Which is too bad, because I always found HL MP to be far more interesting than Q3,UT or other MP games. It had great maps (including gimicky ones like the airstrike maps and rustmill) and a really good mix of weapons that lent themselves to all sorts of different strategies both rambo and tactical.
HL is NOT from the same era as Q3: it is two years older.
The reasons it's so popular include it's low system requirements (no matter what computer you have, you can find HL very cheap, and it will play on your computer), the great support from Valve, a very moddable engine, and also just plain momentum. Not to mention the unprecdented success of CS.
Doom3 should be as moddable as Q3, and it's hard to compare to HL2 because we're heard so much from Valve about how they'll be supporting mods, and very little from id as of yet (D3 comes out several months later, so they have more time to announce stuff). HL2 is supposed to be way easier to mod than even HL, and the SDK should come out fairly soon: a month or two before the game even comes out.
Of the like twenty posts made that all remind this guy that it's Q4, not D4, I think I like yours the best. You used bold: very cunning! A cookie for you.
Re:Do activision really care when it's released ?
on
No Doom 3 This Year?
·
· Score: 1
I agree: DX1 definately still doesnt get enough respect. Sure, combat was no HL1 or Op4 (mostly just you fighting against the same basic unit AI, forever), and it really could have benefited from HL-style scripted animation sequences to enhance the feeling of actual events, but the game world made up for it in spades.
My main reservation about DX2 is that every video I've seen looks like it was being played by a four year old. The physics system doesn't look as good or as well integrated as in HL2 either (look, I threw this box! Now I did it again! I turned off the light! Now I throw a broom at a toilet!). A lesson in how NOT to show off your game.:)
---there hasn't been anything truly new in the FPS genre since CounterStrike came out ages ago.---
Have you tried Natural Selection? It definately feels pretty darn new, and I personally really enjoy it, even though it currently has some bugs (the huge update v2.0 is coming out next week). There are tons of people trying new stuff. As much as I hate the WWII battle sims, you have to admit that they are fairly new gameplay as well: huge battles with vehicles.
Re:It's not surpsing Carmack wants to get it right
on
No Doom 3 This Year?
·
· Score: 1
---In many newer games, the level of detail of the polygons are reduced when viewing terrains from large distances, thus improving performance dramatically without costing any visual degredation. DOOMIII will likely support these enhancements.---
While true, I haven't heard anything about D3 having large viewdistances. In fact, everything I've heard has focused on them needing to cut down view distances because the lighting system is so intensive. In other words, the engine is optimal not as a Tribes or BF1942 engine, but a dark corridor shooter.
---Vehicle support is another big thing for DOOMIII.---
Again, I've heard nothing about D3 focusing on supporting vehicles at all. I'm sure it will, I'm just not sure it's a priority.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of other engines out there that will be competing for developer attention these days. Q3 had no Half-Life2 to compete with: D3 will. And this time it'll be even worse, with Valve turning Source into a constantly upgraded engine with new content and code and aggresively targeting the mod community with in-house tools, tons of support, and so on. The Unreal engine is still in the game as well, and maybe even Stalker and Far Cry. So it'll be a much different field.
There is a very good reason for them to push ATI (though to say they've been plugging it is downright silly: they were at the ATI booth at e3, big deal): only ATI cards have any chance of working with FSAA at the moment in HL2.
It isn't cheating: it's an exploit. Few of the people who made the game actually wanted it in, and few people that play even know that it's there. It often ruins the balance, and turns entire games into ridiculous and chaotic kangaroo matches. I'm happy to see newer games quashing it for good.
Here's a crazy thought: I was just making a suggestion, YMMV? I've never played Counter-Strike. If the dominating popularity of the game intimidates you, that's not my problem. I was jsut pointing out that the game has a nice intergrated voice chat feature that's proven lots of fun, and is a breeze to use.
All Half-Life games now have a very nice voice-chat feature. In fact, I don't think games like Natural Selection would be anywhere near as fun without it.
---Why throw that away for such a small difference in price/performance?---
There's no reason to switch if there's no good reason to. But "I hold their previous bad drivers against them even though they are universally declared to no longer have sub-par driver support" IS still irrational. They WERE just getting into the market prior to getting their Catalyst program running. But now that it's up and running, people are very pleased with them. Obviously they shouldn't be forgiven for crappy drivers that they didn't compensate people for, but personally forgiving a hardware maker and simply choosing a card based on it's actual capabilities are two different things. And continuing to say "oh, ATI has terrible, unreliable drivers" when things are very different now is plain, silly, FUD.
Utterly irrational. Ever heard of the concept of "sunk costs." Once you lose money, it's lost, and should have no weight in your judgements of future decisions.
---It'll be a long while before I buy an ATI card again.---
As I said: your vindictiveness might feel good, but there's no rational reason it should play a role in your decisions about what hardware to buy. ATI had driver problems when they were starting out. Now they are universally hailed as having solved them.
