valve, wildtangent, MS, and hl2???

[tennistoad]

Ok is it just coincidence that two guys, who used to work for microsoft, have developed online distrubution services for games? Were these guys in the same meetings or what? steam is just like wildtangent in that it allows you to load buy and play through a dwnld manager account service.

I really think now that valve has delayed hl2 to get steam going and is in trouble. Just to much stuff in common...

/music from xfiles playing in background

 

[DrPowers]

nearly everyone in the industry feels as if this is the future of gaming.

AKA its not an isolated thought.

 

[DiSTuRbEd]

Wildtangent is spyware, Steam isn't. Thats the difference. How do you know hl2 is delayed?? There was never a date but the given sept 30 2003.

 

[cadaveca]

simple explanation as to why....".net"

 

[Epsi]

.net isn't a simple answer to any question. Over the last few years, Microsoft have tagged everything they can get their hands on with the '.net' tag, and it can be a little hard to understand what it really means.

To me, as a coder, it means the .net framework and CLR, which is a new way to write programs that live in a managed enviroment.

I suspect you're referring the nebulous ".net my services"/hailstorm thing. That never really happened, as I remember. I doubt we're going to see software as a service really happen any time soon.

Anyways, digital distribution of software is just logical. Look at music, for example. That's going digital in a big way, simply because the infrastructure today can support it, and it's the same with software.

 

[cadaveca]

uh, he asked what they had in common.
both were on the .net team, i believe.

i meant nothing more than that.

 

[Epsi]

What? Gabe and whoever? Oh. Right.

Gabe's leaving predates the .net team by a long way.

 

[Demonmerc]

.net does mean applications are more secure to certain attacks, like buffer overruns. Plus no pc-hardware incompatibilities.

 

[cadaveca]

What? Gabe and whoever? Oh. Right.

Gabe's leaving predates the .net team by a long way.

Gabe was part of the original .net team. Read his bio. His Microsoft bio. or email him. i'm sure he.his lackies will answer for ya.

 

[Epsi]

This is true. Arrays in .net are all objects, they throw exceptions when they overflow rather than just allowing code to go into memory and be executed.

Also, .net has something called CAS, code access security, which allows code to be run in locked-down security mode, so for example code from the internet can't access the hard discs. We'll see this more used in the next version of Windows than the version today though.

 

[Epsi]

Where is it? Gabe's MS bio?

(and damn, can't delete this post now... unless I'm being blind...)

I mean, Valve formed in about 1995. Hell, that might even predate COM. I can't see how Gabe could have been on a team that formulated anything like .net before 1995. There's a good reason that Microsoft are going .net crazy right now... .net rocks.