Iantis

You can change the game speed to fast when you set up a multi player game. check it out it's much faster.

I hope you guys make tons of money from this! I can only speak for myself, but I've bought it for three people (myself included, of course).

EvilleJedi, Tried it for the first time last night, really great work. Just out of curiosity, does the game accommodate bump or normal mapping? Currently, and I assume the lighting engine in Sins is to blame, the ships look somewhat flat and gray. The star destroyers are fabulous. :)

Funny that I stumbled on this thread. I've been thinking a lot lately of quitting my job (I'm currently a finance lawyer) and starting an independent game studio. I wanted to do a hardcore starship simulator as our first title, ala Silent Hunter in space. Obviously, less sneaking around than a sub simulator, of course. It's an interesting proposition. Right off the bat you're talking about cutting out 75% of the market (consoles) to make a PC-only game. N

To the OP - not to be rude, but RTFM. Jeez, man.

I'm cool with this. Long experience has shown that more time in the oven is almost never a bad thing. Will pre-order today. Good work, IronClad.

I'm a huge stardock fan, but find the avowed focus in your report on the Windows platform, to the exclusion of all other operating systems, to be both disappointing and short-sighted (see p. 4, "Stardock develops for Windows. Period. It does not, nor does it plan to, support the Mac or Linux markets. Our focus is to help make the Windows platform as successful as possible."). I must confess I don't understand this over-abundant enthusiasm for the Microsoft "platform". Bei

I think your assertion that "Sins's online player counts aren't real high for a game that has supposedly sold a couple hundred thousand copies" is probably mistaken. People play all the time, they just don't show up when they're in-game. ICO is just a match-making service, it's not a huge online chat room where people hang out for hours at a time. And I suspect many people, like me, play exclusively with their friends and just use ICO to create a game and get going.

Another great read. Thanks! Stardock / Ironclad / GPG give me hope for the future.

[quote]The HOST does nothing but "synchronize" the data between the clients. Every client runs the entire simulation on their own machine, therefore the slowest machine in the mix will cause slowdown for everyone.[/quote] @the_Monk : you're right, I had read that somewhere and forgot about it. Must be a problem with my computer then, since while the host is super fast, I'm on a laptop pentium-M. Sort of annoying that my computer being somewhat slower causes latency for me. Fortunatel

Just a thought here, but I'm starting to wonder if the huge lag spikes (I have experienced them as well on an extremely fast university ethernet connection) are due to hardware latency on the host's end. For example, if the host is a fairly slow computer, and he zooms into an enemy's territory early on in the game, before all of the textures are loaded on his end, his computer's CPU and hard drive will thrash away, most likely lagging out the entire game for all who are connected. <br/

I have a similar issue. It's not as bad as yours, but I'd say my lag is around 500ms to 1 second. The problem is, this doesn't occur just on internet games, but also on LAN play. I can't think of any reason why the latency would be so high when we're all plugged into the same router. It can't be CPU-based latency because our host is on an extremely fast dual core system with 3 GB of ram. Anybody else having LAN latency problems?

Looking pretty cool, actually. I like the larger flak bursts and fighter engine trails especially.

[quote]If I get more crappy responses like the one above, I'm seriously going to start flaming. You have been warned.[/quote] Hi, HuntingX! Thanks for your contributions to the board! Please see here ([link="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19"]WWW Link[/link]) and ruminate on what it means to be an adult.

Frogboy, you're on the money about game sales. I am a reluctant 360 owner - I say reluctant because I consider myself a PC gamer before all else (I don't even really enjoy playing games on a console much) but couldn't justify spending another $2000 on a new system until some time next year. Anyway, the ONLY reason I would ever get a console version of a game over a PC version is because of performance. Game developers have lost a lot of sales to me this year quite simply because their

I agree, the "players can't join your game" message is not ideal, especially because it's a false positive a lot of the time. But this is simply not a game that lends itself to having dedicated servers. That's somewhat cost-effective for games with 16 or more players, where players can join and quit at ease - first person shooters are a good example of this. But for a game where it's usually 2-4 people playing from beginning to the end of the whole game? It's not going to happen.

[quote]I don't consider that Savage, World of Warcraft, EVE, Lord of the Rings Online , Guild Wars, Battle for Middle Earth I and BFME II (to name a few that I have played online) are like "Solitaire and stuff"[/quote] Let me give you a little lesson on basic networking. All of the games you mentioned are hosted on a remote computer and you are a peer connecting to that host. In games like Sins, Neverwinter Nights, etc - that is, games where one of the game owners hosts the ga

I, too, have a SB Audigy 2 ZS (PCMCIA) and have crackling issues with the audio.

[quote]Im a pretty tech-savy computer user and this was WAY beyond what 80% of your gamers are familier enough to deal with.[/quote] How many times does it need to be said? This is not the developer's fault, it's an issue of home networking. Whenever you play ANY game where you host the game locally on your computer, be it Neverwinter Nights, or anything else, you will have to open the ports to your computer. People seem to think that because they can play WoW - that is, JOIN another

Started modeling a low poly Lambda-class shuttle just for fun. I figure it could be an interesting vehicle to have either in a campaign or skirmish mode - would be poor in combat, obviously, but maybe could give it interesting support abilities, like "deliver commando team" or something. Anyway, this is just the low detail base mesh, I still have to add the cannons and more fuselage detailing, etc. If anybody is good at texturing and wants to help me out with it, let me know. <b

[quote]Or, OR... YOu could Wait for it. Waaait for it... Stop using capships as your whole force and support them.[/quote] No but ... that would require thinking! About strategy!

[quote]Wow Iantis... you sound like we are making a game xD Administrative/Mission building/Writing? As far as i know sins didnt even have a single player campaign.... and what do you mean by administrative? We are just throwing ideas into the bowl and hopefully something will come out of it....[/quote] Well ... yeah. The last Star Wars mod I worked on (and this will date me) was for the original X-Wing back in 1994, I believe. I made a new campaign for the game that took place betwee

Why won't this work on my Riva TNT?

Let's not forget rebel fighters have hyperdrives and shields, unlike imperial tie fighers (unless you include the annoying additions of lucasarts in games like TIE Fighter). In that sense, rebel fighters are much more like small frigates in the Sins universe than fighter / bombers. There are going to be some VERY interesting differences between playing as the Empire or the Rebels. How does one get involved in this mod, anyway? I'm interested in doing some administrative / mission bui

I love the game, but do agree with all your points.