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Localizing High-End Games for Low-End Machines
CowboyRobot writes "Intel engineer Dean Macri has an article at ACM Queue listing the challenges in designing PC games that will run on very different processors.
PCs vary widely in their performance, and if game developers design only for the high-end, they limit their market.
The article lists specific tips on how to guarantee that even old slow machine can run new games, such as 'the number of triangles used to create the trunks and branches could vary based on the available processor and graphics hardware performance', 'replace the clothing on characters in a game with actual geometry that separates the clothes from the underlying character model', and for simulating ocean waves, having low-end systems rely on basic sine waves while higher-end machines use more sophisticated methods."
'replace the clothing on characters in a game with actual geometry that separates the clothes from the underlying character model'
.. come to think of it, I might be playing the next Tomb Raider on my Pentium 133. Half a frame a sec is fine if it gives me half a chance to ogle Lara's buttcrack.
This actually sound like a pretty good idea. Hey, I got one too. Perhaps they could just leave out the clothes completely on low end machines?
It's easy to say what you want to do when you have unlimited processor resources. But when you don't, you'd rather your program not crash or totally freeze. Especially in a game environment, throwing the little things overboard first will leave the main gameplay elements in tact and still leave a playable game.
Yeah, it means extra programmer work on the design side because you're going to have to design a "smart version" and a "dumb version" for the effects you want to downgrade. You'll also have to select how you're going to measure system resources, and at what level of resources will the changeover for smart to dumb happen for each element. It's work, but I think it's an investment with a payoff.
The keyword is "graceful degradation". Take away the elements that contribute to the "wow factor" for the power user but the low-power user won't really miss. Background elements are the key thing you should be thinking about, especially ones that'll never have much direct impact on the outcome of game situations.
It's all about raising the spread between your "minimum" and "looks best on" system requirements. You want to get the minimum as close to the floor as possible, while having the high-end features will create great demo installations and really sell your game to the high-end fans. The more people who can enjoy your game, the more copies you'll sell, and therefore the more money you'll make. You remember money, right? It's the whole reason games are written anyway...
PCs vary widely in their performance
This is why I come to slashdot, the deep technological information you can't get anywhere else.
Like the X-Box?
I dunno...I'd still rather play Pong or Frogger than huge overdone games.
I remember when games were about gameplay.
The original is the greatest game. I like all the old games the best, where you just point and shoot, all the high end games have no point.
Now my brand-new computer will have a usable life of more than 3 weeks, think of all the money I'll save, and thus spend on new games!
This would require an incredible amount of engineering support for practically no payoff.
use openGL
open the source
maybe folks itching to play the game without spending money will figure out how to port it to their machines.
Next generation games like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 will allegedly scale to meet these sort of demands. And as long as the engine and development tools are written with scaleability in mind, the challenge should be far less for the game developer (assuming they can afford the engine!)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
As a game programmer and developer http://igerard.com, I have worked with a number of systems that scale to the specs of the system. Most recently I have worked with the Torque Engine, which has some scaling capability, and with my own engines (although they usually dont require so much processing power).
As a gamer, I have always had a laptop, as I move around so much, and I am very impressed by the scaling capability I have seen in recent games (Medal of Honor: Call of Duty, Morrowind) which have worked fine on my meager 32mb Mobility Radeon graphics card)
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
This sounds good, until the low-end people realize they are missing out of many of the important graphics that others are seeing. Sure it would be nice for everyone to be able to run the game, but I think most people would want to fully experience the games. I think this idea would fall apart on online multiplayer games. In a FPS, I would prefer to have as much detail as possible. Of course the low-end machine gamers will be shooting at the moving block instead of seeing a fully rendered opponent.
--
Real-time deal updates
Why would they bother optimising games for low-end hardware? We all know that software drives sales of hardware.
Hell, look at most of the hot games coming out: they have marketing deals with the graphics card makers.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Isn't this stating the obvious? Of course you could do this to speed games up, but all of these factors require longer development time.
With the rushed nature of game development, I don't think game companies are that worried about this. It raises development costs without paying out much- most gamers keep up with the latest video card, processor, etc., and won't benefit from this.
The type of computer user that doesn't upgrade their system very often is the same user that doesn't buy very many games.
If these games were open source projects, these sorts of enhancements could be possible. Since the code is open and shared, some guy with a low-end machine wants better performance, so he writes simpler algorithms to emulate the real ones. When you build your own copy, you just pick which optimization level you want to be at.
Instead of trying to do super-duper processor detection degradation stuff, let the player choose levels of detail and such-like.
That way he can choose whatever's important to him... if he's a big fan of realistic trees, let 'em have it at the cost of slower AI or whatever.
The Army reading list
Don't forget to expose these options to the user. Games a pretty good at this nowadays, but it's pretty important that there's some way for the user to actually decide these things, they shouldn't all be left up to 'timing loops' and 'hardware IDs'.
Not only do some gamers perfer framerate over display details or vice-versa, but it's also important for the future where the same game might meet with hardware that is literally 10 times as fast as the state-of-the-art at the time it was released.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I would expect that DOOM 3 will be better optimized than Half Life two. OpenGL just has a better tinker factor, and Carmack and Co. excel at tinkering. HL2, on the other hand, will rely on whatever scaling DirectX can offer, such as lowering the shader specs. DirectX is getting tighter, but it still depends on the programmer to optimize it properly, and since the HL2 programmers have been having problems already...
