gpl sales figures

Tracy, I think if they would have released a MODERN day F1 sim it would have sold MUCH MUCH better. I know I didn't buy GPL right away, and sometimes wish I didn't. I don't have the desire to drive those ugly cars, and I don't like the slidding around. I was hoping for a CART or F1 sim with the same engine as GPL, but that might not happen now. I think this new 1937 sim is going to be an even bigger flop by the company that makes that (can't remember off hand). Who wants to drive cars they can't see on TV. I know when ICR2 came out, I would love to race the track right after I watched the race and think, wow you really do take this turn in 2nd and this one in 4th. It just has that much more appeal if you can see what you sim race on TV, at least for me. -- Sean Higgins "HigPup" "Hollywood" for R6 "Hollywood__NWO" for ZONE http://home.sprintmail.com/~higgy/hsts2/ HSTS, Powered by ATI Rage 128 http://home.sprintmail.com/~higgy/ http://www.colormation.com Colormation (sponsor of H.O. Motorsports) http://www.atitech.ca ATI Technologies that be concluded that GPL failed because it was too difficult.

: remember off hand). Who wants to drive cars they can't see on TV. I know : when ICR2 came out, I would love to race the track right after I watched the : race and think, wow you really do take this turn in 2nd and this one in 4th. : It just has that much more appeal if you can see what you sim race on TV, at : least for me. Bingo. The immersion factor of the original F1GP hooked me because I could drive the track before watching it on TV during a GP weekend. The in-car shots were "exactly" what I saw in the game (okay, our expectations were all a little bit lower in 1992). After each race, I would then go back and race the whole thing again (yeah, life was good back in the pre-PhD days when I could play racing simulations into the wee hours of the night instead of coding biological simulations well past the witching hour). GPL works for me because I can still identify with the drivers. I was born in 1968, so I'm one step removed from the handful of people in this group who watched them race, but you can bet all my Corgi cars had J. Stewart and N. Lauda on the side. I have a hard time seeing the average gamer (ie. not a R.A.S. reader) getting very e***d about the concept, but I can see them dropping dollars for Driver. My girlfriend has a 20 year old brother. The GPL demo went over like a lead balloon. Monaco Grand Prix, on the other hand, keeps his HD spinning on race weekends. And he keeps asking when Driver is coming for the PC. Papyrus mis-read the market. Stephen

Ugly!?!? This is obviously a matter of taste, but I think the '67-'70 cars were the most beautiful F1 cars ever. Sure. it's nice to be able to do that, but for me, I can drive the cars I grew up with and race against (none too successfully!) against boyhood heros. I'd love to see a modern F1 sim with the GPL physics engine too, but I think the choice of the 67 season was truly inspired.

steven fellini wrote Inspired by what, that is the question. Racing against Jim Clark must have been some kind of childhood fantasy of one of the higher ups at Papy. Now the same brilliant minds are releasing a NASCAR legends sim. That might be a tempting add on for an existing sim, but as a stand alone product no way.

It wasn't at all inspired from the point of view of selling units which is what a software company is in business to do. If GPL had been written to be a simulator of more modern machines such as F1 or CART cars then it would undoubtedly have sold many more copies and introduced many more people to 'real' racing. They could have released the 'legends' angle as an add-on pack for those interested in the era and those looking for a new challenge. A lot of people looked at the game and thought 'who wants to race 30 year old cars?'. Its one thing having a great physics engine but if nobody buys the game, then whats the point? Gavan -- There can be only one............. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Share what you know. Learn what you don't.

: A lot of people looked at the game and thought 'who wants to race 30 : year old cars?'. Its one thing having a great physics engine but if : nobody buys the game, then whats the point? I really doubt that was anything to do with it. GPL "requires": 1) One of a limited range of graphics cards 2) Reasonably high end machine 3) Steering wheel or dual joystick set up. 4) Incredible amounts of patience The first three (especially number 3) have already limited the potential sales of the product so much that I don't think the 30 year old cars are going to be that much of a difference. Compare with flight sims. WWII sims and WWI sims can sell just as well as the modern stuff. The real problems that GPL had was that not many people had the system to run it (particularly not that many people have a steering wheel) and if they did have the system to run it, it had no "novice" mode where it was easy to do well and therefore people were put off. I have various friends who love racing games (one friend in particular who has run a full length championship in GP2 running full length races) who won't consider GPL because it requires a steering wheel or at the very least dual joysticks. It's incomprehensible to me that GPL didn't have options to allow a novice mode where it is MUCH easier to drive and at least the option to have clear instrumentation and a speedometer. There seems to have been an attitude in the creation of GPL that it is _meant_ to be user hostile. Fair enough - that makes for a challenging and exciting game for those of us who can be bothered - but, unsurprisingly, most people can't. -- Richard G. Clegg Only the mind is waving Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York. www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

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>> I'd love to see a modern F1 sim with the GPL physics engine too, >> but I think the choice of the 67 season was truly inspired. > It wasn't at all inspired from the point of view of selling units >which is what a software company is in business to do. If GPL had been >written to be a simulator of more modern machines such as F1 or CART >cars then it would undoubtedly have sold many more copies and introduced >many more people to 'real' racing.

