P2 T h e P C D i s e a s e A Public Warning by Lee 'AMIGA' Bamber P1 ~ ~ ~ P3 Once a commodorian, always so. For those who recount their VIC-20's and C64 days with fond memories, the advent of PC domination must be abit of a change in terms of what a computer game is... P1 A Case Study ------------ P3 PAST & PRESENT P4 The PC, designed over twenty years ago. Architecture primarily unchanged due to it's industrial use. Industry exposes more and more employees to this computer and they take them home. They do their work and then play with it. Due to it's cosmetic offerings, the user has absolutely no room to innovate anything as the creative software was not easily available. P4 The occasional programmer writes PD character-based games which please the lazy office workers as they compete to move little blocks from block A to block B, without being eaten by block C. More PC's saturate the home. The graphic resolutions jump from awful to impressive. New flood of games concentrate on the graphical capabilities, standard high storage harddrive and other card based hardware. Public demand is created for visual stimulation and soon after audiable simulus. Home PC's become more common due to cheaper prices and influence of widespread accessability of pirate PC software from industrial packages to commercial games. (Moreso than the Amiga ever had!) Increased investment into the entertainment sector for the PC computer, leading to increased market awareness and moreso, a move by Amiga developers to develop for the PC, and ultimately drop the Amiga due to substantial financial gains in the PC market. Taken from a PC FORMAT SUPPLIMENT (Academic Purchase!), almost each PC developer interviewed in Britain had at some point moved from the Amiga to the PC detailed in their softographies. Suggesting the origin of talent came primarily from the Amiga world P3 NOW P4 Large multi-million companies take control of small software houses, to gear their efforts and market their games as widely as possible. More developers move to the PC as further finacial opportunities become available. CD-ROM and high harddrive capacity games become the norm and couple with a very high purchase price to push the software industry into the billions and transforms games developers into hollywood studios in order to maintain the level of visual/audiable data expected by the pubic. P3 PC - THE FUTURE P4 As the programmers of the old school (Spectrum/C64) retire and die, games creation is left to figures established in the industry. Not having the primal understanding of games without flash trash, development is reduced to repeating formula already set and innovations would derive from what has alreasy been done in the field. Innovation outside the realm of actors film editing, computer generation and easy-to-use rendering packages will be an art practiced more by outsiders and tinkerers, than part of any main consideration. All the programmers will come from academical circles, understanding only high level languages, and knowing little about how they actually work. P4 Moreso, games creators will be replaced by script writers and special effects technicians. The funding will increase as the gap between the film industry and the games entertainment industry not just closes, but merges to form a medium which combines the two. Interactive film experiences is not an unrealistic future. Games as we know it will not be available, and challenge through mental, reflex or puzzles will be part and parcel of the above medium. Not before long, joysticks, mouse, keyboard and all the other user interface hardware will be replaced with speech synthasis, virtual movement selection and retinal detection. All will be geared to making games more widely accessable, completely moving away from the idea of needing to know which direction does what and how to perform an action. The games will play with natural ease, representing the user friendly interface of the future. Overall, the advances tested here will be controlled and marketted by large, faceless companies that will treat you the same way the Satalite and TV organisations do now. Offering their latest product for a huge price, high commitment and with a grasp of control so fundamental to daily life it will suffocate those with little respect for the price of technological advance. P4 Such will be it's influence, not subscribing to it's service would be deemed unusual in the society and even disadvantagous as banking, shopping, credit control and a giagantic array of leisure functions would be offered as standard. In this future, you could live, work and play in the same room. And for many, they WILL live, work and play in their entertainment suite. Life would be easy, almost too easy. Too conveient. Too ignorant of the fundamental details of the systems that control them. P3 AMIGA - THE FUTURE P4 With the overflood of talent from the AMIGA to the PC, a big fat hole will be created in the AMIGA games sector. Not an absence of games, but far fewer new titles and a fair number of poorer quality titles that are haistily published to make up the sales required for large companies to stay afloat. AMIGA users, at least those who regard piracy as normal will find the move to the PC a dream decision. They'll enter a society of users that pirate without thinking about it, and regard the world of cheats and game skips a vital element to their games enjoyment. To