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John Carmack On Consoles Vs. Personal Computers
Dave 'Fargo' Kosak writes "John Carmack addressed an audience of roughly 1,000 gamers this past weekend at QuakeCon 2000. This year he decided to speak on the issue of PCs vs console gaming -- and he proceeded to do so, for nearly an hour and a half, sans notes. He also discussed id Software's plans regarding the new console generation, the X-Box, mod-making, different operating systems and more. GameSpy has posted a full four-page
writeup."
That's sad really, I had thought Linux game sales were doing well, looking at Loki's numerous ports of Windows games. But reading this article and hearing Carmack saying how he was disappointed with Quake 3 Linux sales was a bite of reality. I wonder if Linux graphics and drivers will eventually mature to the point where relatively new users to Linux can just pop in the install CD and be playing the game in 15 minutes, instead of fiddling around for a couple days and giving up.
I really think that Linux won't take off on the desktop, until this obstacle is overcome. How many people here are forced to run Windows solely because of games (that or a lack of a decent, mature web browser) or know someone that is in the same predictament?
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As I was laying in bed thinking about my previous post (#5), it all became clear to me why the X-box is so feature rich. Microsoft is exempt from the Gilette wager [to refresh, "Give away the razor, make it back on the blades."]. Play along: Let's say you buy the X-box with the intent on making it your own little computer. It runs WinCE (MS software quickly available... for a price: and they know that you WILL use MS software. The price that you drop on Office 2035 will quickly recoup any loss that they might have had). They know that no matter what, you will buy the blades. Okay, let's say you buy it to be a linux box... Okay, now you can't play those nice Xbox games. The 4000 (highball) people that do buy the box for that purpose are just a drop in the bucket anyway.
Bill Gates is like Cartman: you really should respect his authority. It must feel good to sit down at the craps table knowing that you made a winning roll before the dealer even hands you the dice.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
Think about it this way. You turn mouse-look on which is practically a default in games now. This means you move the mouse to physically turn your viewpoint and angle of vision. With one calculated move you can spin your character 180 degrees around and 40 degrees down.
Most expert FPS players set their mouse resolution insanely high so that the slightest twitch moves the character quickly. This means minimal movement, a fraction of an inch, to accomplish gymnastic moves you simply CANNOT do with a device that provides upper-limit movement like arrow pads on consoles and arrow keys on keyboards. They both provide no analog feel to movement. You are either turning or you arn't. No fast turns, no slow turns except by controlled tapping which decreases your accuracy.
That is just mouse movement. I set up my keyboard bindings to provide compass movement. N S E W. There is no turning with the keyboard that is all handled with the mouse.
If you have dual input movement you can accomplish such feats as circle strafing, attacking your opponent while he is chasing you, midair snipes, ect.
You can always tell a one-input movement player because they can't effectively circle strafe. In other words, you can circle around them, always pointed at them, and fire at them. If you are fighting somebody that is using a gamepad or keyboard input only you can stay behind them and they can't do a thing about it.
The other advantages were brought up in another message. I have a five button mouse (wheel counts as three) I bind macros to the wheel such as firing off one missile and returning to the previous weapon. You can't even make or bind macros with a console.
On the keyboard I don't use the default 1-9 numbers for weapon selection. That is too slow because it requires moving my hand from the movement keys. So, I've bound three keys around the movement area for weapon macros that alternate between similiar weapons (nail gun, shot gun - supernail gun, double barrel - grenade launcher, rocket launcher) ect.
Everything else I need is bound right within that district so I never move my hands.
You simply cannot do this stuff with a console.
I had a friend that swore by keyboard input alone. He wouldn't use a mouse because it was too weird. He was a GOOD player with just the keyboard, but there were obvious limitations to what he could do. I finally converted him to dual input and he became one of the best Quake players I've ever seen.
V
Reminds me of an old Gary Larson cartoon, of parents watching kids playing on their consoles while in a thought-bubble above their heads are their dream "Employment Ads" sections:
Wanted: Super Mario player, $70,000 plus benefits
Can you rescue the princess? Join our team: $80,000.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Really what ever happened to having graphics good enough that when you look at your hand in the game it looks like your hand in real life...
;-)
Huh???
Are you talking about going back to sprites and bitmap graphics instead of real 3D graphics? I hope not.
The reason the game devlopers started using real 3D is that the bitmaps and sprites are static. If you want an object or a player to perform a new action you have to render a completeley new bitmap for each movement, distance and angle, while in 3D you just apply some transformations to the model (Very roughly spoken).