1967 was the last year of F1 (or pretty well any other top tier series) racing without widespread use of aerodynamic devices to provide downforce. Now, I don't _know_ how easy it is to model and efficiently code the effects of wings, ground effects, etc accurately (in particular the effects when cars are running close together), but I'd guess that it would increase the complexity of the model considerably. Maybe, assuming that the aim was to produce an accurate simulation of motorsports at the highest level, the choice of 1967 was as much a pragmatic decision as a romantic one? I bought it. I liked it. That's point enough for me :-) -- JG

: 1967 was the last year of F1 (or pretty well any other top tier series) : racing without widespread use of aerodynamic devices to provide downforce. : Now, I don't _know_ how easy it is to model and efficiently code the effects : of wings, ground effects, etc accurately (in particular the effects when : cars are running close together), but I'd guess that it would increase the : complexity of the model considerably. The best answer to this is "Ummm errrr". The GPL cars while they do not have aero grip would be significantly affected by aero performance. The drag on the cars will depend heavily on the frontal area, whether they are turning, the rotation of the wheels and whether they are running behind other cars. GPL must (and indeed does) model this to some extent - if you don't believe it then drive down the straight behind another car - your speed with pick up if you're directly behind. Now I'm willing to believe that there's some major frigs in the physics to model this. In fact, for all I know they've included a straight coefficient of drag and reduced if if you're behind someone. Aero modelling is no _less_ necessary for a GPL car since the cars of the era would have been significantly affected by the aero. Effects like the slope of the nose for example would have significantly come into play. I don't know what (if anything) Papy did about all this. Certainly the effects would have to be canned - I can't imagine they're doing real time CFD modelling of the aero effects of the different body shapes. My guess would be that they made simple assumptions about the drag and downforce (or even lift) effects of various body shapes at various speeds and then reduced the drag/downforce as you get behind someone. Canned sure but the only really practical way to do it. -- Richard G. Clegg Only the mind is waving Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York. www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

I think the battle between sims and arcade racers is still pretty similar to what it was back in the days of Revs - I remember that Revs was a hell of a lot harder to play than the arcade racers of the day, but in the end it won out because of its realism and depth - it just held the interest far longer than the competition. I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets in saying that the sales were actually pretty similar to those of GPL, but since it was written by one guy on his own (Geoff Crammond) it was considered very much a commercial success at the time. In those days there wasn't a worldwide market, because no one platform had emerged to become the standard - there were less than a million BBC Micros in existence, and they were all in the UK (oh, and some of our colonies ;-) ). These days the stakes are much higher, which is reflected in the huge amounts of development work that goes into the games, but fundamentally the tradeoff between sim and arcade hasn't changed - there is definitely still a big market for detailed and accurate simulations (but it's harder to satisfy the customers!). I agree that the sim needs to have good gameplay though, and that includes appealing to the newbie - in theory that should be much easier than appealing to the hardened simracer, but the criteria are quite different. Personally I would have loved to have a "training" mode where an AI car trundles along just ahead of you and lets you have a go at overtaking him. If you get too far behind it will wait for you to catch up and have another go. For hotlapping a ghost car would be excellent too - it works really well in MGPRS2. Those are the kind of "gameplay" options that appeal to newbies, IMHO.

