I couldn't resist offering some suggestions
 

This is going to get nowhere. Graal is an extremely cheap online rpg when compared to others.

If people don't want to support Graal and pay 15 dollars to play the classic servers, they don't need to be here. I'm sure there is no one here that could not pay 15 dollars. That's like less than you spend eating lunch at school for a week. That's like a large pizza and soda's. That's like 1/4th of a videogame. That's like 3 movie rentals.

I mean seriously, there is no point in making Graal free, unless you just like seeing Graal fall into a pit of despair. If Graal is free, nobody could afford the servers, and they would be taken down, and there would be no Graal. Sorry, but I'm closing this topic unless someone finds a reasonable and legal way to provide free Graal without Graal losing money.

Above quote by Konidias

my reply:
Although I agree 500% that 15 bucks is DIRT cheap I, being the argumentative jerk that I am, had to offer some solutions, #1 banner advertising is able to keep some servers on popular things up (::points at gamefaqs.com where banner advertising supports them for quite a good web server::) if you forced them to click a banner before playing each time this could (theoretically) work.

#2) Corporate endorsement, sell graal to some big wig company like Blizzard who will provide bettere management, and only make you pay once (like for Diablo)

#3) Threaten to send nude pictures of Birdbird (<3 birdo) across the world in a giant chain letter, governments will cave in and support you with billions of dollars to prevent such a catastrophe.

Re: I couldn't resist offering some suggestions
 

1) (If there is a 1)
Promoting graal by banner Ads in major hitting gamer websites could really bring in the players

2) Then Graal won't be graal anymore, it would be a diablo spinoff =X

3) Whats wrong with Birdo Nuddies I think anybody would be pleasured to see birdo in the buff!

ahh, but you have to consider the elements children.

- gameplay: the game is ran by the players for the players. it's a bit ironic, eh? i mean, you buy an account and its fate resides with other players. the staff make the decisions, not you... unless you have a buddy who makes you staff and approves of your honesty. ;)

- graphics: the graphics are mediocre. they are perfect for this game, i love the visuals! really, you don't find a unique game like this anywhere else. yet some people don't fancy the 2D style.

- replay value: you would think with all the servers/playerworlds there would always be something new, right? nope, you're wrong. even if this was the case, you'd have to jump from server to server to find new content and god knows how hard it is to even find an update on a server... :(

- reliability: unfortunately, when something bad happens to someone in a game, the player isn't going to go brag about being banned and tell everyone "whoa, graal rules! i got banned.", "you can't curse on the forums or share accounts.", and so on. the best advertisement is word of mouth. this game is a game of 'ups' and 'downs', and hard to predict what will happen next.

- originality: the best feature of this game, despite the original concept being ripped from zelda! you can build your own world; levels, NPCs, graphics and all. but there's a double-sided sword to this comfort, once you submit your playerworld, it's GraalOnline's property. heh, you are paying to bring in more bang for the buck. whatever floats your boat, bub! though this is one of the best factors about Graal, it also discourages some other factors...

well, that's my two cents. let the flames begin!

this man speaks the truth. loev. <3

sorry for stealing/buying your Fool Cap when i was an auctioneer, back then. i've never been able to cope with that, until now.

I think they should sell the source code so that people can make their own spinoff versions and host them for themselves...

but make it so that they can still communicate via a universal client :)

500 bucks per sale sounds right to me... they can keep their own little game here but I think it would be cool if people could make their own for a one time fee and they would upgrade/optimize graal making it even better than before :) from players for players like a few of you said :)

I dont like the idea of the people stealing source code though... there should be some dependency er somethin that wont allow people to just dload the source compile it and run it....

You can buy graal's engine, it pretty much cost 5000000 or something check the cyberjourours (sp?) website

No, you can not. That is far outdated. cyberjoueurs would be the right spelling.