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I dunno, it seems like making more generic algorithms -- ones that will draw quickly on diverse platforms -- would tend to limit the optimizations for the fastest machines. I.e., once you start coding algorithms with decisions based on processor speed you'll lose all the specific tweaks.
Games already have a lot of features to make them playable on older hardware including resolution options, fog, shadows, detail level, etc.. Hardware also moves pretty quickly. By optimizing in the general case you'll also make it more playable on less recent hardware (the rising tide floats all boats). Plus, who's to say that games lose their appeal as fast as new hardware comes out? I still play Warcraft II because I enjoy the gameplay.
There will be a software renderer built into UT2004. This means you don't need a 3D capable video card installed to play UT2004. It does help if you have beefy CPU if you use this mode, since that will be doing all the work. It isn't pretty, but at least you can play.
Journal
Valve has been conducting and publishing system specification surveys. It's interesting to see that the majority of their respondents are using GeForce 4 MX cards; I would have thought higher specs.
The most annoying thing about detail controls in games is that it's unclear what you (the end-user) are changing when you tweak the knobs. As a developer of 3d applications, (who's guilty of same), I think I'll approach this in the future by giving users immediate feedback: "Here's what your scene will look like with low shadow detail. Here's how smoothly it'll run, on average."
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
and for simulating ocean waves, having low-end systems rely on basic sine waves while higher-end machines use more sophisticated methods.
It looks better if you just use a cosine...
I lead the graphics effort on The Sims, and for us, there was a lot of luck involved. Most people don't think of The Sims as terribly cutting edge graphics-wise, but at the time we were trying to do something that a lot of people told us wouldn't work (software 3d rendering into a rich z-buffered background). I put a huge amount of effort in to making the game playable on a 200MHz MMX PC, which it barely was. In the end I think we got lucky...by the time it shipped, that was a definite sweet spot in the market. And it did manage to sell a fair number of copies, though probably not for that reason. :)
Rumor has it The Sims has driven up the price of RAM. We didn't spend nearly enough time optimizing how it would use RAM with hundreds or thousands of new objects added to the game, and from what I hear hardcore players are happy enough without high-spec CPUs, but they all like a gig or more of RAM.
Don't forget the article on slashdot the other day that was a rant from a guy who said that games were approaching the graphics cieling in terms of quality. At some point the required PC specs will nearly stop moving upward, then people will catch up . So maybe then in the near future when games can't be much prettier than Doom 3 is supposed to be, the developers will be able to basically stop designing for such things and concentrate on game content. I mean, if you've played or seen the Doom 3 alpha demo (and most of you should have, if not, for shame) How much prettier do gamers demand games to be? I think we are very close to the graphics cieling now....
Increasingly I've seen the reliance on a better graphics card to significantly improve frame-rates the most. Take my current box, in the past few months I just upgraded my PIII 450 from '99 to a P4 2.6 800Mhz FSB. RAM went from an initial 128MB to 320 MB SDRAM last year into 512 MB DDR dual-channel now. The overall improvement in gaming has been limited though. Yes, things do run much better than they did in the past. Massive numbers of units and other computationally intensive tasks have obviously seen the most improvment, but the graphics card is holding everything back.
I'm using a GeForce2 GTS from '00 at present and I certainly feel it. Vice City can drop to a crawl at times and other games need the graphics options knocked back quite a bit in some cases. While the $300 I spent on motherboard and processor upgrades are noticed the same amount of money needs to be put into a graphics card to really notice an improvement in frame rate and for almost all intents and purposes, actual improved performance.
The graphics card is increasingly becoming a major (not to mention expensive) bottleneck that needs to be upgraded on a much faster path than the rest of the system to stay competitive. The only advantage here is that in many cases a weak processor can be enormously helped in some cases by a cutting-edge graphics card.
While the article has a lot to say on this topic and it's certainly one of the easiest changes to implement scalability in it can still be a problem in many cases and should perhaps be addressed more seriously. Graphics technology, moreso than any other part of the computer is really what's driving gaming these days and should be watched closely to keep it in check.
Not bad for a game by Microsoft (and Big Huge Games.)
Computer games were always better then the console ones, were first with 3d, first with networking, you could use mods etc.
But now all the small gaming companies no longer like the pc. Id software and a few others are still around but most people use consoles for games and work on pc's. This leave even less incentive for a small gaming company to consider the limited pc market.
I was hoping Microsofts Xbox would bring in new games to Windows. It did not and now they are leaving the intel platform so that hope is gone.
http://saveie6.com/
One method of making scalable games is to use recursive based algorithms to generate the graphics. Basically, code up a 'for' loop, and vary the number of iterations depending upon the architecture of the machine it's running on. For things like trees, water, snowflakes, clouds, grass, hair, and so forth, this optimises rather well.
For example, refer to Koch's Snowflake
On a low end machine, only two or three iterations would be needed to create a decent snowflake. On a high end machine, you could iterate this function a hundred times with various compounding affects such as rotate, copy, resize, diff, transparency, and so forth. With high end machines, you can do close ups of snowflakes without any resolution loss... And most all of this is using the same algorithm as the lower-end machine would use...
Granted, the fractal algorithms have to be well designed and thought out to achieve this effect. A basic Koch's Snowflake algorithm at high iterations doesn't look too much different from lower iterations... Some transforms would need to be introduced to the algorithm, but those could also be scalable...
