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[PTTG??]

In my experience:
Steam is a flawed but otherwise completely functional system.

I love Steam.  I dealt with StarDock once and hated it, don't even remember what game.  The only problem steam has is that if the Steam servers are down it's remarkably difficult to start a multiplayer game.

You can't play any games when the Steam Servers are down. The program won't start unless it can connect, and you can't go offline unless it's on. If you turn of your computer for any reason, such as you aren't using it, then you have to connect again. The only way you can play when the servers are down is if you go offline before they do on the same day.

[MrWiggles]

I had no idea, that when he said flawed, that it meant without complication. I don't see how pointing out its flaws make it worse to it being stated with flaws.

I haven't used Steam much myself, but my experience was pleasant and hassle free. I think it a step in the right direction.

[PTTG??]

I had no idea, that when he said flawed, that it meant without complication. I don't see how pointing out its flaws make it worse to it being stated with flaws...

Wait, what? What are you saying?

[MrWiggles]

I had no idea, that when he said flawed, that it meant without complication. I don't see how pointing out its flaws make it worse to it being stated with flaws...

Wait, what? What are you saying?

You felt a need to point out it flaws. As if they were hidden. When was stated it has flaws.  A list of flaws doesn't make it worse.

Although I don't see a work around on that. It seem that it does the verification on the server side to run all the games. This is a neat idea, instead of having the cd key verification within the game itself, where it can be examined and reversed engineered.

[Jreengus]

You can't play any games when the Steam Servers are down. The program won't start unless it can connect, and you can't go offline unless it's on. If you turn of your computer for any reason, such as you aren't using it, then you have to connect again. The only way you can play when the servers are down is if you go offline before they do on the same day.

That's not necessarily true, I don't know what triggers it but it can save data onto your computer about an account, what games it has unlocked etc allowing you to play offline games without connecting. I have played steam games on my laptop before with no internet connection. Although it doesn't seem to have the data for my desktop since when I try to log in with no internet it says something along the lines of "No Offline data stored for this account"

[Kogan Loloklam]

...
Wannas learn Fair Use? Actually read the Terms of Service liscense that pops up when you install a commercial game. Basically, only you can use the software on one computer for noncommercial uses (this is the most common liscense, photoshop liscense is obviously different.) All copies of the software are for backups ONLY. You cannot use copies on other computers, you cannot give out copies to friends, and you cannot copy and sell the program. You can only USE the software. Only the software maker, if copyrighted, can give copies out for sale or for free. That's the technical aspect. Practically, you can't copy the program and give it out to others.
...

This is not an example of fair use. This is an example of the software companies regulating how you can and cannot use the product you purchased. Most of the stuff in agreements you "agree" to is rather illegal. They may or may not hold up to a legal challenge. Their lobbiests are working hard to erode away the mandate given by taking exactly these actions.
Fair use is different. Fair use is impossible to define, because it is one of those things of "I'll know it when I see it"
It is not fair use to buy one copy of a game, copy it on 100 computer systems, and have people come into the area and pay you to play a copy of that game on one of the computers. It IS fair use to let a friend play it on your computer. There are hundreds of shades of gray there. It is perfectly legal for you to lend your game to your friend to play. It is perfectly legal to sell it to your friend. It does have to be a transfer of ownership though. It is not okay for you to have it and give it to your friend as well. That is not fair use.

It is legislature attacking that, and DRM attacking that, the ability to lend your friend a game, that reduces the respect for the mandate for Copyright. Fair use is being legislated against in an effort to "eliminate" piracy. They have this vision that fair use is the gateway to piracy, and they are wrong. The Gateway to piracy is in removing the people's moral compass needle against it. The erosion of the mandate is the most damaging thing for those who support IP can do. The legislature created for people to protect their intellectual property in the "Digital Age" is damaging the system in the most critical ways. It is removing the mandate. People don't feel bad about it, and that is the root cause of Piracy. It isn't finances, boredom, lack of quality of the games. It is just simply that they don't feel it is bad. That is why, despite PTTG??'s belief otherwise, pirates greatly outnumber hippies and citizens combined. Privateers don't exist. Privateers are pirates that don't know how to pirate, and looping them in with "lost sales" doesn't accurately reflect that they have removed the mandate to protect a person or company's rights to be paid for their effort.

Don't think this is a simple problem better targeted DRM can fix. The Genie is out of the bottle, and only by regaining the mandate can IP survive as we once knew it. Governmental Legislation, Trade Agreements, DRM, none of it will solve the problem. The Mandate must be regained, which is a PR campaign. It may even be too late for that, and copyright as we know it may be doomed, to bring us back to patronage.

