[FishyBusiness]

Coelacanth,

I welcome you to the forum and hope you stay to help Jim's Aquarium and other Serene Screens achieve perfection. We are all here to help each other out and at the same time help Jim's aquarium.

I have read this thread thoughly and I DO understand your point. I have thought about this before and I have no shortage of power with MY particular computer to increase features in the aquarium. I thought about having more fish and more intensive graphics. These thoughts have led me to think about some of the problems associated with these kinds of features.

One of the first problems is the obvious one that you already pointed out. Not everyone has a fast computer with a great video card. I do understand what you mean by having the features that take advantage of such advanced hardware turn on and off depending on what the individual computer can accomplish.

This brings me to another point. Most of the people that own computers are not computer-literate. I know this from personal experience. Having someone turn features on and off is quite a hard task. I know this sounds absurd but it is true. I have to show people how to install programs, make new folders, and uninstall programs. I taught someone how to turn some of the fish off in the aquarium. I even had to show someone how to cut and paste. These are the majority of people that will be buying Jim's aquarium. Look at all of the Tech support that games have. When a new game come out, people always have problems with hardware and software configuations. So much so that they email the company that made it looking for solutions. If they can't get it to work on their particular computer, they curse the program and uninstall it. I have done this. I bought a game and was never able to get it to work on my Banshee. Jim is a one-man army. So he could not handle the flood of emails that would come with such a complex program with lots of features to turn on and off.

I would like to recapp on the first point. I have a little bit of money and I would never pay $400.00-$600.00 USD for a video card. I have a GeForce2 GTS 32mb and it was bought for me on my birthday by my girlfriend. She paid $300.00 USD for it. I would have a hard time paying that much for a video card. Most of the people buying Jim's aquarium are not gamers and the GeForce line of cards are aimed at the gamer.

Then we come to the file size. I was watching TechTV and they said that 1% of the people online are on network connections. 99% of the people online are still using modems. That in itself would not stop people with modems from downloading. I had no problem with downloading 5mb on my 56K connection. Jim has already stated in the post above that most of his sales are in countries other than U.S.A. A lot of these countries are still using 28.8K connections and have no money for CD-RW's, Zip Drives, and other means of storage. Like he said most of them have floppies and that's it. In the future, the aquarium will be for sale in stores. If all someone has is a floppy, then they will be able to rn the program on their computer.

I have asked that features like the ones you are requesting and had to come to understand that a program has to be made for a very wide variety of computers. Naturally, I said,"Well, make the features adjustable." Then people started to point out how most of the poeple with computers are computer-illiterate. Because of my experiences with people, I had to concurr. One guy I know with a Voodoo 5500, just installs the drivers and that's it. He makes no adjustments of any kind because he does not understand them. He also doesn't have the will or time to understand them. The regulars in this forum and myself would have no problem with adjusting features of the aquarium. It is the rest of the world that may or may not have a problem with it.

At any rate, don't let my post or the posts from anyone else deter you from post your suggestions and/or comments. One time, Feldon23 and I went round and round about the cause of flawed software programming and I'm still here. I am sure that Jim, myself, and the regulars enjoy seeing new people come in here and posting their comments.

Take care. I DO understand and don't take offense to anything in my post. The post is not here to offend anyone. It's here to give some more information.