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Dreadnought Demos Released
John Callaham writes to tell us that Gamecloud is heralding the latest release from Torc Interactive and AMD. The latest demos for the upcoming FPS, Dreadnought, have been released. The first is strictly a gameplay movie while the other gives a comparison between the game running on a 64 bit processor (which it was ultimately designed for) and a 32 bit processor.
It's interesting that AMD is pushing their 64 bit technology with this game. If it weren't for video games then what other reason would we have to continue to build faster computers?
Bradley Holt
If it weren't for video games then what other reason would we have to continue to build faster computers?
one word: porn
drunk chemists
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# uncompressed normal maps allowing for higher texture quality and greater detail
# significantly higher number of particle effects (e.g. more flames, more steam, more smoke, etc.)
# persistent decals (e.g. bullet holes stay on walls and don't fade away over time as in 32-bit)
# post-processing effects (e.g. screen glows)
# more pixel shader instructions (the adrenaline vision mode is built upon and replaces the base lighting shader to produce the effect)
*****************
there's the rundown on the 32bit vs 64 bit changes.
now, call me an idiot if you will, but none of those really smell like something they couldn't have done in 32 bit - which makes the 64bit vs. 32bit comparision TOTALLY FRIGGIN USELESS unless you're a phb or something. mostly it just seems like they assume 64 bit system to have more memory and a faster graphics card tied to it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So blowing away bots at will isn't the aim of this game ... I find that a bit hard to believe.
This extract makes it sound like Sherlock Holmes :)
Images down already? Shame the servers don't run on that optimized 64-bit super-engine too.
I really want to sign up for that website really badly to see a video game for which I am unable to find screenshots or any information whatsoever.
A wise man once said, "wtf h4x."
How is this in any way original to countless other FPS games?
garble
I would prefer it was 'it's own OS' like Quake3 so that if you had a 64 bit processor but not WInXP 64 bit, you could still take advantage of the 64 bit code.
Running on a 64 and 32 bit OS respectively?
That's what it says in the article. Windows x64 for 64 bits, and presumably regular Windows for 32 bits.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
I'm glad to see theyre marketing to all platforms, offering their gameplay files in .exe format.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
This is an advertisement to try and get filecloud sign-ups. Take it down.
Hopefully not this.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
This isn't an upcoming FPS. This is a tech demo for Torc's game engine and AMD's AWESOME64(TM) processors.
SThis is just like the "Pixel Shader 3.0" fakery that happened with Far Cry.
The only difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions is that they have disabled a lot of features on the 32-bit version. There is no reason why they could not look the same.
Pure marketing BS.
It's "important" because this is a pioneering game to be geared towards AMD64. Sure, there is the 64-bit Linux binary for UT2004, for which I am very impressed with Atari to be supporting and the developers to be watching bugzilla so frequently, but this isn't a Linux-64 game. I personally wasn't expecting any Windows-64 games to be out for at least another year or two, Windows, of course being the "standard" gaming OS. Either this game is going to be a little before its time, or it's going to put pressure on other developers to get their games out with AMD64 support because there's now competition at some level out there. For those savvy or rich enough to have AMD64 boxes but don't want to put up with having to hand-edit UT2004.ini in vim to change resolutions, we have a newgame that is kind of paving the way.
Important enough to be Slashdot-worthy, anyway.
I'm a little curious to see what the inside of a Kirov class cruiser looks like. I doubt even the CIA or the navy knows exactly. Based on what I've been allowed to see of our own conventionally powered Aegis cruisers and destroyers in the tours I've been on, and the fact that the layout of nuclear-powered ships is even more protected in both the US navies, there has to be a huge amount of conjecture going on here.