: I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets in saying that the sales : were actually pretty similar to those of GPL, but since it was written : by one guy on his own (Geoff Crammond) it was considered very much a : commercial success at the time. Hold on - the sales were similar? Revs (IIRC) ran on a BBC Micro - a pretty obscure machine really. Few people outside the UK have heard of it. If it sold as many as GPL it must have reached the majority of its possible market. (Or have I misunderstood you)? -- Richard G. Clegg Only the mind is waving Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York. www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

I don't know who said this initially (might have been Doug Arnao or Mike Lescault one year ago), but one of the reasons for doing a historic sim was this: in order not to overtax the existing hardware (even more), the sampling rate of GPL's physics engine was limited to (IIRC) 188 Hz, i.e. all car parameters are calculated 188 times per second. That sounds like a lot (and it is), but it is not sufficient to calculate and simulate the behavior of modern stiff suspensions. A stiff spring will "resonate" (I don't know if this is the right word) at a higher frequency, whereas a comparatively soft spring - such as modelled in GPL - will resonate at a lower frequency. You can imagine it like this: if you take a modern racecar spring and hit it with a wrench, the sound will be "biiinnnngg". If you do the same with an old, soft spring, it will go "boooooiiiiiinnnnngggg" - lower frequency. The problem now is this: if you sample a GPL-era suspension at 188 Hz, you can accurately describe what the spring does between the samples - not much. A modern, stiff suspension, OTOH, might have contracted and expanded in less than 1/188 seconds, and you wouldn't even have noticed it. This is one of the reasons why 1967 GP racing was chosen for the first appearance of the new physics engine. -- Wolfgang Preiss \ E-mail copies of replies to this posting are welcome.

> The best answer to this is "Ummm errrr". Good answer :-) Ooooh yes! It only takes a single race at Monza to realise that slipstreaming effects have been modelled. The only people who know the answer to this one are the chaps at Papyrus, but I would be very surprised if the aerodynamics were modelled in real detail. It would be interesting to do some experiments to see whether the BRM or Honda give a "better" tow than than the Brabham or Lotus. My gut feeling is that they're unlikely to have done anything more sophisticated than putting a frig factor in for the relative aerodynamic efficiency of the different cars. True, but the effects are going to be a lot less significant (and there's a lot les scope for variation with car setup) than those for a winged car, and I suspect it's going to be easier to produce something plausible, Now you've done it. I think I may have to go home and do a few hundred laps of Monza with setups using radically different front/rear ride heights and see what (if anything) the effect of pitch on high/low speed behaviour is (first experiment: Can I get a car to take off by setting rear ride height to *** all and front ride height to max!). If I don't get any sleep tonight it's _all_ your fault! -- JG

:> The best answer to this is "Ummm errrr". : Good answer :-) Well... I don't like to be too specific. : > (On aero effects) : True, but the effects are going to be a lot less significant (and there's a : lot les scope for variation with car setup) than those for a winged car, and : I suspect it's going to be easier to produce something plausible, Hmm... I guess you're right - but look at the raised nose vs lowered nose in modern F1 and the change in the cars between 94 (pretty much all lowered nose) and 97 (almost all raised nose). The aero effects from a huge blunt nose with grille from a 67 car are going to be pretty significant - I just wouldn't like to say what they are. Maybe some of the cars are "accidentally" generating downforce and maybe some are "accidentally" generating lift. Whichever they're doing, at 200mph don't assume it's going to be insignificant. The bodywork variance between modern F1 cars is comparatively small but enough to generate big difference in drag and lift. Don't know what (if any) of this Papy is modelling. : Now you've done it. I think I may have to go home and do a few hundred laps : of Monza with setups using radically different front/rear ride heights and : see what (if anything) the effect of pitch on high/low speed behaviour is : (first experiment: Can I get a car to take off by setting rear ride height : to *** all and front ride height to max!). If I don't get any sleep : tonight it's _all_ your fault! Hehehe. If you manage to get the BRM to do a wheelie as the wind gets under the nose then do let me know. [Now if you can do that then I really really _am_ impressed with their physics model] :-) Actually, I seem to remember four wheel drift strongly recommending that front ride height is always lower than rear? -- Richard G. Clegg Only the mind is waving Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York. www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

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> : I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets in saying that the sales > : were actually pretty similar to those of GPL, but since it was written > : by one guy on his own (Geoff Crammond) it was considered very much a > : commercial success at the time. > Hold on - the sales were similar? Revs (IIRC) ran on a BBC Micro - a > pretty obscure machine really. Few people outside the UK have heard of > it. If it sold as many as GPL it must have reached the majority of its > possible market. (Or have I misunderstood you)?

Well I did say it was a commercial success! In those days 30,000 or so was very good, although Elite did shatter those figures by a huge margin (over 100,000 on the Beeb I believe). At the time there was a lot of piracy about (no change there then!) and the advantage of Elite was that it came with nice extras like a book and poster (as did Revs, in fact) and you wouldn't get that if you pirated the game. Oh, and it had much better software protection as well, AFAIR. (That and the fact that it was a ground-breaking 3D game for the time, and had a lot more hype than we normally reserved for games - it was even advertised in cinemas and on TV! Not sure most people in the cinema understood what it was though!). I sold about 30,000 copies of Planetoid, by comparison, but it's a fair bet that many times that number were in circulation (the first release had no software protection at all). I remember when I gave a free copy to a local computer shop so they'd have something to demo on their BBC Micro, when I came back the next day they weren't running it, and when I asked the guy said someone had taken it home "to make some copies for his friends"! Unbelievable - it just shows how naive we were back then!

