into the mast caps a bit more. Since it sounds like you've downloaded and opened up the Packet Boat, I'll ask you to refer to the structures there. The topmasts and even topgallants would all have trestletrees (fore-and-aft timbers to either side of the mast), cross-trees (cross-timbers that connect the trestletrees and spread the shrouds), as well as the "humped" style of mast cap.

Looks like the tiller might be a hair on the long side too, but it's hard to tell since the perspective in that screenshot could be misleading. Why don't you post a top-down view of the afterdeck. There should be enough room for a binnacle and a crewmember to stand in front of the tiller when it's centred.

I can't remember many better times I've had than diving through Treasure Island. :-)

I would argue that being able to run WoW on your equipment is not the definition of a killer game platform. It's designed for very low end systems.

The DirectX "Koolaid" makes it dramatically easier for us to develop games to the platform. There's nothing wrong with the Mac OS that prohibits great games being made for it, but neither is there anything about it that makes it particularly good for games being made for it. It's pretty obvious that having robust, game-centric APIs will reduce the overhead of bringing great games to the platform.

Personally, I just wish Apple put better video cards in their machines. Otherwise, with boot camp, they'd all make great game machines.

Someone was working on a WW1 naval combat sim, but I can't remember what it was called. If I remember I'll post a note in Off-Topic and link it here.