Anyhow... $0.02 cents
Is this why Vice City loads groundwater instead of roads sometimes?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Okay, so imagine we've got a FPS set on the water (just for kicks, call it Waterworld). You have the sine wave water and I have the sophisticated uberalgorithm water. When you shoot me, your client-side model for water thinks I am in spot A, while my uberalgorithm water thinks I'm in B. You shoot me -- but from my perspective (pun intended!) you couldn't have seen me.
/render/ the smoke.
Sounds like about 10 million "he hacks!" calls waiting to happen.
I remember people turning the smoke off in their Halflife clients because they wanted to see through it. At one point, my graphics card driver wouldn't even
Let's try an alternate approach: let's market the games for the sophisticated gamer and that will get more people to buy better machines. Not everyone is rich, but (see above) It's the Graphics Card, Baby!
[Error 407: No signature found]
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Not only that, but on the other hand, a well designed game would allow for the 'wow effect' to persist in time as the high-end is pushed forward and more details can be enabled. Gives a longer life to games. On the other hand, do publishers want that?
Instead of looking at making a game scalable on a single computer, how about looking at leveraging it off multiple machines instead.
Have a central box that controls the game mechanics, then farm out the rendering engine to multiple servers. Most homes are moving to multiple computers in any number of of applications.
Now, I generally loath the idea of gridcomputing, but rendering is one of the areas it is good at. Have a central box run calibration tests for the graphics flow, then you can add or remove additional processors as needed. A single processor would represent the lowest level.
So, market a generic game rendering standard that can be ported to any sort of processor (including embedded cpu appliances ), then focus on the console box or computer to combine the results.
While the industry specialists are worrying about compatability (which is a valid problem) Microsoft is selling single use machines such as the Xbox at a loss. Maybe it's time to produce similar architectures and even homoginize the processor/chipset platforms into something recognizable as one system. Unfortunately most people get linux for free, don't support open source projects, and then expect the world to cater to their minority preference of alternative environments.
As far as keeping in line with the article I do believe that instead of a diverse platform on which to design games, we are going to instead have more specialized products such as the Xbox and the TiVo that are going to destroy the computer's list of abilities one by one. In the end i see more and more Dell's and HP computers turning into conversation pieces instead of being diverse, which is in direct support of the premise of the article. Diversity in this field currently leads to an inability to produce games that sell well to an uninformed culture, instead you are developing games like GTA which was developed separately for 4 different systems instead of all at once like Sonic Heroes.
Just pick minimum FPS and replace heaviest algorithms with lighter versions whenever FPS drops too drastically. Just look up "Morrowind FPS Optimizer" for example of a program that does similar thing - shortens view distance whenever it causes speed problems. It allows several other hacks too: Remove far, small objects, shorten view distance (better FPS) in battles and much more.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Lots of games have adjustable settings for image quality, bit depth & display resolution. Even Doom 1 did this.
and you get:
Quake 2 with nekid Stroggs galore.
Wolfenstein with a nude Adolph Hitler
GTA 2 with realistic squeeky vinyl bucket seat sounds.
Silent Hill's "playdead" of the month.
Warcraft 3 expansion - Frozen Cajones
and Frodo still says "I am naked before the wheel of fire" in LotR, but he's grinning.
Who is John Cabal?
as they are already developing for low end hardware - tomorrow's low end hardware.
The net result of spending thousands on making your game engine run on machines that are old when you release it is a totally false economy. Games development needs to take into account the future and scale upwards, not downwards. I want my software to run better in the future, not better in the past!
I suppose the only point at which this might be useful is when portable and phone hardware is capable of running what we'd consider decent desktop games now. Is this likely to happen?
That the economics of PC gaming are already starting to look a bit "touch and go" for most titles. Add another mill or so for additional art and development to support bottom end processors and you're starting to have a bit of a problem justifying the investment. Not to mention the schedule risk.
Hopefully PC gaming will turn into a proving ground for the up and comers...
Hopefully.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Sounds like a dead-end street to me. There's a significant market out there (casual, rather than die-hard gamers) that doesn't want to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to upgrade their systems to maximize the gaming experience (or to be able to play the newest games at all.) A parent who just spent $1000 on a stock Costco computer, for example, is not going to hand their kid another five hundred bucks so he can optimize it to play Half Life 2.
...then she must be a genius.
I don't understand why more people don't use ZZT to create games. It works very well on all x86 processors.
"The big question in our lives is how to be at the same time a hedonist and in a hurry" - Alain Ducasse (?)
That bug remained in the final game I believe. I guess it was suppose to be a "feature".
No sig for you!!
Instead of forcing me to make individual choices about every single optional CPU or GPU taxing feature, try and detect the capabilities of my computer and give me the best picture quality I can get at a smooth framerate.
That way I don't have to study the impact of every single optional feature... if my computer can handle two pixel shader passes, 100 MB of textures, and models which have been decimated to 10000-20000 triangles each, I still won't have to know what a "pixel shader" is before playing.
Yeah, but for older models, it's really hard to find hardware... especially the kind that is no longer developed. I think they are looking at older systems running games than lower-end-newer systems.
But yes, this is one of the main reasons video cards sell. That and monitors, harddrives, RAM, sound cards, speakers, etc...
