The open/closed debate means nothing. Metroid Prime is "polished" beacause it is just so damn good. And we don't mean "polished" because of its looks (but it does look nice). It plays well. It has an excellent story. It's just fun. Everything is so perfectly balanced and tweaked. The great graphics and sound are a plus, but they take an already perfect game to the next level of greatness. So many PC games these days are boring clones of other games. Retro Studios did the impossible with Prime. They took a classic 2D game and made it into an excelltn 3D game- without using the same old FPS treatment that would have been expected. That would have been the easy way to do it.
They could have settled for a modified Q3A-based game (like MOH:AA), but they didn't. They created the perfect 3D platformer.
Shoot. You don't even need OpenAL. OSS (commercial) *and* ALSA have 3D spatialization support built right into them and it works perfectly. It's just that nobody ever uses it. They don't really need any special library other than LibSDL- in which Loki proved could be used to do excellent real-time mixing.
I decided to just buy a Gamecube and Metroid. For Linux, I'm just picking up games from smaller development teams, like http://www.pompom.org.uk. I loved MOH:AA when I used Windows, but that was probably the only game that kept me hanging on.
In the way of NWN- I don't really care anymore. I am, however, excited about some of LGP's new offerings. I definately plan top pick those up.
Maybe you don't play Linux games, but a lot of use that frequently visit linuxgames.com are excited about this. I suspected that this was the game thay they'd release when they hinted that the title was three words and a number, and frankly, I am pleased by this announcement.
It might not be the most successful Windows game, but it is a fabulous strategy title. Check out reviews if you are not sure. Typically, this game has been given straight 9+ scores.
Michael Simms of LGP has some great ideas. Plus, he realizes that many higher profile games for Linux just aren't practical right now. Licensing costs are just too high for many newer games. Trying to license the next big PC game (if the development house would even let them publish it) would spell certain doom for LGP. Look at Loki. It wasn't all about the fact that their sales weren't up to par. They chose some expensive titles to publish *before* they had a steady cash flow. They started with Eric's Ultimate Solitaire (bad choice for a platform that has a million free card games) but was a good choice because it was cheap. LGP is doing what they need to do... Starting small (Majesty Gold is coming soon, and Mindrover has been re-released) and working up. Big Windows game companies just don't notice them yet... But they are making ties with a few.
They are playing it SMART. Regardless of how well it sells, D2:DP (DP - I love saying that) is a good choice because it is cheap for them. They also have their own retail channel through tuxgames.com (though they consider it a seperate company with a different budget and income), but this is going to be the key for their survival, when Linux games *do* become more practical.
Does your wavetable card have hardware MIDI? It should work fine with OSS Commercial drivers.
If it uses software MIDI, then that is a CPU emulated device. OSS has some early software midi synthesis, but the samples are pretty poor. It does, however, function OK. 4.0's release should have some excellent new MIDI features (according to the guys at 4-Front). I think that there just hasn't been as much of a demand for that sort of thing yet, but the increase in good MIDI authoring apps like Rosegarden has changed that.
The OSS/Commercial drivers from www.opensound.com support 4/6 channel output using the standard Dolby output FL/FR/LFE/RL/RR format. It is detailed in their driver specs, but not many programs take advantage of it.
It also upsamples stereo audio to output into a 5.1 speaker set. Some cards that support this are the Live! series/C-Media/CS4630, etc., but the SPDIF output doesn't work on all CS4630 cards (like the Santa Cruz)... 5.1 out does, however. I believe that all outputs of the EMU10k1 work though.
ReBorn from http://www.deadvirgins.org.uk/reborn/index.html was shaping up to be a primising authoring program. PropellerHead threatened to sue the guy that made it, so he took it down. Try it if you can find it. It is a fun tool.
I suspect that he will be releasing (he has mentioned this to me) a much more functional program. Odds are that it will be open source too. But easily, the old program had most (or all) of the functionality of Rebirth. I believe that it supported the file formats too.