Well, I used to play Revs on my Commodore 64. I even remember waiting for it impatiently after a respected Finnish computer mag had given it a rave review. --- Antti Markus Peteri 15 miles. your dim light shines from so far away - Soul Asylum, Promises Broken

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> > Hold on - the sales were similar? Revs (IIRC) ran on a BBC Micro - a > > pretty obscure machine really. Few people outside the UK have heard of > > it. > Well, I used to play Revs on my Commodore 64. I even remember waiting for > it impatiently after a respected Finnish computer mag had given it a rave > review.

I hadn't included the figures for other computer systems. I think in the end he sold a lot more copies on the C64 etc. than on the Beeb. Come to think of it, so did Elite - funny that! The strange thing is that the Beeb wasn't considered to be much of a games machine, because it was bought by parents to "educate" their kids - but in some ways it was more powerful than the C64 (about twice the processor speed). The real killer was the lack of memory and hardware support for bit-blitting - but neither of those mattered for Revs or Elite.

But another time.. Was that really the market ? 40,000 copy sold to us of the most accurate racing simulation on the PC ever done, Im pretty happy about that. The target was us, and also the baby boomers who in their young age had curiosity for Formula 1, who remembered Jim Clark as the best driver there will ever be, and who got hooked to racing back in those days (40-55year old people). Who really thinks that a simple gamer would buy GPL ? I mean this is not Star Wars : Rogue Squadron. I think they aimed us pretty well. We are all hooked on GPL, it's almost perfection for many of us :) -- -- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> -- May the Downforce be with you... "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

Planetoid - wasn't that the superb, er 'homage', to Defender? That was definitely a great game. The only comparable 'Defender' at the time was the official licensed version on the Atari 8-bits. The beeb version was a little more true to the arcade since it had the controls on keys rather than joystick like the Atari. Acornsoft had some superb arcade clones for the BBC. I can remember that their versions of Defender, Pac Man, Galaga and Asteroids were near arcade perfect. I think their 'Pac Man' gfx had to be changed actually because the game was just too close! They had some stonking originals too of course, Elite and 'Revs' spring to mind. If anything, Piracy was much WORSE then. Since most games came on cassette tape, anyone could copy them if they had a double cassette deck (which most people had). Secondly, the games tended to be quite simple ... so no incentive to buy the game to get the big manuals and keyboard layout sheets. Not that the packaging was very elaborate anyway back then. Gavan -- There can be only one............. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Share what you know. Learn what you don't.

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> > I sold about 30,000 copies of Planetoid, by comparison, but it's a > fair > > bet that many times that number were in circulation (the first release > > had no software protection at all). > Planetoid - wasn't that the superb, er 'homage', to Defender? That > was definitely a great game. The only comparable 'Defender' at the time > was the official licensed version on the Atari 8-bits. The beeb version > was a little more true to the arcade since it had the controls on keys > rather than joystick like the Atari. > Acornsoft had some superb arcade clones for the BBC. I can remember > that their versions of Defender, Pac Man, Galaga and Asteroids were > near arcade perfect. I think their 'Pac Man' gfx had to be changed > actually because the game was just too close!

Yup, Meteors was one of mine too! I must have spent more time playing Defender and Asteroids in the arcades than I have playing GPL (and that's saying something!) - to the point where I could regularly score over 1,000,000 points in Asteroids (that takes about 3 hours on one game!). I was in a pub doing this once when the landlord eventually turned the machine off while I was still playing. Another time a pub had an Asteroids competition with a bottle of vodka as the prize - after I came in and scored 400,000 in the first game (not good!) he just gave me the bottle there and then! I think writing games was a more profitable line of business though! I remember a journalist coming up to me at the launch of Planetoid asking whether I felt guilty about ripping off Atari - the thought hadn't even occurred to me - as far as I was concerned I had written the game myself, from scratch, without copying anyone's code, so that was that. If it had been left to Atari to come up with a computer version of Defender I don't think the "*** public" would have had anything like the quality of game they ended up with: as it was the skill was to come up with a very fast and smooth implementation of the game, rather than handing over bucketloads of money to the company that owned the copyright. I guess things have changed now that the games market has become more mature: there are plenty of companies able to put in huge amounts of effort into writing the games, and machines that are much more capable of running them. Just as with other software though: the faster the machines become the more ambitious the programmers get, so the games never seem to get any faster! A lot of them take longer to load from a CD than they used to from a 5" floppy disc! Eeh, them were the days etc.

