Re: Adventures in Licensing...

From: madcentral@aol.com (MadCentral)

Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 00:00:00 +0000

>>I have tried licensing my games to others and with one single exception
(a French person) I think that I can honestly say that I have never
received a single penny from such an adventure. I will never try to
license out any of my games again. Enough said. Ken.<<

Ah... perhaps I misunderstood this question, or perhaps Ken did???

Now if the question was ''whats it like to license games'' and meant non-PBM
games for converting to PBM, then my original opinion stands.

But if Ken meant 'licensing another PBM game to and from GMs around the world''
then thats a *very* different kettle of fish.  I've licensed many PBMs in the
old days and been quite happy with most of them (without Lizards back then, I
wouldn't be where I am now).  And these days my licensees of the various Nexus
games and bloody fantastic!  <scuse my language.>

Of course, licensing PBM games is very hit or miss.  You wont believe how awful
some of those so-called professional 'front ends' are.  Some examples:-

'Lords of Destiny' - line-based dos order entry... complicated codes that have
no bearing on what the players actually wrote... make one mistake and start the
whole thing again... no backup functions.

'Cosmic Crusaders' - dos menu-driven order entry, no error checking, slight
syntax errors causes program to crash, bugs galore some of which cause the game
to all-but erase itself, no backup functions.

'Island Takeover' - Colourful Visual Basic Windows editor, bugs galore, system
crashes at the slightest error without saving anything you've done, titles
scroll off the sides of the windows and are mostly unreadable.

'You Rule' - Actually rather good front end, but written in a language called
'Pick' which must be installed on  a partition on your hard drive as it is an
operating system all its own, occasionally a system failure erases the entire
data structure so unless you've spent hours backing up all your games every
five minutes you are pretty much doomed.  All accounts must be double entered
and then confirmed (a really long dreary task for something as simple as PBM
accounting.)

Midgard - grief!

Fire On The Seas - Apple Mac text-based line editor with absolutely no bearing
on anything at all.  Virtually impossible to use and incredibly slow.

Krahlizek 'The Last Battle', later renamed to just plain 'K' - Colourful
Dos-Based Menu -system.  Bugs galore.  Crashed on a regular basis.  had to run
about six different programs to make it all work.  Took over two hours to run
and print a simple 8-player game.  No decent backup function.

The best ones I had were Lizards and Continental Rails, which while not
'pretty', were usable and functional.

I think writing front ends is something you learn to do.  Our own engines, by
comparison, are helpful and user friendly, because they *had* to be, since we
have multiple GMs using them and new GMs need to be able to use the *fast*.

Still, I've rambled on too long. <grin>

Steve T.

References

Re: Adventures in Licensing...
Ken Mulholland <Ken@timepatternspbm.demon.co.uk>
Fri, 12 May 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Referenced By

Re: Adventures in Licensing...
Ken Mulholland <Ken@timepatternspbm.demon.co.uk>
Fri, 12 May 2000 00:00:00 +0000