Slashdot Mirror
Halo 2 Only on Vista
iLogiK writes "Halo 2 will be available for PC, but only in Windows Vista. From the announcement: 'Halo 2 the game that redefined first-person combat and multiplayer action for millions of gamers worldwide, is set to explode onto PCs exclusively for Windows Vista. Halo 2 for Windows Vista will be developed by a dedicated Microsoft Game Studios team in partnership with Bungie Studios.'" That's one way to force upgrades. I thought just not releasing patches for the microsoft-worm-of-the-week would be enough ;)
> noone is going to upgrade their OS just to buy a praticular game.
Not true, I had to up to XP to play EQ2
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I remember reading that the 360 and Vista share similar software in the graphics system. In other words, MS was going to a "write once, play everywhere (that's from MS)" architecture so developers wouldn't have to do a lot of converting. It sounds like this is fallout from that, not some evil marketing plot to make people buy Vista to play a game.
Yup, I hate Windows with a passion, but the latest games I like to play forced me to both build a new gaming rig from scratch (i'm lazy) and get a new copy of Windows - haven't decided between XP or possibly Vista...
This has long been the case; ever since DirectX 10 was announced, it was known to be Vista-only. DirectX 10 will not run on XP. You can verify this yourself by running the DirectX 10 preview from Microsoft.
Not only that, Direct3d 10 requires DirectX 10 capable hardware, non of which is currently available.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
That's one of the big reasons that MS isn't supporting the mouse for the 360...PC gamers would dominate the online play while console-only gamers with their gamepads would be wondering how the other guy moves so fast (and probably screaming HAX!). Rather than put up with a nonintuitive, relatively slow interface, I just stick with the PC for my FPS gaming. And RTS. And flight sims.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Here's the deal:
If you want to watch any commercial video that is "hi-def" in full resolution, you must have an HDCP-compliant monitor. No exceptions.
If you do not have an HDCP-compliant monitor, you are at the mercy of whoever created the video. If they are generous, then they will instruct the codec to downsample the video to at least DVD-quality, if not lower. If they are assholes, they will flat-out prevent the video from playing.
These limitations are absolutely 0% technical.
It seems stupid, but it's all part of plugging every single hole they can find. It works together with the "Trusted Computing" requirements (encrypted and obscured I/O and memory) that are continually on the verge of being brought into force.
Halo 1 Easter Eggs Scroll down abit.
You probably won't hear this, but underneath all the Wintendo themes and bubbles and hiding inactive icons and personalized menus... XP is actually pretty stable. And you can turn all that stuff off and get the security and functionality of a NOT 6 year old OS which runs pretty much just as fast as it's predecessors... I know, it takes time to disable all that crap...but still, isn't it worth it, so you don't get hit by a 2 year old virus?
I'm an Ubuntu person myself... but when I have to use Windows (I.E. my clients), XP really isn't that bad (once you turn off all the crap). You just have to know where to turn it off. It's still 2k underneath!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It's not the speed but rather the accuracy of a mouse that makes it superior. You can set the sensitivity setting in Halo 2 to 10 and turn just as fast as on any PC game but the clumsiness of the controller joystick makes it impossible to aim. With a mouse, on the other hand, you can play at the highest sensitivities and still be able to shoot.
Well that's just dumb. For starters, Microsoft always lie about the minimum requirements for their operating systems so if you upgraded you may find it sucks worse performance wise than it did before. And secondly games always say what their requirements are right there on the box. If Halo 2 says it needs some high end machine then that's what you should have if you want to play it.
Though I find the idea that you need a high spec machine to be extremely dubious. Even modern games like FEAR, Doom3 & Half Life 2 played on my old 1.8Ghz box with an acceptable framerate. I certainly had to turn down some of the detail but they were playable. Unless Halo 2 is some grossly inefficient pig of a game, it would play on that level spec too.
Personally the game I'm looking forward to is Crysis - the newly announced sequel to Far Cry. The technical demos look awesome.
Actually it takes about 15 seconds to 'disable all that crap' (okay, 15 seconds and a re-start)
Start->Run 'msconfig'
Go to 'Services' tab
Un-check 'themes'
Save it and choose whether or not to re-start.
Blue stuff will be gone.
No reason to lie.
You should have also turned off Remote Registry Service if you didn't want to reinstall in another 5 months. Regards, Vox
No, they are not.
What happens right now is that if you dont have a hardware accelerated driver for OpenGL installed, windows will use a 100% software OpenGL implementation (which implements pretty much no extentions or recent GL features).
On Vista, the software implementation will be replaced with an implementation that implements more of the core GL features and extentions but does it on top of Direct3D.
In both cases, if you install the drivers from NVIDIA or ATI or whoever, you will still get full hardware accelerated OpenGL with all the extentions your vendor has chosen to provide. But, on Vista, using that will disable some of the 3D Accelerated Aeroglass UI crap.
Even more to the point, the display vendors say it should be possible to build a driver that can handle both the Aeroglass UI AND OpenGL at the same time.
The most impressive thing to me was the startup time in XP, I didnt believe that it would be faster than 98, I thought these days Windows could only claim to be faster than before, because the base machines they were running on was faster. But it is actually faster through startup. Likely they used similar technology to the hibernation code to save a base setup after installing everything (well that's what I would do..)
which is totally what she said