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Perhaps I'm not X-treme enough for the gaming market. I'm looking for fun gameplay, an interesting storyline, and I want it to run smoothly on my current system without going to Alienware for an upgrade.
The people driving the overclocking movement may buy a disproportionately large share of games per capita, but for every one of them, there are a hundred people who are just going to buy a good, relatively new system, and a thousand who just want to run the game without trading their firstborn for a new graphics card. Ignoring the sub-gigahertz crowd is just asking for financial ruin.
Hy, I'm AOC. I can't tell the difference between 20 and 60 frames per second, and cent for cent my money is every bit as valuable as yours.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
... Wolfenstein with a nude Adolph Hitler ...
....
Dude, I'm gonna be ill
-kgj
-kgj
Does rain/snow/fog work as it does in real life? Have real depth. Affected by overhanging pipes? Strobe lights through rain show rainbows?
No?
Still some way to go then.
I am old enough to have played pong when it was fresh. I also at times indulge myself in a little playing of old games. Played a bit of jagged alliance recently. Once the graphics in that game looked fluid and detailed. After more recent games they hurt.
There is still a long way to go. One of the most obvious increases is size. We are stilling running in dungeon maps. Big dungeons but still square rooms where the rockets hit invisible walls. Operation Flashpoint gave us a big world but it was an empty world. On powerfull hardware it gives some stunning scenery shots but there is still someway to go.
Although to be honest I could live with the next game freezing the graphics and instead spending the CPU power on AI.
Sadly as the darpa race has shown, pretty pictures are a whole load easier then a good AI. Remind me never again to curse the AI coders of OFP when an AI controlled truck has trouble following the road again.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
We all like purty graphics for aesthetic reasons, but many of us play games for other purposes. To lots of people, online gaming is enjoyable because it's competitive, like football or chess.
I'd be interested to see how much both lack of detail (lower resolutions, turning off dynamic lighting, and the like) and bad framerate influence players' performance. My guess is: not much, and quite a bit once you go under 25-30 fps or so.
More developers need to have lower-end systems in mind! I'm a computer game fanatic, but I can't afford to upgrade or replace my system every year. Each computer I get lasts about four years before I get an overhaul. I love Blizzard for keeping people like me in mind! And I really look forward to playing half-life 2 and doom 3... some time in 2006.
It sounds like this guy wants us to write 2 engines: A high end engine and a low end engine.
Why not just write a good low end machine engine that will be killer on a high end machine?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Games will continue to look more and more "real" (as real as a rocket jump can :p), just as movie CGI and completly CGI things have. Look at the Final Fantasy movie, or the Starship Troopers show. Both are still beyond what we can do in games, mostly because they're not dynamic, but games could look that good. Even if games could be photorealistic, not everyone would go that route. From what i hear XIII is a decent game, but the interesting thing to me is the style, that its sort of a cartoony look. And as unrealistic as that looks it still has all the shadowing and textures and other things that eat up (some) GPU power. Simpsons hit and run is a great game, but they went too far with the graphics, it would have been amazing, but probably extremly difficult, to render it in 2.5D like the show is, instead it ends up looking like that one halloween ep where homer ended up in that place that looked like that tron movie nobody saw. But even that looked better than the game does. We have a long way that we're still able to go, but there are also so many directions too.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Which millenium in it's development are we talking here?
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
This is why hardware sells, and why the article is 50% off the mark:
1. The article is old news/looking at eye candy. Trees are a good point, but some games already do it for scaling into the distance. Simple enough to re-use this code for scaling with performance. Cloth etc are just eye candy. Be interesting to see cloth as a gameplay feature, but the biggest use these days is in the flags of Capture the Flag game mode. Heck, Unreal Tourney did that years ago on my humble 300MHz MMX.
2. Implement that super cloth sim, and then you need a Prescot to run it! Good news - more hardware sales.
3. Multiple sets of models is fine for EA, as they can have a serious art budget - but need to buy lots of Maya platforms - more hardware sales - to make that artwork on. It's impractical for most second tier software houses. They stick with the one or two tiers of target platform, as that's all they can AFFORD! The article does not help them, and the first tier developers know most of what is in it already.
Now don't want to just bitch and moan, so constructive suggestions. One look at Doom 3 and I'm writing a check for a faster machine. It's the character skinning and lighting that sells me on the hardware. That Alien like monster in one of the preview screenshots gave me the creeps. I think the article is a good idea, with one good example (trees) and other poor examples. If he'd given a ref to scalable character skinning techniques I'd appreciate it more.
You can get a graphics card that'll run Vice City just fine for under $100. Runs ok on my circa '00 nVidia Vanta 16mb card, cut any processes that eat extraneous memory before you start it though. I am working on a system now however and plan to put a $300 card in it. Mostly for its other features, but 128mb and a Radeon 9800 aren't bad either...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I've been dying to compile and play Tux Racer on my SE/30 for awhile now. As soon as I get done with that, I'm going to compile Celestia so I can explore the solar system at sub-sub-sublight speed.
Constitutionally Correct
There was a bug in the camera-angle determination at a certain point that accidently put the camera inside Lara's head, about where the brain should have been.
I know of another game with exactly the same bug.
It's called Doom.
Games for PS2 render to a 640x240 pixel frame buffer at 60fps. This results in jagged edges. Games for GameCube and Xbox, on the other hand, typically render to a 640x480 pixel frame buffer and try for 60fps. For an interlaced display, they do a simple comb filter on the scanlines. This results in smoother edges.