People do pay for quality audio drivers. They are the turnkey drivers from 4-Front. They work with most any card (autodetencts) and uses a simple install program. Aside from that, they have loads of other cool features like real-time mixing (works like DirectSound). Many people that I suggest them to online, however, won't buy them because "they have a problem with paying for sound drivers". I use them, and they are well worth the $25-$30 to get those features that you commonly only see in Windows. I even have more advanced recording capabilities and control over each channel's playback with a simple, low cost driver upgrade.
You won't, however, get a lot of the same features out of ALSA or standard OSS drivers. There are certain NDAs that the 4-Front guys probably had to sign to write their closed-source drivers.
Check out a demo at www.opensound.com if you are interested.
I believe that I used 16k cluster sizes for my RAID-0 array. After a bit of trial and error, this seemed to get the best results. However, I have a friend with a KG7-RAID that insists that 32k clusters, and others insist on 64k clusters. My experience with 64k clusters was that it wasn't as fast.
Here is an old benchmark of my array from a year ago or so. Mine is the image on the right. On the left is a Seagate X15-36LP.
There are probably some faster drives and controllers now though. My array used dual Deskstar 60GXP drives (40 GB each). My buddy used some newer Maxtor ATA 133 drives and got slower read speeds than mine. He did, however, get faster write speeds. I think that it has something to do with the cluster sizes.
For anyone attempting to set up an IDE RAID array: experiment a bit, and be sure to have Norton Ghost.:) It's time consuming, but it is the easiest way to get the best performance. Here is some useful info for setting choosing a cluster size. http://mywebpages.comcast.net/dbergstein/KT-7.html
My experiences with IDE RAID have been pretty darn good. Benchmarking my Desktar 60GXP drives in Windows 2000 last year showed that I was getting read speeds in striping mode (between two drives) at faster rates than the fastest seagate Cheetah SCSI drives. Times have probably changed now though.
I started with a KT7A-RAID mobo. The important thing is that you get the cluster sizes just right for your particular partition. I used Norton Ghost to image my drive and try all sorts of different variables. In the end I had very satisfying results. Since I switched to Linux, I stopped using RAID-0 (yes, it is supported with this device!). I found that ReiserFS and the multi-drive Linux filesystem on these drives seemed to be just about as fast without having to hassle with soft-RAID controllers. It is probably due to my system RAM though. I couldn't seem to get Windows 2000 to make the most of 1024 MB without using that swapfile. Linux seems to avoid the swap altogether and uses static RAM instead. It is very nice having the extra IDE channels though. Without them, I probably wouldn't have 4 HDs hooked up right now.
Square didn't really "make" Einhander. It was done by Dream Factory, a smaller studio that had some ties with Square. They also did The Bouncer, Tobal, and "Ehrgeiz". Among other titles, they did the UFC: Tapout games for XBox.
Same with things like Bushido Blade, a Lightweight game. Another example: Quest Software members were also contracted for other things, like the FF Tactics games.
Square hasn't really made a whole lot of games in-house, aside from the Final Fantasy Franchise. They mostly do publication or contract other developers to make games for them.
Alien Front Online featured voice chat over modem, and it had no lag at all. Their was also a broadband adapter that was available in very limited supply. Unfortunately, it didn't work with all games.
As much as we like to bash Microsoft, they did well with X-box live. It has finally taken the online PC gaming experience and brought it over to consoles.
Let me remind you that SEGA was the first to take the PC online gaming experience to the consoles. They did it with the Saturn's Netlink, and the Dreamcast was pretty successful at bringing games online (for how many Dreamcast units were in homes).
There have been alternatives from Matrox and PowerVR for some time now, but that may not be viable for all users. PowerVR especially is tight-lipped about weather or not they have plans to release a new product any time soon. The Kyro 2 cards are almost 2 years old now, and I am looking for an upgrade. The Radeon 9700 could now be a good choice for me.
Why are these things posted here? Is it because of the many/. users that use windows:-), or is it because we're always trying to make windows look bad?
I picked up a Platinum Gamecube with Metroid Prime (and a used memory card) last night for only $202.
One of the most polished games that I have played for years. I can't believe that the little GameCube is capable of such breathtaking graphics.
