Messages

1

Support / Re: Vista Save Files Location / Save files not showing up in Continue

« on: January 31, 2008, 08:07:32 am »

As a somewhat late follow-up, there are three possible solutions here (from an end-user standpoint):

1) Run Aquaria as an Administrator. This should bypass all of the above.

2) Add your user (Or Everyone) with Full privileges to the Aquaria savegame directory.

3) Install Aquaria somewhere outside of %ProgramFiles%.

2

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 19, 2007, 08:41:23 pm »

And from the standpoint of advertisers, its not worth it if its unobtrusive. Because if its unobtrusive, then its ineffective. And there is no point in paying large amount of money if its ineffective.

Not true!

If the ad is intrusive, it is worth *LESS* than if it is subtle. People are more likely to remember the ad if it pisses them off, but less likely to buy the product or recommend it to their friends.

3

Gameplay / Re: Ixis' Treasure Hunter's FAQ

« on: December 17, 2007, 04:11:39 am »

It should be noted that it is not actually necessary to have the spirit form in order to get the walker baby, as the walker blocking it is killable like all walkers.  Exactly why spirit crystals are there then is a mystery...

RIP ethics...

4

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 16, 2007, 02:12:32 am »

I don't suppose statistical significance means anything to you.

I'll also direct your attention to the key terms "at least" and "more than". Ten times may be an extremely conservative estimate for all you know. But even if it were as low as fractionally more copies the point may still be valid, as the actual figure is irrelevant to the argument.

The actual figure DOES matter. You also have to remember that there are plenty of people who download just to download, and many websites which will download the patches in order to host them. There are also people who will download the patch thinking that it will patch a demo, and people who downloaded the patch instead of the demo, be it a misclick or stupidity.

I also pointed out that a cum hoc fallacy is impossible to disprove - the 'ten times' figure may indeed be perfectly accurate, but there's no way to tell.

You're very right about that - I thought a similar thing myself when i first read it. I quoted the paragraph mostly because it was the first, and that it made sense out-of-context - not because it was representative of the entire piece. My mistake!

The reason I posted the link was because Chris takes a sort of middle-way and discusses some of the problems with the binary reasoning people use when talking about intellectual property. I have heard others make this argument in more elaborate manners before, but seeing as Introversion are quite big in indie circles, I figured the fact that he posted it should increase interest in the article enough to warrant it being posted.

I should probably have read the whole thing, but I posted from work and didn't have the chance. :p

5

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 15, 2007, 04:11:34 am »

Chris Delay from Introversion posted some interesting thoughts on it awhile ago;

"...there were at least ten times as many pirate copies of Uplink and Darwinia as there were legitimate sales. How do we know? Patches available on our website which only work on the full games have been downloaded more than ten times the sales totals of their games. Now hard-line corporate types will tell you this means they've lost 10 x sales x price million dollars based on this, but thats just nonsense. Would all 10 of those 11 users have ever bought the game? No, of course not. But 1 out of 10 of them might, and that would have doubled our sales and made us very happy devs indeed. "

http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=1046

This is a blatant cum hoc fallacy (it is possibly true, but impossible to verify or disprove, for the record).

'there were at least ten times as many pirate copies... as there were legitimate sales...'
OK, that's a reasonable statement. Prove it.
'Patches available on our website which only work on the full games have been downloaded more than ten times the sales totals of their games'
That fails to account for people who installed the game on a desktop and a laptop (arguably piracy, but certainly people who are never going to buy the second copy), individuals who had to redownload the patches multiple times due to reinstalls/hardware failure/upgrades, individuals who downloaded the file as 'run' instead of 'save as' and crashed after completion (and individuals who didn't complete the download - did the count include only finished downloads, or did it include people on dialup who attempted to download the patch 100 times?), and on and on and on.

This is like saying that 2,000,000,000,000 peanuts were eaten in Georgia last year, so the population of Georgia must be 2,000,000,000,000.

6

Support / Re: Save files not showing up in Continue

« on: December 14, 2007, 06:55:59 am »

If you have access to the c:\program files\aquaria directory, you could create a save directory there and add them.

But I'm not really sure what Vista is trying to do. It seems to move the files around.

Security. Vista doesn't allow the user access to certain areas, hence the "VirtualStore" directory. I suppose in *n*x terms, you could consider it a symbolic link, though that's not exactly right.

