Guys - some of you have been wondering when we would update the Napoleonic series games. Why are the older games still out of date?
In an email to me today John Tiller mentioned that he has been tied up with plenty of work such that no work could be done much on his commercial projects. Now this is a good thing for us indirectly as without the DoD work John cannot do this work. So do not groan about the fact that the DoD work is getting in the way. Hardly. Without the DoD work we would be somewhere back at Campaign Eckmuhl 1.04.
What this all means though is that sometime in the future we should see more updates coming out. I am not going to give you a hard and fast date as John has plenty of projects in the works and I will not speak for him. But you can expect to see updates out sometime this year for some of the older titles.
One of the big reasons why is that the older game engines have issues with the newer video drivers. Without the update some folks are having serious issues with playing the game. Microsoft dropped support for DirectX sometime back and the newer video drivers require code changes in John's programs in order to work.
Here is the usual answer to your concerns: John cannot guarantee that your system will work with his products. He does the best he can to ensure compatibility with existing video hardware/drivers and operating system but the Microsoft world is never a given. Rich handles your questions and does his best to help out as well.
But look at this as a positive. Because there IS a problem he WILL be putting out updates for all of the past games and probably sooner than later for the fact that he wants you to be able to not have issues in as much as he can help out.
One thing I will say ... as the hardware world runs with the 3D action games and goes to a newer format eventually one day we will have to make a choice: keep the old system and the games or move on. Obviously most of us would keep the old system along with a new one. That day will eventually come and we all will have to decide on what we will do.
For me I like our games and it would have to take a new windowed program to replace it. I do not like full screen games much (I tolerate Field of Glory because I like their interface - its bright and easy to look at). So I would just keep an old system complete with a Ghost image in case the drive dies. The problem may come that Microsoft in their usual archaic format will no longer put up with reinstalls of older operating systems. Someday you will get a message "cannot assign new serial code" when you try and reinstall Windows XP. Or your graphics card will go out and no one will make a card to fit your slot. Etc.
Its sad that the computer world runs from one thing to the next as so many good games end up not getting played. I remember the old Australian design on carriers. I have seen that they are redoing it on the Matrix site. Really fun game in that you never knew if you actually sank the enemy carrier or ship until the game was over.
Anyway, as I get closer to finishing off the titles I have left I wanted to thank all of you for your loyalty to the titles and also that I will do my best to continue to create new battles for older games. This includes titles that I originally did not work on.
Now off to work on a campaign file. Have to get the next one out the door!
