Note that ATI X1000 series cards (e.g. X1900) don't have Vertex Texture Fetch, hence they do not fully comply with the VS 3.0 model. Instead, they offer a feature called "Render to Vertex Buffer (R2VB)" that provides functionality that is an alternative Vertex Texture Fetch.
The 'too new' argument has merit; in that, developers have likely stopped supporting R2VB along with AMD's dropping support for the line as of Cat 9.4.
Its only taken them a "few" years to realize this... Yet, the war on drugs is 35(?) years strong now. When will they admit they can't win that one too?
Lets not forget; and I hope the developers didn't either. That, Washington at some point during the war acquired a 'Piece of Eden'. Which was passed down to each subsequent president. So, hopefully this 'American' piece will factor heavily into the story.
Also, this is a chance for them to establish the blood line convergence between Ezio's and Altair's to form subject 16 and Desmond's bloodline. Which makes sense since both characters are decidedly American.
Except that for the most part; they did give the customer a ton of options with the PS3. If I so wanted I can use any bluetooth headset or keyboard I want, any 2.5" SATA HDD. any USB keyboard, any USB external HDD. Perhaps that is why Ken Kutaragi was given the boot; as they saw the line on accessory margins and died a little inside.
Activision or Microsoft wouldn't "make" shit if I bought MW3 used, on the 360. Yet, both would make plenty of margin if I bought their DLC map packs.
By allowing used sales it potentially keeps the game's community alive longer. By eliminating the value based customer you could potentially limit the community as a whole; where the player base shrinks from its post launch honeymoon. I would love to know how many people are playing MW2 right now on Live that did not by the game at launch or even MW3.
I remember reading an article during the opening phase of the purchase. In it; it stated that should AT&T spend the $30B to upgrade their network, etc. It would be vastly superior to their rivals in any form. Which is why the red flags went up. As proven, this was about eliminating competition and eventually an assumed increase in prices. The cost of the $30B merger would have been offset by the increase in the X millions of customers that Tmobile has. Not to mention that AT&T had planned to phase out Tmobile's system, so that people would be forced to buy new phones with the AT&T frequencies.
I hope that with the ever decreasing price of bandwidth and increase in end user access to that will help smaller companies. However; should a future spectrum be auctioned off then once again we're screwed.
There really doesn't need to be a technological solution to this. Just watching the University of Oregon football team is a perfect example. While their playbook is simplistic to a pro scheme; the purpose is speed. According to ESPN, the Ducks averaged around 20'ish seconds per play. The breakneck (per football standards) pace of play easily exposes poor conditioning. The reason that they play so quickly is that every player looks to the sidelines for the play call. Not just the QB. This ensures that everyone gets the play as quickly as possible without the need to huddle.
I feel that the NFL needs to speed up their plays. A 45 second play clock with no timeouts, as a defense effectively (not always; see Chicago v. Denver) ends the game with anything under two minutes remaining. The NCAA has the same problem.
However, if a technological solution is needed then a broadcast to all offensive players for a play call seems appropriate.
Why not make parents pay for it? Up until 2010 high school in Japan was not 'free'. Take a typical class of 30 kids charge them $2k/year for extended hours. That is $60,000 per avg. class size. Even with a 50% attrition you still have enough money to pay for that 30% increase. Its not a panacea but it would do the job.
Student apathy is the major player in this; and parents whom want their kids to learn or kids that NEED that time could surely see a difference. Recently I've heard rumblings about Chicago (CPS) wanting to SHORTEN the school week to 4 days. While the mayor is getting huge pushback from the union about wanting/imposing longer school days.
The biggest problem FF14 had was a most serious case of consulitus. Considering the game is still not ready for the PS3 after a year, that was a really dumb mistake but one Japanese are prone to make. For some reason, games from the east just don't have the polish, technical polish, that we have come to take for granted in the west.
Part of the reason might be that the japanese just don't do PC's. Most western game companies started on the PC or similar user controlled machines like the amiga or mac. We have come to take for granted that a PC game might have to run without sound because there is no sound card and so most games come with a mixer panel to mix not just music, but speech, special effect, environment and music. Many DS games I played don't even allow you to turn the music off and sound is a hardware slider affecting all sound the same.
