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DX10 - How Far Have We Come?
MojoKid writes "When DirectX 10 was first introduced to the market by graphics
manufacturers and subsequently supported by Windows Vista, it was generally
understood that adoption by game developers was going to be more of a slow
migration than a quick flip of a switch. That said, nearly a year later, the
question is how far have we come? An article at the
HotHardware site showcases many of the most popular DX10-capable game
engines, like
Bioshock ,
World In Conflict , Call of Juarez, Lost Planet, and
Company of Heroes, and features current image quality comparisons versus DX9
modes with each. The article
also details
performance levels across many of the more popular graphics
cards, from both the mid-range and high-end." PC Perspective has a similar look at DX10 performance.
Am I the only one who find the DX9 version of the pictures more appealing? With the exception of the Bioshock fog examples (which had sharp boundaries in DX9) they just look more "natural" to me.
it took me a few minutes to remember what the hell DirectX actually was.
I was like, there's nothing in Linux that requires it, so wtf is it?
Found it - http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/2007/04/finally-making-use-of-this-blog-i.html
Anyone tried this or know if it's still being updated?
I wonder how many of these differences would be more apparently with some motion and several sequential frames. I know there are texture effects that look OK when the user isn't moving but terrible when he is, although DX9 already has enhancements for that.
Still, nothing there makes me want to jump out and buy a $600 graphics card. Someday I'll have to move to PCIe, SATA, and multi-core; perhaps that will be the time. If it's with a 64 bit OS, so much the better.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
since it is from Micro$oft, DX10 is such a failure, not only are games not going from DX9 to DX10, they are going from DX9 to DX8.
DirectX Will make just the advancements it needs to keep programmers from going SDL and OpenGL. Thats what it is for. The question is not how far has DirectX come, its how far does SDL and OpenGL have to go.
Then the answer is going to have to be "not very far". I can't see game developers getting that excited about something supported only on a version of the operating system that people are specifically NOT migrating to in droves.
My new (dual-booting) laptop with an Intel GMA X3100 doesn't seem to work properly with DX9 or DX10, which pisses me off because I got it thinking I would have ok performance and decent Linux drivers. Should have gone for AMD/ATI, but I didn't know they would open their specs 2 weeks after I got it. None of my favorite games work, except Rome TW.
These numbers to me validate my suspicion that DX10 was nothing more than a cheep angle to sell Vista. The performance isn't a tremendous improvement and the resulting graphics are enough of an improvement that I'm going to let Vista suck down that much of my hardware.
But the only reason I could see for DX10 was WinVista, and that has been such a disappointment that it's just not going to matter to most of us.
Meanwhile, my Wii works fine with my digital TV as it does for most Americans, and we'll buy HDTV when it's cheap (or we have to in 2009).
Promises mean little. Results matter. Come out with decent fully documented drivers for Linux and the Mac OS and we'll talk.
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I think that the "realism" isn't worth it. Go out and create DX7 games that are fun :P !! (or openGL games that don't require much extensions;)
.... um, hello?
Oh, come on, everyone will buy the PS3 because it has better graphics than the Wii
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I see enough problems getting them to adopt Vista, period. And its not just game developers. Hardware vendors don't seem to do much better. I have a computer that I built almost exactly two years ago. When I built it, all of the parts used had been released within the previous 6 months. So everything on there is younger than 3 years, at the oldest. As of September, the chipset driver hadn't been updated since Vista was in beta and the sound driver offered "limited support." All of the games that I tried ran about 75% as fast as the did in XP. A couple didn't work at all.
Some of the direct x10 images look better, and some look worse. Just shows you that better tech doesn't necesarily translate to better art. The Call of Juarez water effects image definately looks better in the direct x 9 version.
http://www.hothardware.com/articles/The_State_of_DirectX_10__Image_Quality__Performance/?page=5
"shadows in DX10 are crisper and more accurate than in DX9. In the image below, the shadow in DX9 has blurry edges while the same shadow in DX10 has sharp and crisp edges"
That's great, except for the fact that shadows don't have crisp edges in the real world. Unless it's illuminated by a point-source (which immediately excludes the sun, lamps, flashlights, and pretty much every other light source you're likely to encounter), there will be a penumbra. The DX9 image here: http://www.hothardware.com/articleimages/item1031/big_stateofdx10_wic_shad.jpg is more realistic.