Oh, you can't anymore? :(

It was at their Corporate Center:
http://www.cyberjoueurs.com/

the player run aspect of graal is certainly a double edged sword, but thats really what makes the whole game. What's the basic outlook of every new player who wanders around, they wanna be staff! They want it to say (LAT) next to their name or something and to make their server better. That's what makes graal. OK, my two cents have been added...pretty soon we're gonna have a dollar.

I didn't read anything up there, i'm too lazy.
Anyway, mabey only 3-4 PWs will stay as "classic" so there is more bandwith for Graal Kingdoms which needs it since it lags like hell. =/ This would also allow the other servers to run on one server.

Graal Kingdoms has its own server

Since Graal Kingdom is on its own server, your computer must suck or you're using 56k. :p

Stefan please read your forum pms :(

Re: I couldn't resist offering some suggestions
 

Nope. You may be too green to remember, but we tried it. Nobody clicked and Graal got deeper into debt.

That's a great idea! For five years ago, when the Nasdaq was climbing and there were more venture capitalists than .coms! But hey, guess what? The economy's changed since then! Blizzard ain't gonna pay to host Graal, and they ain't gonna pay to host a free game - and they CERTAINLY ain't gonna cover Cyberjoueur's debts accrued over the free period!

Correction - Unixmad is a highranking engineer for the second largest ISP in France. That's how Graal got hosted in the first place, he had access to some spare servers - or so I am told.

Golly. So by extension we should expect Bill Gates to give out Windows for free, since he doesn't need to pay for it and he's even richer?
Let me explain, once again, a key economic concept that is too often overlooked in these discussions - debt. Unixmad covered Graal's expenses out of pocket for the last couple years. You can't just NOT pay off these debts because he's an individual rather than a bank!

See above: Rising Nasdaq. Netzero used to be free too, why aren't you complaining about that?

Godforbid there should be capitalists in a capitalist society.

I will, however, merit that the inability to save on a classic server (even under a limited basis) has severely crippled Graal's primary draw - the community. We all knew it was going to cut Graal back considerably when it went P2P, and we all decided we weren't going to miss the haxorz and newbies, but G2K1 is now way too big for its population...Classic's barren...one begins to miss the newbies, they were the lifeblood of this operation.
Unfortunately, if one lets them save, it increases the bandwidth concern and gives them no reason to register...if one limits the time saved to only the first 2 hours a week, that's slightly better but both gives them reason to play only occasionally and encourages multi-account usage...
As soon as Graal turns a profit (ie as soon as Graal pays off its R&D debts), the income's gotta start going to advertisment. Maybe even earlier. If the community goes, there won't be enough of Graal left to draw new newbies...just lookit eBay, they live on their community, when they attacked them they nearly tanked.

Incidentally, STOP CLOSING THREADS! Jeezus guys, here we are trying to maintain a sense of equality and community and you censor everything which remotely challenges the preconceptions? Threaten to ban people who reopen threads? I'll admit some threads have to die, but discussion and amicable debate is the core of a democratic society!

Re: Re: I couldn't resist offering some suggestions
 

Tyhm is smart :D

well put tyhm.

It does not matter by the speed of your connection, it matters by the speed of your processor, that amount or RAM you have, and the amount of power to your Video Card. I have a cable modem, 53mb of RAM, and only a 7mb video card. ;(
So no wonder it lags. But why does it lag for Graal, when nothing from Blizzard does? I know they have more developers and higher gros for their games. But god, why does graal lag so much =/

Where's your processor speed in this?

Anyways, cable modem = ++good.

53 megabytes of RAM = UNPOSSIBLE.

Yes, Graal2001 has become like more of a club where everyone knows eachother then a server, however, it has maintained it's uniqueness.

he most likely has 64 MB psychical RAM, and some of it is allocated as onboard video memory -- if not, then there are other reasons for it showing up as 53 MB, such as bad memory chips/banks or just bad software reports for example

connection speed does matter but so do those other things.... the key problems is... BAD CODING! there is too much data transfer which is eating more bandwidth than needed and also causes more strain on the server causing more lag for everyone.
The more connections to the server the slower it will go, the way the servers are setup could also be a problem...

