Too many OS releases

[Aeon]

it seems to me the ratio between OS and other software releases is a bit off.

I started a new game today and i had 5 different OS available in 1980, seems a bit much

[cfranks007]

Compared to other software it certainly seems easier to release an OS. I think there is tweaking still going on. I seem to need more artists than I needed in previous releases.

[Aeon]

look at this screenshot, just 3 years in and already 8 different OS systems, a bit too much i think

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/519385854236165844/433E2A1106AFAF09E1D9B98AC1833B3E1BCA20C6/

[Steel Rat]

so....make ur money, buy out the companies, gain their os and then never release anything for it....problem solved :)

[Aeon]

bit early in the game , still short on money, but like i said, in 1980 there were already 4OS available, just seems a bit much

[Proteus]

I agree ... while I haven´t made any experience with developing an OS in the 80s, I suspect that early OSes have a faster development speed due to thr smaller amount of features that are available for them.
In later years (2000+), when OSes with all features (for the player company) take 2-4 years to develope the amount of new AI OSes that get released seems to decline.

Maybe they should adjust the amount of man hours that each feature requires for each decade ... with each feature requiring the most amount of man hours in the 80s and then declines from the 90s to the 2ks.
IMHO that would make sense, considering the fact that IDEs and programming languages (and their class/function libraries) have progressed a lot since the 80s,
with nowadays IDEs provisding an amount of features that help with programming, of which programmers within the 80s could only have dreamed. And also nowadays most of the data structures and functions that would have to be programmed by programmers in the 80s themselves, are nowadays contained within standard class/function libraries

[cfranks007]

Floppy Disks had about 360Kb of data capacity when I got my first computer and it was very rare to have a computer game with 2 disks. 48Kb was standard for an Apple 2 + and for an extra $100 you could get a 16k upgrade memory card. Wizardry by Sir-tech was one game that recognized the extra memory and the 2nd floppy drive I had. Graphics were very simple back then and programmers had to be clever to fit their game into a tiny memory space.

[Zack Wester]

back then okey we got 10000Lines(maybe 10Kb) of code now how do we Vodo it into the space of 3Kb.
10 day codeing and 20 days planing how to actually fit the code into that darn floppy.

Today we got 100GB of space and our programe will end up around 20-30GB of space.
30days of coding 10 days of rewriting codeblocks 2 days to fix an broken libary. 1 day of planing.
end pruduct 41GB of space and 2GB of code thats never called but the program will not work whit out it.

[deece16]

While we are at, and we are comparing the times, the sexs in the game are WAY off. There where hardly any women in the software industry in the 1980s, very few in the 1990s and so on. Even today, it's still dominated by men. Just saying...

[Coredumping]

The current release system is completely broken, it's way too dependent on chance. I will make it more rigid during alpha 5.

deece16 eredeti hozzászólása:

While we are at, and we are comparing the times, the sexs in the game are WAY off. There where hardly any women in the software industry in the 1980s, very few in the 1990s and so on. Even today, it's still dominated by men. Just saying...

I'm well aware, but I think inclusiveness is more important than realism in this case.

[procainezoKAI]

Age garden corp. appears to release an OS every 3 years. This is the same cadence that Microsoft has for Windows: Windows 7 in 2009, 8 in 2012 and Windows 10 in 2015. It only looks like a lot since there is healthy competition between OS developers.

[soldyne]

deece16 eredeti hozzászólása:

While we are at, and we are comparing the times, the sexs in the game are WAY off. There where hardly any women in the software industry in the 1980s, very few in the 1990s and so on. Even today, it's still dominated by men. Just saying...

I'm well aware, but I think inclusiveness is more important than realism in this case. [/quote]

Well said! I think, the issue in 80's and 90's was that the male dominated industry simply wasn't hiring female developers by choice, not that there weren't enough applicants. remember that the worlds first computer programmer was a woman. If you want to run your company by only hiring young men then you can choose to do that I guess, but, I like the ability to choose from the entire population.

As for OS's, Operating Systems date back to the late 1950's and there have been many of them. today we have Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and every single console and hand held device has its own proprietariy OS. In 2017 we are all so used to hearing about Windows and Mac OS because of their "Unavoidable" marketing campaigns, but, we don't talk about the other OS's that exist because many people just don't know about them. And that is the power of marketing and market share!

for me the issue is personal, its hard for me to wrap my head around the OS's in the game because the names are all so foriegn/random. I keep trying to figure out who the games version of "Microsoft" is or which OS is the "Windows" of my game world. But, that's my problem to deal with.

[cfranks007]

The problem with using real names is if the company that owns the name objects. Furthermore, what if they claim that your use of their name damages their reputation? They could have a saved game that shows exactly this.

I know of one guy in the 80's who wrote about a Mario game he did not care for. He had disclaimers that it was an opinion piece. The company sued him and made him take his site down and they may have gotten an injuction so he could never write about them again (can't remember as it was so long ago).