I hope this "real time" was only meant in casual fashion as it applies to the graphics. I was primarily excited about Not-MoM because of it being a turn based game.  We have more Fantasy RTS out there than you can shake a stick at...what we dont have is any good turn based fantasy strategy games in recent memory, made by the last people to carry that torch on this platform with production values and quality design.

I hope this has not changed.  My heart would break.

I believe you are attempting to refer to a race condition, and yes this is a real danger in a multiple core machine. Mutexes are generally used to ensure only one thread can access the shared memory, and sometimes the shared memory model itself is replaced with a message passing model. Many functional languages use immutable objects, which avoids the problems associated with multiple writes at the same location.

Generally I try to avoid situations with shared memory, because you are correct: There is a large cost to using shared memory.

XPsp2 and above, I'd expect.

What about non MS OS's.  I'm starting to look into other OS rather than deal with upgrading to Vista.

That would be highly unlikely, I would say.

Not officially. If you're interested in at least trying to get any issues with emulation ironed out though, the beta is the time to do that.

Ok.

However, it is time to start thinking about platforms. Win32 is frozen, Win64 is where further development will happen. Linux continues like an unstoppable train and MacOS is more successfull than ever.

Game freaks will continue to use Windows as their main platform. Professional computer users, like me, increasingly use Linux and MacOS. I run Galciv2 on Windows, being a professional I don't to spend all the time (and do the pirate of all needed Win32 DLLs) getting it to run under Wine, however, that does nothing to the fact I have fully migrated from Windows, both at home and at work. I guess many people on these forums can say the same.

Keep in mind that you'll have to learn the new OS and perhaps convert some documents to a format that works better with the new OS.

My recommencation is that, for any OS you decide to switch to, you upgrade on a new or different machine from your primary machine. A simple replacement of the OS on the old machine might not be so simple - you may have to worry about driver compatibility and OS performance requirements. A new machine, especially one that comes with the OS already installed, won't have as many troubles as older machines.

It would be great if it suppots other OSes, although honestly Windows tends to be the OS of choice for gamers.

My personal experience is that emulators and virtualizers have very poor support for 3D graphics. I think Wine has some support and VMWare has some experimental support. Virtual PC emulates an ancient S3 card that has no 3D acceleration at all. Supporting emulators could be pretty difficult.

Wine has decent support for 3D graphics, and they have a new release every 2 weeks so it's improving quickly.  It's hit or miss whether a game will work right now, but it doesn't seem dependent on how advanced the graphics are.  Wine is actually not an emulator, though, it's an implementation of the Win32 libraries in Linux.  This means that when a game does work, it usually runs as well as it would run on Windows.

If i'm a gamer, i just use windows.

If i'm a professional + gamer i install windows + Linux or MacOS.

Emulators or implementation of the Win32 libraries just to be able to play some games gives you more problems than just installing 2 OS on the same machine.

I just want to ask when can we expect to see 2.0 to come out.  I thought it will be at the end of the summer.  But then..summer is already almost over.  Sooo will we be seeing it by the end of the year.

Another thread (Journals) predicts a release due date for October 1st.

I think there is a "next OS" problem around in general and for Stardock too.

XP is well entrenched for both professionals and gamers. The former are less than the later but pay for their games.

XP end of life will be declared sooner than later.

Vista is a flop besides preinstalled and MS will have to take care of it quickly.

In the meantime users like me have both XP and Linux on different machines and corporations are moving slices of users to Linux where possible.

Currently Stardock looks quite in good friendship with MS so I see 2 problems for a Linux GC:

1) technically an almost common solution should be found

2) politically could not be the best option and could affect other parts of SD business

Many years ago' Brad left OS/2 for Windows and managed it well. We'll see what will be next...

(forgive me the off-topic)

Good news, made my day. There is still a large fanbase of *cough* today, grieving about the fact that EA holds the rights and nobody was allowed to develop a successor of this great game. I'm looking forward to not-MOM.

Me too; me too!