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Yeah... and you could have every single gaming company write drivers for different video cards, and you get pissed when your $600 Turtle Beach card doesn't play sounds in Doom III. You also get to reset your computer every single time you want to play.

Do people multitask while playing games like Doom III? HELL YEAH! I can't remember how many times I've 'windowed' UT or TO:AoT to tweak my TeamSpeak settings. Or how often I take a break while woring (I work at home) to let off some steam lobbing grenades or rushing SF with my trusty AK.

Besides, Doom III is as much a proof of concept as it is a game. By developing the engine in a console-like enviroment you're limiting it's 'real world' parameters, you're not letting it get tested. Let's not kid ourselves, in 2-3 years time there's going to a *lot* of games toting the Doom III Engine badge.

Anyway, we've been in this situation before - praying your game can detect your video and sound card. This is why DirectX and OpenGL are popular - they provide a much needed interface and abstraction layer to your sound and graphics. This is one of the promises of a modern OS - set up an interface to differnet devices. Configure it once and you're set! The lack of this was one of the worst things about DOS, and I don't really want to go back there.

...where * is used in the globbing sense. In order to do THAT we need fully deformable terrain. In other words, when I'm playing Tactical Ops, and someone throws a high explosive grenade down a stairwell at me, there should be possible real-world repercussions, like the building falling down around both of us.

Of course this requires insanely greater amounts of processing power than current games (except possibly Unreal Tournament, which is horribly CPU-bound these days on systems with the latest 3d accelerators.) You also need to be an architect to make maps because you have to have an idea of structural load distribution to do it in a realistic manner.

That could be a good thing, though; maybe more people would become architects, and the quality of level design can't help but improve because you're going to HAVE to make structures that could actually hold themselves up. (Floating structures will have to have some part of the structure that does the job of holding it up, possibly Laputa-style. (When the island falls apart, the blue stones depart upwards, toward the heavens.)

In order to do it you're going to have to generate new meshes based on damage (you can be pretty sloppy about this) and then figure out how they will be represented on screen -- you get THAT part for free if you use Multires techniques in place of traditional culling/occlusion methods. You also have to figure out how structurally sound they are. Software for determining stresses and failures in architecture is becoming more common on PCs, so that part of the puzzle is not THAT far off. Much more important is figuring out how to store and distribute the information relating to the new shapes of structures to all players.

Really, it's pretty dumb to have games with high explosives that don't have fully deformable terrain. Unfortunately, processing power is currently a limiting factor. Eventually, game engines will do this for you for free.

The deathmatch syndrome is a curious thing. People don't play in teams... until the other side plays as a team. I play TO:AoT, which is to Unreal Tournament what CS is to Halflife, and I've seen teams made up of weak players take out crews of *great* individual players. All it takes is strategy, teamwork and training (which is actually quite a lot.)

I stopped playing HL because too few servers which were fast for me used anti-cheat software, and too many of the players are chumps. Tacops seems to have a better breed of player for the most part (Obviously some CS players are great people) and I just enjoy the gameplay more as well.

If you have UT, check it out.

Bang... you hit it square on the head... damn what a workplace that would be! Oh and the afternoon thing... we are supposed to work after lunch? I thought that we were SUPPOSED to play tacops

Heck, I thought that was a given...

That's an extra hour for UT (Tactical Ops mod, of course)!

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Aww, FSCK!

already been done. Tactical Ops (for UT 1)

There's also Strike Force, but Tactical Ops is the best IMO.

Then for Half-Life there's CounterStrike.

FYI, Tactical Ops & Strike Force are more taxing on the system than regular UT. Real life(like) requires more detail.

Is a very good total conversion for unreal tournament. Check it out here.

My picks thus far:
1) Unreal Tournament
2) Tactical Ops
3) Return to Castle Wolfenstein

They really should release a playable demo for Tribes 2 linux...