> > Acornsoft had some superb arcade clones for the BBC. I can remember > > that their versions of Defender, Pac Man, Galaga and Asteroids were > > near arcade perfect. I think their 'Pac Man' gfx had to be changed > > actually because the game was just too close! > Yup, Meteors was one of mine too! Excellent, the BBC versions of Asteroids and Defender were pretty much the closest home versions I ever saw on the old 8 bit computers. They were virtually arcade perfect. That was good coding, are you still writing games these days? To be fair, the Atari version was very good. I can't say the same about their licensed version of 'Asteroids' though - it was awful, barely better than the VCS version. Not to mention the fact that with MAME you can actually run the original arcade ROMs, amazing. Now I can actually have all the arcade games that I used to play as a kid, running perfectly on my PC. One of the things I always remember when waiting for games to load from my PCs superfast HD is how quickly 'meteors' (a lunchtime favourite) loaded from the old 5.25" disk drive on the BBC Model B we had in our 'computer room' when I was at school. My mate was a programming whiz and figured out how to transfer just about every tape game he had (except Elite) onto floppy. I can remember just hitting return after typing the command line, and when I looked up the game would be there on the screen! Now I wait for minutes as a hard drive capable of 5 megs per second transfer grinds away loading the level of a game, or my 32x CDROM whirrs madly. So much for progress. I imagine that with one person writing the entire game it must have been a lot easier to make some money, as opposed to the huge teams it now takes to make a title. Did I hear that GPL only sold 30-40k units? I can't see how they would break even if that was the case. Gavan -- There can be only one............. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Share what you know. Learn what you don't.

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> [SNIPPED] > One of the things I always remember when waiting for games to load > from my PCs superfast HD is how quickly 'meteors' (a lunchtime > favourite) loaded from the old 5.25" disk drive on the BBC Model B we > had in our 'computer room' when I was at school. My mate was a > programming whiz and figured out how to transfer just about every tape > game he had (except Elite) onto floppy. I can remember just hitting > return after typing the command line, and when I looked up the game > would be there on the screen! Now I wait for minutes as a hard drive > capable of 5 megs per second transfer grinds away loading the level of a > game, or my 32x CDROM whirrs madly. So much for progress.

Omigod - don't tell me you were running a PIRATED copy! So where's my royalty cheque then? ;-)

But think about Internet's contribution to piracy. Pirated software is distributed faster than ever, games are cracked even before they're officially released and after that there's nothing to stop the copying. Afai can tell, the beast is more efficient than ever. --- Antti Markus Peteri 15 miles. your dim light shines from so far away - Soul Asylum, Promises Broken

: But think about Internet's contribution to piracy. Pirated software is : distributed faster than ever, games are cracked even before they're : officially released and after that there's nothing to stop the copying. : Afai can tell, the beast is more efficient than ever. Naw... Most people I knew in the 80s who were computer buffs had about 10-20 pirated games for every non-pirated one. You could fit about 20 ripped off spectrum games onto a 90 minute cassette tape. It was still cheap even if you never played most of them. If you wanted to get those 20 games you took a tape recorder round to a mates house and 90 minutes later you had 20 new games. You would then give all 20 to your other friends. It simply isn't that easy cheap or quick these days. If you know someone with a writeable CD then OK it's as quick - but not everyone has those and the writeable media costs more. The best evidence that games aren't pirated as much is that we never see the much feared "lenslok" device any more :-) (anyone else remember squinting through a cheap plastic lens trying to decipher a random squiggle on the screen). Not that this has much to do with racing games.... except that one of the games I pirated was "Chequered flag" a terrible racing game for the Spectrum - anyone remember it? I seem to remember it had some real courses including silverstone and brands. I developed my own theories of racing line in those days - being about 12 and not having read any books on the principles of performance driving. Noticing that when you drive round a right hand corner your car gradually drifts left I was convinced that, therefore, you'd be faster round the corner if you started a right hand corner on the right - because it would take you longer to be forced over to the left hand side of the screen. Needless to say I wasn't a very good sim driver in those days either. -- Richard G. Clegg Only the mind is waving Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York. www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

