Archive for the ‘Official Announcements’ Category

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PPC support officially being discontinued for all LGP titles

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

I am sorry to have to announce that as of today, we are officially discontinuing support for all PPC versions of LGP games.

The decision is not one I am happy with, and I know that a lot of people will be equally unhappy, but unfortunately, practicalities must win out. The demand for PPC versions of LGP games has been almost non existant, with just a few players buying for this platform. The decision was reached recently, when we looked at the costs for bringing the new Majesty updates to PPC. The cost would have been well in excess of any possible revenue we would gain from new PPC sales, and with most people who have already bought Majesty for PPC also having access to x86 machines, well, it just seemed for the best. I seriously doubt if any players will actually be left behind because of this (though I expect several people to post comments here saying that they will be). While we would love to keep supporting ppc, and any other platform you can think of, we have to be practical, and throwing money into a project we know will never even come close to recovering its costs is not going to keep LGP making games into the future.

For the forseeable future, we will concentrate on the x86 platform, 32 bit, and when appropriate 64 bit (although all of our games will continue to run on 64 bit using the 32 bit compatibility libraries).

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Posted in Official Announcements | 4 Comments »

The case of the missing Majesty

Friday, July 17th, 2009

A few people are asking where is Majesty, howcome everywhere is running out of stock?

Well, Majesty is actually out of stock. We ran out during the May sales, and it is still not reprinted yet.

We have been holding off on the reprint, as we are working heavily on updating it. The first version of Majesty is a little dated now, it uses some old libraries (we were using SDL 1.2.5, which is just a little out of date!), and it uses some systems we have since stopped using (such as the old static/dynamic release system to satisfy the LGPL).

We are also removing the old OpenPlay library used for multiplayer games up to now, and replacing it with Grapple, and integrating it with the PenguinPlay server for lobby and scoring systems (as you can see below).

majesty

This does mean network compatibility between versions will be lost, but it means that you now get all the advantages of PenguinPlay, and Grapple, which is a more advanced networking system than OpenPlay. Saved game compatibility will not be lost, luckily!

Unfortunately this all takes time, and we were not expecting to sell out so soon. We sold more Majesty than we were expecting to in the sale, and so we were out in our time estimates by a few months, as to how long the remaining stock would last. The updates were about half way through when the stock finally ran out, and not in any position where we could simply release a new version.

Luckily the changes are almost finished…maj_manual

So, in a few more weeks, you can expect that new Majesty will be coming your way! If you don’t have it already, you probably should get it. If you already have it, well, the new version also has a colour manual instead of the old black and white one, uses the new setup tool, and the disc looks better.

I know some people may ask, why didn’t we make the colour manual and better layouts before? Well back when Majesty was first printed back in 2003, the cost of colour manuals was so high that it was just not possible. Now, colour manuals are much more affordable. As for the rest, well, LGP was just learning its trade back then, and now, we know what we are doing and can do a better job!

So, new player or old, whether you buy the new version, or just patch your existing disc, I hope you enjoy the new version of Majesty. All in all, it is a new lease of life for one of our most popular games!

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Posted in Official Announcements | 20 Comments »

Customer Services Update for June 2009

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Welcome to a issue 3 of the LGP customer services monthly report for the LGP Blog.

We didn’t have an update in May, as very few issues seemed to be similar, and we simply dealt with them on an individual basis.

This month we have a couple of new issues to discuss.

X3: Hanging or Crashing

This issue has been affecting a small number of people, where X3 seems to be leaking memory. We are in the process of assigning a new staff member to look for this issue, as a matter of priority. The problem does not seem to affect everyone, as many players play for long periods of time with no problem, where some can hit the problem in five minutes of play.

While we acknowledge that the bug does indeed seem to be there, it may be some time until a fix can be provided, as it may take some time to locate such an elusive bug.

Sacred Networking Bug

The networking bug in Sacred that we have talked about previously seems to be more widespread than first suspected. We have found what could possibly be a solution, and we are hoping to have a patch out soon. However we are still working on a few other issues to resolve before the Sacred patch is ready.

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Posted in Official Announcements | 12 Comments »

Downloadable and rental games now available

Monday, June 1st, 2009

A lot of you asked for the ability to download games.

We have listened and created the reseller download system.

From today all resellers will be able to sell downloadable copies of LGP games, and these will be cheaper than boxed copies. LGP is not selling downloadable versions directly, as to do so would seriously damage the ability of the reseller chain to compete meaningfully.

When buying a downloadable game you are guaranteed the following:

  1. All LGP games will be re-downloadable from LGP itself for as long as we are in business
  2. All full downloadable games, while keylocked, will always work, even if LGP shuts down
  3. In the unlikely event of LGP going out of business, all downloaded games will be placed onto the bittorrent network (in a keylocked state obviously) so that they will remain in circulation for as long as people demand them.

Rental Option

We have also listened to those who wanted ridiculously low prices on their games. We have created the LGP Rental system. Any downloadable game is now available for rental. This means you can pay just a fraction of the price, and have the game for a week, or for a month. The rental games DO require internet access to start up, but apart from that are exactly the same as the full game. I know some of you will dislike this, but really, it is rental, we have to have stronger security on it. The downloadable purchased game does NOT require internet access to start the game.

Right now, the only games we have that are available for download or rental are the three newest games that have the LGP Key System, X3, Jets’n'Guns, and Sacred. Other games will follow as we get time to add them into the system.