Simple flash example: http://www.goalfinder.com/Downloads/Shadows.swf
G
when games become as fun as they are pretty to look at. Till then I'll be off playing Defcon and Peggle.
There is simply too much glass..
recently ditched the windows world and have been happily working with ubuntu for a couple of months now. ran vista for a few months when it came out, funny how all those cool Aero effects look pretty weak compared to Beryl... I'm starting to think MS hasn't got a clue. 5 YEARS for Vista and this is IT? half my games wouldn't even work. in fact several of them run better in ubuntu w/ wine than they did in Vista. now that's pretty sad. Whatever, i've seen the writing on the wall, and i'm getting a console for gaming. The only reason i was still on windows was games, but i've reached the point due to tech advances that it's going to cost me as much as getting PS3/360/Wii combined to continue enjoying games on the PC. Unfortunately, nothing else i do on the pc requires nearly that much horsepower. bye bye bill.
Any word on how DX10 will compare to OpenGL in the new Unreal?
Who cares about cool special effects to fake optical accuracy? Within a few years we'll have real-time ray tracing and everything using rasterized graphics will look so fake.
What's this "we" business? DX10 is only available with Vista, and Vista sales are abysmal. And with this being a *nix-oriented site, it's falling on deaf ears.
The summary states that DirectX 10 was "introduced" to by the hardware manufacturers and Windows adopted it. I have always understood it to be the other way around. If it is the hardware makers, then why are they actively supporting two different 3D APIs (DX, OpenGL)? Does this mean that DirectX could be adopted by another OS, say Linux? Only for a fee?
I urge everyone to vote with their wallet and try games that support OpenGL and Linux. Sure, you may never get to play Halo 3 in Linux, but if the game developers see the market growing there, I'm sure we'll start to see more big names soon. It will be to their ultimate benefit, too, since they can take advantage of the advanced technologies that Linux has to offer (mostly for free). Can you imagine games or applications that worked with Beryl to create actual 3D desktop objects instead of just 2D windows. Or how about a Linux LiveCD that did nothing but boot a kernel with drivers and ran a dedicated game; every single CPU cycle would be dedicated to giving you frames per second.
Personally, I've been addicted to this great 3D bridge-building game, Bridge Construction Set. Of course, it supports Linux
Adapt, adopt, or get out of the way!
The real joke is that neither DX9 nor DX10 are inherently "better" any more than the original Glide API was inherently "better" than DirectX or OpenGL. Hardware has been changed constantly, to give "better" responses to this call or that call, but inevitably you have to write a driver that converts the OpenGL or DX9/DX10 or whatever into something your card understands.
In the really old days, you had people actually coding for the card on hand. This is why there's a gazillion different releases of Mechwarrior 2, each of which varies greatly in image quality and features - each had to be hand tuned to the card.
If Bioshock had been intended for DX9, it would probably look the same as that DX10 shot on DX9. They'd have figured out what they needed to do, perhaps coded a few "If ATI, do this, if NVidia, do this, if Intel Extreme fail 'your video card is too crappy to play this game'" decisions for specific hardware, and that would have been that. Since it was backported (and MS would have thrown a fit to have "no difference") they had to just do a more slappy job of it.
Then again, if not for the emphasis on ridiculous graphics, think about how many games would be able to use their processing power for some seriously wicked AI. Even Bioshock only has half-decent AI that can be twigged to and predicted fairly easily - you know that a wrench guy is going to rush you, you know that the spider slicers will hang from the ceiling and lob stuff all day till you burn or freeze them, you know where the houdinis are going to land long before the animation starts merely because you can figure out what the AI tree says for them to do in what radius... it's sad.
Hell, you can predict the precise spot on the health bar where they'll run for the health station, and if you're smart you trapped that thing half an hour ago. Now you get to watch as four of them all kill themselves on the same damn one, never paying attention to the 3 dead bodies on the floor that obviously just gassed themselve using a booby-trapped station.