It is more then just simple missing configurations. I was quite shocked when recently caved and bought a PS3 by the BLACK saving screens... wtf? When was the last time a PC game even had to pause while saving? Oh wait, Rage, another game with a serious case of consilitus (try changin ammo on your equipped but not in the quick set, weapon. It will switch to weapon in your quickset instead of changing ammo).
How does this relate to FF14? Simple:
Config: Changing resolution or ANY other setting requires you to quit the game and launch a seperate config utility. This utility is NOT launched during first or indeed any startup. You have to dig for it.
Character loading screen, not just akward it takes AGES. Just to render three chars. I can run any game with full details but FF14 bring my PC to its knees.
Monthly fee? If you want more then one character, you pay more. You quickly pay a monthly fee far higher then any other mainstream game. If this game was the best in its class, that might be okay... but it is not.
Classes, you create a character, either a fighter or a crafter. Maybe... as everywhere else in the game, explanation is zero. That is what fans call hardcore. I call it needlessly complex. Every MMO explains with simple text what your choices are during config. FF14 makes it guessing game.
The chat system. Apparently there is one. Good luck on figuring it out. 99% of MMO's use an IRC like system. Two did not. Age of Conan and FF14. Gosh, what else do they have in common?
The menu... I know consoles don't have keyboards... oh wait, the PS3 can use keyboards just fine and you can get a working one for 5 bucks... so WHY the menu on a PC? The menu hursts us.
The game feels full of potential but they need to hire some white nerds to make it into a product that is not a pain to use. I know the Japanese committed horrible war crimes but come on, it has been over half a century, STOP punishing yourselves! Enjoy the comforts of the modern age, buy a chair and use common sense design in your computer games.
Having played the game in the Alpha, It was obvious from the first test that the game WAS ready for PS3. However, due to the immediate changes to the battle system that was implemented in alpha 2 it completely broke the ps3 version. Running XIV in its alpha form (no config save for shadows enabled in a random.ini file) it fit nicely in a 256MB VRAM environment at 720p. With a few HQ cutscenes going over that. So yeah FFXIV was heavily reliant on the PS3.
Let us also not forget the man in charge of FFXIV Hiromichi Tanaka. While responsible for the (opinion) awesomeness that was XI. He was also the person that chiefly held it back. Citing the infamous "PS2 limitations". This guy is a sadist when it comes to MMOs. It wasn't until the proliferation of wiki like websites that information on the game was a potpourri of relevant information and conjecture. It wasn't until he left to do XIV (officially in 2010 but I can assume day to day stuff was a lot sooner) That we got massive inventory upgrades (deemed impossible by him), and the refreshing abyssea expansions.
I started in in the first alpha test. It was VERY obvious that PC was a MAJOR afterthought in development of the UI. On the PC side of things the menu system was very similar to FFXI's. So, having to learn that wasn't to much of a hassle. However, Square thought nothing of hardware specs when sending people alpha/beta invites. Many people were on antiquated systems; or systems that were underpowered even though they just bought it "6 months" ago.
Square did not help themselves by ignoring the western player base. Many of whom were old FFXI players looking for a fresh start. The menu and UI systems were oddly tied to the overall framerate of the game. The game itself barely ran on two threads. The second thread being that of the UI. There was limited support for tweaking graphics; and it still used FFXI's antiquated "render-to-texture" system to display. Hence why you have "background" and "overlay" resolutions. Gameplay wise, Square ruined the party for everyone because they thought of combating RMT before they thought about the game. Since FFXI was so heavily plagued by RMT I can understand this measure. It ruined a lot of the experience; mostly through limiting how much a player could do in a X amount of time. Many of my friends who wanted to spend a lot of time at launch leveling doing as much as possible hit the brick wall of in game fatigue.
Many of the early testers on SLI and Xfire systems were left in the cold, also. The patch program was thrown together in a day or two. Many of us had to resort using uTorrent or whatever outside BT program just to download patches. Couple all of this with a gameplay structure that made me long for old time FFXI 10 hour grindfests.
