Bad management is the cause of so many corporate failures, it amazes me that those with a business degree are not flagged by GOOD company founders to be automatically denied employment. I am serious here, we saw this back in the late 1990s when you had a ton of non-technical people being placed as vice presidents of technical companies, and look at how many of them have crashed since then. Even the whole.com meltdown was caused by too many technical companies being founded by non-technical people with contacts in the venture capital world, inflating the industry and eventually causing the industry to implode.
Good managers know how to bring people together to get a job done, bad ones will try to muddle through and get their project done, but without understanding that good products are made by a team of people, not just a random collection of individuals. It sounds like Pandemic lacked talented management that had the ability to bring the different parts of the company together.
Even the idea of being focused on making ONE game engine that can be used for multiple titles(which helps with profitability) seems to be difficult for some people to understand.
I hope that Apple is stupid enough to actually implement this, just to show others that bad ideas CAN drive even the most obnoxious supporters away. If you buy a device, you should NOT be forced to deal with advertising. If you get a device for free, then that is another story, but even then, it would make it so only those desperate would use such a device rather than a different one without the feature.
AMD has needed new fabs to increase capacity for a long time now. After AMD purchased ATI, I always found it odd that there wasn't more of a push to build more fabs and bring their GPU production in-house. At the least, NVIDIA should also be suffering from TSMC having problems, even though they may not be feeling the crunch at the moment.
But, AT&T could sue over copyright violations since Verizon is using the AT&T map in their advertising. Fair use is one thing, but re-distributing via commercial can't be considered fair use. Then again, once AT&T starts to deploy 4/5G, 3G will be pushed out into areas that currently do not have it, and all this concern over 3G will go away.
The real down-side to the position AT&T is in with the iPhone is that the iPhone is more about web browsing and connected services than it is about being a good phone, so being able to talk takes a back seat to data. On the flip side, a true GPS with included maps on the device, rather than using a Google Maps application would push back against that very well, since "you don't need to pay for a data service to use the GPS" would be a way to go. Since you can't swap the batteries out yourself on the iPhone, you are also in the position where you can't even use the iPhone as a stand-alone GPS when you don't have access to some sort of charger, while with other devices, you can have multiple charged batteries and swap them out as needed.
You can get a decent 40 inch Samsung that does 1080p for $800 now, and you CAN see the difference between a DVD and a BluRay version of the same movie(even with the upscaling in BluRay players). My point was that since the retail price of BluRay is still very high, many are just waiting at the moment. You CAN get BluRay versions of movies for $20 or even a little less now, but many people do not look around to find where they can get BD movies for an acceptable price.
The adoption rate of BluRay isn't that bad, considering that you first need a TV/display that is HD in the first place, then you need the player(which isn't the $60 that a cheap DVD player costs these days), and then you get into the sale of the BD movies. If you ONLY look at those who have a flat panel TV already, rather than the entire public, the adoption rate isn't as bad as other stats may make it seem.
If you judge the number of people in the world and compare how many cars are sold in total, the numbers don't look as good as if you compare the number of people who are old enough to be able to drive, then the number that are legally allowed to drive(drivers license requirement), and then those who can afford to buy a car. You can even cut back and make things look better by not counting people in a third world country where no one has the money to buy a new car as well.
You have to look at things like how many HD vs. SD displays are out there as well as the price of the player. BluRay has the problem that movies cost more, and many people don't have a player yet.
BluRay won when it comes to HD movie standards, but HD is still something fairly new.
With BluRay here, but more expensive, many people may have decided to wait a bit on buying until the BD version gets a bit cheaper. I wonder if these people have even considered that.
Computation power only matters if you actually use it for something useful. The fastest chip out there that isn't being used, or does not generate reliable results is worthless.
To encourage invention or innovation, the system MUST go back to the original reason for patent protection in the first place. The idea is that new ideas should be protected so the patent "owner" can develop said idea and turn it into a product. If there is no ability or intention to DIRECTLY make a product to take advantage of the protection, then the protection should be removed.
This means that patent trolls would all go away, since none of them have any intention to make a product based on the patents they own. It is one thing for a company like AMD or Intel to file a patent and make use of their inventions, and another for someone sitting in an office to buy a patent just so they can file lawsuits against anyone who makes a product that might infringe on the patent in question.
So, for all of these companies that file patent related lawsuits, they SHOULD be looked at to see if they have taken even a few steps towards making a product. If there has been no effort made to create a working product based on the technology, they should be fined for filing a lawsuit in the first place.
A big issue is the costs involved with game development, and the advertising side of it. You also have to expect that when it comes to books, there ARE pressures placed on authors to release the next book in a series. Do you REALLY think that the seventh Harry Potter book didn't have the publisher asking for updates and pushing for it to be done so they could print and sell it?
Now, in the development of computer games, you really have two types of development models.
The first is when you have an independent developer with its own money that can get the job done from start to finish. In that case, the publishers only need to do some very basic work when it comes to the product development, like putting in the normal copyright stuff, publisher logos, etc. In these cases, the publisher only has to do advertising for the product to generate enough hype to properly sell the product. It should be noted that this CAN cost a lot of money. TV advertising is VERY VERY VERY expensive, and advertising in movie theaters and such also can be expensive. The production costs for the advertisements for TV ads as well can not be discounted. So, how many millions of dollars can they REALLY spend to hype a game before the advertising costs exceed expected revenue?