But nevermind. I know the reason they want graphics over AI - the same fucking morons that could never defeat a decently programmed AI (hell, they have trouble getting through Halo on NORMAL), drool over thinking that they can see the shoelaces on Madden's boot.
I don't think DirectX 10 will achieve any kind of market acceptance until DirectX 11 is released. Then everyone will bitch about DirectX 11's high-end hardware requirements, DRM lockdowns, and poor performance and they'll start clamoring for the good old days of Direct X 10.
Microsoft is basically being themselves and holding the entire PC gaming industry back. Its basic business: why would a company spend millions of dollars and months making a game that only about at most 7-10% of consumers would even have access to? Your computer has to be super powerful if it has Windows Vista on it to come close to running DirectX 10 games. I play FlightGear on my computer, and tried it on Windows Vista and Linux. Every time I played it on Windows Vista I would get "Virtual memory low" messages and the system would automaticly increce my pagefile. The Linux version, however, ran with no lag or problems of any kind. I think its time the SEC starts coming back into play. But Microsoft is just digging their own grave, if they destroy PC gaming, I have no more reasons to use Windows or have it on my hard drive. Gaming is the only thing I do not use Linux for.
A lot of the "improvements" are things that the game is doing differently in the DX9 and DX10 versions. Some of them, like the "litter objects" in one of the games, or gun movement effects in another, have nothing to do with DX10... it's like the game developers simply put more polish in the DX10 versions because they wanted the punters to "get their money's worth".
Stories posted to the Game section of Slashdot rarely see more than fifty responses.
The Slashdot Geek isn't really a driving force in PC gaming and anything said here about Microsoft and Vista tends to be tainted by wishful thinking. It isn't retail-boxed Vista that sells to the home market, it is the OEM system bundle.
You'll find the neon-lit Gamer's PC with Vista and NVIDIA 8800 DX10 Video at Walmart.com. What you won't find is OEM Linux at any price or in any configuration.
As someone who writes AI for text-based games, let me clear you of some misconceptions.
First, the goal of "AI" isn't always to be as smart as possible. Often, the goal is to make something believable and/or of the appropriate difficulty level. It's possible that Bioshock missed the mark there, but I haven't played Bioshock yet, so I don't know.
I can write "AI" that will kick your ass every time, even without cheating. (Mobs have the advantage of being on home turf, and they outnumber you.) But that's not fun for the player, so I don't do it. Instead, I'll write something with a pattern you have to figure out. Once you learn one of the ways to beat it, the mob will be easy for you, and it's time to move on to the next area. Very few mobs get the full "try to survive at all cost" treatment, and even fewer are programmed to actually learn from your behavior.
You're describing the classic "I wish this mob would keep getting harder" remorse, but think about it: would it really make sense for those mobs to learn from your new tactics? Are they supposed to be smart, or are they just supposed to be an obstacle?
As for your dead bodies example: would you really prefer to have an infinite standoff as the mobs decide it's not worth getting killed, so they go hide somewhere with their own traps and wait for you to attack? Right... so get over it. If games were realistic, you would realdie on level 1.
Agree 100%. Dx9 appears to be more realistic, Dx10 is very "cartoonish" looking.
> I can write "AI" that will kick your ass every time, even without cheating.
> (Mobs have the advantage of being on home turf, and they outnumber you.)
You are assuming that the mob would just sit there and wait for the player, like it usually does in pretty much every game. In reality, a "level" would not necessarily know that Gordon Freeman is on his way. Neither will they have the patience to sit in their assigned ambush places, waiting for him all day long. A better AI would actually "live" in the environment where it is placed, so that it would react to the player instead of waiting for him. It would also be fun to watch. In Half-Life I really enjoyed watching those occasional scenes where monsters are wondering around doing things; like when the bullsquids feed on the headcrabs. I wish there were more things like that, things worth watching.
> would it really make sense for those mobs to learn from your new tactics?
> Are they supposed to be smart, or are they just supposed to be an obstacle?