I still remember well walking along the corridors of the Maths/Physics block at Nottingham University circa 1985 and seeing *every* single Beeb in sight with Revs on it. Yes, they were all probably pirated though.... btw - thanks for Planetoid. One of my favourite games for a long time! I did buy my copy so don't expect another cheque ;-)) Cheers, Richard

I still call this inefficient. It's hardly the sheer number of games that counts. Today it takes a whole freakin hollywoodian production team instead of possibly just a couple of guys to produce a seriously marketable game. If a typical 80s ratio was something like 20:1, then today it could be around 5:1. But it really is the ratio of the pirated games and the ones you would have bought if not getting a pirate copy, that counts, and, I believe that it too, was much bigger in the 80's. Those massive productions of today often being a bit on the pricey side, one might just be tempted to get a pirate copy of the CD instead of buying it, since a scanned copy of the manual is usually available too. And by making this decision, you're probably doin as much damage as by copying a cassette full of games in the 80s, 90% of which you wouldn't have bought anyway. The cost of a CD-R drive is comparable to 80's 5,25" disk drive, same with the media. I don't know bout UK but here in Finland practically everyone who's wired owns a CD-R (they're just so inexpensive there's no excuse for not getting one) and pretty much everyone else knows at least one who's got a burner. They even had to stop the rental of console games because of the copying. AND... oh the glory of 90s! We've got the Internet. You can do it all from the comfort of your own house, with just a few movements of your fingers and wrist. We don't see it because it was a bad idea from the 80s. Today's lenslocks are the enormous and complex games themselves. I doubt if Baldur's Gate (5 CD RPG), for example, was pirated much. There's lenslock fer ya. But whatta hell, it's prolly pointless for me to ponder the effects of piracy in the 80s/90s, since the fact still remains the effects have always been negative... --- Antti Markus Peteri 15 miles. your dim light shines from so far away - Soul Asylum, Promises Broken

errr, to be fair I think he had the orignal for his Electron. And since we were using the beeb in school he couldn't be running both copies at the same time or something..... which made it sort of legal. BTW, how did you change the games so they ran at mostly the same speed on the electron even though the CPU was only clocked at half the speed of the BBC? Gavan -- There can be only one............. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Share what you know. Learn what you don't.

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> > Omigod - don't tell me you were running a PIRATED copy! > > So where's my royalty cheque then? ;-) > errr, to be fair I think he had the orignal for his Electron. And > since we were using the beeb in school he couldn't be running both > copies at the same time or something..... which made it sort of legal.

Don't worry, I was only kidding! You may not have noticed, but they all ran in mode 5 rather than mode 2 - ie. same resolution but with only 4 colours available rather than 16, so the graphics were effectively smaller in memory terms and plottable in half the time. Sadly it wasn't till Elite was ported to the Electron that someone noticed that some bozo had written the main operating system interrupt handler in a really stupid way so that the most common interrupts were processed last! This is how Elite managed to run at a decent speed on the Electron - once they'd replaced the interrupt handler with one of their own the machine was really not so slow after all! In the case of Electron Planetoid I rewrote the game so it didn't use sideways hardware scrolling (not supported on the Electron anyway) and scrolled the landscape sideways instead, using a cunning technique to undraw the old one and redraw the new one at the same time, to reduce flicker. Sadly we'd been telling everyone for months that it wasn't going to be possible to do Electron Planetoid, and the sales staff didn't realise we were actually selling it until someone said "So what's this big pile of boxes over here then?". I lost a lot of money over that! (Sorry, this is getting seriously off-topic now, but I just had to get it off my chest!). ;-)

> > If anything, Piracy was much WORSE then. Since most games came on > > cassette tape, anyone could copy them if they had a double cassette > > deck (which most people had). Secondly, the games tended to be quite > > simple ... so no incentive to buy the game to get the big manuals and > > keyboard layout sheets. Not that the packaging was very elaborate > > anyway back then. > But think about Internet's contribution to piracy. Pirated software is > distributed faster than ever, games are cracked even before they're > officially released and after that there's nothing to stop the copying. > Afai can tell, the beast is more efficient than ever. Well, theres nothing new in using telecoms to send pirated games. Back when I had an Atari 8bit the big thing was to compress disks into files and send them via modem (typically 2400bps!). There were guys with contacts in the states who would modem across the massive (!) 90K files of complete disks and then swap disks with 6-10 games on them. Furthermore, games were so compact that you got many on a single tape or disk. And of course, anyone could copy tapes, no technical knowlege or special equipment required. And pre-release pirate copies were also available back then. You could get 'Behind Jaggi Lines' and 'Ballblazer' at least 1 year before they were ever officially released. Nowadays the main barrier to piracy is the sheer size and complexity of the games. I wouldn't want a copy of something like GPL simply because without the manual there would be no point. And even with CD burners, its still quite difficult to distribute the huge games unless you hack out lots of things like cut scenes and the like. Lastly, the market for PC games is mostly among young professionals who actually have the money and the responsibility to buy games. I bought about 95% of all the games I have and I still haven't got around to fully playing all my stuff. If I was to get into piracy I'd never get around to playing any of the games. If I see something I like I just buy it. Its not expensive and I don't have to waste time trawling around for a copy which most likely will have been cut down, with the instructions on a file on the CD. Plus theres less risk of virus infections. Gavan -- There can be only one............. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Share what you know. Learn what you don't.

