ericgorr

Unfortunately, that really won't work. I am sure I am not alone in filtering out those people who don't have the games I want to play. Plus, I like my icon already. Perhaps what would work well is if a few people who can get permission to run an IRC bot could set up a group there. That would work better then that ICQ active list, which as near as I can tell, does not exist for the Mac yet.

The issue is one of time: we don't have any. -- Perhaps, but unless you look into it, you cannot really don't know for sure. Have you even bothered contacting GameRanger at all to at least get some details? Based on comments, I'm guessing you haven't. -- Any time one adds support for a third-party library it's going to take a nontrivial amount of effort, even just to modify the game's interface alone. -- Again, this seems to demonstrate how little you understand about how trivial it may be to provide support for GameRanger. Many games don't require any interface changes at all. They have simply provided a special path through the interface to support GameRanger. I would encourage you to at least send the e-mail and find out.

It wasn't an insult. I was stating a fact. You haven't looked into it and really don't know how difficult it would be. Your decision is based, at least in part, on pure ignorance. I have a feeling that if it took < 60 minutes to provide the support, the decision would likely change. Does it? I don't know and neither do you. You clearly don't have any understanding of the importance of GameRanger to Macintosh internet gaming. I find this to be an unfortunate attitude on your part.

How in the world do you know if you don't have the time or the resources to do it if you won't even consider looking into it at this time? It cannot *possibly* be very difficult if even Deadlock, long after it became largely a dead game and was never that popular to begin with, was able to achieve GR support. Look into it first and then decide. To make a decision based in pure ignorance is simply stupid.

The reply came from: matt@battlefront.com It seems clear that they haven't even looked into the issue at all. Personally, I would be willing to wait a bit longer for the final release of the TCP/IP patch for the Mac if it meant it had GR support from the start.

I asked about GameRanger Support and got the following back: -- We will not be natively supporting any third party TCP/IP service or add-on as there just isn't time. That doesn't mean we will not look at such options the future though. I am not familiar with the particulars of Gameranger but with services like Mplayer or Microsofts Gamezone they charge hefty fees to be hosted which pretty much prevents us from being hosted there. They also are usually wary of hosting games where only 2 people can connect at a time as it limits the amount of potential customers they will receive. -- I find this very unfortunate and would encourage every Mac player to write and request they support GameRanger.

I would like to see a way to link units together for a couple of different purposes. 1. All of the linked units travel a fast as the slowest unit in the group. 2. Along with the ability to select a lead unit, all of the unit units will walk on the exact same ground as the lead unit. Of course, these two items would be subject to command/control considerations, etc. This would provide, for example, the ability to link several vehicles together, select a lead vehicle and then be able to specify a path along a road just once, making play more efficient. If such things are possible now, I would be interested in learning how to accomplish this. The Pause command just doesn't seem to be enough to keep a group of units together. I believe such features would not violate the concept of being realistic.