If the AI was smart, you wouldn't need a mob. You would only need a few individuals. It would be like a multiplayer deathmatch, and, judging from the popularity of those, would likely be more fun than the current mob situation.
> As for your dead bodies example: would you really prefer to have an infinite standoff
> as the mobs decide it's not worth getting killed, so they go hide somewhere with their
> own traps and wait for you to attack?
An infinite standoff will only happen if the game designer makes you kill off the entire mob before setting off some stupid trigger to open some stupid door. Don't program artificial obstacles and the player will be able to ignore the hiding mob and go on, just like in real life.
For all the guff that Tabula Rasa is getting,this one one of the things that (to me) made the world seem more dynamic and lived in. The worlds you play on are active battlefields with reasonably intelligent good and evil mobs that are jocking for tactical and strategic advantages. The "bad" mobs arrive in dropships in actual squads of various types, and will patrol/hunt through areas for "good" mobs (including the player). A lot of people don't seem to like TR very much, but this was a great idea, to me.
When DirectX 10 was first introduced to the market by graphics manufacturers?
I guess it was technological innovations brought to us by the graphics card manufactures. Thank goodness Microsoft was able to provide us with a platform that implements this great new and improved gaming API. No wonder the other vendors in the desktop OS industry are falling behind in the market.
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
IS it really that the DX10 gives you the ability to stuff more complex code into shaders?
This is my sig.
Some of the DX10 screen shots actually look worse than the DX9 screens. In the Call of Juarez screens the water looks slightly more realistic in the distance, but up close the reflections on the water's surface are more realistic with DX9. The distance terrain texturing in DX10 appears to be a little better at very long distances, but worse the closer you get to the viewport. A lot of the distant terrain in the CoJ DX10 screens just looks hazy and out of focus. Particle render is better under DX10. I guess I was just expecting to much.
http://www.hothardware.com/articles/The_State_of_DirectX_10__Image_Quality__Performance/?page=8
Seriously, why do people continue to put up with this abuse? Newer/More Expensive should be better in the computing world, no?
Frankly, I'm glad I use Linux and need not worry about this crap anymore.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
quote :
/quote
Are We There Yet? The DX10 exclusive effects available in the five games we looked at were usually too subtle to be noticed in the middle of heated gameplay. The only exception is Call of Juarez, which boasts greatly improved graphics in DX10. Unfortunately these image quality improvements can't entirely be attributed to DX10 since the North American version of the game -- the only version that supports DX10 -- had the benefit of a full nine months of extra development time. And much of the image quality improvements in Call of Juarez when using DX10 rendering were due to significantly improved textures rather than better rendering effects. Our test results also suggest that currently available DX10 hardware struggles with today's DX10 enhanced gaming titles. While high-end hardware has enough power to grind out enough frames in DX10 to keep them playable, mid-range hardware simply can't afford the performance hit of DX10. With currently available DX10 hardware and games, you have two choices if you want to play games at a decent frame rate; play the game in DX9 and miss out on a handful of DX10 exclusive image quality enhancements, or play the game in DX10 but be forced to lower image quality settings to offset the performance hit. In the end, it's practically the same result either way. While the new DX10 image quality enhancements are nice, when we finally pulled our noses off the monitor, sat back and considered the overall gameplay experience, DirectX 10 enhancements just didn't amount to enough of an image quality improvement to justify the associated performance hit. However, we aren't saying you should avoid DX10 hardware or wait to upgrade. On the contrary, the current generation of graphics cards from both ATI and NVIDIA offer many tangible improvements over the previous generation, especially in the high-end of the product lines. With the possible exception of some mid-range offerings, which actually perform below last generation's similarly priced cards, the current generation of graphics hardware has a nice leg-up in performance and features that is worth the upgrade. But if your only reason for upgrading is to get hardware support for DX10, then you might want to hold out for as long as possible to see how things play out.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Whoa, whoa... baby steps first!