---While the manner in which the article arrived on Slashdot is dubious, the article should be judged on its own merit, relative to other video card benchmark articles.---
Frankly, I can't think of anything more boring than sitting around judging the merits of various benchmark articles.:)
Yeah 100$ is definately worth pointless, vindictive self-righteousness over the past that wins you absolutely nothing in terms of present game performance?
I agree. Not only do these cards lack applications that can even take meaningful advantage of them (256Mb memory? For what game is this a major bottleneck yet?) but by the time games come out that really do take advantage of them, new cards will be out that will have moved to a whole new bus (PCIExpress). You can buy a mid-range card now for hundreds of dollars less that will play everything (even HL2 and D3) great, and then either buy the next-gen chips in 2004 or the 5900/9800 then when they are much much cheaper. Either way, you really don't need a 5900/9800 256Mb right NOW. It's a silly purchase for anyone other than someone who simply MUST get a new 3d card (new computer, or you have a REALLY old card, like a TNT2, that you need to upgrade)
I can barely see a diff, but the real problem is that maybe it looks different moving... which they can't possibly show us in still pictures. So, who knows?
I dunno: FPS benchmarks aren't all that helpful either, because they are inevitably averages of demo performance. What I want to know is the lowest FPS score: how bad it gets during the most intense action in a game. It's not the constant framerate throughout the game that I worry about, since I know pretty well that a given card can manage a given game at a certain level. It's the "hitches" that I worry about, and want to know if they are eliminated by the card.
You're so obssesed that you ranted and mused right over any semblance of a point: you somehow end up telling me that gaming is not important... not important to what? Gaming? I wasn't trying to build a life around it, just a computer purchase cycle.
What I said was that the amount of money this system is going to cost is the kind of price that is really only worth highend gaming for MOST people (i.e. those who buy computers for other reasons than just to crow over them and berate others). And the Mac platform is too underdeveloped for gaming for me. You can complain about chicken and the egg all you want: that's your cross to bear. I am just a gaming enthusiast who's sitting around triyng to figure out what's worth my money. I'm not going to blow 3000$ on a system just to smugly sit back and figure that my act will one day change the market. I'm not interested in being on the front lines of some platform pissing match. I'm going to blow 3000$ on something if it has he things I want to play.
So yes: I AM going to penalize a system for a lack of my favorite games. I'm a gamer. You're not (and apparently, you like to steal: nice job). Big deal. You like to spooge over hardware specs and rack up silicon. That's your thing, not mine. Don't hold it argainst me.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is too bad, because I always found HL MP to be far more interesting than Q3,UT or other MP games. It had great maps (including gimicky ones like the airstrike maps and rustmill) and a really good mix of weapons that lent themselves to all sorts of different strategies both rambo and tactical.
HL is NOT from the same era as Q3: it is two years older. The reasons it's so popular include it's low system requirements (no matter what computer you have, you can find HL very cheap, and it will play on your computer), the great support from Valve, a very moddable engine, and also just plain momentum. Not to mention the unprecdented success of CS. Doom3 should be as moddable as Q3, and it's hard to compare to HL2 because we're heard so much from Valve about how they'll be supporting mods, and very little from id as of yet (D3 comes out several months later, so they have more time to announce stuff). HL2 is supposed to be way easier to mod than even HL, and the SDK should come out fairly soon: a month or two before the game even comes out.
But most game review sites say that ATI's AA looks better at lower levels than NVIDA cards do at higher levels. So whachoo talking about Willis?
Of the like twenty posts made that all remind this guy that it's Q4, not D4, I think I like yours the best. You used bold: very cunning! A cookie for you.
I agree: DX1 definately still doesnt get enough respect. Sure, combat was no HL1 or Op4 (mostly just you fighting against the same basic unit AI, forever), and it really could have benefited from HL-style scripted animation sequences to enhance the feeling of actual events, but the game world made up for it in spades.
:)
My main reservation about DX2 is that every video I've seen looks like it was being played by a four year old. The physics system doesn't look as good or as well integrated as in HL2 either (look, I threw this box! Now I did it again! I turned off the light! Now I throw a broom at a toilet!). A lesson in how NOT to show off your game.
---Don't have a url on hand, but Google for "Paul Steed sacked".---
You bastard. I should have known what sort of sites that would bring up...
---there hasn't been anything truly new in the FPS genre since CounterStrike came out ages ago.---
Have you tried Natural Selection? It definately feels pretty darn new, and I personally really enjoy it, even though it currently has some bugs (the huge update v2.0 is coming out next week). There are tons of people trying new stuff. As much as I hate the WWII battle sims, you have to admit that they are fairly new gameplay as well: huge battles with vehicles.
---In many newer games, the level of detail of the polygons are reduced when viewing terrains from large distances, thus improving performance dramatically without costing any visual degredation. DOOMIII will likely support these enhancements.---
While true, I haven't heard anything about D3 having large viewdistances. In fact, everything I've heard has focused on them needing to cut down view distances because the lighting system is so intensive. In other words, the engine is optimal not as a Tribes or BF1942 engine, but a dark corridor shooter.
