Hey Ubi, consider this...

[Faamecanic]

Originally Posted by Phantom Mark

The crazy thing is that I bet at least 10-20% of the pirated downloads of SH5 are actually for people who have bought and paid for the game.........someone like myself who is considering it who has no internet connection during the working week because I work away from home.....thats when things start to get crazy.

Or from people getting tired of getting screwed by the game companies releasing crap products riddled with bugs.

I have ALWAYS been against Piracy, and ALWAYS pay for my games....

But I did download a....umm...Trial copy of a rather famous football coach game to see if it was as screwed up as the forum posters were saying before plunking down $50 on it. And it was.... (example: for no reason at all the QB would turn around and throw the football the wrong way) so I didnt buy it.

I have ALWAYS bought SH series (even after getting burned with SH3).... then burned with SH4...you think I would have learned. But I bought SH5 to support the franchise... Im regretting that now.

My copy of SH5 is legit, but due to DRM dropout issues (and I have cable for crying out loud) my game is DRM free. Only happened at peak hours, but annoying as hell when ya get a friggin notice every 5min and the game freezes up.

DRM has got to be killing sales for UBI.

[Fincuan]

Originally Posted by janh

Is the Falcon 4 source code then public by now? I'd be too curious to check how they did it...

No, at least not legally. As far as I know all legal rights to the title and the code are owned by Lead Pursuit, the makers of Allied Force and the eternal work-in-progress Falcon 5.

[Bilge_Rat]

Its a long story, the source code to falcon 1.07 was leaked and worked on semi-legally for many years. Microprose tried to shut them down, never successfully.

Another group of modders were working on the outside on the 1.08 game.

eventually both group of modders worked out a deal with the legal owner of the software which lead to the creation of Lead Pursuit. LP cleaned up the code and released F4AF in 2005.

F4 when it was a released in 1999 was a buggy mess with near-constant CTDs. By comparaison, SH5 looks like a 100% complete game...

I also have the F4 binder pictured above in my bookcase. It came with the special edition.

[daft]

This thread made me dig out the Falcon 4.0 manual again. I've sort of given up on flight sims though. Might get back into it once we get a proper house with a real gaming room. The manual really is awesome.

[IanC]

Originally Posted by daft

This thread made me dig out the Falcon 4.0 manual again. I've sort of given up on flight sims though. Might get back into it once we get a proper house with a real gaming room. The manual really is awesome.

OT: You know what got me back into flight sims, those Third Wire "lite" flight sims. Wings over Europe, Wings over Vietnam, First Eagles, they're a blast to play. Hundreds of mods for them too, just mentioning it in case somebody doesn't know about them.

[Commie]

Originally Posted by trotter

Sigh...the old Falcon 4 manual.




Remember the days when you would spend almost a week reading the manual before playing the game?

I understand this is not cost-feasible any longer, all I ask is that developers stop claiming that pdf manuals and materials will be robust or immersive. Stop it, it's insulting.

Hehe. I have this too!

I disagree that it wouldn't be cost effective. Companies make collectors' editions of games with more fancy and costlier (but more useless) trinkets included for not much more than a basic version of the game so why couldn't they make a decent manual instead which would be cheaper anyway? The squadron commander's edition of Falcon with the binder was just 10 dollars more than the normal one which had a huge manual anyway, so it seems that costs of production weren't excessive.

Relatively it was just as expensive, even more so to make a big game in 1991 than now. Just read about Origin and their problems with packing a game box with a dozen diskettes which led to them losing their independence as their ambitions overtook the technology(cost effective cd-roms weren't available).

Greed killed off the simulation companies more than a lack of income. All those mergers in the 90's where one company would pay excessively for a brand name and then decide to trim staff and quality in order to get a quick return on their investment are the reason sims died and not because people weren't buying them! If UBI still made enough from SH3 and SH4 in this day and age with smaller sales than Microprose and the rest then it shows that the market isn't dead for sims(and sub sims are arguably more niche than flight sims).

[jason210]

Originally Posted by daft

This thread made me dig out the Falcon 4.0 manual again. I've sort of given up on flight sims though. Might get back into it once we get a proper house with a real gaming room. The manual really is awesome.

If you do, take a look at x-plane. I've been keeping my eye on this sim for years and it looks like it will be the sim of the future.