Then you have the case where a publisher has to INVEST in the development of a title. This becomes more essential as the development cost of an all original game with engine takes four to five years, and all the programming, sound, and other development work, plus voice actors(every game has voice acting in it now for the most part), licenses for the software used for in-game cut scenes, etc. How many millions of dollars does it really take to make a game these days? How many start-ups can afford the risk of spending $10 million or more for a game that may not sell more than 10000 copies in a worst-case scenario? With this situation, the publisher DOES have to invest a bit to help the developer get the title out, in the same way that book publishers will give an advance on royalties to an author to help the author make it a full-time investment(rather than writing while working a regular day-job to pay the bills).
The big thing is when a publisher really tries to hype a given book or product vs. these books that come out that are very good, but that no one has heard of. You will notice that you don't see books advertised very often, considering how many books are published each year. That shows the level of investment from the publisher. And, books have what, 1-4 people who do the writing, vs. how many people are needed for game development.
So, a better comparison would be the film industry, where you have hundreds, if not thousands of people who contribute to getting a movie out the door. The thing is, film is a mature industry, so it is easier to see up front and early when a movie will be well done, or if it will be horrible. You hear from the film industry about movies that get started in production, but then die as well(if you look into it). You hear about budgets and costs in movie development. And you hear about the studios running into money issues when they release too many bad or mediocre moves in a year, and they lose money in a given year. The difference is that movie studios DO have systems in place for how things are done, and people with experience that can be called in to help fix problems with projects that are having problems.
Now, do you see how generally independent game developers have it a lot harder? Who do you go to when you run into problems and don't have the expertise in-house to deal with them? Even companies like EA, which have a lot of expertise don't seem to have management understand how to make use of the talent they have available to them to help the smaller developers gain the experience and expertise needed to stand on their own.
And of course, game technology is still advancing at an insane rate. Due to how much better(faster, better quality graphi
So how hard would it have been to take the REQUIRED parts of these applications and ONLY the required parts and include them as a part of iTunes? Or ask if we want the stupid Quicktime app to auto-load every time Windows starts up? If people really want the full versions of QuickTime and WebKit, then they will get them. For the rest of us, why not just put in the very bare essentials needed for iTunes to work, and leave the rest of the GARBAGE off our systems? How about NOT sticking Bonjour on our systems unless we have requested a feature that actually needs it?
While there is a good reason to want/need fun gameplay, I feel that what is missing from many games is the feeling of purpose that a storyline will bring. I do NOT suggest from this that long cut-scenes or pauses in the game are needed to bring this about, but instead suggest that the idea of "if it moves, shoot it", or just random acts of violence in games for no purpose without there being other types of games that get a lot of publicity is what is KILLING gaming.
I have been playing computer games since well before Wolfenstein 3D(which came out before Doom and Quake for those who don't know). The old gold-box D&D games starting with Pool of Radiance, Wizardry, Bards Tale, and other classic fantasy RPGs had a strength to them that makes some modern games seem pathetic by comparison, just because you felt like you had some purpose to what you were doing.
I don't mind violence in games, but I find that the biggest games that are released really focus so much on player vs. player that the whole point of WHY you are fighting is lost. Why not set it up so that you have multiple sides in a player vs. player environment, but make it so there really is a point to WHY you are fighting. A way to make this work would be to have storyline chains, similar to the original Wing Commander, where you have a war going on, but the missions the players are going on are based on how each side is doing in the war. Make it so a war will go on for a full 30 days, and teams fighting on both sides can tip the balance. People have the option to come in fully supporting the losing side, just to help keep the balance, or you will have people supporting the clearly stronger side, or weaker side. If a mission is won or lost, contributions of different types will earn credit, so that support roles have a purpose as well(people playing a medic in a war game for example), or technical support roles where you have to run out to fix things for others.
And that is the biggest weakness, that the big games that come out are based on the idea of players wanting to play the soldier/warrior, and the idea that not everyone WANTS to be fighting on the front lines has been lost on many developers. Even the RPG scene is more about action/adventure these days, rather than about roleplaying and giving the player options on how he/she wants to play. Being able to COMMAND troops for example(earning rank, command status, or even moving from being on the front lines to the command tent where you set the strategy have others out there doing the fighting) is something that most games don't provide.
While those would be nice, they are also not "critical" features that make or break a game. The issue I was talking about was the attitude that some players have when dealing with others. There are some people new to the game that really have an attitude that Dungeons and Dragons is some amazing game system that because the name D&D has been around for so long that is MUST be better, and some people find that attitude to be....annoying.
Dungeons and Dragons as a name HAS been around for a long long time, but the history of the game system itself needs to be looked at by some people, because of false impressions.
From the start, the original game rules that evolved into Dungeons and Dragons and then Advanced Dungeons and Dragons(first and second editions) showed a clear evolution in the rules. While some things changed, during those years, the fundamental game systems could clearly be seen as an evolution over time.
The Dungeons and Dragons rule system changed DRASTICALLY with the release of the third edition. As a result, while there are certain similarities, these changes really made the third edition an all new game with some elements taken from Advanced D&D. As a result, all those people who say the game has been around really do not understand that the Dungeons and Dragons of today is NOT the same game that I had played back in my high school and college days.