I wanted a true sequel to FFXI. What we got was a devolution in all things except graphics. A lot of my FFXI friends would gladly pay $60 for a FFXI-2. FFXIV tried so hard to be different from FFXI that it failed to even be a decent game.
As some food for thought. You can begin to see some of the FFXIV gameplay influences in the FFXI expansion: Treasures of Aht Urhgan. Not only in equipment designs and NPC/MOBs but gameplay.
Much of FFXIVs "issues" have been massaged out of the past year. However many a good MMO have failed because of a shitty launch. I assume FFXIV will be no different. Sorry about the rant'ish post.
(ATTN! compare to watching football with you buddies and sipping beer) through your anniversary helps, too.
That is why my wife and I got married in May - we both loathe baseball, and the NBA since jordan retired for the third time. Hockey is ok for us in small doses. But we both love football. so trying to plan a wedding during football season (late august - superbowl) was just nuts. Given that both our families are huge football fans.
At what point will they give up on the whole micro-transaction idea? When we have to pay one slip of gold pressed latinum every time we enter someones house or sit in a chair in a waiting room?
I understand the need for people to show off their hard work. In this case however; they could have easily kept it internal/quiet, until the mod was released.
Once out in the open C&D letters aren't even worth the time for a lawyer to write them up.
Will this(among many others) start a trend of keeping these mods/hacks secret to avoid C&D letters?
Of course in a perfect world SE could have offered them a big fat check for all the new material.
Slashdot Mirror
Lifted from wiki:
Note that ATI X1000 series cards (e.g. X1900) don't have Vertex Texture Fetch, hence they do not fully comply with the VS 3.0 model. Instead, they offer a feature called "Render to Vertex Buffer (R2VB)" that provides functionality that is an alternative Vertex Texture Fetch.
The 'too new' argument has merit; in that, developers have likely stopped supporting R2VB along with AMD's dropping support for the line as of Cat 9.4.
Given the easter egg of A113 in pixar movies.I suggest Pixarium.
If Element 115 is not eventually named Elerium I will be quite upset.
Coincidentally, There is an icon of a slime at the location of the Square-Enix HQ in Tokyo.
Its only taken them a "few" years to realize this... Yet, the war on drugs is 35(?) years strong now. When will they admit they can't win that one too?
It is a damn shame the warranty couldn't...
SPOILER
Lets not forget; and I hope the developers didn't either. That, Washington at some point during the war acquired a 'Piece of Eden'. Which was passed down to each subsequent president. So, hopefully this 'American' piece will factor heavily into the story.
Also, this is a chance for them to establish the blood line convergence between Ezio's and Altair's to form subject 16 and Desmond's bloodline. Which makes sense since both characters are decidedly American.
So, is Washingtons's Havoc weight going to be 2000lbs?
Except that for the most part; they did give the customer a ton of options with the PS3. If I so wanted I can use any bluetooth headset or keyboard I want, any 2.5" SATA HDD. any USB keyboard, any USB external HDD. Perhaps that is why Ken Kutaragi was given the boot; as they saw the line on accessory margins and died a little inside.
Activision or Microsoft wouldn't "make" shit if I bought MW3 used, on the 360. Yet, both would make plenty of margin if I bought their DLC map packs.
By allowing used sales it potentially keeps the game's community alive longer. By eliminating the value based customer you could potentially limit the community as a whole; where the player base shrinks from its post launch honeymoon. I would love to know how many people are playing MW2 right now on Live that did not by the game at launch or even MW3.
I remember reading an article during the opening phase of the purchase. In it; it stated that should AT&T spend the $30B to upgrade their network, etc. It would be vastly superior to their rivals in any form. Which is why the red flags went up. As proven, this was about eliminating competition and eventually an assumed increase in prices. The cost of the $30B merger would have been offset by the increase in the X millions of customers that Tmobile has. Not to mention that AT&T had planned to phase out Tmobile's system, so that people would be forced to buy new phones with the AT&T frequencies.