Make no mistake... This is Metroid. Everything about it is Metroid, only in 3D. It is the most perfect transistion that I have ever seen a 2D platformer make. And there is *so much* story here too. It isn't an all-out frag fest like most FPS games. It is about exploration and puzzles. I think that the monsters are only in there to keep you on your toes.
This is a platform/aventure game in the first person. It is the perfect way to resurrect a series that many of us started playing about 15 years ago.
Same thing is happening at my workplace. We do technical support for clients, and the number of clients has dropped pretty significantly. I'd say that it is about half of what it was two years ago. Despite having about half as many employees around I find that I am really doing less, which is why I get to hang out and BS with you guys all day.;-)
Things aren't just *added* to the codebase of open source programs. You can't just walk up and pop some code into the codebase. It doesn't work that way. There always a code maintainer who reviews the changes before applying the patches. I can't think of any exceptions to this. Can you?
My apologies. I just see lots of posts from people that berate the OS and its users. Many of them spout off things that they don't understand about it and its programs. It's kinda like the guys that insist that OpenGL performance is better on Windows "just because it is the gaming platform". That isn't the case at all.
I don't really think that Linux has a "large user base". If anything, it has a growing user base. I still feel that there are more Linux boxes out there on desktops than there are Mac boxes. But then again, OS X doesn't seem to have a lot in the way of gaming either.
DirectX may be a quick and easy way to program the input and output layers for a game, but there are other "multi-platform" alternatives. For instance, had Epic actually written Unreal Tournament 2003 around OpenGL to begin with, there might be much better performance on alternative operating systems. I shudder to see how it runs on OS X. They are going to need to do some serious tweaking of the game's OpenGL engine, instead of using that half-assed wrapper that they wrote in 3 days. The performance is HORRIBLE, and it isn't the fault of OpenGL.
Slashdot Mirror
The open/closed debate means nothing. Metroid Prime is "polished" beacause it is just so damn good. And we don't mean "polished" because of its looks (but it does look nice). It plays well. It has an excellent story. It's just fun. Everything is so perfectly balanced and tweaked. The great graphics and sound are a plus, but they take an already perfect game to the next level of greatness. So many PC games these days are boring clones of other games. Retro Studios did the impossible with Prime. They took a classic 2D game and made it into an excelltn 3D game- without using the same old FPS treatment that would have been expected. That would have been the easy way to do it.
They could have settled for a modified Q3A-based game (like MOH:AA), but they didn't. They created the perfect 3D platformer.
Switched to Slackware and bought a Gamecube. There are a few games coming from LGP that I am interested in though (like D2:DP and Majesty).
Are you sure that it isn't just a server port?
Shoot. You don't even need OpenAL. OSS (commercial) *and* ALSA have 3D spatialization support built right into them and it works perfectly. It's just that nobody ever uses it. They don't really need any special library other than LibSDL- in which Loki proved could be used to do excellent real-time mixing.
I decided to just buy a Gamecube and Metroid. For Linux, I'm just picking up games from smaller development teams, like http://www.pompom.org.uk .
I loved MOH:AA when I used Windows, but that was probably the only game that kept me hanging on.
In the way of NWN- I don't really care anymore. I am, however, excited about some of LGP's new offerings. I definately plan top pick those up.
Maybe you don't play Linux games, but a lot of use that frequently visit linuxgames.com are excited about this. I suspected that this was the game thay they'd release when they hinted that the title was three words and a number, and frankly, I am pleased by this announcement.
It might not be the most successful Windows game, but it is a fabulous strategy title. Check out reviews if you are not sure. Typically, this game has been given straight 9+ scores.
Michael Simms of LGP has some great ideas. Plus, he realizes that many higher profile games for Linux just aren't practical right now. Licensing costs are just too high for many newer games. Trying to license the next big PC game (if the development house would even let them publish it) would spell certain doom for LGP. Look at Loki. It wasn't all about the fact that their sales weren't up to par. They chose some expensive titles to publish *before* they had a steady cash flow. They started with Eric's Ultimate Solitaire (bad choice for a platform that has a million free card games) but was a good choice because it was cheap. LGP is doing what they need to do... Starting small (Majesty Gold is coming soon, and Mindrover has been re-released) and working up. Big Windows game companies just don't notice them yet... But they are making ties with a few.