>(Sorry, this is getting seriously off-topic now, but I just had to get >it off my chest!). ;-) I find those tales from ancient times highly interesting. When men were men and electrons had to be herded up and driven on on horseback. :) Say something about 'Revs' every once in a while to reset the off-topic counter and simply go on. I at least am enjoying this. -- Wolfgang Preiss \ E-mail copies of replies to this posting are welcome.

<snip> <snip> Erm, tell your friend that GPL is quite playable with just one joystick. With my single joystick I've bettered 9 out of the 11 original track records and can still see room for improvement. I have also used a steering wheel and pedals in the past and don't see this as an absolute necessity. I have just started a 'Grand Prix' season, going back to my trusty Logic 3 PC Phantom after my previous joystick expired and still managed to set a new PB in practice of 1:20.8x. ;-) -- Peter Ives

:>(Sorry, this is getting seriously off-topic now, but I just had to get :>it off my chest!). ;-) : I find those tales from ancient times highly interesting. When men : were men and electrons had to be herded up and driven on on horseback. : :) Say something about 'Revs' every once in a while to reset the : off-topic counter and simply go on. I at least am enjoying this. Speaking of Revs, thanks to whoever it was who posted the keys for it. Pressing "T" to start the motor was the problem. Having grown up in Canada and never having seen the game, I was quite impressed with its quality for something running on an 8-bit computer. Of course, I didn't get past the first three corners without a spin as I am spoiled by current sims, but it has some nice touches I would like to see back in current sims, like having to put it into neutral (or put a clutch in for current sims) if you spin off, or else you kill the motor. Stephen

: <snip> :>I have various :>friends who love racing games (one friend in particular who has run a :>full length championship in GP2 running full length races) who won't :>consider GPL because it requires a steering wheel or at the very least :>dual joysticks. :> : <snip> : Erm, tell your friend that GPL is quite playable with just one joystick. : With my single joystick I've bettered 9 out of the 11 original track : records and can still see room for improvement. I have also used a : steering wheel and pedals in the past and don't see this as an absolute : necessity. How can you blip the throttle properly when changing gear without swerving off the straight? Sounds like you have an uncanny degree of motor control. :-) What do you mean by "original track records" - what sort of time are you getting at Monza and the Glen? My impression is certainly that for normal mortals it's unplayable with a single joystick. -- Richard G. Clegg Only the mind is waving Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York. www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

don't knock it till you try it richard. I played GPL with a stick for the best part of a year before succumbing to a MSFF wheel. The whole gearchange action becomes intuitive after a while. I never gave it a thought. I'm now on average 2-3 seconds slower with a wheel. Of course, split axis are impossible with a joystick but I always considered the fact that this was countered somewhat by the advantage of almost instantaneous lock to lock on the steering if required. With a wheel, I sometimes feel that I am catching up with the car's position on the road rather than placing it where I want it to be. Mark

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> : <snip> > :>I have various > :>friends who love racing games (one friend in particular who has run a > :>full length championship in GP2 running full length races) who won't > :>consider GPL because it requires a steering wheel or at the very least > :>dual joysticks. > :> > : <snip> > : Erm, tell your friend that GPL is quite playable with just one joystick. > : With my single joystick I've bettered 9 out of the 11 original track > : records and can still see room for improvement. I have also used a > : steering wheel and pedals in the past and don't see this as an absolute > : necessity. > How can you blip the throttle properly when changing gear without > swerving off the straight? Sounds like you have an uncanny degree of > motor control. :-) What do you mean by "original track records" - what > sort of time are you getting at Monza and the Glen? > My impression is certainly that for normal mortals it's unplayable > with a single joystick. > -- > Richard G. Clegg Only the mind is waving > Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York. > www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