My time is worth a lot more than zero dollars an hour.
Not everybody who has searched the help wanted ads and submitted a resume has been offered an interview let alone a job, You Insensitive Clod(tm)!
I agree.
PC games keep pushing the limit higher and higher for requirements.
Consoles are equally as bad now. Don't they have PS3, XBOX2 etc coming out in 2 years.
Imagine having the buy a new house every 4 years because your furniture is not compatible. This is the gaming industry tactics.
Open Source games suck dick
Do you claim that all games published as free software give fellatio, or just many? If the former, then on what evidence do you claim id Software's Quake gives fellatio?
You can't apply the same simplifications to koch's snowflake and to human's head, just because human's head isn't a fractal. True you can drop points, but then results suddenly become really awful.
They don't have to become awful. Store rounded geometry as Bezier patches and you can resample the geometry dynamically, all the way down to two triangles per patch on the slowest of machines. And Bezier patches are especially amenable to conversion to displacement maps on hardware that supports such GL extensions.
Drop every fourth point and suddenly teeth become random sharp spikes,
That's why you apply different sorts of optimizations to Orc models than to Human models.
nose becomes a pinokio'ish point
If you're working with a franchise like Astro Boy, what's wrong with making the model Pinocchio-ish?
ears get asymmetric
If you've already gone down the road to retelling Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, you may not have to worry about realistic outer-ears on at least some of the models. Collodi wrote that Geppetto was in a hurry and made Pinocchio with great eyes but without much of an outer-ear.
and Frodo still says "I am naked before the wheel of fire" in LotR, but he's grinning.
"Wheel of" fire? Does Vanna step out in her birthday suit next?
they are already developing for low end hardware - tomorrow's low end hardware.
As you distantly suggest, tomorrow's low-end desktop hardware is often tomorrow's high-end laptop hardware.
I want my software to run better in the future, not better in the past!
Once "the future" arrives, and low-end hardware becomes able to run a given first-person shooter with --all-bells-and-whistles, many players of that game have moved on to the next, and it becomes increasingly difficult to find a good public server. Where again can I find an active Quake 1 community?
Nintendo's recent patent is limited to emulating console games with raster-chasing graphics engines. A 3D game typically does not chase the raster the way a 2D game does but instead renders to a dumb frame buffer.
The marketing deals with hardware manufacturers can't become their main source of revenue though. They want to sell as many retail boxes as they can along with the bundled-with-HW stuff that they probably make much less on.
Plus, just imagine if a game came out that required even a 2 GHz P4 equivalent. Think of all the parents who would be angrily returning the games when they didn't run on the PC they just bought a year ago, and junior isn't old enough to know about system requirements yet.
Sure, games have a large market with the high-end users, but selling exclusively to that market probably wouldn't be the wisest policy.
Considering that Intel ship only integrated gfx chipsets, it is no suprising for such an article. Traditionally integrated gfx chipsets are targeted to corp. clients, but I noticed that a lot of people besides corp. people are buying them too. Consider this, last year who ship the most graphics chips? Would it be suprising that ATI was NOT the king? In volume, Intel is flooding the market with their cheap gfx chipsets w/o hardware T&L and people have been flocking to them because they are cheap and they reduced the price of a computer by at least 200 to 300 dollars because you cut out the gfx card you gota buy. In addition, for every chipset sold for Intel, a CPU is attached to it. This is making Intel tons of money.
I think the problem is that when people started to play games on those cheap computers with integrated gfx they found out painfully that they got what they paid for. Some games won't even work because hardware T&L is the first thing they check. As a result, people will start to realize that they didn't save any money and they still have to go out and buy that 200 to 300 dollar gfx card in order to play the game they just spend 25 to 50 bucks on and can't return it because they opened it.
I am not an Intel hater, but rather I am tired of people asking me why can't they play the games they just bought and is there a way I can work some magic. Once I figured out they are using an integrated gfx, the only thing I can say was you need to spend 100 bucks on a decent card.
I am not suprised of such a paper getting published.
> Imagine having the buy a new house every 4 years because your furniture is not compatible. This is the gaming industry tactics.
If I could get buy a new house for $300 and couches were $50 each, I'd be quite thrilled.
this should be done automatically with the hardware (or drivers?)
the driver should allow the user to set a minimum frame rate,
and as the game requests effects, if the frame rate is below the minimum simply deny extra eye candy.
the coder shouldnt have to be thinking about the hardware, just like the coder shouldnt have to think about how to optimize their code for a particular cpu. (that's automatic through the compiler nowadays)
i do understand that sometimes frame rate doesn't matter (ie. CAD programs) where eye candy may dominate, therefore the option in the driver would be nice.
come on linux driver coders, do some innovation!
-judging another only defines yourself
This guy is not a game developer. He's an Intel marketeer.
Notice what he talks about: Hyperthreading and Intel instruction set extensions. There's no discussion of the graphics subsystem, programmable shader pipelines, multipass rendering, lighting, Z-buffering, or texture memory - the things that concern graphics programmers for games today, and things that Intel doesn't do very well.
Beg to differ. Businesses buy expensive systems to use as servers. The only reason you'd use that much money is top-flight hard disks, gigs of RAM, RAID arrays, etc. (See ArsTechnica's insane "God" Box ($10k!))
