Slashdot Mirror
PC Gaming's 10 Commandments
An anonymous reader tips a Tech Report article laying out ten sacred conventions of PC gaming. Quoting:
"VI. Keep thine configurations options exposed. PC gamers are used to being able to configure things. That comes from both necessity and whim, and while one doesn't necessarily need to cater to the latter, the former is a must. Games don't have to expose a 1000-line menu for every conceivable detail level on the torches of King Whatever's castle entrance, but we'd like at least some amount of granularity. ... X. Honor thine modders and mod communities. Not every game benefits from mod support, mind you. When they do and the tools exist, however, the result is almost invariably a much bigger and more pervasive community (especially on the multiplayer front). That, in turn, leads to a constant stream of sales. It truly is a win-win situation."
Good list. For once (and this doesn't happen often with these things), I don't think I disagree with a single entry. If I could add an eleventh, it would be:
"XI: If thou art an fps and if thou art not a realistic military simulator, thou shalt stick any ideas regarding two-weapon limits quite firmly where the sun shineth not.
Seriously, even console players seem to be getting sick of this particular convention, judging by the fact that one of the highest profile console fpses on the horizon, Resistance 3, is going back to the weapon-wheel system."
And while it's not a commandment, one thing I would really love to see on the PC is some kind of system (perhaps implemented via Steam or something) which carries my control bindings between similar games, so far as is possible. I like my mouse inverted, and I am quite insistant that my right mouse button makes my character jump, while "use" is always assigned to the space bar. Zoom/aim lives on the middle mouse button - never the right mouse button (even if the game in question doesn't feature jumping). It would be extremely nice if, even if only between games from the same developer, those settings could be carried over automatically.
Fallout 3 modding community comes to mind. those people have really made games out of the game with their mods.
The Microsoft Flight Simulator kicks the shit out of any other modding community. Entire companies set up to provide aircraft, scenery, utils and airports. Literally tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of free addons. Whole boards full of dedicated content.
Pity the idiotic management at Microsoft decided to bastardise it with FSX and then kill it off altogether. Oh but there's apparently a new Windows Live "Microsoft Flight" game coming out "any time soon" with screenshots appearing every 2-3 months.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Corrolary:
For example the anti-aliasing thing. That is often not in a game because of technical limitations. If the developers choose to use a deferred lighting , which many do these days, then regular anti-aliasing doesn't work. You turn it on, nothing will happen.
To overcome that limitation you have two real choices:
1) Make your engine DirectX 10 or newer. There the GPU supports what is needed to so FSAA with a deferred lighting renderer. This is what we'll start seeing since Windows XP has dropped off in a big way and game markers are starting to be willing to target Vista/7 only (XP only has DX9) but it'll take some time. Some games do have multiple versions, and can support FSAA in their DX10+ version, but many don't bother to do that since it takes extra development resources.
2) Have the drivers deal with it. The graphics card drivers can do some trickery on hardware that is DX10 (or better) capable and force FSAA in games that can't handle it due to being DX9/deferred shading. That is fine but it takes implementation by the card maker (which nVidia and ATi do) and means you don't have the option in the game.
The guy needs to understand the difference between what he thinks would be nice and what is possible.
Steam is like a vasectomy. It's intrusive and it looks like it will hurt a ton, but in reality it's painless and not a big deal.
And it also leaves you somewhat less a man for having accepted it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Stop trolling you troll. They can. You can install a PC game like Half Life 2 and start playing immediately. It defaults to "optimum" settings for your machine. However, if you want to increase the settings at the expense of frame-rate, or decrease the settings because you don't need the eye-candy, you can do that too.
Exhibit A: For anyone who feels the need to alter their video settings in HL2, clicking Options>Video Tab, they see this.
Exhibit B: For anyone who feels they need to monkey with anything more than resolution/brightness, they can click on advanced.
I say again, in what way does this make for a confusing UI? In order to get anything even remotely confusing, you have to go looking for it. Firstly, this isn't the olden-days where you have to summon gaming voodoo and edit a config/bindings file, and it's not going to drive people away from PC gaming. The "advanced" options are available, but hidden, and there is an easy way to revert to the defaults. And the defaults are clearly labelled.
Secondly, I hope companies do stop porting games to PC if they're only going to do a half-arsed job of it as they seem to be doing now.