This is much easier to handle ingame and looks better, at the cost of details. The 2% advances you are talking about are the slow, but steady advances in making real 3D graphics as detailed as your mentioned photo realistic hand.
WowTIP, stating the obvious...
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
On page 3 of that interview, there's a photo of Carmack fragging - on a Mac! Looks like a G4, plus a sweet LCD screen. Hope he brought his own mouse ;)
I'm pretty sure they played on G3s last year.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I disagree, though not about NTSC sucking as a video standard. I take our continued acceptance of NTSC as a positive sign - a sign that TV is not yet so important that we must spend billions just so we can watch the local news at such a high res that you can count the hairs in the anchor's nose. Long live NTSC!
I can run Quake3 at 1280x1024 -- four times NTSC resolution...why would I ever play it on a console?
Maybe because the cost of a 40" TV is actually reasonable compared to the cost of a 40" monitor?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
and you'd boot your computer if you wanted to play others (Ultima, Castle Wolfenstein, MS Flight Simulator).
;)
For shame! It was SubLOGIC Flight Simulator!
Still, I did love Karateka, Elite, Kabul Spy (ok, I hated Kabul Spy), Infocom.*..
*reminisce*
Your Working Boy,
CBS was promoting a field sequential color system, which received FCC approval and began limited operation in 1951. It soon died and was replaced with RCA's system, color NTSC, in 1953. RCA did hardware, CBS did not. The original NTSC system used three electron guns and a shadow mask CRT. Sony invented the single gun Trinitron CRT. NASA later used a field sequential color system for Apollo and other manned missions.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Carmack pointed out a lot of interesting points about how the console folks make their money. They seem to follow the Gillette "Give away the razor, make it back on the blades" principle. With the growth of the internet and superfast network connections coming into many homes, it is not a surprise that the Game console manufacturers are a little bit hesitant to support all of the neat little gadgets available. It is sort of like the Netpliance system- they sell you the console with the expectation that they are going to make something back on it. If you go and buy a playstation, hook a a keyboard and a printer up to it, and maybe throw linux on it, they don't get anything in return for their wager that you are going to keep them alive. In the end, I don't really see how computers and consoles can really coexist peacefully... at least it is apparent that it gets harder every day.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
With that said, there will always be certain genres of games I will want to play on consoles rather than PCs. Sports games, racing games, and 2 person fighting games, I'd much rather play on a console. Real Time Strategy games (ala Starcraft), First Person Shooters, and adventure games, I'd much rather play on a PC...I mean seriously, how on earth can you play a RTS or FPS on something with no mouse and low resolution??
Ahwell, I suppose all those damn Pokemon games will keep the consoles indefinitely alive, and in fact, twice as popular gaming platforms as the PC.
I disagree.
I think there are plenty of original games coming out. It's just harder to find them, because the market is so glutted with crappy games. Original is a relative term. It's like people who complain that all Hollywood's movies are unoriginal and stupid. What are you comparing to? Are you looking back at the first video games and noticing that the jump in originality from no video games to early video games was more significant than that from last year's games and this year's game? Well duh.
I also think that comparing Wolfenstein to say, Quake III on strength of the 3D graphics and finding them close is laughable. I guess I am one of those people who claim graphics have increased "soooo much." Download the latest trailer for the Final Fantasy movie and tell me we aren't advancing significantly in 3D graphics. Sure, that's not real-time gaming, but in a few years, maybe it will be. Quake III's quality would have been movie-special-effects quality a few years ago.
If you think the existing games suck so much, why don't you go make one, and we'll see if we like yours better. If we do, then you'll make lots of money and the gaming community will be happy. If not, maybe you'll stop complaining about the better games that are coming out.
:wq
Traditionally, it's been more than a half step. PS/2 and X-Box are the first consoles ever that will be/are all that close to being as powerful as their PC rivals.
The next closest thing was the Sega Saturn. Playstation was never as powerful as PCs when it shipped, largely due to the low resolution and the poor little 38mhz R3000 32-bit MIPS processor. (MIPS being a company here, for those that don't know, now part of SGI I believe?)
The up side of PCs is that they are upgradable, as you said. The down side, of course, is just the same point. You get developers making it so that their games only work with a 3d accelerator (This is called "laziness" or "marketing schedule" since it takes time and effort to do a software 3d engine) and so that they require the latest and greatest Pimpium Processor with Increased-Level-1-Cache-X technology. But again, this is also the strength; You can wring more performance out of a PC with every new upgrade. Console systems don't HAVE upgrades.