It's eminently possible to put together the hardware for a very good gaming box for under a thousand, and an excellent one can be had with $1500-$2000.
Just as an example:
There, that's about $850. I said "under a thousand" for the hardware, right? That's lots of wiggle room for a second drive or better video card or whatever you feel the need for.
Now, given that this is a gaming box, and the best OS for gaming on this hardware is Windows, I'm not going to zealot around and scream "Linux! Linux! Linux!" at you, but figure in an extra $200 even for XP Home non-update; Professional is $300. (But just because you run Windows doesn't mean you have to run Office - take a look at OpenOffice.) Add to that an antivirus program (NAV 2004 is $50 or so) and whatever else you consider necessary, and you're looking at about $1100-1200 done. A far far cry from $5000.
And as a final point, I get plenty of games where my broadband connection doesn't matter. Some people still play singleplayer / offline games, and when I play MP, it's usually LAN.
[0] The last one I saw was 2600 & board for $90.
[1] Hell, a combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW runs about $60, if you have a minitower case.
[2] Do not skimp on the case. Cheap ones both cut corners (I did a build the other week where the motherboard just barely fit in past the optidrives - there was less than a cm of room. $15 case, I should have known.) and have corners that cut. (/me shows off scars on hands from cheap cases)
[3] Case fans, good cpuhsf, floppy drive if you want it, mouse, keyboard, etc.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
This is why nobody really develops cool games primarily for the PC now. Why bother with all that crap for a market of say 50 million, when you can write for just one configuration with a market of 50 million?
Can you guess what each market is? Yep, PC's and PS2's. What's more, console games don't get pirated anywhere near as much as PC games do. (That's based on anecdotal evidence: I've seen more people with legal games for their consoles than people with legal games for their PC's)
Working with the PS2 may be a bitch, but it's better than dealing with tracking down bugs that may or may not be caused by any number of things in the users PC. Just look at the shocking state of PC graphics drivers... no wonder PC games always need to be patched straight after they're released - it's just impossible to test on every combination of hardware and software!
You obviously didn't RTFA, because the Author proposes
"Typically, the installation program determines the level of performance and configures in-game options accordingly. Gamers can then choose to alter those choices at the expense of performance or quality."
here, then continues to elaborate this scenario.
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
The problem is that the hardware has gotten faster and now the developers can slack of more on their coding because 'by the time the game is released, there will be faster hardware available'. The progress in game 'speed' has nothing like kept up with the hardware speed. How else do you explain that the likes Descent and Terminal Velocity with their full 3D features ran just fine on a 486/66, and ran perfectly on a Pentium 66 with the full textures and details cranked up? Hardware speed has gone up by a factor of at least 50 (possibly even close to 100) since the first Pentiums were released. How come we now need this new high-end hardware to run all the new games when the technical advances have not been all that great? Original Quake worked just fine in 1024x768 on a Pentium 66. See how far you get with the recent first person shooters on hardware like that. Bottom line - hardware has long become the replacement for the skill of developers. How else do you explain the difference in resource consumption between, say, Windows 98 and Windows XP? Does it really do sufficiently more to justify a 10 fold resource use increase?
DirectX10 will support 3d splines/surface subdivision. By describing a surface as a curve with 16 control points, instead of a fixed polygon list, it is possible to create the optimum number of polygons depending on distance from viewer and rotation.
I hope OpenGL gets something similar.
Oh dear oh dear, where to begin.
IMHO the author has no credibility at all. If you've never worked on an industrial-strength game (which a 'multimedia kiosk demo' is emphatically NOT), you have *no idea* what's involved in integrating new technology into a production title. I have, and I do, and his ideas are completely impractical.
All that stuff about procedural trees and waves is just nonsense...a good artist will almost always produce superior results to an algorithm, given the right tools.
Really! There was no official software renderer for UT2003. A 3rd party, w/ the blessing of Epic, did come out with one. Go to http://unreal.epicgames.com and scroll down to the May 19, 2003 news post.
Journal
Nope. Actual games where not much scalable, but support very high resolutions.. well... with really huge resolutions the icons will looks unsable, very small.. also the fonts. And will really small resolutions the icons will looks too much huge, with REAL problems of usability. And thats all scalability most games has. Window resolution.
Other problem is some games REALLY want some minimal set of X,Y,Z. Doom3 and Half-Life will need some 3dCard features that will be common, but will stop Nvidia TNT users to play that games. Also Morrowind and Battlefield1942 can run with very old and slow harddisk, but the load times will be a TOTAL FUCKING PAIN HELLISH pain. I have a pretty decent system and Morrowind move here like mud.
So... well.. some code can be writte to optimize features for XY FPS, and you can smartly use LOD and other techniques.. but dont asume scalability will be increible and cool. Most games will work well only for a tight set of resolution, horsepower, etc...
-Woof woof woof!
That's why Starsiege/Tribes and Tribes 2 maps are able to have such large outdoor environments. File size of each map is relatively small because the entire terrain is defined by a single fractal equation.
Journal
When you buy your parts at a local shop, the can sell you an OEM version of windows XP. Up north it's 138$ canadian for XP home, so I figure you could get it for around 100 US. It's only when you go to Best Buy and pick up a "full" version in a nice box on the shelves that you pay 299$ canadian (@futureshop.ca).