Where's the 60fps *FAKE* 3D the industry has to achive for me before they create your new hardware arms-race and move on to a raytracing fps showdowns? Matter of fact, the benchmarks on TFA show numbers in the 20fps the max 1900x1200 monitor resolutions in the slowest cards and ONLY around 50-70fps at the speediest resolutions. All the effects were turned on, but I expect full power from "ray tracing" and photo quality, so it's not something to "not care about" quite yet, since we can't solve our current state of the art.
60fps is a golden number IMO, but to contrast paradigm shifts, emulated SNES games in mere 2D reached it only about 4 years ago on home-bound integrated cards. A @1.7GHZ dual core machine can finally help emulate an N64's 3D comfortably, though my old 1.7GHZ *single* core stuttered along. Emulation DOES take an extra toll, but here is my refute for native games on Windows...
City of Heroes / City of Villains has been out for 3 years and I was complaining to my friends that I need to enable the second core in order to run it at 10-20fps, max, at only 16bit color with minimum graphic detail, via the game and the card control panel on Vista. To conclude: photo quality won't be "photo" quality till games run at 32 bit color. To that, add 30-60fps, but make a strict no-slowdown policy or my eye will notice lags. In Heroes, I got like 6fps with color at the minimum setting with an integrated card on this shared-intel U305-5107 laptop.
I remember a 10fps era encompassing last decade, and how my progressive PC upgrades through this decade gave me no more at max maybe 15-30fps per increase. Even if top-gaming rigs were ray-tracing 3D today at 15fps, I'd give it about 10 more years for home machines / intel's crippled integrated cards to catch up to the wave.
This is not even accounting for advanced physics models, AI, and other stuff that DirectX would want to get into if it ever stopped advancing the purely visual field. But we all know looks never stop advancing. Just look at Playstation's visual growth when it was already pretty awesome to our 1997 eyes.
According to the TFA dx9 is also capable of soft particles.
So the most noticeable difference seems intentional.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
You should be coding in Execute Buffers like we had to in the original version of Direct3D. There was none of this fanboi stuff - multipass rendering, pixel shaders and the like.
If you want real: go outside.
If you want games: get good game play.
The looks might get you to buy the game, but it's the game play that keeps you coming back for more.
I've seen that in the tutorial part of the game, yes.
However, after that it was back to the beaten-to-death formula: a elevation-map based terrain with the very occasional cave, and mobs spawning at random and standing there, attacking you when you get within some fixed radius from them.
The only slightly original thing is that instead of just popping in existence out of thin air, they have this (badly looking) animation where a ship shows up and the guys drop from it.
Add the also beaten-to-death "go collect 5 mutant bulls balls" kind of quests and you get a game that really looks like a dead horse.
DX10 is the first API to give access to a Geometry Shading Unit. In a couple of years expect all games to use GPU accelerated physics (fragging, smoke, fluids). Expect some innovative use of procedural content (textures/images AND geometrically). Think procedural vines that snare you as you BF1942. It's not because of DX10. It's because of NVidia (& ATI?) pushing the boundaries of GPU computing. OpenGL supports a lot the new features of graphics hardware. So for now I'm devving in XP and the only way I can dabble with a Geometry shader is using OGSL. DX10 is on the other bootable partition.
DX10 gives access to the Geometry Shading Unit. A new logical processor on the GPU (like the pixel and vertex shader). Physics engines aren't using this functionality yet. Ageia PhysX flopped because noone wants to buy a new card just for the odd bit of shrapnel. Soon everyone will have the ability to hardware accelerate physics... and as soon as we do, developers will give us in game physics never before possible. I dev VR software for Med training. The geometry shader has enabled a new field of touchable interactive applications central to simulation. Games are only the half of it.
keep following the herd, dude
i would mod you down, as you are stupid and dont really know what you talk about.
Hint: real time raytracing will look so much more shitty than any rasterized engine of the last 5 years
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Enough of raster already it isn't good enough, make way for the Ray-traced games Age (still experimental though)
This depends a lot on the kind of game you're talking about. For FPS, you're right, but that's not nearly the most demanding kind of game for AI. So far, no company has been able to write a turn-based strategy game where the AI comes even close to being a challenge for a good player. There, the goal is still to make AI as strong as possible, and will remain so for quite some time to come.