Or at least, they didn't. Now you'll be able to add more peripherals including hard drives (PS/2 will have an IEEE1394-connected disk; X-Box will have one internally) and ethernet NICs (What's taking Sega so long?) but it's important to realize that these are very limited numbers of upgrades. I don't know anything about how these boxes are doing things internally, but I'd assume they're just using TCP/IP for the networking, so you as a game developer don't have to care about what the connection type is, just about metering your bandwidth usage. On a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft also included NetBEUI support on the X-Box's version of Windows Whatever; In fact, I'll be kind of let down if they drop it. It's really useful on small, non-internet-connected LANs. Being able to buy a 10mbps hub and hook three or four X-boxen up to it and not have to do any configuration would be slick.
Also, there's been a lot of talk about USB, but it's important to recognize that most USB devices will not be usable. Period. Oh, you'll be able to use the most common cameras and such, any standard USB hub should work (But that's pure speculation) and of course there's the ubiquitous Zip USB, which I suspect will be supported by everything just because everyone and their great-grandmother has a Zip drive, seemingly even if they don't have a computer. I kind of doubt anyone will adhere to a filesystem standard, but if they do, for the record, it should be Fat32 or Fat16.
It really is nice just how stable console systems tend to be. I do say tend because there are always crashy games on console platforms. Even Driver, one of my favorite PSX games, has a crash bug I've run into. But all in all, console games don't have those problems, and that makes them very attractive. Also, consoles are instant-on (some of them have really annoying splash screens you can't skip, though, are you listening Sony?) and hook up to your TV. For those who hate NTSC, the current generation of consoles all have VGA built in or as an add-on.
Are consoles going to kill PCs? Not any time soon. Will they shrink the PC market? Most definitely. What do I think Console makers need to do to shrink the PC market? Get a good standards-based web browser that supports DHTML, Flash, Shockwave, Windows media, Real media, mp3s, Java, and HTML 3.2. This one thing alone will make many, many people forget about their PCs and move to a console.
Everyone look out for Microsoft.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If msft made a computer today "optimally designed to run Winders 2x" the DOJ would probably send old Bill to Levenworth. The solution, therefore, is for msft to get into the hardware racket via the backdoor. It's a simple concept of thin-edge-of-the-wedgery really:
1. Make a console, give it some net connectivity.
2. Establish a hefty marketshare.
3. Offer web/email/yattayatta as enhancements or a 2.0
4. Bring out a new copy of Office with some web-connected features (like, oh, a power-point driven email reader... msft's had worse ideas...)
5. Offer this new Office for the X crowd.
6. Gotta have a keyboard and mouse for that... make those too.
7. Throw in a monitor for that hi-res everyone wants
8. Announce that the next X-thingy will have the option to run winders
9. It's a computer... but it's still a "game console".
10. Version 4.0 is "optimized to run Winders 2003"
Since the "total Microsoft solution" seems to be actually popular with people, the Xcomputer will sell a tonne. Why buy from Dell? It's essentially only a partially-supported platform by the time we get to point 10. It runs winders standard but those "extra" features require the optimized Xcomputer.
But it's still a game console if the DOJ comes knocking.
Am I paranoid or what?
2 1337 4 u!
You seem quite happy with the fact consoles are becoming more like PCs - personally, I think it's a shame - for this very reason.
I'm a die-hard home computer/PC gamer, ever since the Sinclair Spectrum, and have never owned a console (well, except a gameboy, but that doesn't count ;-). But I like consoles like the Dreamcast, because everything just works.
With the evolution of OSs, software, and hardware on PC's i feel that eventually pc's will eventually be used primarily for development, mission critical applications, and serving a broad range from home network administration to asp's.
Yeah, PCs as we know them may become rarer, like you say with devices like consoles taking their roles, but I doubt that they will die out. In the same way that there are car enthusiasts, who fix up their own hot-rod, there will be PC enthusiasts, who tinker with their PCs.
Carmack explains, "it's not a matter of a game console versus a PC, it's more a matter of PC versus another gaming platform."
Take a PSX2/Xbox with a harddrive, hook a modem, keyboard & mouse up to the USB ports, and you've got yourself a PC, in my book. It may not be a PC in the "IMB compatible" sense - but you still hear people reffer to Apple's as PCs, as in "Personal Computer". The only difference is that is has a funky custom chipset and you plug it into your TV set - sounds like this could be the new Amiga we have been waiting for.