Still, I've always been interested in playing a game that effectively encompasses all of a relatively small area, rather than meandering through small parts of a huge area. Quite a few pictures of the Kirovs are publicly available, and if they study other ships (retired destroyers, battleships, etc), they should be able to create a very believable environment, with all sorts of mundane curiousities to explore. If the entire game really takes place on this ship, notwithstanding the fact that it's dimensionally nearly as big as an Iowa class battleship, it should lend itself well to that sort of game design. Being on a ship also offers some fun. For example, they could change the weather and sea states throughout the game (how about throwing a grenade in a 40 knot wind?). I thought the varying weather was one of the nice subtleties of Enigma: Rising Tide (although that's not an FPS).
Of course, it could end up simply sucking like most other games out there.
Yeah.....
I remember when I was like 11, I thought Maxis could see everything I was doing in SimAnt, since it had a Name/Company registration thing in the game, and that my games were being transmitted to Maxis for some kind of high-score database. My computer had no modem or anything at all in my computer, the only thing plugging it into the wall being the power cable.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
All of what they say pretty much pertains only to the graphics card's capabilities.
No compression for textures? Cards with 512MB are the hot things now, and there's not really a good use for it. With 32 bit addressing, we can address 4GB of memory. That's what? 8 times what's currently available on anything less than a ginormous SGI simulation center? Yeah. 64 bit doesn't help us there, not even in the long term.
There's not a graphics card alive that's going to need 64 bit addressing to render literally billions of particles, and there won't be for at least 10 years, barring some extreme advances, or the use of alien technology (teehee). Same with decals, even if you "only" had memory to store the location of 512 million of 'em, there's no way the system will handle displaying even a few thousand all at once.
Glows? Unless they need 64 precision math done on the CPU (which they don't), yeah, non-issue. Consumer GPUs are limited to what? 24 bit plus alpha? Same for pixel shaders, this has nothing to do with the CPU in almost all instances.
So yeah, for games, as with most general purpose computing, this is pretty much useless. What's really sad is that they've rallied around arguments for their 64 bit push that are essentially limited by the decidedly non-64 bit GPU. Brilliant.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
It's BS.
s p
http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/dellbug.a
I don't follow. Quake 3 was not its own OS and still had to rely on Windows (or Linux) to provide resource allocation and management.
The example you're looking for is pretty much ANY complex game ~95/96 which still required you to launch it off a special dos bootdisk. It was these games that had their own video drivers, their own sound drivers, their own protected mode kernel, their own task management, their own memory allocation routines, etc. An older example of this phenomenon is Doom (the original one).
Cause it would be stupid to think that Slashdot's editors tailor their articles just for you. Guess what I do when I see an article I'm not interested in...I don't read it!!!! OMFG, who would have ever thought of that, eh? I must be the most intelligent person in the world!!!! One thing I definately don't do is make a stupid comment that says nothing more than I'm not interested, cause guess what??? No one cares :)
almost. ~95/96 was DOS4GW, the defacto standard 32bit loader for dos that all games used (yay DJGPP) to break out of 16bit dos (think windows 3.1/95 starting from dos). this was when miles and i think scitech were the popular audio and video drivers that a lot of major developers used (why reinvent the wheel?).
:). i never figured out if there was a common library that developers used to build off of. if anyone is familiar with these games, please enlighten me
~85/86 where the dos bootdisk games, such as Pacman, Tapper, Kings Quest 1, and Styx. these games actually were their own os, since they had to handle keyboard interrupts, draw graphics to a video adapter (cga,ega anyone?
You could use the DOS interrupts, but they were slow and had many issues that weren't good for games. Graphics was down to the metal, no other way of getting good performance, keyboard, joystick and mouse aren't all that complicated, really. No network for the most part, sound usually consisted of 2 or 3 options (speaker, soundblaster, adlib, little else).
or do the 32-bit screenshots actually look better than the 64-bit ones?
s p
I am referring to these screenshots:
http://amd64downloads.filecloud.com/dreadnought.a
The Admiral Ushakov is an old Soviet Kirov class nuclear missile cruiser which disappeared in the Barents sea 4 years ago and was believed lost at sea with all hands. It reappeared off the coast of Iceland recently and is believed to have fallen into terrorist hands and is being used to carry out bio-weapon research.