I hope that with the ever decreasing price of bandwidth and increase in end user access to that will help smaller companies. However; should a future spectrum be auctioned off then once again we're screwed.
There really doesn't need to be a technological solution to this. Just watching the University of Oregon football team is a perfect example. While their playbook is simplistic to a pro scheme; the purpose is speed. According to ESPN, the Ducks averaged around 20'ish seconds per play. The breakneck (per football standards) pace of play easily exposes poor conditioning. The reason that they play so quickly is that every player looks to the sidelines for the play call. Not just the QB. This ensures that everyone gets the play as quickly as possible without the need to huddle.
I feel that the NFL needs to speed up their plays. A 45 second play clock with no timeouts, as a defense effectively (not always; see Chicago v. Denver) ends the game with anything under two minutes remaining. The NCAA has the same problem.
However, if a technological solution is needed then a broadcast to all offensive players for a play call seems appropriate.
My 4 year old has turned my PS3 into a Netflixstation 3. Though I'm just as guilty; it is just so damned convenient!
I would rather do that, than be Found On Road Dead.
Why not make parents pay for it? Up until 2010 high school in Japan was not 'free'. Take a typical class of 30 kids charge them $2k/year for extended hours. That is $60,000 per avg. class size. Even with a 50% attrition you still have enough money to pay for that 30% increase. Its not a panacea but it would do the job.
Student apathy is the major player in this; and parents whom want their kids to learn or kids that NEED that time could surely see a difference. Recently I've heard rumblings about Chicago (CPS) wanting to SHORTEN the school week to 4 days. While the mayor is getting huge pushback from the union about wanting/imposing longer school days.
The biggest problem FF14 had was a most serious case of consulitus. Considering the game is still not ready for the PS3 after a year, that was a really dumb mistake but one Japanese are prone to make. For some reason, games from the east just don't have the polish, technical polish, that we have come to take for granted in the west.
Part of the reason might be that the japanese just don't do PC's. Most western game companies started on the PC or similar user controlled machines like the amiga or mac. We have come to take for granted that a PC game might have to run without sound because there is no sound card and so most games come with a mixer panel to mix not just music, but speech, special effect, environment and music. Many DS games I played don't even allow you to turn the music off and sound is a hardware slider affecting all sound the same.
It is more then just simple missing configurations. I was quite shocked when recently caved and bought a PS3 by the BLACK saving screens... wtf? When was the last time a PC game even had to pause while saving? Oh wait, Rage, another game with a serious case of consilitus (try changin ammo on your equipped but not in the quick set, weapon. It will switch to weapon in your quickset instead of changing ammo).
How does this relate to FF14? Simple:
Config: Changing resolution or ANY other setting requires you to quit the game and launch a seperate config utility. This utility is NOT launched during first or indeed any startup. You have to dig for it.
Character loading screen, not just akward it takes AGES. Just to render three chars. I can run any game with full details but FF14 bring my PC to its knees.
Monthly fee? If you want more then one character, you pay more. You quickly pay a monthly fee far higher then any other mainstream game. If this game was the best in its class, that might be okay... but it is not.
Classes, you create a character, either a fighter or a crafter. Maybe... as everywhere else in the game, explanation is zero. That is what fans call hardcore. I call it needlessly complex. Every MMO explains with simple text what your choices are during config. FF14 makes it guessing game.
The chat system. Apparently there is one. Good luck on figuring it out. 99% of MMO's use an IRC like system. Two did not. Age of Conan and FF14. Gosh, what else do they have in common?
The menu... I know consoles don't have keyboards... oh wait, the PS3 can use keyboards just fine and you can get a working one for 5 bucks... so WHY the menu on a PC? The menu hursts us.
The game feels full of potential but they need to hire some white nerds to make it into a product that is not a pain to use. I know the Japanese committed horrible war crimes but come on, it has been over half a century, STOP punishing yourselves! Enjoy the comforts of the modern age, buy a chair and use common sense design in your computer games.
