Hi Philip, Yes, that is the case. USA Games is a business, but is privately owned by me and I am owner, developer, and treasurer all in one. My partner, if you want to call her that is my wife, which will occasionally answer sales questions, send product keys, whatever but her income and my income from the games is the same, but there is no question that the business is really mine. Also, like you, I higher people to do certain aspects of the software development like a composer for the music, a sound company to create/produce game sounds, maybe a voice actor for voice work, etc. They don’t work for USA games directly, but are hired on for a specific job or aspect of development like what you have done for Streemway etc. As for cross-platform support I completely understand as I have the same conclusions as far as supporting Mac or Linux commercially goes. However, as you might have seen from my post earlier after I’m done with Mysteries of the Ancients I’d like to create an open source version of my Genesis Engine, Open G3D, that the community can use to produce games for Mac, Linux, Windows, whatever. I’m not sure on the licensing details, but this version of the engine would basically be intended for freeware and shareware games and wouldn’t be intended for big commercial projects the way BGT or Genesis 3D would be. USA Games is here to make commercial games so Linux and Mac would be an extra expense in producing, and I’m not looking at commercial games for those platforms either. Still it would be nice to have something available for those platforms as there are some VI users for Mac and Linux that would certainly appreciate some games including myself. However, I’ve done some game development on the Linux side and it is a decent game development platform if you use things like OpenGL, OpenAL, etc. However, there are still some game features like force feedback controllers that aren’t yet supported by SDL and that is a bit of a drawback. The other thing is that on Linux the default voice is ESpeak and that is no better than Microsoft Sam. I can’t stand the voice, and to get decent TTS support you have to buy and support something like AT&T Natural Voices, Dectalk, or the Cepstral Swift engine which all have their own individual APIs. Speech-Dispatcher doesn’t yet support commercial TTS engines which means a game developer would have to write his or her own wrapper library for the various commercial engines, and own the development kits for each to do it properly. That is without a doubt a serious drawback to creating a commercial engine for Linux.I personally have a copy of Cepstral Callie and the Dectalk software for Linux and I could give such a project a start, but I don’t have the AT&T SDK nor the Eloquence SDK so obviously my Sapi-like wrapper library would be incomplete. It would cost more time and money than it is worth for me to invest in all the various development kits to support the commercial engines which is why Speech-Dispatcher doesn’t support something like Eloquence for Linux. I think the Eloquence SDK is $300 or something like that which is almost the price of BGT Pro, and I doubt I could get my investment back selling to the small community of VI Linux users at this time. So the answer is to create a free and open source engine that wraps the open source game APIs, perhaps ESpeak for TTS if desired, and allows a developer to create games for Mac or Linux without the developer such as myself spending a lot of money trying to create and market a commercial engine.
Smile. On 7/15/10, Philip Bennefall <phi...@u7142039.fsdata.se> wrote: > Hi Thomas, > > I'm glad to hear that you like the new pricing structure. I decided to make > it Windows only for now, because my impression is that the majority of blind > gamers are using Windows. Thus, porting to Mac or Unix at this point would > probably be just an expense rather than a profit. In a few years, we'll see, > but I will be sticking with Windows for the time being. > > As for the company license, I haven't quite defined that part yet. Blastbay > Studios is a registered business but it's still run by a single individual, > much the same as with USA Games if I'm not mistaken. Thus, it wouldn't make > sense for me to charge you for a full site license if you do decide to order > BGT. I'll have to leave this question open for the time being, but if you > wish to order it you'd be paying the same price as everyone else. If you had > a larger business with several staff members, that'd be different. > > Kind regards, > > Philip Bennefall --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gam...@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