I personally only agree with the change in the Armor Class system from being -10(best) to +10(worst) to the current system, just for clarity.
Adding points to stats, and being able to pick up levels in other classes than the ones you have just doesn't work for me since the systems for these things just feel like they were poorly designed(You go from being a trained level 1 fighter with enough experience to advance to level 2, but now you take a level in something else?)
Back to the topic at hand though, DDO as a GAME is a lot of fun, and my disagreement with the fundamental 3rd and 3.5 edition rules can be put aside for the enjoyment of the game. That really should be seen as a benchmark of how good a game is, where a game is fun to play, even if you do not care for the base rule system, and further, is worth paying a subscription fee to play.
For those who have not tried out the game yet, with Free to Play, there really isn't anything holding you back(except a really bad Intel graphics chip). When you make a character, I suggest that people check out the custom character generation rather than taking one of the pre-built type as well, just to see how many different ways you can go with each class. That is mostly to show a primary difference in DDO vs. other games that force the same basic design for a class on everyone with very little customization available.
I think you have missed my point. At this point, since the game WAS originally designed around DirectX, it would cost more money to update the game to support another API than would be made. It wouldn't make sense for Turbine to change the rendering engine to something multi-platform if the expected revenue from such a change would not be well beyond the cost of the development work. Since DDO is not being sold in stores, the only money made would be off the micro-transactions and the subscription revenue. Do you REALLY think there are enough Mac people out there who would spend enough money to justify the cost of the extra development at this point?
There is a big difference between the long-time players and many of the new players just getting into the game. Yes, there are SOME people who are really bad, but most of the long-time players on Ghallanda at least don't take that sort of attitude. Then again, what you are seeing may be due to the World of Warcraft crowd trying to compare every last feature to WoW, rather than looking at DDO as a DIFFERENT sort of game, and not a clone of the old EQ game design with different graphics/rules.
In the case of DDO, Free to Play works because people have the option to really play the game and decide if they like it enough to play. There being no initial investment(buying the game in stores or online) before having to pay the subscription also helps.
You can play DDO fully free, but then decide you want to pay real money to buy an adventure pack like the Deleras quest series if you want access to that content without having to continue to pay after that. Or, people decide that they will pay $15 up front for one month, have all the content be included for that one month, and then play whatever. It is very possible to get through all the level 1-10 content packs in that one month, so if you would not want to go back through that content after your one month, that one month subscription means you avoid needing to buy that low end content after you switch back to Free to Play.
DDO uses DirectX for rendering, and it would take a LOT of effort/money to recode the graphics engine at this point, and since the number of Mac people who would pay money would be fairly low, the return on investment would be so low that it would be a money losing effort. Then again, you KNEW that the selection of games that support Mac was fairly low when you bought your computer, so if you want to play games, you should have known that you would need to set up Windows to play the vast majority of games.
You also have to look at how many people on a given platform may turn into paying customers early in the program development cycle. If you do not expect many Mac people to buy your game, and it will cost $1 million in development costs to support that platform, do you REALLY see it as a wise investment? DDO started as a regular MMO with a subscription, and Free to Play only came out YEARS after the initial release. With this in mind, would you REALLY expect that the Mac platform would have made Turbine a profit?
You have not looked at how Turbine has applied the concept to DDO. In DDO, money only buys you access to the adventure packs, and other game features that subscribers get for their monthly fee. The only thing money will get you is convenience items since the items from raids are NOT available for purchase, and even "good" items need to be earned in-game since gold is not sold on the store.
DDO doesn't have a "pay for raid loot" system though, so you can't just drop money in to get what the long-time players have had to work for. Most of the micro-transaction stuff you can buy is centered around either the premium stuff that subscribers get automatically with their monthly subscription, or convenience items like healing or spell point potions. This keeps the paying customers happy that only those who PLAY their way into the high end game(free to play or subscriber) will be getting the better items in the game.
This is where you clearly have never even looked at the game in question(DDO). The game does not revolve around player vs. player, though there are some very very limited forms of it in the game(in certain taverns there are combat pits).
The DDO method of free to play is really giving you an unlimited taste of the game for free by offering a bit of free content without making all content for free. You have the option to either play the free content on multiple characters to generate enough "Turbine Points" to purchase additional content, or you can pay real money for Turbine points which you can then use to get the content package of your choice. If you don't like being limited in what you can access, you can just become a normal $15/month subscriber to get access to all the content in the game. In a month or two, if you don't want to pay the monthly subscription any more, you can switch back to free to play, lose access to the non-free content you have not purchased, but you don't LOSE what you have accomplished. Those who pay the monthly subscription also get 500 Turbine Points each month they are a subscriber, and those points can be used to unlock content for the free to play if the player decides to go back to Free to Play status.
So, DDO offers the best of both worlds. You get free to play with micro transactions, and you get subscription based for those who want all the content the game has to offer. There are also no "player rankings" as such, so no one really cares about who has the absolute best stuff, as long as your skill at playing your character is at an acceptable level(clerics who don't heal, or who don't know how to use mass healing spells in a raid situation may upset others for example). There is also a tolerance for poor equipment levels to an extent as long as party members know about it in advance so it doesn't kill what the group is trying to do.