They are playing it SMART. Regardless of how well it sells, D2:DP (DP - I love saying that) is a good choice because it is cheap for them. They also have their own retail channel through tuxgames.com (though they consider it a seperate company with a different budget and income), but this is going to be the key for their survival, when Linux games *do* become more practical.
Does your wavetable card have hardware MIDI? It should work fine with OSS Commercial drivers.
If it uses software MIDI, then that is a CPU emulated device. OSS has some early software midi synthesis, but the samples are pretty poor. It does, however, function OK. 4.0's release should have some excellent new MIDI features (according to the guys at 4-Front). I think that there just hasn't been as much of a demand for that sort of thing yet, but the increase in good MIDI authoring apps like Rosegarden has changed that.
The OSS/Commercial drivers from www.opensound.com support 4/6 channel output using the standard Dolby output FL/FR/LFE/RL/RR format. It is detailed in their driver specs, but not many programs take advantage of it.
It also upsamples stereo audio to output into a 5.1 speaker set. Some cards that support this are the Live! series/C-Media/CS4630, etc., but the SPDIF output doesn't work on all CS4630 cards (like the Santa Cruz)... 5.1 out does, however. I believe that all outputs of the EMU10k1 work though.
ReBorn from http://www.deadvirgins.org.uk/reborn/index.html was shaping up to be a primising authoring program. PropellerHead threatened to sue the guy that made it, so he took it down. Try it if you can find it. It is a fun tool.
I suspect that he will be releasing (he has mentioned this to me) a much more functional program. Odds are that it will be open source too. But easily, the old program had most (or all) of the functionality of Rebirth. I believe that it supported the file formats too.
People do pay for quality audio drivers. They are the turnkey drivers from 4-Front. They work with most any card (autodetencts) and uses a simple install program. Aside from that, they have loads of other cool features like real-time mixing (works like DirectSound). Many people that I suggest them to online, however, won't buy them because "they have a problem with paying for sound drivers". I use them, and they are well worth the $25-$30 to get those features that you commonly only see in Windows. I even have more advanced recording capabilities and control over each channel's playback with a simple, low cost driver upgrade.
You won't, however, get a lot of the same features out of ALSA or standard OSS drivers. There are certain NDAs that the 4-Front guys probably had to sign to write their closed-source drivers.
Check out a demo at www.opensound.com if you are interested.
I believe that I used 16k cluster sizes for my RAID-0 array. After a bit of trial and error, this seemed to get the best results. However, I have a friend with a KG7-RAID that insists that 32k clusters, and others insist on 64k clusters. My experience with 64k clusters was that it wasn't as fast.
:) It's time consuming, but it is the easiest way to get the best performance. Here is some useful info for setting choosing a cluster size. http://mywebpages.comcast.net/dbergstein/KT-7.html
Here is an old benchmark of my array from a year ago or so. Mine is the image on the right. On the left is a Seagate X15-36LP.
http://home.woh.rr.com/zborgerd/atto.jpg
There are probably some faster drives and controllers now though. My array used dual Deskstar 60GXP drives (40 GB each). My buddy used some newer Maxtor ATA 133 drives and got slower read speeds than mine. He did, however, get faster write speeds. I think that it has something to do with the cluster sizes.
For anyone attempting to set up an IDE RAID array: experiment a bit, and be sure to have Norton Ghost.
My experiences with IDE RAID have been pretty darn good. Benchmarking my Desktar 60GXP drives in Windows 2000 last year showed that I was getting read speeds in striping mode (between two drives) at faster rates than the fastest seagate Cheetah SCSI drives. Times have probably changed now though.