I bet they could sell another 40,000 by doing a linux port and a decent server version. I am not kidding. CivCTP has been a huge seller on the Linux platform, and fact is we will buy *anything* decent that gets ported to our platform of choice. I'd even buy GPL again if they did a Linux port. Cheers, Uwe -- Uwe Schuerkamp http://www.schuerkamp.de/ uwe.schuerkamp at telemedia.de for direct mail (from: is spambox) PGP Fingerprint: 2E 13 20 22 9A 3F 63 7F 67 6F E9 B1 A8 36 A4 61

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>: <snip> >:>I have various >:>friends who love racing games (one friend in particular who has run a >:>full length championship in GP2 running full length races) who won't >:>consider GPL because it requires a steering wheel or at the very least >:>dual joysticks. >:> >: <snip> >: Erm, tell your friend that GPL is quite playable with just one joystick. >: With my single joystick I've bettered 9 out of the 11 original track >: records and can still see room for improvement. I have also used a >: steering wheel and pedals in the past and don't see this as an absolute >: necessity. > How can you blip the throttle properly when changing gear without >swerving off the straight? Sounds like you have an uncanny degree of >motor control. :-) What do you mean by "original track records" - what >sort of time are you getting at Monza and the Glen? > My impression is certainly that for normal mortals it's unplayable >with a single joystick.

When I referred to the "original track records" I meant the track records that you start out with when you originally install GPL. For instance Kyalami has 1:22.85 and Mosport 1:24.64. I think these are the actual track records that were set in real life in '67. My current best for Monza is 1:29.5 and the Glen 1:06.8, however I don't race on those tracks any more often than on all the others. What I enjoy doing is a full race season and so each track gets a fair share of my time. Because of this I'm still improving every time I return to a track. For instance I've just started a full "grand prix" season setting new PBs at Kyalami of 1:20.8x and today in practice at Monaco of 1:30.4x, this being with my now not so trusty Logic 3 joystick as the wheels are starting to stutter noticably when I turn to the right. So anyway, I would expect to improve on my times at Monza and the Glen when I get back round to them. ;-) -- Peter Ives

Perhaps that is true but 40k units would probably not bring them enough to make it worth their while... M

So at what number of units sold can a software title be considered as a hit? A while back 100,000 sold copies was quite near that mark, but it might have shifted to a million... Anyone from the industry knowledgable on this issue? Thanks, Uwe -- Uwe Schuerkamp http://www.schuerkamp.de/ Herford, Germany (52.0N/8h30mE) Ever wondered what's wrong with the world? http://bnetwork.com/ PGP Fingerprint: 2E 13 20 22 9A 3F 63 7F 67 6F E9 B1 A8 36 A4 61

I have no idea who else here has publisher experience but anyway, it all depends on the cost of the project and your expectations. Sometimes 100k may be a commercial success, others a total failure. However, you can assume fairly large wage bills at a big developer and as such they need to shift large numbers of units. I think, for example, Daitakana needs to sell half a million units to make money. I'd laugh but it's tragic really. Papyrus really need to sell lots of units to make up for the relative lack of success of GPL and as such will have to concentrate on the moneyspinners, aka, the US racing sims like NASCAR and Indy. M

: So at what number of units sold can a software title be considered : as a hit? A while back 100,000 sold copies was quite near that mark, : but it might have shifted to a million... Anyone from the industry : knowledgable on this issue? It's bound to shift all the time. 10 years ago, owning a computer wasn't that common. 20 years ago I strongly suspect that if you sold a million copies then everyone with a home computer must have bought several. -- Richard G. Clegg Only the mind is waving Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York. www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

>In those days there wasn't a worldwide market, because no one platform >had emerged to become the standard - there were less than a million BBC >Micros in existence, and they were all in the UK (oh, and some of our >colonies ;-) ). COLONIES?!? That's it - you're officially BANNED from my servers....<g> Eldred __ Put your message in a modem, and throw it in the ***-sea... remove SPAM-OFF to reply.

> Nowadays the main barrier to piracy is the sheer size and complexity >of the games. I wouldn't want a copy of something like GPL simply >because without the manual there would be no point. And even with CD >burners, its still quite difficult to distribute the huge games unless >you hack out lots of things like cut scenes and the like. I used to buy games from Lucasfilm. (Battlehawks 1942, Their Finest Hour, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe) Their manuals were VERY interesting history books - great to read. I thought I was the only one with a shelf FULL of games that I've never played...? I feel so much better now...<g> Eldred __ Put your message in a modem, and throw it in the ***-sea... remove SPAM-OFF to reply.