It's like the difference between night ... and slightly later that night ;-)
Finally, a little off topic, but if you are reading this article, you may be interested in this link, that I spotted on the page: Mein Leiben!
At 32, I'm already something of an old fogie, relative to many of my peers in the PC game business. I've been a programmer ever since the day I first got my hands on an Apple ][+ at the age of 14. Even with the threat of encroaching senility on the horizon, I can still remember debating the merits of 8-bit home computers vis-a-vis the primitive game consoles of the day. Those debates sounded an awful lot like the debates we're having today. The ultimate answer back then was that most gamers were better off keeping both platforms handy. I think that's still true.
:)
:)
There were giants in the earth in those days. The "PC" platforms were the legendary 8-bit Apples, Ataris, and Commodores, while the "console" guys owned Colecovisions, Intellivisions, and Atari VCSs. The IBM PC platform hadn't made any significant inroads into consumer space by the early 80s, at least not in my neighborhood. Just as today, though, practically all of the people who had a home computer also owned a home videogame console. And just like today, you'd crank up your Atari if you wanted to play certain games (Missile Command, Space Invaders) and you'd boot your computer if you wanted to play others (Ultima, Castle Wolfenstein, MS Flight Simulator). I don't remember anyone complaining about not being able to play a decent game of Zork on their Colecovision or Kaboom! on their Apple. Games that required more than the 'twitch and dodge' level of user interaction were played on the home computer, while those that relied on bright, colorful animated sprites were a natural fit for the consoles of the time.
I was (and am) different, though -- I didn't own a console as a kid, and never felt the slightest stirrings of desire for one. Still don't. When I wasn't playing games on my Apple, I was either cracking their copy protection and disassembling them, or making lame-ass attempts at writing my own. I learned how the Bresenham line algorithm worked by poring over the entrails of Ultima II's DNGDRAW.OBJ, and Karateka taught me what good sound and animation code looked like. When my friends and I would discuss the relative merits of console versus PC gaming, it would always come down to that: my platform of choice was a genuine creativity tool, and the other was just a thing they hooked up to their TVs to play a bunch of games I sucked at.
I could not have become a professional programmer and game developer if my folks had bought me a Colecovision instead of an Apple for Christmas in 1982, and neither could Carmack, Romero, Garriott, or many of the other eminences grise currently duking it out on JeffK's SmartyMan Gaem Designar Survivor Island. We all got our start more or less the same way: by making the most of an open platform.
So it's with some regret that I see PC game developers flocking to the PS2s and XBoxen of the world, cheerfully paying Microsoft and Sony ten bucks a box or more in hopes of deliverance from the PC's tech-support hassles and platform variability. The magic of the Apple ][ was that it was a general-purpose computing device that could do anything you wanted -- you could run the assemblers and editors you needed to build your game on the exact same piece of hardware that Nasir Gebelli, Richard Garriott, or Ken Williams had on their desks. There were no excuses -- you could do anything those guys could do, assuming you didn't suck.
Fortunately, that's still true of the PC world today. Even though our machines are close to five orders of magnitude faster than the old 1 MHz 8-bit home computers, any high-school kid with a PC still has access to an inexpensive, ubiquitous, open platform fit for nurturing new talent. (Microsoft bashers may object to my application of the term 'open platform' to a Wintel PC, but as far as I'm concerned, any machine I can write and sell code on without paying platform royalties is 'open' enough.)
My lengthy rant will have served its purpose if it inspires some of the die-hard console advocates out there to give a second thought to their own history. Few games more interesting than Super Mario Brothers really owe their origins to the proprietary arcade/console side of the business. Almost all the good stuff came from some bored, geeky kid fooling around on a home computer, or from college students with more access to general-purpose computer hardware than their professors knew what to do with.
I don't think PC gamers and console gamers are genuinely trapped in an us-versus-them situation, but if I'm wrong, and we really do have to draw battle lines in the sand, I know what side I'm on.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
You can probably put some blame on the late release of the Linux version. Too many linux users just went and got the windows version. And I blame them if no more games are ported to linux and Loki goes out of business:)
I know I will be moderated down for this, but . . . Vincent
Yes, the linux sales figures were low. Low enough that they are certainly not going to provide an incentive for other developers to do simultaneous linux releases, which was a good chunk of my goal. The sales would cover the costs of porting, but they wouldn't make a bean-counter blink.