I hope that this will be what you all wanted, and will give everyone, even those that want their games for next to nothing, the ability to play LGP games. If you can think of other things we can do with downloads, please do comment here and let us know. I wont promise that LGP will do everything that people ask, but I can say, and I think we have now proved this, we DO listen {:-)

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Posted in Official Announcements | 39 Comments »

In response to the pricing question

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

We have decided to respond to the question of game pricing that has been brought up here a few times. Tomorrow is May the 8th, which happens to be my birthday, and I’ve decided it will be sale day at LGP.

We will be setting the price of everything (except X3 special edition) to £9 for a 24 hour period. This will last from midnight to midnight UK time.

To be honest, this isn’t going to become a regular thing, it may be the only time it will happen, so enjoy it while it lasts!

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Posted in Official Announcements | 86 Comments »

Customer Services Update for April 2009

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Welcome to a issue 2 of the LGP customer services monthly report for the LGP Blog.

There is only really one new common issue this month:

Sacred – problem starting a new game on Open Internet multiplayer option

This problem seems to affect people with certain network setups that are designed to block network traffic, such as symmetric NAT or Firewall systems.

You can find out your current setup’s networking facilities by downloading our Test Tool and checking that the networking section. If it says that networking is only available via TURN, then you are going to experience this problem.

The way around this problem for the moment, simply, is patience. The game will connect in the end, although it can take between 30 and 60 seconds to negotiate its way past your network security systems. We are working on a way to speed this up, and we hope to have a patch out soon which will address this problem.

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Posted in Official Announcements | 3 Comments »

What direction for downloadable games

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

A fair few people have talked about downloadable games. I for one, personally, have never been a fan of the idea, but, I want to know what you all think. So, I’m going to run a poll to see what people like the idea of, and what you all want us to provide you with.

So, what would you like to be able to do?

  • Yes, I want download only games (10% discount) (46.0%, 188 Votes)
  • I want the boxed copy shipped, and to download immediately too (10% extra) (18.0%, 73 Votes)
  • I want to download but I wont touch it unless its half price (14.0%, 56 Votes)
  • I want boxed copies with extra stuff, like the X3 special edition (13.0%, 55 Votes)
  • No, I just want the boxed copy (normal price) (9.0%, 38 Votes)

Total Voters: 410

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Before you ask, this poll does not decide company policy, but I am hoping to get an insight into the minds of you, our customers. Thanks for your time!

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Posted in Official Announcements | 39 Comments »

Customer Services Update for March 2009

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

Hi,

Welcome to a new monthly report for the LGP Blog. Here, I’m going to run though the common problems people have reported over the last month here at the customer services team, and report on how these have been resolved, or how to work around the problems. We are not addressing all the issues, just the top two or three that lots of people have had problems with, those that we think it would be helpful for people to be able to read up on!

X3: Reunion – Problems on a number of ATI cards – Patch Available

This problem manifests itself with the game crashing after the loading screen when starting a new game on a small number of ATI based graphics cards.

Finally after weeks of trying, we have managed to reproduce the error on one of our test servers. Our technical team have finished working on the solution and the patch is now available for everyone to download in our updates section.

X3: Reunion – Problem with the game not starting

This problem is one reported by a number of people who have been trying to run X3 using open source drivers for their graphics cards. Unfortunately, at this point in time, neither the ATI or Nvidia open source graphics drivers are capable of running X3, due to the requirement of Shader Model 3.

You can find out if your current setup can run X3 by downloading our Test Tool and checking that the Shader Level reported by the test tool is at least 3.0, and that Direct Rendering is possible.

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Posted in Official Announcements | 4 Comments »

Sacred Gold is now, well, gold!

Friday, March 6th, 2009

sacredIt took a little longer than we had expected, but we can finally announce that Sacred Gold has been sent to the production company, and we expect it to be ready to ship in 2-3 weeks.

We expected to have had it ready weeks ago, but some last minute issues caused some unexpected delays. The network layer, Grapple, had an error in how it communicated through certain types of firewalls and NAT routers, which meant that only around 30% of players would be able to access the multiplayer features of the game on the PenguinPlay servers.

But that is all past us now, and the game is in production! The game also has a nice new large map insert being produced with the game, just as a small bonus extra! We are also working on the finalising of the demo, which we hope to have available before stock of the game arrives, so you can try it out before buying.

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Posted in Official Announcements | 31 Comments »

Jets’n'Guns just arrived!

Friday, January 30th, 2009

Well, me and one of the guys just spent some time out in the cold helping a truck driver unload boxes of Jets’n'Guns from the back of a truck. So, I guess this is the announcement to the blog that the game is in!

Jets’n'Guns is just like the old space shooters, like R-Type, that kind of thing, but with modern graphics, and a soundtrack that, well, Ive added the intro music to my playlist on my mp3 player!

We’ve also added an extra bonus over the Windows version, with PenguinPlay highscore tables. For those of you that don’t know what PenguinPlay is, it is our online game matchmaking and highscore service, designed to bring Linux gamers a little closer together.

In Jets’n'Guns you take the part of an ex war-hero with no wars left to fight. Hiring out your services for pay, you must fly your ship through over 40 levels of enemies, some in space, some around planets. Your ship is fully customisable, with dozens of weapons and upgrades. As the game progresses, a storyline unfolds, and by the end, you aren’t just a mercenary, you are saving the whole universe!

But I won’t spoil the ending for you. You’ll just have to play it to find out how it ends!

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Posted in Official Announcements | 7 Comments »

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