If a program fails a privilege check when attempting to write to, and this is just an example:

%PROGRAMFILES%/Aquaria/Save

UAC will intercept the call and redirect it to:

%USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/Program Files/Aquaria/Save

In a perfect world, the application will then read from:

%USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/Program Files/Aquaria/Save

every time the program makes a call to:

%PROGRAMFILES%/Aquaria/Save

but in practice, this isn't always the case, since the program might not read files in the same way it wrote them.
In the case of Aquaria, it seems that this goes as follows:

(For simplicity's sake, I'm going to refer to both the user and the program as Aquaria, but I think you can follow)

Aquaria writes to %PROGRAMFILES%/Aquaria/Save/save-0000.aqs, fails the privilege check (Non-elevated accounts are NOT allowed to *WRITE* to %PROGRAMFILES%), and is redirected by UAC to %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/Program Files/Aquaria/Save/save-0000.aqs, where the data is written.
(We'll ignore screen-0000.zga , since I'd just be repeating myself repeating myself.)

Aquaria then later attempts to get a listing from %PROGRAMFILES%/Aquaria/Save/ , and sees.... nothing. Aquaria passed the privilege check (Non-elevated accounts ARE allowed to *READ* from %PROGRAMFILES%), and gets the *real* directory listing - which contains nothing, since Aquaria was never allowed to write into that directory. What is Aquaria to do but report that there are no saves? It can't see them, of course, so they must not exist!

Ah, but if Aquaria had specifically requested %PROGRAMFILES%/Aquaria/Save/save-0000.aqs , UAC would have redirected Aquaria to %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/Program Files/Aquaria/Save/save-0000.aqs, because UAC remembers when Aquaria asked to create save-0000.aqs and was sent somewhere else.

This is, of course, simplified a little bit. Other things may be going on that I'm not aware of, and there are certainly a few flaws in the real world vs. UAC-theory. That's the explanation in a nutshell, though.

*edit* Those code-boxes were too damned big.*edit*

7

Gameplay / Re: *SPOILERS* Giant Jellyfish Help Please.

« on: December 11, 2007, 06:12:56 am »

I don't think there's any choice for that miniboss, you *have* to take the hits. It spawns jellyfish far, far, far faster than you can kill them.

Dual form would make it a little easier, though.

8

Gameplay / Re: Gaint Octopus Boss help

« on: December 11, 2007, 06:09:56 am »

Well, you run the risk of getting hit by the tentacle...

Really, though, you can mostly ignore the little squids, since they just blind you.

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Gameplay / Re: Nature form!

« on: December 11, 2007, 06:07:28 am »

Awesome, thanks Quemaqua. I had remembered those bulbous bunkers but didn't think they were organic! Nice.

I'm trying to delay fighting the boss in the Cathedral as much as I can- is the only song in the Cave of Song (did I get that right?) Bind?

Yes, it is. You can get something else there, though.

10

Gameplay / Re: Ixis' Treasure Hunter's FAQ

« on: December 11, 2007, 04:41:44 am »

I didn't have Cold Soup. I may be missing one more, but I have both Hot and Cold Borscht.

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General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 11, 2007, 04:40:46 am »

You can't stop it - there's no point in trying, since it wastes effort you can devote to more worthwhile things.

The best you can do is hope that the people who play it will eventually pay for it. Keep in mind that the majority of people who pirate it _never_ intended to buy it (or can't afford it, $30 is a ton of money to some), so you aren't really 'losing' many (if any) sales.

12

Gameplay / Re: Ixis' Treasure Hunter's FAQ

« on: December 11, 2007, 04:25:48 am »

Grr, still need ~14 recipes!

Magic Soup and Royal Soup will get us to 10 full pages, but there are three pages left!

13

Gameplay / Re: Cooking ingredients and where to get them.

« on: December 11, 2007, 04:03:26 am »

As far as I've been able to tell, there only appear to be 4 Special Bulbs in the game, appearing after a few bosses.

14

Gameplay / Re: Ixis' Treasure Hunter's FAQ

« on: December 10, 2007, 09:08:03 pm »

Still missing 2 or 3 pages of recipes, too.

15

General / Re: Soundtrack

« on: December 10, 2007, 06:41:29 pm »

Stuff like this looks kind of cool:

http://www.firebrandinc.com/Firebrand-Pricing-Replicated-CD.html

But there's probably some place where they do everything for you.

For a small developer or indie musician, it really only works if you have a guaranteed number of orders. Depending on pricing and preordering, you can move up a tier in duplication (1-500 to 501-1000, etc etc.) without breaking the bank. The key word here is "preordering".