Do you honestly think this type of patenting didn't happen back in the '70s and '80s with Atari and the like? Take a look at this page and scroll down to the section on Magnavox vs Atari regarding patents over Pong. Magnavox went on to sue Activision over this patent as well. There have been lots of these types of patent lawsuits since the beginning of the video game industry.
"Was that the animated version of Warcraft that was going to come out? Looked like a game for little kids?"
The style they were using was actually common for adventure games of the time. It was an animated adventure game in the mold of stuff like Monkey Island I believe. Then the market on adventure games evaporated and the game was cancelled.
"iTunes would never, ever just magically delete your music because you copied it somewhere. You can copy your iTunes music ANYWHERE."
On purpose? Probably not. Due to a bug? Quite possibly. At least that what has appeared to happen with my girlfriend's older iTunes purchased files. All of her older iTunes purchased songs mysteriously vanished.
Notice that the FX-57 pulls almost 40 frames more per second than the 3000+ in 1024x768. This is less apparent at the high res 16000x1200, because at that point the video card becomes the bottleneck.
"Our CPU scaling experiences really helped us understand just how important the CPU is to having a great gaming experience. In real-world gaming situations with a slower CPU such as an AthlonXP 2500+ or a Pentium4 2.4GHz, the video performance becomes extremely bottlenecked by the CPU. We were forced to reduce resolution, AA and AF settings, as well as in-game quality settings in the case of FarCry just to get playable performance."
This is an older article but they did one recently on pretty much the same thing. Try searching for "video card cpu scaling" on Google and you should get some results. Tom's Hardware also does some CPU comparison stuff.
You'll see CPU bottlenecking occuring with processors less than a 3.2GHz P4 or a 3800+ Athlon 64. A 2.8GHz processor is not bad though. I see significant differences between my older 2.4Ghz P4 and my 3.2 with the same video card. The majority of MMOs aren't too hard on the video, the biggest exception being Everquest 2. It's true that a video card is a better investment overall, but there is a point where CPU bottlenecking on (much) older CPUs mean that there is no point in going for the top of the line video card when the mid range will give you close to the same performance. BTW, there is a version of the 7800GT from Nvidia available in an AGP form factor which would be a decent upgrade. I probably wouldn't bother if you are running something like a 6800 or higher already though or ATI's last gen.
Hmmm. Rakafisk vs lutefisk is a fair fight, but smalahove is hands down the winner. Possibly beats out the pig face they sell at the asian market here.
I left the game awhile after hitting 60. Mostly because I couldn't commit the time to raiding and found the majority of end game activities to be dull, repetitive time sinks. At the time I was pretty sure I'd come back for Burning Crusade, now I'm not so sure. A couple of the questions on my mind:
1. How will they balance the expansion between epic equipped raiding characters and blue wearing non-raiders? Itemization causes a huge disparity in power between level 60 characters. 2. How well will their server architecture handle the flood of people renewing their accounts once the expansion comes out? I see a large potential for overloading of the servers again. I can't stand paying to wait in a queue.
Uh huh sure whatever. I've had friends who have been permanently injured by heavy meth use. It makes me wonder if you've used meth for an extended time. I would highly doubt it. At the most you've probably played around with it a couple times. It's dangerous shit. I'm speaking from personal experience not quoting "Drug Free America" ads.
Lutefisk is soaked in water and lye for two days but after that it's soaked in water for several days to get the lye out. I don't think it's dangerous to eat, just nasty.
I find Computer Games Magazine to have the best commentary and least bias out of the gaming magazines. It's quite a bit different from the usual 2/3s glowing previews, 1/3 reviews model that most mags use. I get the feeling that most of the contributors are like me, long time gamers. I'm kind of amazed they're still able to publish since their volume of advertising is a lot less than PC Gamer and the like.
As someone who still has to support Mac OS 9 - I'd have to say it's a piece of crap. Application failures that take down the whole system are more common than on Windows 98. I just had to fix a machine that was rendered unbootable by an application crash the other day. Nothing like that informative blinking question mark on bootup. Anyway, both of these older operating systems are crap so I suppose comparisons are pointless.
The great thing about the C64 is that it benefitted tremendously from coming out as the video game console market was collapsing. Parents that didn't want to spend money on a video game would shell out cash for a computer that could be used for school work. The C64 my family owned was used for word processing and programming BASIC but was primarily used for gaming.
