Inglonias

Redoing my YouTube comment over here, so it doesn't get drowned out. I have a very, very strange memory of this game. I actually had a copy of Journeyman Project at one time. My dad sat me down to play it with him, and there was some sort of bug that turned the volume on the Mac up as loud as it could go when the game started. The intro started playing and blasting through the speakers and I got so scared that I didn't touch the disk again for years. I must have been four years old at MOST when this happened. Years later, I did try the game again, but didn't have the manual at that point, so failed the copy protection. Later still, when I was around fifteen, I started watching Let's Plays of the series, but they didn't catch every nook and cranny of the games, so I bought all three games from eBay. This was in the WinXP era, so uh... The first two didn't work. The third one did, and I played that. It was good. A friend of mine happened to have a Win98 PC that DID run the first two games, so I left those disks with him. Around this time, someone was trying to remake the series in 3D. They even made a snazzy trailer, but damned if I can find that now. As you can probably guess, they did not remake the trilogy in 3D. You are right. The whole idea of protecting history in this way makes no sense. They fix things a little in the sequels, but... Ehhh. It's a vehicle for going to cool times/places. It seems from the end of your video that you haven't played the sequels, but they fix many of the problems that you're complaining about (and are advanced enough that you can't screw yourself over). You go to real historical sites in the second game with an AI that gives you trivia, jokes, and references. In the third game, you go to... less real historical sites... but the places you get to see have enough verisimilitude that there is still history you can learn from the AI companion. Not to mention you can go back to each timezone and keep some or all of the progress you have made when you do. In the third game, you even get a special spacesuit that can disguise you as someone relevant to each timezone you're in, so you can have actual conversations with the denizens of each time period.

Something that didn't occur to me until today. CircleDock is open source and C# based. At least the most recent version is. This might be something fun I can mess with in my off time. I emphasize might because I am very bad at sticking with projects for any amount of actual time. EDIT: Ok, so based on my research, something weird happened wtih CircleDock. The short version is that the .NET version was prototyped by one person before another developer picked up the torch. Then they basically deleted all of their work because they felt trapped by the GPL license that they had inherited. To make a long story short, the version of CircleDock you can find on SourceForge is nowhere near the most recent version of the program. Furthermore, the source code is not the same version as the compiled version of the code. There is some basic functionality missing there. Trying to make it better based on what is already in source code form would be quite a challenge.

I could get into this. AI War: Fleet Command is an asymmetric RTS set in space. You fight a pair of evil AIs that already control the galaxy. Your task is to fix that. * SkyNet In Training - Because the AI doesn't need to play like a human, the devs have focused on making it the best player-killer possible. When someone wins this game at its highest difficulty, it is considered a BUG.

I've worked as a software developer at large companies. Usually, "Good enough" is all you can shoot for. You aren't given the time nor incentive to make something truly great. Not that any one person really could, even if they had the motivation. Do you know how many lines of code are in Windows 10? 50 million. That’s 50 million lines of code written by hundreds or thousands of different people, some of whom are most certainly dead and didn’t comment their code properly, over the span of decades, since I guarantee you Microsoft wouldn’t start fresh with their flagship product. There’s still code in there from Windows 95 if for no other reason than to support some legacy compatibility modes. No one person fully understands it. To be honest, I consider it a miracle that Windows works as well as it does today. I can count the number of BSODs on my custom built gaming PC on one hand. That is an astounding achievement. To fix this problem, you said you needed experts. These experts will never exist, because the amount of time you need to gain enough experience to solve this problem is greater than the length of a career as an OS developer, designer, tester, or manager. Ramp up time would be a nightmare for any team. You’d have to pass knowledge along to others, and even with the best documentation in the world, ramp up time means that it’s simply not worth it to solve this problem for any software company, even Microsoft. I also want to say that a perfect system like you want is impossible without knowing EXACTLY what you need right from day 1, which has never happened in software development EVER. Have you ever played Factorio? You always hit a point in making your factory where you think "If I had known I needed this at the start, I would have done this section totally differently. I can either tear down EVERYTHING or accept some inefficiency." Humans, being fundamentally lazy, pick the latter unless the problem is truly too big. Requirements for software change. Constantly. You get a new customer who wants the product to do one more thing, one more feature. You didn't plan for it, and it causes some small slowdowns, but hell, let's do it. It would be cool. Or you get a security issue in that cool new thing you designed. Or the head designer who didn't take good notes dies in a car crash, or one of a million other things goes wrong. Or you're asked to write a fix on a section of the product you don't understand because the usual guy is sick and can't come in, and no, it can't wait, so you write a hack, it fixes the issue, and nobody looks at that section of code again. Tl;Dr: The nature of software development is such that "the perfect GUI" that you want will never come into existence. Especially not from Microsoft.