I started with a KT7A-RAID mobo. The important thing is that you get the cluster sizes just right for your particular partition. I used Norton Ghost to image my drive and try all sorts of different variables. In the end I had very satisfying results. Since I switched to Linux, I stopped using RAID-0 (yes, it is supported with this device!). I found that ReiserFS and the multi-drive Linux filesystem on these drives seemed to be just about as fast without having to hassle with soft-RAID controllers. It is probably due to my system RAM though. I couldn't seem to get Windows 2000 to make the most of 1024 MB without using that swapfile. Linux seems to avoid the swap altogether and uses static RAM instead. It is very nice having the extra IDE channels though. Without them, I probably wouldn't have 4 HDs hooked up right now.
Guess who probably got a free IIS/5.0 license out of the deal? December 3, 2002. Cute.
o de_w=on&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crn.com&submit=Exami ne
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?mode_u=off&m
Square didn't really "make" Einhander. It was done by Dream Factory, a smaller studio that had some ties with Square. They also did The Bouncer, Tobal, and "Ehrgeiz". Among other titles, they did the UFC: Tapout games for XBox.
Same with things like Bushido Blade, a Lightweight game. Another example: Quest Software members were also contracted for other things, like the FF Tactics games.
Square hasn't really made a whole lot of games in-house, aside from the Final Fantasy Franchise. They mostly do publication or contract other developers to make games for them.
Alien Front Online featured voice chat over modem, and it had no lag at all. Their was also a broadband adapter that was available in very limited supply. Unfortunately, it didn't work with all games.
Let me remind you that SEGA was the first to take the PC online gaming experience to the consoles. They did it with the Saturn's Netlink, and the Dreamcast was pretty successful at bringing games online (for how many Dreamcast units were in homes).
There have been alternatives from Matrox and PowerVR for some time now, but that may not be viable for all users. PowerVR especially is tight-lipped about weather or not they have plans to release a new product any time soon. The Kyro 2 cards are almost 2 years old now, and I am looking for an upgrade. The Radeon 9700 could now be a good choice for me.
You forgot to say...
"... And we liked it!" from Dana Carvey's 'Grumpy Old Man' skit.
Yes.
I picked up a Platinum Gamecube with Metroid Prime (and a used memory card) last night for only $202.
One of the most polished games that I have played for years. I can't believe that the little GameCube is capable of such breathtaking graphics.
Make no mistake... This is Metroid. Everything about it is Metroid, only in 3D. It is the most perfect transistion that I have ever seen a 2D platformer make. And there is *so much* story here too. It isn't an all-out frag fest like most FPS games. It is about exploration and puzzles. I think that the monsters are only in there to keep you on your toes.
This is a platform/aventure game in the first person. It is the perfect way to resurrect a series that many of us started playing about 15 years ago.
That's interesting. Every game that you list there is available (or will be next monthwhen Neverwinter Nights is released) for Linux except for WC3.
I can't personally suggest the Linux version of UT2003 over Windows though. The OpenGL wrapper is pretty bad on any platform.
Same thing is happening at my workplace. We do technical support for clients, and the number of clients has dropped pretty significantly. I'd say that it is about half of what it was two years ago. Despite having about half as many employees around I find that I am really doing less, which is why I get to hang out and BS with you guys all day. ;-)
"Editors ignore Slashdot."
Things aren't just *added* to the codebase of open source programs. You can't just walk up and pop some code into the codebase. It doesn't work that way. There always a code maintainer who reviews the changes before applying the patches. I can't think of any exceptions to this. Can you?
My apologies. I just see lots of posts from people that berate the OS and its users. Many of them spout off things that they don't understand about it and its programs. It's kinda like the guys that insist that OpenGL performance is better on Windows "just because it is the gaming platform". That isn't the case at all.
I don't really think that Linux has a "large user base". If anything, it has a growing user base. I still feel that there are more Linux boxes out there on desktops than there are Mac boxes. But then again, OS X doesn't seem to have a lot in the way of gaming either.
DirectX may be a quick and easy way to program the input and output layers for a game, but there are other "multi-platform" alternatives. For instance, had Epic actually written Unreal Tournament 2003 around OpenGL to begin with, there might be much better performance on alternative operating systems. I shudder to see how it runs on OS X. They are going to need to do some serious tweaking of the game's OpenGL engine, instead of using that half-assed wrapper that they wrote in 3 days. The performance is HORRIBLE, and it isn't the fault of OpenGL.