Blizzards games could be coded in a language that can process things faster or they could have faster servers/connection
main problem is the way it was coded though...



BTW when they had the sell thing at cyberjoueurs.com I think it was they managed it but you could add your own ad support and all of that crap... that means you paid them to make a server for you.

Source code sale would be a really nice thing...

somethin I was thinkin about... if source code was sold servers that are modified/enhanced beyond the ability of the current client, software modules could be created for the client, when connecting to the server a routine could tell it which module to use so that custom games can be created within the same game...

so lets say I want to make a brand new game I buy the graal sourcode and rewrite it in C. Its really great because its faster but I think it could be faster if the client was rewritten, so what I do is write a module that would make data transfer faster. Now that it is running awsome and is really fast even when 100 people are online at one time I want to add a particle engine and custom DX stuff to make magic spells and everything sexier.
I would also be able to release modules automatically from my server and update my server any time I needed....

This would all be very sexy and could cause servers to be more diversed and different type of games can be made inside the game "psuedo" games we could call em :)

All this would be working using current users and a main exe listing servers :) this would also be good because people could create things to make the game accept different type of input devices like video Camera's, Streaming Radio, Special types of game controlers

this would be awsome and I am sure it would help graal... I know I would buy the source if it was only 200-500 dollars...

also ports of the game could be made to Mac and linux to allow EVERYONE TO PLAY!

when it has to do with Windows' programs, C isn't faster than Delphi -- they're nearly even, yet Delphi compiles much faster which is probably the main reason that Stefan likes it

(as a bad example) if you were to compile a very basic Windows API call such as CreateWindow without using Delphi's standard forms.pas, I believe that it would be exactly (or very close to) the same compiled code as if it were done in C ... Delphi's code isn't interpreted by a runtime library as VB's is

Graal runs very very good for me on my home computer and I only have 48kbps connection...On the other hand I have 1.2 GHz processor, 512 DRAM, and plenty of free hard-drive space.

I've played Graal on some other computers in the past and they all lagged g2k2 horribly. Wasnt even worth playing with the kind of lag I had. Even gfx seemed worse keke.

C would be my preference, and the point isnt about the language it is ported to but what extra things developers could create on their own without having to wait for stefan to update anything.

I knew that

I was just letting people know that Delphi isn't bad (because I use and like it) since it can do anything that C/C++ compilers can do and faster

although it's not as widely used on operating systems other than Windows and occassionally Linux (with or without Kylix), but could be

___

about the source code being available to the public:

yes, I'd (also) like to be able to modify and add a lot of it, but there are a lot of problems that outweigh the benefits of releasing it I think..

believing that more than a few people would want to do something with it, how would it with all of the different ideas, different coding styles, distances between us and simultaneous modifications (including from Stefan) etc. be easily done?
it would take a lot of organization, unless we maybe only submitted code segments to Stefan (which would also take time to get approved and modified if needed)

besides this, you also mentioned using a different language, which would take more time to initially do and then later for translating back to the original, unless you weren't planning on giving any of the updates back, which wouldn't benefit us much again unless we had mulitple releases of the Graal client and server, which would probably be confusing and possibly even time-consuming for the majority of players -- if you'd be planning on starting your own server and client at a different place, that would possibly take customers away from here and most likely wouldn't be approved

there are also other problems such as people using the code to create their "own game" with a different name and not even giving credit to Graal, cheaters learning more about the client (and server(?)) for their advantage and being able to modify sections to exploit certain things at their will.. the list could go on and on, so I don't understand how much good can come out of this besides people having personal fun with it, but that's just my opinion (I'm sure that you'll post yours)

[added]
having "modules" for a modified client and/or server most likely wouldn't work too well.. it would have to allow the other servers and clients to run on their own

having some type of server scripting language and a more low-level client scripting language might be an alternative, but obviously wouldn't allow total customization (read the rest of my post about this)
[/added]

First off it wouldnt be free, and I would hope that the people that did buy it wouldnt release it.