I think Loki did a fantastic job - they went above and beyond what was required, pestering us (a good thing in this case) about the linux deliverables, taking pre-orders, doing the tin box run, shipping CDs first, then boxes when available, etc.
There are a number of possible reasons why you might not have bought the linux specific version:
You couldn't find the game in stores near you. This is going to remain a problem for quite some time.
The game is available earlier for windows. Even with a simultaneous release, this is going to continue. Big publishers making large lot runs get priority, and that is just life.
The game costs more for linux. This is probably also not going to change. The wholesale prices are probably the same, but big stores severely discount popular titles and advertise them to bring customers in. This won't happen with linux versions.
Configuring 3D on linux is a significant chore. I expect this will largely be gone by the time we ship another game. As the DRI drivers mature and XF4.0 becomes standard in distributions, people should start having out-of-box 3D support.
The game runs slower in linux than under windows. While we did have a couple benchmark victories on some cards, the general rule will still stand: a high performance card on windows will probably have more significant effort expended on optimization than it will get from an open source driver. Nvidia's drivers may be the exception, because all of their windows optimization work immediately applies to the linux version, but it is valid for most of the mesa based drivers.
Trying to change this would probably have negative long-term consequences. There are certainly coders in the open source community that are every bit as good of optimizers as the driver writers at the card companies, but I have always tried to restrain them from going gung-ho at winning benchmarks against windows. Mesa is going to be with us five years from now, and dodgy optimizations are going to make future work a lot more difficult.
Loki's position is that the free availability of linux executables for download to convert windows versions into linux versions was the primary factor. They have been recommending that we stop making full executables available, and only do binary patches.
I hate binary patches, and I think that going down that road would be making life more difficult for the people playing our games.
That becomes the crucial question: How much inconvenience is it worth to help nurture a new market? We tried a small bit of it with Q3 by not making the linux executables available for a while. Is it worth even more? The upside is that a visibly healthy independent market would bring more titles to it.
The fallback position is to just have hybrid CD's. I'm pretty sure we can force our publishers to have a linux executable in an "unsupported" directory. You would lose technical support, you wouldn't get an install program, and you wouldn't have anyone that is really dedicated to the issues of the product, but it would be there on day 1.
John Carmack
>Carmack is master of the gaming world.
:-b
Assuming your gaming world consists of nothing but carbon-copy first-person shooters. Mine doesn't.
Carmack is the master of PC gaming graphics. Or was, back before most PC developers knew mucb about 3D. These days, Quake III looks pretty run of the mill next to lots of games, technology-wise (ditto for Unreal Tournament).
At the time there were two compeating products biding to become the official standard, a 'simple' one gun solution from RCA, and a more complex three gun (one streem for each of RGB, no grille) from [somebody else].
The solution from RCA won out for two main reasons:
Im compeled to bring this up whenever I talk about the B&W-color transition and RCA/NBC, so I will agian. Star Trek (TOS) was filmed and brodcast in color (one of the first shows to do so), and was, infact, one of the most popular color programs on the air (using either the-at-the-time-rating-system (which said ST sucked, in general) or a resonable system (which would have said ST was a hit)). It sold TV sets for RCA. Thats why it survived as long as it did (which is not long enough).
On page 3 of that interview, there's a photo of Carmack fragging - on a Mac! Looks like a G4, plus a sweet LCD screen. Hope he brought his own mouse ;)
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I recently bought some games (Diablo, Starcraft) that run on both the Mac and PC. I quickly noticed that the color rendition on the Mac looked much better than what was displayed on the PC. The Mac versions looks good without any tweaking of the computer. The PC versions looks terrible, even with the gamma setting cranked up to the maximum value. I've seen similar problems with Doom and Quake on PCs. I'm not sure if it is a problem with the operating system, device drivers or video cards. The Mac has the advantage that it was designed as an integrated system, and Apple has to keep all those graphic arts people happy. On the PC there are multiple companies designing the hardware and software components. I wonder if they ever talk to each other. The video card driver in my PC allows the user to tweak the gamma, but somehow this setting is ignored by the DirectX video drivers used by many games. I wonder how game developers keep their sanity when they have to deal with broken drivers and non-standard hardware, not to mention the endless combinations of operating system versions and DLLs. It makes a standardized console platform look very attractive. Why is it so hard to do graphics on a PC?