And, this is why DDO is seeing good subscription numbers from the release of Free to Play. Some people may upgrade for only a few months to get full access to the "premium" content in the low to mid levels, and then switch back to the Free to Play and then only buy the few high level premium modules they want access to after that. Or, if new content is released often enough, they may stick with their subscription so they don't have to buy each new content pack as it is released.
True cheating when benchmarking a GPU vs. optimizing is something that many people do not seem to understand. Cheating when it comes to GPUs really would come down to intentionally degrading visual quality just to get higher scores while tricking the benchmark application into thinking the quality is as high as specified.
An example of this would be when running a test with Antialiasing set at 8x in the applications, and antialiasing being set to "application control" in the drivers, yet when the drivers see the application running, it forces AA off to get better scores, no matter what the settings might be set to. This is a clear case of trying to fool people into thinking that the GPU in question handles AA very well or has better performance.
And that is where most of the big reports of cheating have come from in the past. If the image quality is degraded, that will generally increase the framerates, and that is what both NVIDIA and ATI were guilty of.
Now, adjusting things in the drivers to provide the proper visual quality but changing HOW things are done to provide better framerates is fine, because what you are telling the card to do is what you get.
In this case with Intel, the GPU is what is being tested, not the CPU. If a GPU test has results based on CPU doing a lot of the work, then going with a lower end CPU will have a MAJOR impact on GPU performance. The whole point of benchmarking a GPU is to test how fast the GPU is, so you could put that GPU in a modern system with various processors and you get roughly the same GPU performance(of course, when the application is CPU limited, you will see reduced GPU performance anyway).
I have felt for a long time that drivers should compensate for missing features in the hardware when it comes to the APIs though. If a GPU only accelerates DirectX 7 stuff, with a properly powerful CPU you SHOULD be able to use DirectX 11 instructions, but since the GPU doesn't handle them, it would be much slower. The real key is that performance would be HORRIBLE when using software to handle those newer "unaccelerated" instructions, but it would still work.
From that perspective then, it does not bother me that Intel would use the CPU to compensate for their GPUs, except that published benchmark results need to indicate the true performance of the product. From that perspective, if SLI/Crossfire were used and the benchmark were reporting the results as a single GPU result numbers, that too would give a false impression of the performance of the product.
If Intel were to make it clear that faster CPUs will improve the performance of their GPUs, but would result in slower application performance(since CPU cycles are going to the GPU), then that wouldn't bother me for how the product actually performs. The problem is that it still doesn't show just how fast a given GPU is in a benchmark environment.
But the logic is still flawed because they don't say it won't work with ATI cards, they make it not work with NVIDIA hardware if AMD/ATI hardware is also in the system.
When it comes down to it, if food products are larger but do not provide additional "food value" to go with the size, the only benefit would be for those trying to lose weight, since there is less food "value" for a given mass. 1000 calories of something grown in space may take up more room, but it is still only 1000 calories worth of food. Now, if you take a plant that on Earth provides 1000 calories and when grown in space it provides 1500 calories, THEN that would be worth looking at.
As I mentioned in my previous comment, the renewable energy needs to be set up by someone to generate ENOUGH power to handle the increase in demand. Electricity may not be as cheap as it currently is if the electric grid itself becomes overloaded.
Now, keep in mind that not all areas of the country are set up the same way. You have places like NY City where the value of land makes it very difficult to justify setting up a power plant in many areas(not all). Just because it is practical in some places does not mean it is practical everywhere, and that is where you run into trouble.
And then, you get the old "Not in my backyard" response to new power plants, no matter how clean they may be.
And, more demand means higher costs for electric, no matter how cheap it may be to generate. It could cost one cent per megawatt, and we would still end up paying through the nose to the power company.
People keep saying how wonderful the idea is of an all-electric car is, but the need to charge the batteries won't disappear. So, we go from paying $20-$50 to fill a tank with gas to $100-$200 to charge the batteries, because the increased draw on the electric grid will increase the price of electricity by a HUGE amount.
Think about it, there are times of the year where there is concern about the supply of electricity in some parts of the country. So, let's just increase the demand without adding a significant amount of supply to the power grid and that will be fine, right? Coal, oil, nuclear, solar, water, and wind are what provide power to the electric grid.
Coal....people don't like it because even clean coal isn't terribly clean in terms of air polution.
Oil....ok, so we move from gas in our cars to using it for extra electric production...even if it is more efficient to use a big plant vs gasoline in engines, the number of NEW power plants would still require a lot of oil, and the electric companies would still charge US a ton of money with no additional regulation to keep us from being ripped off.
Nuclear....Most people are still against nuclear power, even though they don't have a clue how it works, or about the improvements to knowledge and safety of Nuclear power.
Solar, water, and wind are seen as the clean and renewable power sources, but because these technologies have not been as popular until fairly recently(the past few years), the deployment and investments in these technologies have been fairly low. How long would it take before a massive deployment of these technologies could actually supply power?
So, that is really the problem, there just isn't enough power in the power grid to handle the demand, and in some areas of the country, there isn't a lot of extra capacity with CURRENT uses. Some may know about the rolling blackouts that have been done in some areas to help address the shortage of electric power on the power grid. Picture what adding millions of cars would do, where you can't go to work because you can't charge up your batteries.
Or we end up on a quota system where we can't use more than a certain amount of electric power in our homes TOTAL, or we suddenly lose power when we exceed what the government says we can use.
So, be careful what you wish for, because you might not like the price when you get the bill.