And yes, that OEM version is "full", not an upgrade. Some shop will even sell you an OEM copy if you buy a hard drive, so I could buy a 120 gig Maxtor HD for 132$ canadian and get my XP OEM copy. HD + XP = 270$, 29$ less than at futureshop for the OS alone.
Most people I knew when I was at the university simply used cracked copies, not very hard to find. I bought a copy with my new computer to save me the hassle of re-cracking it for service packs and such.
Right, the author mentioned configuration... but I felt like he kind of let that idea die off. I mean, when he's talking about the tree movement, he talks about trunks, then something like "if the processor can handle it" introduce branches and leaves, and then a third level of realism above that. I guess I felt that talking about configuration at that point would have been helpful.
Off topic, but I found the article a bit hard to follow since I had to click through all 7 pages - and clicking on "printable version" just showed one page at a time as well. Argh....
The Army reading list
Of course, it's all moot. Hardly anything uses OpenGL nowadays. :(
I'm looking to get rich. I've got steps #2 (????) and #3 (PROFIT!) planned out, but am having trouble coming up with #1.
I _still_ haven't been able to turn it up all the way and have it run smoothly (especially with Midnight Madness). Granted, I'm only an athlon 1.4 and a geforce three, but for a 5 year old game, I'm mighty impressed/surprised
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
The OpenGL nurbs support is a indeed slow; it's in GLU (GL Utility library) which (on win32 at least) cannot be hardware-accelerated.
However, you can do curved surfaces in hardware if you have a programmable vertex pipeline, which means the current revisions of both OpenGL and D3D.
'Scale the number triangles to...' 'use a sine wave instead of...', game development 101 my friend.
That doesn't mean that game developers have the time to support such a broad range of hardware, the Q&A and testing expansion associated, et cetera...
Nearly every game developed in the past 5 years attempts to embrace this approach, I can't believe that this is news. I mean, most games pipeline out over 2 years AT LEAST, so by virtue of the machines they develop upon there is a 2 year coverage of hardware support (and often games ship without support or scalable performance options for the 'latest and greatest' out there.)
Maybe he's under the impression that they don't support the PII because they just don't realize that there's money in them thar hills; however, that is incredibly naive thinking. They do not usually support the large PII base (just as an example) because their research has shown that people with PIIs are not very interested in the 'latest games.' (Game Dev magazine had a survey's results published 2 or so years ago that covered this.) Simultaneously, development teams are of a generally 'limited' size. They have 'limited' time to produce a game with a particular 'window' or 'target' for shipping. Each iteration backwards in performance that you wish to support requires a serious commitment of resources. Some games which make use of (relatively) new innovations (such as pixel or vertex shaders, or new processor instruction sets) may find it inordinately difficult supporting a long back history of machine performance. Ironically, engineering a (for example) 'rendering path' which supports much older hardware can preclude your game from taking advantage of newer capabilities.
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Well, think what you like, but that was me. Sorry about the typo, I "led" it, I don't presently have anything to do with it.
The RAM prices thing was a joke.
This is a good idea; however, you have Microsoft's standard (DirectX), and you have an open standard (OpenGL). While they are both relatively good standards, what happens with DirectX is solely the decision of Microsoft, and what happens with OpenGL is the result of a consortium's views on 3D technology. Because OpenGL gets updated by a consortium, it takes much longer for them to agree on a standard than Microsoft. This is why OpenGL 1.5 was finalized so much later than DirectX 9.
It's nearly impossible to get people to agree on things, and a single standard for 3D graphics ain't gunna happen as long as Microsoft is a huge part of the market.
I'll respond even though you're an obvious troll.
They *can*, but they usually *won't*. Or they insist that you buy the major parts from them, which may end up ruining your deal-hunting.
The retailers have rules they have to abide to for selling these OEM version. I'm guessing they'll lose the right to sell them if it's discovered they sell them without systems. I'll call my prices at all the local shops carrying parts, and buy the parts from the shop where the total for everything is the lowest, not drive around and spend 10 bucks of gas to save 5$ off my RAM. And they *will* sell me an OEM version.
Is there such a thing as an "upgrade" OEM version?
No, there isn't. That sentence was put there so that people would compare the OEM prices with "full" versions. I'm pretty sure you weren't asking, just trying to be sarcastic towards me. I gave you an answer nonetheless.
Well, yeah, and if you ambush a truck and steal some video cards, that reduces your cost somewhat as well. That shouldn't figure in a post about "Look how cheap parts are these days."
No need to bring out absurdities. I was merely expanding on the OS part of the parent post. The parent brought up several subjects, and I took up one for my response. The fact that a lot of people do used cracked copy of windows is spot-on for the conversation.
It's possible to *avoid* buying a copy of Windows with a new computer?
I've bought two computers in the last 8 months without windows, it is perfectly possible. I order all my parts, pick them up, pay for them and leave. I've never had a problem doing this in Canada.
mmmm... 2 big flesh-coloured angular polygons...
I have a VX1 I bought about 7 years ago, but sadly less and less games are supporting OpenGL. Guess it's MS's DirectX pushing them around.
As I recall...
You're sort of correct. MICROS~1 really likes it if OEM copies of Windows are sold with one-per-system type of hardware - IE CPU or board. Harddrive, like you cited, is borderline. Also, just because they need to sell you hardware X in order to sell you the OEM, doesn't mean they have to offer you the opportunity to buy an OEM copy with hardware X.