But only in games that don't really revolve around intelligence and strategy in the first place.
Maybe this was mentioned this already, maybe not.
I think these comparisons of DX10 with DX9 are misleading. DX10 builds on a completely new architecture, so comparing to existing games isn't really fair. Basically, the games that will really demonstrate DX10 don't exist yet. These are all new features that DX9 doesn't even support.
Some examples:
- Geometry processors (for displacement mapping, procedural modeling)
- Render Arrays (to render 6-face shadow maps in one pass)
- Volumetric Textures (for volume rendering apps)
As mentioned, the games to take full advantage of DX10 don't exist yet.
For example:
- Shadows. A typical DX 9 game will implement geometry for "shadow volumes" on the CPU, then perform shadow shading using a fragment shader on the GPU. A DX 10 game could implement the entire process on the GPU much faster (not possible with DX9), leaving the CPU for better AI, etc. However, if you run a DX9 game on DX10 its not going to take advantage of that. i.e. its still going use the old method, just run through a DX10 card. So there will be a slight performance gain because of the new architecture and faster card, but you're not really taking advantage of what DX10 can do with the card.
Games have to be written to take advantage of the new features. This has always been an issue with graphics programming. You write software solutions. You have to re-write it once it gets ported to hardware. Not sure if this will ever change (one can hope).
Bottom line, putting old games through radically new cards is not a fair test. A real comparison would be to completely rewrite the same game in DX10.
For more details look here: http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/s2006c03/ch02.pdf
PS. I code for both DX and OpenGL. In my experience, both do a pretty go job of keeping up with hardware. DX10 is a little ahead because the game industry has mostly adopted directx (theres some history to that story).
Maybe this was mentioned this already, maybe not.
I think these comparisons of DX10 with DX9 are misleading. DX10 builds on a completely new architecture, so comparing to existing games isn't really fair. Basically, the games that will really demonstrate DX10 don't exist yet. These are all new features that DX9 doesn't even support.
Some examples:
- Geometry processors (for displacement mapping, procedural modeling)
- Render Arrays (to render 6-face shadow maps in one pass)
- Volumetric Textures (for volume rendering apps)
As mentioned, the games to take full advantage of DX10 don't exist yet.
For example:
- Shadows. A typical DX 9 game will implement geometry for "shadow volumes" on the CPU, then perform shadow shading using a fragment shader on the GPU. A DX 10 game could implement the entire process on the GPU much faster (not possible with DX9), leaving the CPU for better AI, etc. However, if you run a DX9 game on DX10 its not going to take advantage of that. i.e. its still going use the old method, just run through a DX10 card. So there will be a slight performance gain because of the new architecture and faster card, but you're not really taking advantage of what DX10 can do with the card.
Games have to be written to take advantage of the new features. This has always been an issue with graphics programming. You write software solutions. You have to re-write it once it gets ported to hardware. Not sure if this will ever change (one can hope).
Bottom line, putting old games through radically new cards is not a fair test. A real comparison would be to completely rewrite the same game in DX10.
For more details look here:
http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/s2006c03/ch02.pdf
PS. I code for both DX and OpenGL. In my experience, both do a pretty go job of keeping up with hardware. DX10 is a little ahead because the game industry has mostly adopted directx (theres some history to that story).
If the AI was smart, you wouldn't need a mob. You would only need a few individuals.
Just so you know, 'mob' is a term for an individual enemy in a game like that, which dates from text-based MUD days (which would explain why the person used the term, having explained that he writes AI for text-based adventures).
Hopefully your misunderstanding is cleared up.
I like the beginning where, if you look through a window as your are going by in the hall, you see a scientist fighting two head crabs. He knocks a a filing cabinet over on one, killing it, and jumps up and down pointing at it in glee. The other one then proceeds to jump on his head. Classic!
Stuff like that got more sparse as the game went on. It's as if they were running out of time to get the game out the door.
You didn't play it far enough into the game, honestly. The fighting and patrolling becomes more obvious as you progress through the game.
More people eat McDonalds hamburgers than Ruth Chris New York strip steaks, but does that make McDonalds better?
