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Spore System Specs Released, Creature Creator Coming Soon
Will Wright's long-awaited game, Spore, seems to be nearing completion, with a release slated for September. In anticipation of this release, EA has outlined the system requirements and will still be releasing their Creature Creator demo for experimentation on June 17th.
... they just consume all your computer's resources.
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You can say the same with XP at 512 or OSX at 1 gb. Wonder why you omit them? Less likely to get free mod-points I guess.
HL2 textures had low poly count and were generally easy to render. The game looked good because the texture artwork looked good. It's the ultimate efficiency hack.
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Ya ya, and they reversed the polarity of the neutron flux, too. My point was, even for it's time HL2 was quite easy to run at high settings, unlike the content-free flop that was Doom3. You can't judge a game by how hard it is to run.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm perfectly fine with developers doing the homework and trying to make good looking game by all possible means, not just relying mostly on bling of latest GPUs...
(@importance of textures: http://forums.galciv2.com/310173
section "The Updated Graphics", also:
http://forums.galciv2.com/167995
I couldn't find the post in which they describe how they did it, so: each race has one, detailed, "ships texture", parts of which are used by all ships of given race; apparently it also means only one copy has to kept in memory = massive reduction of usage)
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By taking so long to develop the game that piece took care of itself. It's like if you wanted to run Duke Nukem Forever, back when they announced it, it would only run on what was basically a supercomputer. Not the case anymore.
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I believe EA has backed off slightly after the outcry over that scheme. I believe now they check upon initial installation and whenever new content is downloaded.
Which is still pretty obscene, since downloading new content is one of the main features of the game. Your point still stands, I agree with it, and won't be buying this for the pc.
These registration schemes, along with constantly increasing requirements, are killing pc gaming.
Agreed, is this Nvidia/ATI shenanigans or is there some reason that pixel shader 2.0 can't be done in software...
Spore doesn't seem likely to need uber framerates...
Not necessarily. It can just mean you have a bunch of predefined choices at each step. It doesn't mean you can't do better.
I mean, look at, say, Paradox's games. Different genre, I know, but they do illustrate the point nevertheless.
You can start Hearts Of Iron in 1941 and get directly to attacking the USSR, or being attacked if you play the USSR. In which case you'll start from the historical situation in 1941. But you can also start in 1936, build up your economy, and build up teh uber-Wehrmacht or Red Army, and deliver some serious smack down when 1941 comes. Or play a USA which didn't wait around for Pearl Harbour to start thinking about war, and is in much better shape to deliver a devastating punch when that happens. Play a France which picked different doctrines and built up its army, and can hold its own at the Maginot Line. Etc.
Essentially having the option to skip to 1941, doesn't make the 1936 option meaningless. You can and _do_ affect your options in the future by starting earlier.
Ditto in any other of their games. You can skip to the 1600's in EU2 and get to colonizing America, or even directly at the Napoleonic wars, or start in 1419 as an England bogged down in the 100 year war and work your way from there.
Heck, IIRC you can even export your world from one game to the next, and play it as one uber-campaign spanning 1000 years. You can start in Crusader Kings, export to EU2 when you reach the 1400's, export to Victoria in early 1800's, and (if you have the expansion pack) export to Hearts Of Iron when you reach the 1930's. The option to start directly with Hearts Of Iron doesn't make the previous stages meaningless minigames. Starting at CK can _massively_ affect your options later. You can end up in EU2 with a Byzantine Empire that regained the former lands of the Roman Empire and has the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum (our sea), instead of being a one-province victim of the Turks. Colonize, get to Victoria with it, and you can try to out-industrialize the English. Make Byzantium _the_ industrial and cultural capital of the world, like in the old days, and the empire over whose flag the sun never sets. Etc.
You can still ask, "why?" because it gets so ahistorical that it's not even funny. Still, the principle remains. And as Spore isn't a historical game, even that objection vanishes.
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