Hello game industry,

I know I'm not the only one who's choking on the recent news, but is it really necessary for you to charge MORE for content that should have been in the game but wasn't ready when the game was released?

The just-released Samurai Warriors 2 (360) requires that you purchase most of the extra characters, special items, and even special combos after you've already paid more than you wanted to for the game itself.

Grand Tourismo 5/HD (PS3) will ship with only a handful of cars and tracks, requiring you to pay MONEY for the additional tracks. What ever happened to having the content ready for the shipping date and letting me unlock them?

Just-announced: Grand Theft Auto IV (360) will ship, and then a month or two later, two or three new sub-missions will become available for purchase. Uhh, hello??? These things are usually included in the game to add depth and make the game world a bit richer.

See, with Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (360/PC) the add-ons made sense (except for the "horse armor" add-on which was rather pointless and EXPENSIVE): The game world was SOO huge, and the included game content was already richer than players could have even hoped. Once the players had finished the game and were almost done playing it a second time (or not even finished the first time yet), it was really great that Bethesda spent a little extra time to give us a few new story arcs or mega-items to go and collect. It was really great. But the point is, that the game dosn't make you feel like you HAVE to go and buy the extras to enjoy it.

Project Gotham 2 (360) is another example of a game that got it right. The game was fun and complete and enjoyable. It had the expected variety of cars and tracks. Online play was actually better than I had expected. Then they started releasing additional cars. Would it really have hurt them to include the cars with the game when it shipped? I think the price on the additional cars was a bit high too. At least the bundles gave you a discount.....but definately not enough of one.

Revewers should rate/review the game based on SHIPPING/INCLUDED content only. The game should be fun, playable, and COMPLETE when I walk out of the game store with it. Any add-ons should be reasonably priced. How about the following for pricing guidelines:

Driving games: $0.50-$1 for a new car. $2 for a new track.
RPGs: something like $1 per additional hour of play for new missions/storylines.
Fighters: $0.75-$1.25 for a new character in a fighter. But forget $5 for another playable character in a game that already has like 30 of them.

Anyone who knows me knows 2 things:

1) Internationalization is my bag. Between having non-english-speaking girlfriends for a long time, and helping their friends/family/relatives/etc with computer issues, I've made knowing of internationalization issues one of my pet projects. Coworkers know that I always insist on using Unicode as often as possible in my software, and that I almost always have an eye towards globalization.

2) I have a lot of non-english music.

So it's always bothered me that my MP3 files (whose names show up correctly in Windows) always show up as garbage in Winamp. Windows Media Player can handle them just fine. Even the crazy ID3 tags with intl or unicode text in them show up in WMP. But I hate WMP. I don't know anyone who likes it. I love Winamp. And it's good that here we are, 10 years later, and the latest version of Winamp 5.3 IS READING MY FILES CORRECTLY!

Now, if only Picasa could handle unicode file names, I could finally stop bitching about this.

Oh, and if you are a software developer writing software in a non-unicode language (ahem: C++) make sure you ALWAYS use the unicode interfaces!!!! I found this utility from Microsoft years ago to generate crazy test strings. Use strgen to name your files and test your application's i/o.

Yeah! I've got attachments working in CS-Wiki. Attachments are represented by a topic/file combination in the data directory. When "Viewing" an attachment, you're actually viewing a topic with the same name:

~/Sandbox/view.aspx/MyFile.zip

Into the topic body is rendered a Download Control with a link to the actual file:

~/Sandbox/download.ashx/MyFile.zip

Of course, you can edit the topic and customize it any number of ways. Eventually, I can even have different visualizers for different attachment content types like images, text/code files, etc.

Note that there's no UI to upload or create "attachment topics"...That's next.

On a stroke of imagination, I was able to greatly simplify the logic necessary to display a topic on a page. Not only that, but the topic body is actually executed server-side!! This means that all my ideas of being able to insert dynamic content into my topics can come true!

I really wasn't expecting this to work, but now that it is working, this is GREAT NEWS!

Sorry for all those who have had difficulty downloading and installing CS-Wiki. I've been updating the Installation Instructions on the CS-Wiki homepage as I find more that I forgot to tell you. ;P Be sure to check the link above to see if you may have missed any steps.