What people like this about the Wii:
Cost - much like McDonalds hamburgers....
Controller/Remote - Gets the "casual" gamers in because it doesn't look confusing.
Mario/kids games.
Nintendo has a hit on their hand no doubt, but by no means to people want crappy graphics and crummy AI. Those same people would LOVE most games with better graphics and better AI.
I know I would LOVE the same Zelda/Mario at 1080P 60FPS with more creatures and better AI. That isn't a knock on Zelda (a great game for the Wii), but just the way most people play games.
Now, to get back on topic. Isn't the real issue with DX10, that it only runs on Vista? Vista sales have been very poor by most accounts and thus developers are reluctant to adopt it as their primary API base?
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
True, it is that it's a Vista thing (designed to force you to use Vista if you want to play games) - and that is a major problem.
But, as you said with the Wii, we know they will release a higher-graphics version in 2009 when HDTV becomes standard worldwide and they no longer have to support non-HDTV sets. This, coincidentally, is when HDTV 40" sets will retail for $300 USD.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Since DX10 is specifically tied to Vista, we have not come far at all. LOL Though Valve has stated they have a way of accessing features of DX10 hardware using DX9 api. :)
I'm pretty sure Unreal Tournament 2003/4 uses SDL for input and OpenGL initialization, though I can't find any "official" information about it.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
"So far, no company has been able to write a turn-based strategy game where the AI comes even close to being a challenge for a good player." Last I checked Chess was still turn based, so IBM may have something to say on that. Not that they wrote chess. Or that this disproves your argument... why am I replying?
Have a look at Galactic Civilizations, I and II - Granted, on the higher levels the computer does cheat (production etc bonuses), but many people still cannot beat them on the non-cheating levels. I'm far from saying the AI is unbeatable, but it is pretty good. I personally can win on non-cheating levels most of the time, but I get my arse handed to me quite often too. I do have some very flawed strategies though, that I continue to use because I enjoy the game more. The most obvious of these is that I'm a builder, and I can't bear to see anything I've nurtured to a decent level lost, so I defend each and every colony fully. This is most definitely a poor strategy to use all the time, but I enjoy the game more using it.
One other advantage people have over the computer is save/reload. It's become so ubiquitous it's almost an integral part of modern games. That's why save points on consoles are put just before dangerous fights.
Few things: dead mobs don't learn from players' tactics. Only living mobs who can see how player operates can learn and to see correctly, every mob has to have field of view calculated and also if they can hear a disturbance. Not any stinking scripted fow or reactions but adaptive so that they only see if their head are turned that way and if it's not blocked with some leaf or something... and they can tell other mobs their experiences but only if they have radios or are near others and they have time to explain and they have to be able to speak, know basic vocabulary to explain anything..
Nah, I don't buy your "it's doable but i won't because it would suck" reasons. You can't do it.
I've played GalCiv I (not II, though), and while the AI was much better than anything I'd ever seen before, I don't think it was as good as a competent human player. The AI is great at economy, and it wasn't uncommon for me to miss the first couple Wonders/Trade Goods while struggling to catch up with the AI's lightning start, but eventually I would catch up and build all remaining wonders and trade goods.
But I could win wars even against a much stronger opponent; they lack the real killer mentality that distinguished a good human player from a decent AI. I know how to pick my fights, how to raid, how to defend my transports, how to concentrate my force, when to withdraw, when to attack, etc. Because of the way invasions work, the biggest fleet of dreadnoughts is completely useless if you don't have any transports with you. I make sure I have the speed advantage, and whenever I'm fighting a bigger opponent, I simply resort to sniping at his transports and keep my ships out of his reach. He can surround a planet, but he can't take it. When I attack, I make sure I attack with a decisive strike force consisting of sufficient warships to kill all his defenses in the area, and enough transports to take the planet. I defend my transports, and when I lose them, I call off the attack (although I might resort to raids or attrition if I'm strong enough. I just know that taking a planet won't happen without transports).
So while GalCiv is great, and has much better AI than anything else, it's still not smart enough. It's no walk over, but I still don't actually lose.