Alright I was completely wrong about the GPL, as QT is now LGPL. Don't know where I took that piece of mis-information, I believe it was like that years ago, but no more. Well, that makes QT Creator even a better option.

Free, multi-plataform IDE for C/C++ projects: http://qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools

You are forced to release your software as GPL if you use the QT sdk tough. But I think that's a limitation of QT, not qtcreator itself. It uses gcc/gdb as a backend.

PS. Even though I posted disagreeing with parent, the fact it's been modded down (and indeed, not modded up) irritates me profoundly.

If ever a reminder was needed that slashdot moderation options are not "+1 agree" and "-1 disagree".

Ok, I'll bite on this and admit that you have at least the bones of a reasonable argument there, and that a couple of your points are valid. However, I don't believe that taken as a whole, they amount to an argument against Diablo 3 needing an offline mode.

Over on the consoles, games that actually require online connectivity to play are few and far between. There are certainly games that lose a good bit of functionality if there's no internet connection present; Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3 and Your Shape 2012 on the 360/Kinect stand out as good examples. But the core gameplay is at least accessible offline. There are a couple of exceptions - mainly a few Capcom downloadable games on the PS3. Don't buy them. Certainly not after last summer's PSN outage made them unplayable for months.

Similarly, all of the iPad games that I have been willing to pay money for are playable offline. There are others that don't meet that criterion - and I don't buy them. Facebook gaming? Feels like a step back to me, not progress.

I don't think I've ever argued that all PC games must be playable offline. I excluded MMOs in my earlier post because the very nature of the game requires an always online connection. I suppose I could have excluded multiplayer-online FPSes as well, as they fall into the same category, but I don't buy those anyway (not for ethical reasons, but rather because deathmatch as a game-mode hasn't really appealed to me for 7 or 8 years now). In fact, even with those, I'd expect an offline bots-mode, as it's fairly trivial to implement.

But if a game is to require an always-on connection, then it needs to have features which are both essential to the gameplay and of benefit to the player. And Diablo 3 fails on both counts here. The big thing in Diablo 3 is the auction house - which has in-game currency and real-cash variants. The in-game currency auction house is of some benefit to the average player, but nothing I've seen thus far suggests it's even close to being essential for play. The real-money auction house is frankly only likely to be of benefit to a small hardcore and to Blizzard's coffers.

And I'd dispute that Diablo 2 was "miserable" offline. I moved house last month and spent about 5 days without a home internet connection while I waited for my ISP to hook my cable up. I used some of that time (when I wasn't unpacking boxes) to replay Diablo 2, to remind myself of the plot. The game hasn't aged all that well in some respects, but it was far from miserable. Certainly, it was more enjoyable than the 20 minutes I have just now spent copy-pasting my password over and over as I tried to login to Diablo 3's servers so I could play a singleplayer game.

Executable code is tiny by comparison. All that data is textures, models, animation, and audio (sound effects, voice, and music). So, no, there's nothing to ponder, really.

I've had a general policy of not buying games for any platform if their PC version requires an always-on connection (aside from MMOs, which it would be unfair to penalise, as "always on" is the very nature of the game there). This means I've missed out on every Assassin's Creed game since the original and a few other titles to boot.

I agonised about Diablo 3. It did look, at face value, like a straightforward case of Ubisoft-style DRM. However, Blizzard did push quite hard the line that the game had integral features that meant they couldn't have done it without the always-on without making serious compromises to the game. I was... unconvinced. So I decided to wait and see how things went at launch.

As it happens, Blizzard then wheeled out that "subscribe to WoW for a year get Diablo 3 free" thing at just about the time when I was in the market to get back into an MMO. On balance, I decided that I might as well go for that.

Now that I've had a few hours with Diablo 3, I can conclude that if it hadn't been for the WoW special offer, this would still have been firmly in the "boycott" camp. I've yet to see any online features that could not have been made 100% optional at no expense to the player (though possibly at some expense to Blizzard through lost real-money auction house fees). If you're in the "undecided" camp on D3 over its DRM, my advice would be to avoid it.

Well, sheezh, yo don't have to be an azz abot it.

Hggs and kizzes,
a Yank.

Ok then, to slightly modify my original thesis:

"If you think you will be anything more than a very light user of it and don't have access to a supply of free USB sticks, the 4 gig model will inevitably end up either costing you more than the 250 gig model, or else you will have to put up with some annoying limitations."

Live is required for online play only. In fact - a clarification. A "gold" Live account is required to play games online and will get you certain discounts in the online store on occasion, as well as early access to the odd demo or trailer. Aside from online play, all features of the console can be used with a free "silver" Live account.

The model on offer here appears to be the more recent "slim" revision. This does come with wifi built in - rather than requiring the (expensive) external adaptor that the first 2 generations of the 360 hardware required.