rec.autos.simulators

How come as soon as NASCAR 2 comes out papyrus stops caring about every
other sim they have made? You hear about busch series sets for n2 but
nothing for n1? I know you get people saying well get nascar 2. I don't
have the money to upgrade my system to race nascar 2!(I wish I could)
Even so you don't see record companies stop making cassets.  I think
papyrus should even out there work so nascar 1 and even irc2 can get
some new products to add to their sim enjoyment
                         James Willoughby

--
Sit down,,Strap in,,Shut up,,Hang on,,Go fast,,Turn left,,Kiss Trophy
Girl
GGGGGGgoooo #3,,,31,,,28,,,94,,,6,,,5,,,18,,,8,,,
                                                        Handy^man

Critical mass is important in software development.  Sierra sees that there
is a critical mass of users that have the capability to run the new
software thus concentrating on the platform.  I hope that they abandon the
DOS side and start using DirectX and other technologies so that we even get
more realistic.

I don't believe that by virtue of a program being written for DOS, it
becomes less realistic, nor is DirectX something that inherently adds or
supports realism in a simulation (or app of any kind).

Clearly, the opposite is true, since fewer system resources (mainly, memory
and processor utilization) would be utilized by such things as big, slow,
and fat DirectX - not to mention big, slow and fat Win 95.  (Before this
goes further, DirectX *is* Sloooow - but it is a step in the right direction
when compared with tools commonly available to games developers creating for
previous versions of Windows.)

However, DOS developers are faced with the challenge of writing apps with
little, or no, common APIs. This (usually) increases the development time,
since there is less reusable code, not to mention the fact that the hardware
layer is not abstracted (meaning programs must be written in many cases to
explicitly support the many different hardware setups in existence).  With
the Windows, and DirectX, programming APIs,  more complex apps/games can be
produced within a marketable time frame, using fewer programming resources.
This is one major way that Microsoft sold the idea to developers for writing
programs for Windows, and later, DirectX.

In an ideal world <g> games/apps/operating systems would be written with a
more minimilistic approach to system resource utilization.  However, it has
become unrealistic to expect that developers can spend time/money
fine-tuning their apps/games/OS's to run in the most optimized state, as
time-to-market becomes an issue ("whoever releases first, gets the buck
first") -- not to mention the nearly exponential increase in program
complexity on the PC platform.
--
 Philip M. D'Amato

 >>>>>=======comanche bowmen==brooklyn ny usa==========>
 My Current High Scores Since 12/96
Indoor
 NFAA 300:   275   5/21/97
 FITA 450:   397  2/28/97
FITA 600:  483 3/22/97

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--                        

Another issue would be th size of the market. I'd guess the N1 market
is shrinking fast. Perhaps you'd be willing to pay three or four times
as much for the N1 Busch pack to help offset the production costs
for such a small market. Speaking of market size, I'd bet we won't
see any track packs the Nascar MAC version for a while<BG>

Mike Radler

Hawaii Ace League http://www.dithots.org/hal

NASCAR came out 3 years ago, and NASCAR 2 is its replacement. The reason
you don't see anything for ICR2 is because Papy isn't allowed to do
anything with it anymore.

N1 is a dead product, as it should be IMNSHO. Record companies long ago
stopped making 8-tracks, and most have stopped pressing wax. (In
computer game terms, a 1994 game really is about the same as a vinyl
record...)

---Jim