By the way, I see the same problems with graphics on PCs running Linux. So it isn't just a problem with Microsoft software.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Even ignoring those precision problems, there just aren't enough buttons to play effectively. Any console FPS with more than a dozen weapons will end up using a horrible switching mechansism a la Turok 2 (which would be a joke to use in a modern online multiplayer FPS).
When playing Quake 3 on a PC, I use
- 9 keys to access individual weapons
- 4 keys for horizontal movement
- 1 key each for crouch, run/walk, and jump
- 1 key each for chat, console, and "use"
- 3 mouse buttons and a mousewheel for switching weapons and other functions
- 1 mouse for aiming/climbing/steering
You just try to duplicate the functionality of ~25 buttons and a mouse on the current crop of gamepads! Not gonna happen. If console manufacturers get a clue, they'll bundle a mouse and keyboard with their new systems. Combine that with Internet access and a DVD player, and you've got a pretty schweet entertainment system/web appliance... competition for both PC games and WebTV-type stuff.Playing on a PC, I get a superior interface, much higher video resolution, much better graphics, and much faster action. (Goldeneye feels like walking through molasses after playing even the original Quake!!)
I am happy to hear that at least someone enjoyed an N64 port of an id game. You're the first person I've met that has. :-)
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All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
too bad no one will read this...
i have a much easier time going back to my old favorite console games than to my old favorite computer games. while i can play zelda any day of the week, my old favorite computer games, zork, castles, doom, and the better king's quests feel so sadly dated.
i guess its in that two button controller.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I find that the PC is a much more versitle system. It allows, and, in may respects, encourages, people to customize the hell out of it. Different video cards, memory, operating systems -- it all blends together in a nice, personalized machine.
Consoles, on the other hand, are a set thing. You plunk down your 200 bux, and you know that you are getting exactly what your buddy got. You can do some VERY basic customizing (mod chips, etc) but it is discouraged by the manufacturer.
HOWEVER, there are some positive points for consoles.. for one, if you buy a console game, you are POSITIVE that it will work. No 'do I have enough ram?' questions, video card drivers, or hard disk space. It's a very efficient system in that respect.
I'm curious as to how the X-BOX will turn out.. will MS let us plunk our own hardware inside it? Install a different OS? Well, probably not.. I'll wait and see though.
But, for now, just give me my PC -- posting to Slashdot using a PSX2 would be pretty weird =)
This is why I do not think consoles will ever support expansion slots that allow you to hook up normal PC hardware to the console. The only way console manufactures can make a profit is by keeping everything that gives the console functionality proprietary.
As an aside, the idea to make the source code available so people have complete freedom with the software is a completely different idea than the idea of destroying a company's profit model by buying a company's loss leader and hacking it so we don't need to "buy the razors". I really wish people would not confuse the libery of having source available with the idea that it is OK to get something for nothing at a corporation's expense.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
could I drive 3 hours to get a copy, or compromise my desires to not order off the net, in order to order a game for linux instead of windows? yea, but would most people (including myself, as someone who was just a casual user at the time) do it? no.
It's too bad.
Linux version sitting beside the windows version on the shelf in the software store, and you bet your ass I'd be right there buying the linux version. Hell, I only play Q3 in linux. But as it is, it's not just a slight inconvenience to get the linux version, it's a MAJOR inconvenience. Which, if that isn't bad enough, People end up comparing the two.
Would not releasing a linux patch have made me buy linux q3? no, it would have made me not buy Q3 at all.
Loki is a good company, and they are doing all they can. But, without proper distribution (not a single retail outlet supported by loki in my town of 110,000 people) you can't possibly get an accurate representation of the interest. It's the same with releasing old, outdated games. Of course you can't generate the same interest.
Obviously, the problem here is that you can't get the marketshare without interest, and you can't get interest without marketshare. major hurdle to overcome, no good solutions.
________
Nyet!
Caffeine for mind.
Pizza for body.
Sushi... for SOUL.
Really it seems that most games are not at all original in the least. And they justify the use and application of more hardware to cover up the fact that they don't have any new ideas. Did you know that Wolfenstein had acceptable 3d like graphics and ran on a 286? Hell I can run the original doom on an old 486/33 with no problems. Then people claim that these graphics have increased soooo much and it's totally obvious? Really what ever happened to having graphics good enough that when you look at your hand in the game it looks like your hand in real life (assuming they are modled after the same thing?) Hardware upgrades that increase graphics that humans can see by a 2% increase and give the game some mp3 player and they thing that really counts for an actual advance?
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