---Vehicle support is another big thing for DOOMIII.---
Again, I've heard nothing about D3 focusing on supporting vehicles at all. I'm sure it will, I'm just not sure it's a priority.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of other engines out there that will be competing for developer attention these days. Q3 had no Half-Life2 to compete with: D3 will. And this time it'll be even worse, with Valve turning Source into a constantly upgraded engine with new content and code and aggresively targeting the mod community with in-house tools, tons of support, and so on. The Unreal engine is still in the game as well, and maybe even Stalker and Far Cry. So it'll be a much different field.
Let's be fair: most awards do not ALLOW games to win two years in a row: and D3 won last year.
There is a very good reason for them to push ATI (though to say they've been plugging it is downright silly: they were at the ATI booth at e3, big deal): only ATI cards have any chance of working with FSAA at the moment in HL2.
It isn't cheating: it's an exploit. Few of the people who made the game actually wanted it in, and few people that play even know that it's there. It often ruins the balance, and turns entire games into ridiculous and chaotic kangaroo matches. I'm happy to see newer games quashing it for good.
Here's a crazy thought: I was just making a suggestion, YMMV? I've never played Counter-Strike. If the dominating popularity of the game intimidates you, that's not my problem. I was jsut pointing out that the game has a nice intergrated voice chat feature that's proven lots of fun, and is a breeze to use.
All Half-Life games now have a very nice voice-chat feature. In fact, I don't think games like Natural Selection would be anywhere near as fun without it.
---Why throw that away for such a small difference in price/performance?---
There's no reason to switch if there's no good reason to. But "I hold their previous bad drivers against them even though they are universally declared to no longer have sub-par driver support" IS still irrational. They WERE just getting into the market prior to getting their Catalyst program running. But now that it's up and running, people are very pleased with them. Obviously they shouldn't be forgiven for crappy drivers that they didn't compensate people for, but personally forgiving a hardware maker and simply choosing a card based on it's actual capabilities are two different things. And continuing to say "oh, ATI has terrible, unreliable drivers" when things are very different now is plain, silly, FUD.
No Half-Life 2
---No; I don't throw good money after bad.---
Utterly irrational. Ever heard of the concept of "sunk costs." Once you lose money, it's lost, and should have no weight in your judgements of future decisions.
---It'll be a long while before I buy an ATI card again.---
As I said: your vindictiveness might feel good, but there's no rational reason it should play a role in your decisions about what hardware to buy. ATI had driver problems when they were starting out. Now they are universally hailed as having solved them.
---While the manner in which the article arrived on Slashdot is dubious, the article should be judged on its own merit, relative to other video card benchmark articles.---
:)
Frankly, I can't think of anything more boring than sitting around judging the merits of various benchmark articles.
Yeah 100$ is definately worth pointless, vindictive self-righteousness over the past that wins you absolutely nothing in terms of present game performance?
I agree. Not only do these cards lack applications that can even take meaningful advantage of them (256Mb memory? For what game is this a major bottleneck yet?) but by the time games come out that really do take advantage of them, new cards will be out that will have moved to a whole new bus (PCIExpress). You can buy a mid-range card now for hundreds of dollars less that will play everything (even HL2 and D3) great, and then either buy the next-gen chips in 2004 or the 5900/9800 then when they are much much cheaper. Either way, you really don't need a 5900/9800 256Mb right NOW. It's a silly purchase for anyone other than someone who simply MUST get a new 3d card (new computer, or you have a REALLY old card, like a TNT2, that you need to upgrade)
I can barely see a diff, but the real problem is that maybe it looks different moving... which they can't possibly show us in still pictures. So, who knows?
I dunno: FPS benchmarks aren't all that helpful either, because they are inevitably averages of demo performance. What I want to know is the lowest FPS score: how bad it gets during the most intense action in a game. It's not the constant framerate throughout the game that I worry about, since I know pretty well that a given card can manage a given game at a certain level. It's the "hitches" that I worry about, and want to know if they are eliminated by the card.
Boy did that joke totally go over your head.
I guess you do.
You're so obssesed that you ranted and mused right over any semblance of a point: you somehow end up telling me that gaming is not important... not important to what? Gaming? I wasn't trying to build a life around it, just a computer purchase cycle.
What I said was that the amount of money this system is going to cost is the kind of price that is really only worth highend gaming for MOST people (i.e. those who buy computers for other reasons than just to crow over them and berate others). And the Mac platform is too underdeveloped for gaming for me. You can complain about chicken and the egg all you want: that's your cross to bear. I am just a gaming enthusiast who's sitting around triyng to figure out what's worth my money. I'm not going to blow 3000$ on a system just to smugly sit back and figure that my act will one day change the market. I'm not interested in being on the front lines of some platform pissing match. I'm going to blow 3000$ on something if it has he things I want to play.
So yes: I AM going to penalize a system for a lack of my favorite games. I'm a gamer. You're not (and apparently, you like to steal: nice job). Big deal. You like to spooge over hardware specs and rack up silicon. That's your thing, not mine. Don't hold it argainst me.
In which case, I STILL don't need a high-end Mac.