And yes, they probably will lose the right to sell them if it's discovered they sell them without *hardware*. However, if it's discovered they sell a complete system bare, they may also lose the right to the OEM versions.
The rest of your post indicates you're in Canada; I'm in California. There aren't that many shops of the kind you cite left here, where you can walk in and leave with everything you need. (And the last time I did this, the RAM was more like spend $5 of gas to save $50-$60.) If you buy everything at one place, you are definitely missing out on a deal or two.
And yes, they can sell you an OEM version under those circumstances. They don't have to offer it, nor do they have to force it on you. Unlike...
See, you didn't buy computers as in two complete system. You bought two complete system's worth of parts and put them together yourself. Subtle difference, but if you had the shop assemble it... well, remember when MICROS~1 basically told everyone they had an OEM deal with "You have two options. Either 100% of the systems you build go out with Windows licenses, or you lose your OEM version - and pricing - rights."? So therefore OEM had to put - and charge the customer for - Windows on every machine.
By just buying the parts, and not the system as assembled and software installed by the OEM, you probably ducked that bit of the language in their agreement.
Now, the anti-MICROS~1 view of this is that they abused their monopoly to ensure its dominance. If an OEM was to sell even one bare - or Linux - machine, the cost for the rest of their systems would pop up by $100+, and they faced the poisonous dilemma of absorbing the extra expense or raising prices.
The Microsoft sympathetic view is this: Linux on the desktop is far far in the minority now, and was even more so then. The great likelyhood was that any bare system would have pirated (cracked, warez, keygenned, corporate, take your pick) Windows installed.
Speaking of which,
Yes, but I can't suggest that, just like I can't suggest hijacking a truck, as the AC exampled.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
I've noticed that ever since the days of the C64 and NES, many game designers have opted to push their hardware way beyond its limits, resulting in slowdown. Today, the problem persists quite commonly in cross-platform ports where the designers couldn't be bothered to simplify the rendering to get the performance smoother on the target platform.
The most important aspect of any game, and in fact, any user-interface, is responsiveness. Give me an otherwise identical port of an excellent game, but with a choppy framerate, and it completely ruins the game. It feels like wading through molasses.
The reason I have historically liked Nintendo is that they have never pushed the system beyond its limits in their own in-house games. When Nintendo writes a game for its own hardware, it ensures the game runs smoothly. They simplify the game, if necessary, to ensure it performs well. I belive the only time they ever came close to violating this was with the original SNES StarFox game, and that was only because 3D was a new-fangled trick and there really wasn't much else like it availble on home systems at the time.
I want to see game designers stop trying to focus on visual detail, and instead focus on behavioral detail. Zelda WindWaker is an excellent example of how to do it right: the game's visuals are actually pretty simplistic, but that's fine because there's still an attention to detail throughout the game in terms of how the characters move, how the camera angles work, how objects that are just part of the "background" are still interactable, etc. The game looks pretty much like Zelda64 on the N64 if you examine still screenshots, but if you actually play the game you realize that the GameCube is a huge step up.
Incidentally, this is my same primary gripe with graphic operating systems for personal computers. When I click something, I expect it to respond immediately -- not to launch into a hard-drive-thrashing frenzy for 15 seconds before finally doing what I told it to do. Responsiveness to user input should be the highest-priority job for any graphic desktop, rather than an afterthought that enslaves users to frustrating delays. Fifteen seconds is an eternity, after all, in an environment when your mind already runs faster than your fingers can physically type.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Relatively decent computers are available for 300$USD.....
With TV out? And including a high-quality USB game pad designed by specialists in game pads? And can games run directly from the CD instead of needing to be "installed"? And what about copy protection that Just Doesn't Work with your CD drive until you download and install a no-CD crack?
Explain to me again the advantages of having a cheap, weak-ass gaming console?
In addition to the above, nobody has made anything like Super Smash Bros. for the PC.
>>> Horrible pixellation is no longer fashionable
>> Then why are so many people trying to pirate and emulate the latest SNK fighting games?
> SNK games are not open source.
I recognized that SNK Playmore follows a proprietary software business model. I was giving an example of "horrible pixellation", running in a similar video mode to Quake 1, that is in fact fashionable. If 320-pixel-wide video modes are no longer fashionable, then what explains the success in both commercial and pirate circles of SNK titles that use such modes?
> and the kde games are not on the level that even Age of Empires was years ago.
Level of what? Do you seriously think more people play AoE style games than play solitaire? How would you suggest that one design and implement, say, a solitaire sim on a higher "level" as you put it than Kpatience? And it's true that 2D RTS games such as Stratagus are not as graphically sophisticated as the more recent 3D RTS games, but as the success of SNK games shows, since when are graphics everything? If graphics were everything, a version of Photoshop Elements specialized for turn-based image editing contests would be the hottest selling video game.
Just to clarify a few points, I do live in Canada. Those systems were bought separately, but invoiced by the company as a system sold. I just dodged assembly cost by doing it myself, altough I also do that because I love putting them together.
I rarely see prices vary more than 5% between different shops. I usually check www.canadacomputers.com, www.microbytes.com and www.lcimtl.com, and use those prices to compare with various shops. When you check those prices just remember that it's in canadian $, and factor in no shipping.
Thanks for the clarifications for OEMs, altough the rules might differ a little in Canada.