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Entropy

andrew-hoyer.com

31–32 of 32 posts

Re: Entropy

#31

I see an evil DRM for games, you buy a game and textures will decay over time until you buy the game again to reset the decay.

Degredation as a DRM mechanism sounds clever, and lots of developers think of it at some point (and many games have actually done it). It's actually a really bad idea, though, for a couple of reasons:

* Your support site will be flooded by pirates experiencing the degredation if it is severe enough to be noticed * People will just assume it is a bug and your game sucks if it's subtle * If it's very blatant it will be removed in the pirated versions. Meanwhile you run the risk of it happening to legitimate customers due to bugs in the DRM.

Why should you care that pirates think your game sucks? Well, for one, on the great democracy that is the internet, pirates' game reviews have just as much weight as legitimate purchasers. Also a pirate is not necessarily always a pirate, they may be trying before they buy, or may convert to a paying customer later in life and remember their experience with your company.

Re: Entropy

#32

Computers are precise but sometimes I wonder could they be made faster if we relaxed this precision requirement? For example in game 3d graphics it might acceptable to sacrifice some precision for performance. Could be interesting to apply some thing "Entropy" to the graphics part of some existing game. Flappy Bird maybe?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
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