1) Fer crying out loud. A "dreadnought" used to mean a kick-ass battleship, not some whiny little cruiser.
2) If we can't find one fucking cruiser for 4 years with the satellites we have now, China deserves to kick our ass. (Or, just look it up on Google Earth.)
3) OK, if a cruiser DID fall into terrorist hands and is parked out in the middle of nowhere: send a sub, sink the boat and move on to the next problem. (Unless you've seen one too many Steven Seagal movie, I guess...)
4) Enough, already, my brain hurts!
First of all, I don't see how this belongs on the front page at all; perhaps in the Games section, but not on the front page. It's just a technology demo put out by some company working on some game engine. Maybe if it was the next Half-Life, Doom, or Quake engine, but not some no-name game.
Secondly, it is a big fat load of bullshit. Others have pointed out the obvious.
Thirdly, why the fuck is AMD teaming with these people? Hmm. If you were betting your company on the jump to 64-bit, what would you be willing to do to improve your presence? Perhaps team up with somebody who intentionally cripples a 32-bit application in order to show how awesome your 64-bit products are? No, that could never happen. AMD can do no evil!
Is it just me, or does the 32 bit shot have image compression artifacts? For example, just outside the edge of the guy's head. I don't notice any on the 64 bit shot. Also the 32bit image is 18.7KB in size and the 64bit image is 45.6KB in size, hmmmmmm.
Judging from the gameplay video it looks more like a - First Person Throw Stuff At People With My Weird Tentacles And See Pretty Particle Effects - than a FPS.
I wouldn't play it merely because it looked like it took so long to kill the guys... I mean if it takes me 5 seconds pounding away at an AI that's just standing there to kill him theres something really wrong with the way damage is calculated.
Why oh why do people post compressed videos as recompressed files in proprietary platform-specific .exe files?
95/96 I had a F1 racing game, which amusing enough installed from *within* 95, but required you to boot off a diskette.
DOS4GW was a 32-bit extender (read: it provided some normal 32-bit kernel-like functionality under DOS, sorta). I never had anything DOS4GW actually work correectly under Win95, since Win95 by itself a 32-bit extender of sorts. Some DOS4GW versions were able to knock out EMM/HIMEM/VM86-monitors, but they certainly cannot break out of real 32-bit system.
That used to be a tech demo and turned into a full-fledged game/series.
... and wow, how very underwhelming. Firstly, it ran fine, such as it is, on my P4 3.2 Ghz w/GB RAM and Radeon x850 XT PE. The only problem is, the game sucks, even for a tech demo.
The environs are even more cramped than Doom 3. The sound is OK, but the graphics look about two generations old. Maybe that's the point? Are they saying that's as good as it gets on my Pentium proc? Well, hey, that's fine. If you'd rather not have me as a customer because I'm running a 32 bit Intel processor, there are lots of other games I can spend my money on.
F.E.A.R. is comming-out in a few weeks (which is what this game wishes it could live up to), or Quake 4. I can't wait.
Glows actually can be helped by 64+ bits, but not CPU bits. All of the latest generation of GPUs, and some previous (basically all DirectX 9 GPUs) support colour depths greater than 32-bit. A 32-bit colour depth is 8 bits per colour, and 8 bits for transparancy. Given that 8-bits per channel is the normal output, it was generally thought to be enough. However anyone who's worked with shaders will tell you that small errors start to add up, and you can get nasty results. So new GPUs support 64-bit and 128-bit floating point colour.
Now because of the extra bits, and because it's a FP representation, you get much better colour, highlights, and shadows. Though the output is ultimately the same resolution, you don't have the clipping problems you used to, and you don't have errors that add up to incorrect colours.
Both nVidia and ATi have a bunch of demos that'll show you this, if you like. Any Radeon 9 or X series or GeForce 6 or 7 series will handle it.
