Comments on: Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day: Actually, 10 Minutes

By: lee

lee — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:22:15 +0000

Lmao, this concept is a bit dodgey, but who knows, once every person on the earth has ultra violet fibre optics ( goes faster than current technology ) this should be possible :D

By: Legandir

Legandir — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:21:37 +0000

@The_B http://awomo.com/?q=node/29
“What is AWOMO 3D?

Ah! Our plan for the future… We are building a massive online virtual world for gamers complete with top of the range social networking and group management tools. You will be able to live and play inside this world, launching your games straight from it. We hope to build the ultimate hub for gamers complete with personal housing, leagues, tournaments, shops… everything that you might need, whoever you are, whatever type of games you like and however you play. More on this soon…”

By: Anthony Damiani

Anthony Damiani — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:48:34 +0000

“Is anybody really suggesting that being able to play a game before it’s finished downloading is a ‘feature’? Good luck to them.”

So you’ve never spent 18+ hours on a game download (damn you, D2D!), then?

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:06:02 +0000

If I might just shamelessly promote the excellent Inflammable Jim again, he’s done a similar thing he did for Hitman (The Amateur) for Rome:TW.

http://houseofjimius.wordpress.com/

It wraps up tomorrow, so the whole thing is there to enjoy. The screens are delicious.

By: Heliocentric

Heliocentric — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:03:27 +0000

I own rome. But i never got the expansions. Med 2 never hooked me. But i might get rome gold off steam for a tenner. To be honest if empire wasn’t such a retardedly expensive price i’d love to get it off steam. But 40? 30 if you count the free rome as a discount? Is too much when it will be 17.99 a month after release at retail. Saddest of all is now some people have preordered at that price they wont lower the price until after release fearing people asking for the difference back. Blah

By: kafka7

kafka7 — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:04:24 +0000

Is anybody really suggesting that being able to play a game before it’s finished downloading is a ‘feature’? Good luck to them.

By: aiusepsi

aiusepsi — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:51:01 +0000

The thing with game streaming is while it’s one of those features that sounds cool on paper, it’s actually really hard to do right in practice, especially if you’re going to have to retrofit old games to support such a thing.

It’s not new, either. Steam does it with the older games (HL and HL2) and Triton did it, at least in the beta. There are good reasons they don’t do it any more!

The trouble is that making games work well in an environment where you can’t be sure that your assets are going to be available just adds a whole new set of complexities. Do you pop up a loading bar? Can anything be done to ensure relevant content is bumped to the top of the download queue? etc.

Also, there’s a good reason Valve stopped using a virtual drive to support third-party games in Steam – it does hideous things to loading performance.

Oh, and if you’re streaming you suddenly become extremely sensitive to network throughput. If your servers start to fall over under heavy load, it becomes a heck of a lot more of an issue, which is going to be an operational headache for them.

They’ve no doubt dropped the little virtual world feature too because it’s another one of those things that sounds great on paper, but in practice it has a terrible benefit to cost ratio.

By: The_B

The_B — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:24:44 +0000

Oooh, something else I just remembered about the chat last night that I also think is interesting to note – AWOMO was supposed to have a Second Life style client attached to it when it was first announced, a lot like PlayStation Home. However, there’s now no mention of that at all on the website anywhere. It would be interesting to find out if that’s been dropped altogether or what, especially after the demise of Google’s Lively.

(No worries about the credit, by the way.)

By: Neil

Neil — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:51:05 +0000

Yep, no XP/Vista 64-bit support. Probably should put that in the main article.

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:47:38 +0000

I really do want a decent PC game rental service, but I think it would have to operate more like Gamefly, Gametap, or Netflix – a single rental fee for a month’s use. Perhaps sort of a combination of Gamefly and Gametap – stream the download to your PC, but only allow X number of games installed at once where X is the number you’re paying a monthly rental fee for. And offer a discounted digital purchase option (preferably DRM-free) after you’ve spent some time with the game.

Also, it would need to be more accessible than Gametap – mods are an essential part of the experience you miss with Gametap, and it certainly shouldn’t erase all your saves when you uninstall the app.

By: Shamanic Miner

Shamanic Miner — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:35:12 +0000

Bring back invaderload.

By: El Stevo

El Stevo — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:24:57 +0000

Interesting technologically, perhaps, but as a consumer I don’t really see the appeal of the service.