these, it's a loss of software sales, but not much and for the better. P4 Those who move to the PC are either required by financial demands, or have not realised there creative capabilities. Armed with an array of creative tools, the Amiga has been the most successful tool for recruiting games talent. Users dedicated to it's survival will continue to support it, and game writers will continue to improve their skills. By the time the AMIGA is in full circulation, with the new Amiga under development, a new emergance of games software writers, teams and publishers will appear to fill the gaps left by the once-established houses. What once was the most formitable home computer will find itself in a similar position it found itself 10 years ago. A low cost home computer offering relatively inexpensive software of a kind not to be found on any PC. Moving away from mass graphical waffle and expensive film-esque techniques, the software will move in the direction it has always moved. Pure creativity. Having an undetermined amount of storage space, memory and speed acts as a disadvantage on the PC for it offers the easy way out for programmers. Amiga programmers will be less inclined to ask the user to pay for more equipment to run their games and thus will improve the quality of the game ITSELF rather than extending (and stretching) the game to fill up space. P4 A new and expected twist is the Amiga now has a strong following of hard drive and CD-ROM owners, and the new Amiga with pre-bundled packages will promote the purchase and use of these vital peripherals. As the fresh batch of Amiga programmers move toward this demand, more projects will be based around the CD-ROM and hard drive use. And will this move the AMIGA in the same direction as the PC in terms of the games that will eventually be created as described in the PC future? Certainly not. Where the PC lacked a solid base of innovative gameplay fundamentals in the early days, their development is plagued by having to now conform to a demand that wants only graphics, footage and lots of speech. The Amiga equivilant would be geared towards using the extra storage and hard drive space to create a more realistic aura to grace the already firmly extablished gameplay. Give an Amiga game writer access to 650 Megabytes of disk space and a 20 meg fast access hard drive and there is nothing else they need. Unlike the countless cards one might require for their particular kind of PC, the Amiga would purr like a cat as it uses fully the resources that is made available to it. As the new Amiga scene emerges, a new band of small companies will form that offer the games you can play and play again. Not the ones you watch like a cartoon for ten minutes, then never play again. P4 Plus the entire structure of the amiga games software scene means the price of Amiga games is less than half of that charged by PC publishers and developers alike. As and when these small companies grow into much more established institutes, we will have a computer that's taken it's time and got it right every stage of the way. It may take another ten years, but at the end of the day, it will be a home computer people can afford, and be supplied in the light of innovation and creativity, not controlled and money grabbing. P3 ASSUMPTIONS P4 Applogies to Amiga programmers who program PC's. PC Programmer refers to high level language types who wouldn't know a peice of machine code if it bit them on the leg. It refers to people who use editors, constructors and other packages to assemble games based on standard formula. It's too all those boffins who don't know the first thing about writing a game from scratch single handedly. I sympathise to those who have had to devise their own functions in order to replicate the abilities of the Amiga on the PC. It can only be them money, and the notability, but certainly not for the fun of coding! From personal experience, games programming on the PC is about as fun as dental surgeory, with a hammer. P4 You might play the same tune, but the instrument is about three hundred years old with just alot of keys (they don't tell you they are all the same note though). P7 DIGITAL NINJA P4 Have I angered anyone? I hope so, that means you've listened, which I hope brings you to your senses, or at leasts wakes you up with a couple of sharp slaps across the face. Everything stated is my own opinion, and is not the view of AZ, just to make that clear. It might be, but hey, it's my column. With my view of the future, Digital Ninja will be around supplying you with increasingly better software for many years. Money isn't everything and I place value on work enjoyment as much as financial gain. And I plan on getting abit of that too. Free Digital Ninja Info Sheet to those who want one but send the return postage in MY currency or postal type. Address elsewhere (Code Clinic, I think). P4 I certainly hope I've made myself clear. Don't want any confused people sending me nasty letters. Basically, I always say. If you've plenty money and don't mind wasting it, buy a PC and start spending. If you're anything else, stick with the Amiga, it'll stick with you! P5 I agree with you Lee as I too love my Amiga, but for some strange reason, people seem to think the Amiga is dead ! Hence their move to the PC (pissy computer). I will continue to support the Amiga and Amos, but the BIG question must be .... will YOU ? (the reader) P1 End.