(Edit: FYI, changing our way of thinking does not, in any way, affect Bay12games, which already uses a model that worked well in the middle ages. Busking. We aren't donating for "Dwarf Fortress". We are giving our Alms to the excellent performer. Our favorite programmer.)

[Skorpion]

Hmm. I'm fairly anti-DRM, anti high-priced-games, anti hoop-jumping, and anti lazy-programming.

That's why I didn't buy Spore. It promised the earth, but why should I pay £50 for something I can only install a few times, have to register with each use, register every time I'm online, and so forth?
And then I found out what the content being protected actually WAS, and decided to pass it up. Wasn't worth the bother.

GTA4 was full of malware that made it run WORSE on my system. I had the minimum specs, but it was unplayable at times.
Two updates and new video drivers, and it runs passably most of the time. I still wouldn't pay that much for it.

With DF, it's free. You can't fault it on price. In terms of content, it's practically infinite. The only limitation is the code being un-optimised and leading to slow performance. But it's not finished yet, so I can just wait.
Also, the sheer scale of the game means an active forum community to share ideas.

[MrWiggles]

Hmm. I'm fairly anti-DRM, anti high-priced-games, anti hoop-jumping, and anti lazy-programming.

That's why I didn't buy Spore. It promised the earth, but why should I pay £50 for something I can only install a few times, have to register with each use, register every time I'm online, and so forth?
And then I found out what the content being protected actually WAS, and decided to pass it up. Wasn't worth the bother.

GTA4 was full of malware that made it run WORSE on my system. I had the minimum specs, but it was unplayable at times.
Two updates and new video drivers, and it runs passably most of the time. I still wouldn't pay that much for it.

With DF, it's free. You can't fault it on price. In terms of content, it's practically infinite. The only limitation is the code being un-optimised and leading to slow performance. But it's not finished yet, so I can just wait.
Also, the sheer scale of the game means an active forum community to share ideas.

Game prices have to go up to keep games profitability at similar levels in increase of dev. cost and time. Of all entreatment media, video game prices have barely gone up. Though movie prices have gone up, I think they made some of that with the dvd releases offering more content, with similar cost and few month later at a lower cost.

[Draco18s]

Game prices have to go up to keep games profitability at similar levels in increase of dev. cost and time.

One reason I went "WTF?" at the PS3's capability of having subsurface scattering and bone shadows.  Someone has to model all the bones!  Which does two things: 1) increases the cost of the game 2) increases development time.

Alternatively you could not-do it, in which case, what was the point of implementing it?

[MrWiggles]

Game prices have to go up to keep games profitability at similar levels in increase of dev. cost and time.

One reason I went "WTF?" at the PS3's capability of having subsurface scattering and bone shadows.  Someone has to model all the bones!  Which does two things: 1) increases the cost of the game 2) increases development time.

Alternatively you could not-do it, in which case, what was the point of implementing it?

You could, and not all games will.

There an interesting coloration to video game need to capture photo-realism, in many aspect (such as bones baby! No more hilarity with rag doll! Respect to ligament DOF is coming baby!!!) and with painting. After the sad reset of fall of the roman empire, we saw a race to photo realism of painting then once it was recapture we say impressionism, cubism so forth.

And I think once CG graphic in games can be readily confused with reality, we'll see more artistic expersion.

Organic shapes are hard to render in real time.

[Draco18s]

Organic shapes are hard to render in real time.

And there's a damn good reason for it too:
Organic is not Mathematical.
Computers are math computation machines.

[PTTG??]

Not at all; pretty much every natural structure is fractal, procedural, or crystalline, with varying amounts of innacuracies. Trees are simple procedures, while an animal might be a procedural thing emerging from procedural bone structure.

In fact, the very function of DNA is a form of fractal or computation not entirely different from a computer.

The reason that organic shapes are not well rendered in computers is because many systems are top-down; the sculpt the end tree, without respect to how it grew. It is a relatively simple and powerful method to instead define a tree's growth and generate it from these rules.

There are difficulties (for instance, processing power demand,) to this method, but it is by far the most lifelike, the quickest to apply, and the most efficient to store.

[MrWiggles]

But its getting better, the horse power is finally getting their.

There such little things that we take for granted in live action media, such as liquid acting like liquid. And hair, not being a plastic mold, where these things are just computationally expensive.

[Yanlin]

Remember Half life 2? When we were all fawning how realistic it looks?

So much for that now...

[Tormy]

Remember Half life 2? When we were all fawning how realistic it looks?

So much for that now...

That's understandable. Everyone was like "WOW! THIS LOOKS AWESOME!", when they've seen Duke Nukem 3D for the first time. 
Since then, we have games like HL2, Crysis, Far Cry 2 etc....in a couple of years, even Crysis will look like crap compared to the nextgen games at least.