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Bad management is the cause of so many corporate failures, it amazes me that those with a business degree are not flagged by GOOD company founders to be automatically denied employment. I am serious here, we saw this back in the late 1990s when you had a ton of non-technical people being placed as vice presidents of technical companies, and look at how many of them have crashed since then. Even the whole .com meltdown was caused by too many technical companies being founded by non-technical people with contacts in the venture capital world, inflating the industry and eventually causing the industry to implode.
Good managers know how to bring people together to get a job done, bad ones will try to muddle through and get their project done, but without understanding that good products are made by a team of people, not just a random collection of individuals. It sounds like Pandemic lacked talented management that had the ability to bring the different parts of the company together.
Even the idea of being focused on making ONE game engine that can be used for multiple titles(which helps with profitability) seems to be difficult for some people to understand.
I hope that Apple is stupid enough to actually implement this, just to show others that bad ideas CAN drive even the most obnoxious supporters away. If you buy a device, you should NOT be forced to deal with advertising. If you get a device for free, then that is another story, but even then, it would make it so only those desperate would use such a device rather than a different one without the feature.
AMD has needed new fabs to increase capacity for a long time now. After AMD purchased ATI, I always found it odd that there wasn't more of a push to build more fabs and bring their GPU production in-house. At the least, NVIDIA should also be suffering from TSMC having problems, even though they may not be feeling the crunch at the moment.
But, AT&T could sue over copyright violations since Verizon is using the AT&T map in their advertising. Fair use is one thing, but re-distributing via commercial can't be considered fair use. Then again, once AT&T starts to deploy 4/5G, 3G will be pushed out into areas that currently do not have it, and all this concern over 3G will go away.
The real down-side to the position AT&T is in with the iPhone is that the iPhone is more about web browsing and connected services than it is about being a good phone, so being able to talk takes a back seat to data. On the flip side, a true GPS with included maps on the device, rather than using a Google Maps application would push back against that very well, since "you don't need to pay for a data service to use the GPS" would be a way to go. Since you can't swap the batteries out yourself on the iPhone, you are also in the position where you can't even use the iPhone as a stand-alone GPS when you don't have access to some sort of charger, while with other devices, you can have multiple charged batteries and swap them out as needed.
You can get a decent 40 inch Samsung that does 1080p for $800 now, and you CAN see the difference between a DVD and a BluRay version of the same movie(even with the upscaling in BluRay players). My point was that since the retail price of BluRay is still very high, many are just waiting at the moment. You CAN get BluRay versions of movies for $20 or even a little less now, but many people do not look around to find where they can get BD movies for an acceptable price.
The adoption rate of BluRay isn't that bad, considering that you first need a TV/display that is HD in the first place, then you need the player(which isn't the $60 that a cheap DVD player costs these days), and then you get into the sale of the BD movies. If you ONLY look at those who have a flat panel TV already, rather than the entire public, the adoption rate isn't as bad as other stats may make it seem.
If you judge the number of people in the world and compare how many cars are sold in total, the numbers don't look as good as if you compare the number of people who are old enough to be able to drive, then the number that are legally allowed to drive(drivers license requirement), and then those who can afford to buy a car. You can even cut back and make things look better by not counting people in a third world country where no one has the money to buy a new car as well.
You have to look at things like how many HD vs. SD displays are out there as well as the price of the player. BluRay has the problem that movies cost more, and many people don't have a player yet.
BluRay won when it comes to HD movie standards, but HD is still something fairly new.
With BluRay here, but more expensive, many people may have decided to wait a bit on buying until the BD version gets a bit cheaper. I wonder if these people have even considered that.
Computation power only matters if you actually use it for something useful. The fastest chip out there that isn't being used, or does not generate reliable results is worthless.
To encourage invention or innovation, the system MUST go back to the original reason for patent protection in the first place. The idea is that new ideas should be protected so the patent "owner" can develop said idea and turn it into a product. If there is no ability or intention to DIRECTLY make a product to take advantage of the protection, then the protection should be removed.
This means that patent trolls would all go away, since none of them have any intention to make a product based on the patents they own. It is one thing for a company like AMD or Intel to file a patent and make use of their inventions, and another for someone sitting in an office to buy a patent just so they can file lawsuits against anyone who makes a product that might infringe on the patent in question.
So, for all of these companies that file patent related lawsuits, they SHOULD be looked at to see if they have taken even a few steps towards making a product. If there has been no effort made to create a working product based on the technology, they should be fined for filing a lawsuit in the first place.
A big issue is the costs involved with game development, and the advertising side of it. You also have to expect that when it comes to books, there ARE pressures placed on authors to release the next book in a series. Do you REALLY think that the seventh Harry Potter book didn't have the publisher asking for updates and pushing for it to be done so they could print and sell it?
Now, in the development of computer games, you really have two types of development models.
The first is when you have an independent developer with its own money that can get the job done from start to finish. In that case, the publishers only need to do some very basic work when it comes to the product development, like putting in the normal copyright stuff, publisher logos, etc. In these cases, the publisher only has to do advertising for the product to generate enough hype to properly sell the product. It should be noted that this CAN cost a lot of money. TV advertising is VERY VERY VERY expensive, and advertising in movie theaters and such also can be expensive. The production costs for the advertisements for TV ads as well can not be discounted. So, how many millions of dollars can they REALLY spend to hype a game before the advertising costs exceed expected revenue?
