Gearbox make Opposing Force, which leaves Blue Shift which was hardly long enough to be anything more than a mod. So 6 yr gap between HL and HL2. But it was worth it! 

id Software took long as hell (whatever that might mean heh) to produce Doom3, and they took even longer to produce RAGE. I'm not trying to have some big ideological perspective on it all I'm saying is Valve has succeeded like Apple, which is much more about understanding how to control the market rather than producing content within the market and its rules. I mean, id has become a publisher as well, and they've sucked at it.

"Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century." 

nitin: yeah, i think so, now that you mention it. 

I have seen it tried in several other companies but it always fails because people are initially uneasy with the notion of just doing something creative on their own initiative

Maybe if you have boring/conditioned people to start with. What Valve seems to be doing is making sure to gather a critical mass of untethered creative/skilled people that will act as a magnet and attract even more awesome people.

The interesting part then is how much stays in R&D and how much they manage to turn into business. Would be nice if they manage to make it work long term instead of becoming a new Xerox PARC from the 70s. 

Very cool, actually captures the raw brutality of teh smabler. I'd prefer it to be a bit more angular though. 

A question for those who own Quake on Steam: is it already patched to version 1.06? You can test this by trying if impulse 10 and 12 work (weapon change). 

In the lower right corner of the console, running quake.exe that comes with steam, it identifies as 1.09 (and yes, those impulse commands work).

It should be noted that the .exe files included by steam (quake.exe, winquake.exe, glquake.exe, qwcl.exe glqwcl.exe) all must be started through steam as some part of steam DRM is imbedded within them... but nothing stops you from replacing those .exe files or using a modern Quake engine as all the other files required by Quake are just fine and dandy. 

i can't believe they went out of their way to put drm into those old executables.
the fact that other engines are available to replace them just makes it an even bigger waste of time. :\
i guess they didn't want to set a precedent where one game was convenient to start. (it still annoys me i have to turn on steam to play civ5) 

Thanks for checking. It's safe to assume the progs.dat is 1.06 then if it has impulse 12. 1.09 is the version of Glquake, though - it's always there. Shame about the DRM. 

like I said, I myself just copied the contents for the directory steam made when I downloaded it, and put everything into c:\quake\, like god intended, and just use quakespasm.. and if I really wanted to, I could download winquake or glquake from wherever and just replace the .exes 

Yeah, I use the Steam Quake install with my Quakespasm EXE and it works fine. 

added some graphs to http://www.quaddicted.com/statistics/ 

"* Still 4 months of 2011 left. "

Really? 

 

 

*giggles* 

... is a spam target :P 

Cheers, thanks for the note about the short story collection - looking forward to checking out your writing! 

"An Example to the Men" I think is my best conventional story (with a reader-enticing arc, etc), but if you're into scifi "Thought Process" (not by me) is one of the best in there. PS I feel like the title story could be taken in a purely negative, paranoid way, but there's supposed to be some humour in it too. heh. 

too much beer = me posting this and the spreading the word. Was couple months back.. the guitar has a big crack in it and 5 strings. But I still spank the shit out of that bitch.

Every day.