However none of this is relivant to a 64-bit CPU. This can, and does work great on a 32-bit CPU. It's all internal to the GPU. Even if the CPU needed to do some work as 64-bit CPU would be irrelivant as only the integer unit is increased in size. FP units have been larger than 32-bits for a long time, current CPUs generally can handle up to 128-bit FP numbers, depending on what you are doing.
So you are correct, all fluff as far as the CPU is concerned.
I find it disturbing that in the future everything seems to be soaked in vaseline.
doesn't seem to have removed this. Time to update my filter list!
Is this still the old-fashioned hard shading of doom 3?
Come on. Nowadays i expected multi-light soft shading on high res rigid bodies...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No, I didn't think so. Does anyone even use Windows around here? Right, so why post links to .exe movies?
32-bit Windows splits the virtual address space in half, 2 GB for the OS and 2 GB for the app.
Then it splits that 2 GB again, not in the most optimum fashion, for: code, libraries, stack, read-only data, heap, read-write data, etc.
What you have left is probably less than 1 GB unless you juggle things around with some horribly complex hack that isn't likely to work with the next Windows release.
I have no doubt that a game could use more than 1 GB of data. Well, there you go. The 32-bit game will need to compress the textures and bum maps and such. The 64-bit game won't have that trouble.
Plus 64-bit mode gets you more registers, which really helps the compiler to make fast code.
Huh, that's intersting about the glows/alphas and stuff, and the latest gen cards supporting more than 24 bit--I'll admit that I haven't messed around too much with pixel shaders, but then again, I'm no game dev. Makes sense, though, and if John Carmack wants 128bit FPs on GPUs, I'm sure they'll make something beautiful that can use it...
:) Saddam should've held off a few years on that shipment of PS2s... *grin*
And hey, besides games, I've no doubt that a well priced and comercially available processor capable of fast and precise 128bit floating point math could be useful in any number of situations
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Do you think they'll lob the reactor fuel rods at the enemy or what? Fuel rods are not weapon grade material.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I think he means that quake3 was a VM. the gamecode proper ran bytecode in a virtual "os" presented to it by quake3.
Does anyone even use Windows around here?
.exes from a strange website claiming to be from a game I've never heard of before? I'm not going to touch them.
Oh, *please*. Not only has CmdrTaco (or one of the other folks) said about 70% of the folks that read slashdot do so from Windows PCs according to their server logs, but gamers are the most likely group of all to use Windows. Perhaps you've not noticed, but there are precious few video game offerings for Linux as opposed to Windows currently. I certainly don't remember agreeing to any EULA stating I would never use Windows again when I was setting up my slackware router or mandrake proxy server...
As for executable files being used to display video, I'm with you all the way. Download and run
...that this isn't just like Battlecruiser only bigger...
Chris Mattern
Or are neither of these images particular enticing in comparison to other game offerings that have already come out? Even in the "better" 64-bit image the wall textures look pretty non-realistic, and the wall console reminds me of Doom (not Doom 3). The AA also seems not so great, the arms look jaggy, and are the soldier dude's eyes crossed???
Yes, that's what I meant but lacked the technical ability to explain. Thanks.
It's an .exe and it's not playable? Who would bother downloading it? Not I!!
Faster CPUs matter too. As bandwidth increases (say, gigabit speeds), it reaches a point at which the computers become the limiting factor in network throughput, not the pipe. What good is having a 5 gpbs line to your house when your computer chokes on 500 mbps or so? That's a lot of wasted boobage.
"definitely" but I really wasn't trying to sound disinterested. I really didn't see the importance of it. I'm glad other people responded and cleared it up for me. But thanks.
I did not know this. This is the most absolutely freaking coolest thing I've seen. I never knew Q3 had its onw VM that actually executed the game code. Do sorta-derived games like HL do the same?
d e/qcommon/vm.c?rev=1&view=markup
Cool...
http://quake3.delphigl.com:8080/viewsvn/source/co
No, HL does not. If you were ever wondering why Q3 had such a strange interface, now you know.