Then you have the case where a publisher has to INVEST in the development of a title. This becomes more essential as the development cost of an all original game with engine takes four to five years, and all the programming, sound, and other development work, plus voice actors(every game has voice acting in it now for the most part), licenses for the software used for in-game cut scenes, etc. How many millions of dollars does it really take to make a game these days? How many start-ups can afford the risk of spending $10 million or more for a game that may not sell more than 10000 copies in a worst-case scenario? With this situation, the publisher DOES have to invest a bit to help the developer get the title out, in the same way that book publishers will give an advance on royalties to an author to help the author make it a full-time investment(rather than writing while working a regular day-job to pay the bills).
The big thing is when a publisher really tries to hype a given book or product vs. these books that come out that are very good, but that no one has heard of. You will notice that you don't see books advertised very often, considering how many books are published each year. That shows the level of investment from the publisher. And, books have what, 1-4 people who do the writing, vs. how many people are needed for game development.
So, a better comparison would be the film industry, where you have hundreds, if not thousands of people who contribute to getting a movie out the door. The thing is, film is a mature industry, so it is easier to see up front and early when a movie will be well done, or if it will be horrible. You hear from the film industry about movies that get started in production, but then die as well(if you look into it). You hear about budgets and costs in movie development. And you hear about the studios running into money issues when they release too many bad or mediocre moves in a year, and they lose money in a given year. The difference is that movie studios DO have systems in place for how things are done, and people with experience that can be called in to help fix problems with projects that are having problems.
Now, do you see how generally independent game developers have it a lot harder? Who do you go to when you run into problems and don't have the expertise in-house to deal with them? Even companies like EA, which have a lot of expertise don't seem to have management understand how to make use of the talent they have available to them to help the smaller developers gain the experience and expertise needed to stand on their own.
And of course, game technology is still advancing at an insane rate. Due to how much better(faster, better quality graphi
So how hard would it have been to take the REQUIRED parts of these applications and ONLY the required parts and include them as a part of iTunes? Or ask if we want the stupid Quicktime app to auto-load every time Windows starts up? If people really want the full versions of QuickTime and WebKit, then they will get them. For the rest of us, why not just put in the very bare essentials needed for iTunes to work, and leave the rest of the GARBAGE off our systems? How about NOT sticking Bonjour on our systems unless we have requested a feature that actually needs it?
While there is a good reason to want/need fun gameplay, I feel that what is missing from many games is the feeling of purpose that a storyline will bring. I do NOT suggest from this that long cut-scenes or pauses in the game are needed to bring this about, but instead suggest that the idea of "if it moves, shoot it", or just random acts of violence in games for no purpose without there being other types of games that get a lot of publicity is what is KILLING gaming.
I have been playing computer games since well before Wolfenstein 3D(which came out before Doom and Quake for those who don't know). The old gold-box D&D games starting with Pool of Radiance, Wizardry, Bards Tale, and other classic fantasy RPGs had a strength to them that makes some modern games seem pathetic by comparison, just because you felt like you had some purpose to what you were doing.
I don't mind violence in games, but I find that the biggest games that are released really focus so much on player vs. player that the whole point of WHY you are fighting is lost. Why not set it up so that you have multiple sides in a player vs. player environment, but make it so there really is a point to WHY you are fighting. A way to make this work would be to have storyline chains, similar to the original Wing Commander, where you have a war going on, but the missions the players are going on are based on how each side is doing in the war. Make it so a war will go on for a full 30 days, and teams fighting on both sides can tip the balance. People have the option to come in fully supporting the losing side, just to help keep the balance, or you will have people supporting the clearly stronger side, or weaker side. If a mission is won or lost, contributions of different types will earn credit, so that support roles have a purpose as well(people playing a medic in a war game for example), or technical support roles where you have to run out to fix things for others.
And that is the biggest weakness, that the big games that come out are based on the idea of players wanting to play the soldier/warrior, and the idea that not everyone WANTS to be fighting on the front lines has been lost on many developers. Even the RPG scene is more about action/adventure these days, rather than about roleplaying and giving the player options on how he/she wants to play. Being able to COMMAND troops for example(earning rank, command status, or even moving from being on the front lines to the command tent where you set the strategy have others out there doing the fighting) is something that most games don't provide.
While those would be nice, they are also not "critical" features that make or break a game. The issue I was talking about was the attitude that some players have when dealing with others. There are some people new to the game that really have an attitude that Dungeons and Dragons is some amazing game system that because the name D&D has been around for so long that is MUST be better, and some people find that attitude to be....annoying.
Dungeons and Dragons as a name HAS been around for a long long time, but the history of the game system itself needs to be looked at by some people, because of false impressions.
From the start, the original game rules that evolved into Dungeons and Dragons and then Advanced Dungeons and Dragons(first and second editions) showed a clear evolution in the rules. While some things changed, during those years, the fundamental game systems could clearly be seen as an evolution over time.
The Dungeons and Dragons rule system changed DRASTICALLY with the release of the third edition. As a result, while there are certain similarities, these changes really made the third edition an all new game with some elements taken from Advanced D&D. As a result, all those people who say the game has been around really do not understand that the Dungeons and Dragons of today is NOT the same game that I had played back in my high school and college days.
