PlayBASIC Demo Limitations..

[kevin]

Note:

  All editions of the PlayBASIC demo will have the following functionality disabled/reduced.  

  - Can not produce stand alone exe's

  - Media limitations

  - Limit program size



P.S

 Session limit relates to how long a compiled application can run for.  Therefore limiting your programs to say  1,2,5, 10, whatever minutes of execution before they time out.

[Ian Price]

Sounds like a good idea, although I think a 1 minute time out is just a bit tooooo short - some monitors can take upto 30 seconds to refresh as a result of resolution changes - giving you only 30 secs to enjoy the title screen and perhaps a bit of the game.

Therefore I voted for no time limited sessions. In all honesty even 60 days isn't enough to explore the language properly (sure you can get a good idea). I've been playing with it for 6 months and haven't even touched on half the available command list/features.

Removing the ability to create .EXEs will be a psychological barrier enough - users will not be able to distribute games without the source - most people don't like to give away source-code, so will hopefully opt to buy the full version.

Obviously this is a big gamble and you should do what you feel is right for you and your company. I'm not sure there are any hard and fast answers that will sell PB, other than getting users to actually play with it and the games that others have created. There is a limit on how many games us PB users can out.

The more users, the more games, the more games the more potential new users there could be.

[tomazmb]

Hello,

Just my opinion. People will start to buy PB more when it hit the 3D and have all the top-rated stuff from directx 9.0. 2D is probably for a lot of wanna-be programmers "to limited". It's allright to have 2D and directX 3 compatibility to work on a much of PC's as possible. But are those people which have such a low-end computers really a market target. I wonder?

Have a nice day,

Tomaz

[IanM]

Basically, I'm with Ian Price's suggestion. Full featured PB and editor, no time limits, no running time limits. You might even want to include the watermark idea, if you can tie it tightly enough into the VM.

[kevin]

I actually voted for option (4) myself..  As having the product expire, just seems too detrimental to the products growth at this time.

[thaaks]

Option (4) is okay. The other limitations (no .exe compilation, media and program size limitations) are enough I think.

If the current aim is a growing customer base PlayBasic needs to be as useful as possible.

[kevin]

An alternative limitation (from the TGC forums) could be a total usage time, rather than a fixed session time limit.  So the Runtime could record the length of each (successful) execution.  So the PB demo would only time out if it's used been from more than X number of hours in total.     Which I think is an equally interesting approach.    As it leave an incentive for heavy users without totally limiting casual users also.

[Ian Price]

That could still be a problem though Kevin - how would you record whether the user had just left their machine on with PB running?

What if the user was creating maps for a game? - they can take ages.

Who says that eg 1000 hours for a user is sufficient to learn a language/play with it's abilities? Exactly how long is a fair usage of a product? How long is a piece of string?

It is a bit of a doozy...

[kevin]

While we are looking at easing the limitations in this interim period, it's unlikely  future revisions would appear without some type of time/usage limit.  

 So if a future edition had a 1000 hour (runtime) usage allocation.  

 A person would have to run their game/example  24/7 for 41.67 days straight before it expired.  

 1000/10 hours per day = 100/31 = 3.2 months  

 1000/5 hours per day = 200/31 = 6.4 months  

  Given that users control their usage, that seems like a fairer system to me.    And for those hitting the limit, well this is business and that's certainly going to be stretching the boundaries of  reasonable use.   For a passive user, they'd most likely be able to use the demo or the best part of a year.   When If it expired, they could just revert to an older demo..

[Ian Price]

When you put it like that, it does indeed sound a pretty good deal. I presume that would also remove .EXE creation?

[kevin]

The demos won't (ever) have any export ability.  It's too easily abused.

[Ian Price]

Agreed :)

[Jeku]

I don't think a session limit would work well, as quite often I use PB for menial non-gaming tasks (i.e. file stripper, fast-fourier analysis, etc.) which would never be used for more than a minute before closing.  PB has been quite fast for me using it for non-gaming things actually :)

I think having no expiration on the IDE is fair, as people will not be able to export EXE files anyways.  An interesting question, no doubt.