"The one thing he has noticed though is that the idle temperature of his GPU has increased from an average 34 degrees to 45 degress. And he's not even tried any games with it yet (apparently this used to get the GPU temp up to about 44)"
If he's using the flashy new aero interface that's because it uses the GPU's 3D capabilities for accelerating the UI. With WinXP and earlier, most modern GPUs down throttle when just running 2D desktop applications.
Although I doubt that Vista's new shiny aero user interface will work in a VM, since VM's usually don't have 3D video card support (at least my experience with VMware and Virtual PC). So if you want to test this OS with all the bells and whistles you'd need a decent spare computer.
Re:DnD is NOT a Solo Game
on
DDO Goes Solo
·
· Score: 1
"I just cannot help but hate this change. DnD is not a solo game, infact it is impossible to play alone."
Well except for those bizarre solo modules TSR released back in the mid-80s.
"Since when did quality assurance for commercial software become the sole responsibility of the customers???"
What makes you think this is their sole mechanism for testing? For testing usability the future users of the OS are a lot better than some internal test group. This allows those businesses and individuals who would like to play around with the OS a chance to offer feedback before it is released. This is a bad thing?
Some people enjoy getting a "sneak preview" even if it is incomplete. I've participated in a number of betas for game software, because I enjoy games and find it interesting to see the game development mature. As with this beta, I get to play with something buggy, feature incomplete that will expire after a certain date. That's to be expected, it's a beta. For me the enjoyment of playing with the software early outweighs the negatives. I'm sure there are plenty of people who feel the same way about operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you honestly think this type of patenting didn't happen back in the '70s and '80s with Atari and the like?
Take a look at this page and scroll down to the section on Magnavox vs Atari regarding patents over Pong. Magnavox went on to sue Activision over this patent as well.
There have been lots of these types of patent lawsuits since the beginning of the video game industry.
Pretty sure there are save games going back earlier on the Apple 2 and such. Certainly Ultima 1 in '81 beats the Hobbit by a year.
"Was that the animated version of Warcraft that was going to come out? Looked like a game for little kids?"
The style they were using was actually common for adventure games of the time. It was an animated adventure game in the mold of stuff like Monkey Island I believe. Then the market on adventure games evaporated and the game was cancelled.
"iTunes would never, ever just magically delete your music because you copied it somewhere. You can copy your iTunes music ANYWHERE."
On purpose? Probably not. Due to a bug? Quite possibly. At least that what has appeared to happen with my girlfriend's older iTunes purchased files. All of her older iTunes purchased songs mysteriously vanished.
I should point out that this is definately game dependant. Half Life 2 is a big example of where CPU scaling affects gameplay:
CPU Scaling with a 7800GTX in HL2
Notice that the FX-57 pulls almost 40 frames more per second than the 3000+ in 1024x768. This is less apparent at the high res 16000x1200, because at that point the video card becomes the bottleneck.
Sure:
Hard OCP CPU scaling
"Our CPU scaling experiences really helped us understand just how important the CPU is to having a great gaming experience. In real-world gaming situations with a slower CPU such as an AthlonXP 2500+ or a Pentium4 2.4GHz, the video performance becomes extremely bottlenecked by the CPU. We were forced to reduce resolution, AA and AF settings, as well as in-game quality settings in the case of FarCry just to get playable performance."
This is an older article but they did one recently on pretty much the same thing. Try searching for "video card cpu scaling" on Google and you should get some results. Tom's Hardware also does some CPU comparison stuff.
You'll see CPU bottlenecking occuring with processors less than a 3.2GHz P4 or a 3800+ Athlon 64. A 2.8GHz processor is not bad though. I see significant differences between my older 2.4Ghz P4 and my 3.2 with the same video card.
The majority of MMOs aren't too hard on the video, the biggest exception being Everquest 2.
It's true that a video card is a better investment overall, but there is a point where CPU bottlenecking on (much) older CPUs mean that there is no point in going for the top of the line video card when the mid range will give you close to the same performance.
BTW, there is a version of the 7800GT from Nvidia available in an AGP form factor which would be a decent upgrade. I probably wouldn't bother if you are running something like a 6800 or higher already though or ATI's last gen.
Take a look around at some benchmarking sites. You'll see CPU bottlenecking occuring with processors less than a 3.2GHz P4 or a 3800+ Athlon 64.