I personally only agree with the change in the Armor Class system from being -10(best) to +10(worst) to the current system, just for clarity.
Adding points to stats, and being able to pick up levels in other classes than the ones you have just doesn't work for me since the systems for these things just feel like they were poorly designed(You go from being a trained level 1 fighter with enough experience to advance to level 2, but now you take a level in something else?)
Back to the topic at hand though, DDO as a GAME is a lot of fun, and my disagreement with the fundamental 3rd and 3.5 edition rules can be put aside for the enjoyment of the game. That really should be seen as a benchmark of how good a game is, where a game is fun to play, even if you do not care for the base rule system, and further, is worth paying a subscription fee to play.
For those who have not tried out the game yet, with Free to Play, there really isn't anything holding you back(except a really bad Intel graphics chip). When you make a character, I suggest that people check out the custom character generation rather than taking one of the pre-built type as well, just to see how many different ways you can go with each class. That is mostly to show a primary difference in DDO vs. other games that force the same basic design for a class on everyone with very little customization available.
I think you have missed my point. At this point, since the game WAS originally designed around DirectX, it would cost more money to update the game to support another API than would be made. It wouldn't make sense for Turbine to change the rendering engine to something multi-platform if the expected revenue from such a change would not be well beyond the cost of the development work. Since DDO is not being sold in stores, the only money made would be off the micro-transactions and the subscription revenue. Do you REALLY think there are enough Mac people out there who would spend enough money to justify the cost of the extra development at this point?
There is a big difference between the long-time players and many of the new players just getting into the game. Yes, there are SOME people who are really bad, but most of the long-time players on Ghallanda at least don't take that sort of attitude. Then again, what you are seeing may be due to the World of Warcraft crowd trying to compare every last feature to WoW, rather than looking at DDO as a DIFFERENT sort of game, and not a clone of the old EQ game design with different graphics/rules.
In the case of DDO, Free to Play works because people have the option to really play the game and decide if they like it enough to play. There being no initial investment(buying the game in stores or online) before having to pay the subscription also helps.
You can play DDO fully free, but then decide you want to pay real money to buy an adventure pack like the Deleras quest series if you want access to that content without having to continue to pay after that. Or, people decide that they will pay $15 up front for one month, have all the content be included for that one month, and then play whatever. It is very possible to get through all the level 1-10 content packs in that one month, so if you would not want to go back through that content after your one month, that one month subscription means you avoid needing to buy that low end content after you switch back to Free to Play.
DDO uses DirectX for rendering, and it would take a LOT of effort/money to recode the graphics engine at this point, and since the number of Mac people who would pay money would be fairly low, the return on investment would be so low that it would be a money losing effort. Then again, you KNEW that the selection of games that support Mac was fairly low when you bought your computer, so if you want to play games, you should have known that you would need to set up Windows to play the vast majority of games.
You also have to look at how many people on a given platform may turn into paying customers early in the program development cycle. If you do not expect many Mac people to buy your game, and it will cost $1 million in development costs to support that platform, do you REALLY see it as a wise investment? DDO started as a regular MMO with a subscription, and Free to Play only came out YEARS after the initial release. With this in mind, would you REALLY expect that the Mac platform would have made Turbine a profit?
You have not looked at how Turbine has applied the concept to DDO. In DDO, money only buys you access to the adventure packs, and other game features that subscribers get for their monthly fee. The only thing money will get you is convenience items since the items from raids are NOT available for purchase, and even "good" items need to be earned in-game since gold is not sold on the store.
DDO doesn't have a "pay for raid loot" system though, so you can't just drop money in to get what the long-time players have had to work for. Most of the micro-transaction stuff you can buy is centered around either the premium stuff that subscribers get automatically with their monthly subscription, or convenience items like healing or spell point potions. This keeps the paying customers happy that only those who PLAY their way into the high end game(free to play or subscriber) will be getting the better items in the game.
This is where you clearly have never even looked at the game in question(DDO). The game does not revolve around player vs. player, though there are some very very limited forms of it in the game(in certain taverns there are combat pits).
The DDO method of free to play is really giving you an unlimited taste of the game for free by offering a bit of free content without making all content for free. You have the option to either play the free content on multiple characters to generate enough "Turbine Points" to purchase additional content, or you can pay real money for Turbine points which you can then use to get the content package of your choice. If you don't like being limited in what you can access, you can just become a normal $15/month subscriber to get access to all the content in the game. In a month or two, if you don't want to pay the monthly subscription any more, you can switch back to free to play, lose access to the non-free content you have not purchased, but you don't LOSE what you have accomplished. Those who pay the monthly subscription also get 500 Turbine Points each month they are a subscriber, and those points can be used to unlock content for the free to play if the player decides to go back to Free to Play status.
So, DDO offers the best of both worlds. You get free to play with micro transactions, and you get subscription based for those who want all the content the game has to offer. There are also no "player rankings" as such, so no one really cares about who has the absolute best stuff, as long as your skill at playing your character is at an acceptable level(clerics who don't heal, or who don't know how to use mass healing spells in a raid situation may upset others for example). There is also a tolerance for poor equipment levels to an extent as long as party members know about it in advance so it doesn't kill what the group is trying to do.