The module thing I was talking about was, each server could automatically send their module to each client so they may play on that modified/enhanced server making the server owner responsible for updating their client module, so there wont be a need to universally update the client anymore (after the proper modifications to allow modules was added of course)

The only thing that graal would universally share would be users and account info so technically brand new games could be made all tied into the graal user base.

People would most likely make their own game but wouldnt get the user base if they didnt tie their server into the network. They wouldnt be allowed to buy the source if they werent going to tie into the network, hopefully.

Every Server would actually run on their own, that is the point of having the source and running your own server. So "hackers" and all of that is your problem not graal's.

The scripting language would be updated depending on you want to do with your server, or auto updates could be enabled downloading updates made by stefan/others could be incorperated so that you wouldnt have to addon to the existing language.

Having your modules and server in a different language wouldnt matter if you werent going to help in the general development of the server/game but some would like to stay using delphi and return source to other server owners/developers to update their client with their modifications

What's the point of buying Graal's source code if you're just going to "redo" it and make it a "whole new game"? I just think that it's not worth doing if you know how to program enough to make any good modifications, and in that case you should do just that, make a new game. There aren't millions (or close to that amount) of players on Graal, so why would you even worry about the same user database? If you want your friends etc. to come play your game, then invite them to. I mean, I'm not against anyone trying to help, but I don't believe that a lot of people editing the source code for many different servers and clients will actually help much; I do believe that more "official" programmers would though, so try getting hired! Now tell me that you don't live in France and probably wouldn't get hired anyway etc. :(

I don't know, I just don't believe that this should happen.. good luck to whoever wants it to.

Any way you look at it,Graal online still gets the 200-500$ that the person payed for it.Have the buy sign a binding contract that makes then keep the information secret,and you should be fine.Its 2 AM,and this was just off the top of my head,so don't flame me.:|

Re: I couldn't resist offering some suggestions
 

I could see your point there, but i heard something going around, that they are still taking down like all the servers besides like 5, even though we still pay $15 dollars now. Oh well, cant keep your word for everything.

Re: I couldn't resist offering some suggestions
 

1.) Yes. I like spending my money on essentials. I need food, not Graal. Thanks. (Ghostie said banners. They're fine, just no GOD DAMNED POP-UPS ON WEBSITES@#$@#%@WEFSDG) I don't want to spend $50+ a month on Graal like I do clothes. Just because I pay for something more than something else doesn't mean I need to spend that much money on something else. If I build a computer for $1,000, I'm not going to pay an extra thousand just to play Graal.

2.) Graal needs money, yes, but that doesn't mean you need to charge people an arm and a leg on games. I don't usually use level editors, but Graal's editor is very easy to use. Anyone with a brain and a mouse (and preferrably a finger or two) can use the editor. I'm going off the topic, though.

3.) You go back to the money thing. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." GO is doing good as it is.

4.) Why would LC want to sell their main game to a big company? They lose power over it. Not all power, but it's like giving "COMPANY" level 4 RC, and Stefan/Unix/Koni/etc. get level 1. Not good.

5.) I don't want to see naked pictures of Birdbird. I already have the whole collection. >:] ;p

ibonic its not to make your own game only, some would just want the original game and have it update whenever stefan updates it. This would be for people that want to host their own server and be in control of the entire environment.

But for the other people that want to make seperate games, its for the userbase! So when they open up they wont have to worry about advertizing and all of that... the #1 reason *besides being a crappy game* most games fail is because there is no advertisement no one spreads the word about the good game.

I guess there is no reason to give feedback.. its not like it would happen, even though it wouldnt hurt them.... 500 bucks is 500 bucks

^--- stole what I said.

I didnt even notice your post lol