Hmmm. Rakafisk vs lutefisk is a fair fight, but smalahove is hands down the winner. Possibly beats out the pig face they sell at the asian market here.
True - but you need a decent processor to take advantage of the video card performance. Using a 7900GTX with a 2Ghz P4 would be silly.
I left the game awhile after hitting 60. Mostly because I couldn't commit the time to raiding and found the majority of end game activities to be dull, repetitive time sinks. At the time I was pretty sure I'd come back for Burning Crusade, now I'm not so sure. A couple of the questions on my mind:
1. How will they balance the expansion between epic equipped raiding characters and blue wearing non-raiders? Itemization causes a huge disparity in power between level 60 characters.
2. How well will their server architecture handle the flood of people renewing their accounts once the expansion comes out? I see a large potential for overloading of the servers again. I can't stand paying to wait in a queue.
Uh huh sure whatever. I've had friends who have been permanently injured by heavy meth use. It makes me wonder if you've used meth for an extended time. I would highly doubt it. At the most you've probably played around with it a couple times. It's dangerous shit. I'm speaking from personal experience not quoting "Drug Free America" ads.
Long term brain damage. Hallucinations. Psychopathic behavior. Extreme paranoia. Violent outbreaks.
I've seen what meth can do. It isn't pleasent.
Lutefisk is soaked in water and lye for two days but after that it's soaked in water for several days to get the lye out. I don't think it's dangerous to eat, just nasty.
It means:
"Please come and eat our gelatinous fish, it's prepared with lye."
I find Computer Games Magazine to have the best commentary and least bias out of the gaming magazines. It's quite a bit different from the usual 2/3s glowing previews, 1/3 reviews model that most mags use. I get the feeling that most of the contributors are like me, long time gamers.
I'm kind of amazed they're still able to publish since their volume of advertising is a lot less than PC Gamer and the like.
As someone who still has to support Mac OS 9 - I'd have to say it's a piece of crap. Application failures that take down the whole system are more common than on Windows 98. I just had to fix a machine that was rendered unbootable by an application crash the other day. Nothing like that informative blinking question mark on bootup.
Anyway, both of these older operating systems are crap so I suppose comparisons are pointless.
The great thing about the C64 is that it benefitted tremendously from coming out as the video game console market was collapsing. Parents that didn't want to spend money on a video game would shell out cash for a computer that could be used for school work. The C64 my family owned was used for word processing and programming BASIC but was primarily used for gaming.
Unfortunately these are the lower end single core processors. I'd love to see a drop in 4200+ or higher X2 chips seeing as I'm about to buy one.
"The one thing he has noticed though is that the idle temperature of his GPU has increased from an average 34 degrees to 45 degress. And he's not even tried any games with it yet (apparently this used to get the GPU temp up to about 44)"
If he's using the flashy new aero interface that's because it uses the GPU's 3D capabilities for accelerating the UI. With WinXP and earlier, most modern GPUs down throttle when just running 2D desktop applications.
Although I doubt that Vista's new shiny aero user interface will work in a VM, since VM's usually don't have 3D video card support (at least my experience with VMware and Virtual PC).
So if you want to test this OS with all the bells and whistles you'd need a decent spare computer.
"I just cannot help but hate this change. DnD is not a solo game, infact it is impossible to play alone."
Well except for those bizarre solo modules TSR released back in the mid-80s.
"Since when did quality assurance for commercial software become the sole responsibility of the customers???"
What makes you think this is their sole mechanism for testing?
For testing usability the future users of the OS are a lot better than some internal test group. This allows those businesses and individuals who would like to play around with the OS a chance to offer feedback before it is released. This is a bad thing?
Some people enjoy getting a "sneak preview" even if it is incomplete. I've participated in a number of betas for game software, because I enjoy games and find it interesting to see the game development mature. As with this beta, I get to play with something buggy, feature incomplete that will expire after a certain date. That's to be expected, it's a beta. For me the enjoyment of playing with the software early outweighs the negatives. I'm sure there are plenty of people who feel the same way about operating systems.
"If a games replay value is based on making me do pointles shit to unlock special modes/levels/characters, I'm being ripped off."
Wow, you've just described MMO gameplay.
My personal list would have to include "playing games" with the wife in the #1 slot.