And, this is why DDO is seeing good subscription numbers from the release of Free to Play. Some people may upgrade for only a few months to get full access to the "premium" content in the low to mid levels, and then switch back to the Free to Play and then only buy the few high level premium modules they want access to after that. Or, if new content is released often enough, they may stick with their subscription so they don't have to buy each new content pack as it is released.
True cheating when benchmarking a GPU vs. optimizing is something that many people do not seem to understand. Cheating when it comes to GPUs really would come down to intentionally degrading visual quality just to get higher scores while tricking the benchmark application into thinking the quality is as high as specified.
An example of this would be when running a test with Antialiasing set at 8x in the applications, and antialiasing being set to "application control" in the drivers, yet when the drivers see the application running, it forces AA off to get better scores, no matter what the settings might be set to. This is a clear case of trying to fool people into thinking that the GPU in question handles AA very well or has better performance.
And that is where most of the big reports of cheating have come from in the past. If the image quality is degraded, that will generally increase the framerates, and that is what both NVIDIA and ATI were guilty of.
Now, adjusting things in the drivers to provide the proper visual quality but changing HOW things are done to provide better framerates is fine, because what you are telling the card to do is what you get.
In this case with Intel, the GPU is what is being tested, not the CPU. If a GPU test has results based on CPU doing a lot of the work, then going with a lower end CPU will have a MAJOR impact on GPU performance. The whole point of benchmarking a GPU is to test how fast the GPU is, so you could put that GPU in a modern system with various processors and you get roughly the same GPU performance(of course, when the application is CPU limited, you will see reduced GPU performance anyway).
I have felt for a long time that drivers should compensate for missing features in the hardware when it comes to the APIs though. If a GPU only accelerates DirectX 7 stuff, with a properly powerful CPU you SHOULD be able to use DirectX 11 instructions, but since the GPU doesn't handle them, it would be much slower. The real key is that performance would be HORRIBLE when using software to handle those newer "unaccelerated" instructions, but it would still work.
From that perspective then, it does not bother me that Intel would use the CPU to compensate for their GPUs, except that published benchmark results need to indicate the true performance of the product. From that perspective, if SLI/Crossfire were used and the benchmark were reporting the results as a single GPU result numbers, that too would give a false impression of the performance of the product.
If Intel were to make it clear that faster CPUs will improve the performance of their GPUs, but would result in slower application performance(since CPU cycles are going to the GPU), then that wouldn't bother me for how the product actually performs. The problem is that it still doesn't show just how fast a given GPU is in a benchmark environment.
But the logic is still flawed because they don't say it won't work with ATI cards, they make it not work with NVIDIA hardware if AMD/ATI hardware is also in the system.
When it comes down to it, if food products are larger but do not provide additional "food value" to go with the size, the only benefit would be for those trying to lose weight, since there is less food "value" for a given mass. 1000 calories of something grown in space may take up more room, but it is still only 1000 calories worth of food. Now, if you take a plant that on Earth provides 1000 calories and when grown in space it provides 1500 calories, THEN that would be worth looking at.
As I mentioned in my previous comment, the renewable energy needs to be set up by someone to generate ENOUGH power to handle the increase in demand. Electricity may not be as cheap as it currently is if the electric grid itself becomes overloaded.
Now, keep in mind that not all areas of the country are set up the same way. You have places like NY City where the value of land makes it very difficult to justify setting up a power plant in many areas(not all). Just because it is practical in some places does not mean it is practical everywhere, and that is where you run into trouble.
And then, you get the old "Not in my backyard" response to new power plants, no matter how clean they may be.
And, more demand means higher costs for electric, no matter how cheap it may be to generate. It could cost one cent per megawatt, and we would still end up paying through the nose to the power company.
People keep saying how wonderful the idea is of an all-electric car is, but the need to charge the batteries won't disappear. So, we go from paying $20-$50 to fill a tank with gas to $100-$200 to charge the batteries, because the increased draw on the electric grid will increase the price of electricity by a HUGE amount.
Think about it, there are times of the year where there is concern about the supply of electricity in some parts of the country. So, let's just increase the demand without adding a significant amount of supply to the power grid and that will be fine, right? Coal, oil, nuclear, solar, water, and wind are what provide power to the electric grid.
Coal....people don't like it because even clean coal isn't terribly clean in terms of air polution.
Oil....ok, so we move from gas in our cars to using it for extra electric production...even if it is more efficient to use a big plant vs gasoline in engines, the number of NEW power plants would still require a lot of oil, and the electric companies would still charge US a ton of money with no additional regulation to keep us from being ripped off.
Nuclear....Most people are still against nuclear power, even though they don't have a clue how it works, or about the improvements to knowledge and safety of Nuclear power.
Solar, water, and wind are seen as the clean and renewable power sources, but because these technologies have not been as popular until fairly recently(the past few years), the deployment and investments in these technologies have been fairly low. How long would it take before a massive deployment of these technologies could actually supply power?
So, that is really the problem, there just isn't enough power in the power grid to handle the demand, and in some areas of the country, there isn't a lot of extra capacity with CURRENT uses. Some may know about the rolling blackouts that have been done in some areas to help address the shortage of electric power on the power grid. Picture what adding millions of cars would do, where you can't go to work because you can't charge up your batteries.
Or we end up on a quota system where we can't use more than a certain amount of electric power in our homes TOTAL, or we suddenly lose power when we exceed what the government says we can use.
So, be careful what you wish for, because you might not like the price when you get the bill.