If anyone has managed to get CS-Wiki installed and running, I sure would like to know that I'm not the only one.

Unfortunately, some who have downloaded the initial CS-Wiki release have found that it will only work running under full trust. And even then, with some rather awkward permissions.

The permissions problem is because I use the .NET Uri class and a custom schema (wiki:///TopicSet/Topic#Revision) internally to manage topic resolution and loading. The Uri object really helped a lot with topic path building. It's pretty tied in, and won't be easy to work arround. About the only thing I can think of would be to use standard http schema instead, short of replacing the whole thing. Does anyone else have any ideas?

I'm very happy to annouce that the first public release of CS-Wiki has gone up to the server! Note that this should be considered BETA. I'll try to respond to bugs as quickly as possible, but I need your help too. If you can send me fixes instead of bugs, the whole world will be much happier.

I want pretty URLs! Does anyone know of a better way to get IIS to behave? Currently, the prettiest URLs I can get in IIS are like this:

http://sitename/wiki.aspx/Folder/Topic

The wiki.aspx is required in there so that IIS will actually execute the ASP.NET engine and allow me to process the URL and handle the request. If there's no .aspx, .asmx, or .ashx files referenced in the URL, then IIS won't even touch the ASP.NET engine. The files don't have to exist, they just have to be in the URL.

If you have a URL like: http://sitename/Folder/ then the Folder/ must exist, and there must be a default.aspx file present to trigger the loading of ASP.NET.

The only other solution I can come up with is to override the 404 page-not-found functionality to cause ASP.NET to load up correctly. But due to integration with Community Server, (and I want to keep deployment simple and atomic for hosted environments) I can't use the 404 trick.

HttpModules also will only be triggered if IIS calls ASP.NET. If you're requesting a .GIF file, the HttpModules are bypassed.

My vote goes to the need of every business person everywhere to open every single link in a new window. Example: go to www.shuttle.com and try to get to their support downloads. You can do it with no less than 5 or 6 pop-up windows.

I will never write another popup again.

If the user wants a new window, they can middle-click the link or hold cntrl when clicking.

If my boss wants things in new windows, then I'll go change the setting in his IE or Firefox to open every link in a new tab.

First order of business: Does anyone have a better name in mind? I'm getting tired of calling it CS-Wiki or just "Wiki". Or "My Wiki".

Second order of business: Where the hell is it?

If you're following along, you'll know that I was expecting to release a public beta at the end of July. Well, it turned out that I needed changes in the CS 2.1 release. Those got in, but I didn't get the CS 2.1 SDK release until just recently. That's not what the delay was about though.

db4objects was the first to install and start using CS-Wiki in a live environment. CS-Wiki happens to be one of the few wiki systems which allows namespaces (folders) in topic paths. I call them Topic Sets. Unfortunately, or fortunately, people started using them imediately....and quickly found that the whole system was completely unmanagable. Of course that was because none of the management functionality has been (and most of it still is) unwritten. I've been trying to address those, but there are a few things that still need to be done. (imho before a public release, but I won't hold it up any longer)

• Topic Renaming is included and working. Topic forwarders are (optionally) left in place of the old topic name. Disambiguation forwarders however, have no way to be created at this time.
• Topics currently cannot be moved. Get an admin to move the TopicName.topic.xml file to the desired topic set folder.
• TopicSets cannot be created if a topic exists with the same name. Rename the topic file, use the management interface to create a new topic set, rename the old topic back to the old name, and put it into the new folder. This will be automated in the future as a "promote to topic set" function.
• There is no way to get to the delete topic page. But it exists and the feature works (and is secure). Go to /WikiRoot/delete.aspx/TopicSet/TopicName to delete a topic.

It is my goal to have the first public bits out by the end of the week. I know I've gotten a lot of people excited about this project, but I felt that many of the changes I have had to make over the last few weeks were necessary durring a first round of tuning before the general public started using this Wiki system all over the world. Storage formats were changing, and I could migrate the few dozen pages we had created here. Topic administration also became VERY importaint to make an improvement on. I knew how the system worked, and could manage the topic organization myself, but others would have found it annoying and a pain in the ass. Now that the necessary foundation is in and the most importaint administrative functionality is in place, I feel that the system is usable as an Alpha.

Like I said....end of the week.