Having played the game in the Alpha, It was obvious from the first test that the game WAS ready for PS3. However, due to the immediate changes to the battle system that was implemented in alpha 2 it completely broke the ps3 version. Running XIV in its alpha form (no config save for shadows enabled in a random .ini file) it fit nicely in a 256MB VRAM environment at 720p. With a few HQ cutscenes going over that. So yeah FFXIV was heavily reliant on the PS3.
Let us also not forget the man in charge of FFXIV Hiromichi Tanaka. While responsible for the (opinion) awesomeness that was XI. He was also the person that chiefly held it back. Citing the infamous "PS2 limitations". This guy is a sadist when it comes to MMOs. It wasn't until the proliferation of wiki like websites that information on the game was a potpourri of relevant information and conjecture. It wasn't until he left to do XIV (officially in 2010 but I can assume day to day stuff was a lot sooner) That we got massive inventory upgrades (deemed impossible by him), and the refreshing abyssea expansions.
I started in in the first alpha test. It was VERY obvious that PC was a MAJOR afterthought in development of the UI. On the PC side of things the menu system was very similar to FFXI's. So, having to learn that wasn't to much of a hassle. However, Square thought nothing of hardware specs when sending people alpha/beta invites. Many people were on antiquated systems; or systems that were underpowered even though they just bought it "6 months" ago.
Square did not help themselves by ignoring the western player base. Many of whom were old FFXI players looking for a fresh start. The menu and UI systems were oddly tied to the overall framerate of the game. The game itself barely ran on two threads. The second thread being that of the UI. There was limited support for tweaking graphics; and it still used FFXI's antiquated "render-to-texture" system to display. Hence why you have "background" and "overlay" resolutions. Gameplay wise, Square ruined the party for everyone because they thought of combating RMT before they thought about the game. Since FFXI was so heavily plagued by RMT I can understand this measure. It ruined a lot of the experience; mostly through limiting how much a player could do in a X amount of time. Many of my friends who wanted to spend a lot of time at launch leveling doing as much as possible hit the brick wall of in game fatigue.
Many of the early testers on SLI and Xfire systems were left in the cold, also. The patch program was thrown together in a day or two. Many of us had to resort using uTorrent or whatever outside BT program just to download patches. Couple all of this with a gameplay structure that made me long for old time FFXI 10 hour grindfests.
I wanted a true sequel to FFXI. What we got was a devolution in all things except graphics. A lot of my FFXI friends would gladly pay $60 for a FFXI-2. FFXIV tried so hard to be different from FFXI that it failed to even be a decent game.
As some food for thought. You can begin to see some of the FFXIV gameplay influences in the FFXI expansion: Treasures of Aht Urhgan. Not only in equipment designs and NPC/MOBs but gameplay.
Much of FFXIVs "issues" have been massaged out of the past year. However many a good MMO have failed because of a shitty launch. I assume FFXIV will be no different. Sorry about the rant'ish post.
There's an app for that?
I believe its called Safari.
.... iOuija....
My Nokia 446xPro thanks you from its 1600x1200 @85hz from 1998 heart.
I wonder how many WoW players have been married on tuesday mornings...
(ATTN! compare to watching football with you buddies and sipping beer) through your anniversary helps, too.
That is why my wife and I got married in May - we both loathe baseball, and the NBA since jordan retired for the third time. Hockey is ok for us in small doses. But we both love football. so trying to plan a wedding during football season (late august - superbowl) was just nuts. Given that both our families are huge football fans.
At what point will they give up on the whole micro-transaction idea? When we have to pay one slip of gold pressed latinum every time we enter someones house or sit in a chair in a waiting room?
Some sources say that over 80% of desktop computers are infected with a virus called Windows.
It was 90% ten years ago. Virus removal takes a very long time. Just ask Symantec
I understand the need for people to show off their hard work. In this case however; they could have easily kept it internal/quiet, until the mod was released.
Once out in the open C&D letters aren't even worth the time for a lawyer to write them up.
Will this(among many others) start a trend of keeping these mods/hacks secret to avoid C&D letters?
Of course in a perfect world SE could have offered them a big fat check for all the new material.