Too bad for Activision that they already lost the talent involved in making CoD a great franchise. After Activition withheld millions and millions of dollars of royalties, then fired Zampanella and West for trying to do something about it, Infinity Ward was reduced to basically an empty shell. Many of its former employees now work for Zampanella and West again at Respawn Entertainment building a new franchise, and I can't wait to see what they make for us.
Then you've never met an IT guy who can report HIPAA security violations directly to federal authorities in order to keep himself from being put in jail. IT guy catches you violating company policy at a regular corporate job, probably no big deal depending on who you are. IT guy catches you committing mutiple federal offenses in a medical facility, probably a bigger deal.
I wouldn't say that DRM drives people to "pirate" the games, per se, but it definitely does drive them to look for the ability to bypass the DRM for games that they own. I always look for a DRM hack for any game that requires the disc to be in my PC. My monster rig is up on a cabinet for proper cooling and the DVD drive is in no way convenient to access. Add to that the fact that swapping discs all the time is the best way to get them scratched to an unusable state.
Not only that, but I've had several games that actually would not run on my PC until I circumvented their DRM. I've even bought one game that I've NEVER been able to play. I believe it was Space Rangers 2, supposedly a surprisingly good game, but I'll never know. I paid $40 for it at a retail store, took it home, and the early version StarDock DRM fully prevented not only that game from running, but several other retail purchased games from operating properly. Took me 3 days to get it off of my system, and I've since thrown the disc away. I bought Battlefield 2 + all the expansions through the EA online store, and I think it took 3 months for me to get it to let me actually log in without crashing.
When people who actually paid retail money for your game STILL have to "steal" it in order to play it, something is horribly, horribly wrong.
Notice what they were demoing on the screen? Quake 3. That's 12 years ago, sir. Not even Call of Duty, or Joint Operations, or Battlefield 1942? And you're talking about modern gaming in the portable platform? As a developer, I would be simply too ashamed of myself to show that in public, as if my target audience wouldn't be able to identify it. "Oh look, flashy pictures and things that move! Is that a new awesome game? Yeah, sure it is..." I'm sure it's probably a licensing thing, they could have even done enough changes with the open source to say that it's not actually Quake 3, so there's no licensing issues. I wouldn't think Razer would have a hard time getting a game publisher to let them demo something better. Still, I just couldn't believe my eyes. Not to mention that it's "portable", except you still need to have a desktop surface for the mouse in order to actually play the game. At least that's better than them thinking you could use the 7" screen as a touch-mouse, since we've all seen how much that sucks on smaller devices. "I think I'm aiming at it, but I can't see what's under my finger".
And I love how the first guy is just so serious the entire time. It could be a complete parody, and he wouldn't even have to change the tone of his voice, and it would be hilarious. In fact, for the first minute, I thought it WAS a some sort of industry comedy sketch by The Onion sponsored by Razer, and was waiting for the final punch line. "PC gaming has always been impossible in a portable form factor." My immediate thoughts were "Hah, you mean my laptop? The joke must be some huge desktop gaming rig in a backpack with an armrest for the new Razer mouse... Oh, the punch line is, they're demoing Quake 3, and they're serious? Wow."
This thing could actually be a significantly awesome device, but that preview was just so misguided and self-detrimental that I can hardly bring myself to care.
Depending on the cost of the e-books, the iPad/tablet/whatever solution may actually be less expensive over the course of 4 years than just textbooks. 6 to 8 books a year, at 40 to 100 dollars each (college books are freaking insane) is a cost of anywhere from about $1000 to $3000 over the course of a 4-year education. At that level, it doesn't take too much of a discount on e-books to cover the cost of a tablet device. Also, as much as I dislike Apple's stone grip on their devices (being a software dev, I like to have options and hate being told I can't build something), the iPad is a better real-world fit because of it's restrictions. Less work for IT when you have technology that won't let you do anything "cool" enough to screw it up. As for it's use in general as a replacement for paper books, I still prefer the physical book for many things, but the possibilities for the device in this context are very interesting.
I want to like this game, I want it to be great, but shame on anybody who participates in this beta, or pre-orders this game. Less than a subscription period away from launching, and they haven't even announced the subscription model yet. There is talk that $15/mo time cards have been seen at a GameStop retail store that wasn't supposed to shelve them yet, but the amount is not the issue. It's the fact that they excpect us to NOT EVEN CARE how much it costs. We don't deserve to know. We are but red-shirts paying taxes to the almighty captains and should be glad for the opportunity to die in their service. While fighting level 1 BORG?!?!? Screw that. I'll be playing Global Agenda for the slow-but-acceptable action and Aion for the omg-it-makes-sense-for-me subscription model. Call me when you care about the franchise and have some modicum of respect for the fanbase.
Sure, everybody has a difficult job some days. But really, how often does a waitress get killed by a customer when she asks for their order, or a tech get murdered on the job because he saw something he wasn't supposed to? The border police in this case are in all likelihood over-inflated bullies, but you should never generalize a police officer's job as "no more difficult than anybody else's job" unless that "anybody else's job" includes the real daily threat of sudden violent death.
However, I wonder if the final outcome will be the same. In the end, they found a way to make the meat strong, healthy and delicious, but it was a commercial failure because it cost $10,000 per pound.
Yes and no. If a Chevy Volt costs 60 mpg + $50/mo to travel 1200 mi/mo, that's $100 at $2.50/gal. If a traditional car got a straight 25 mpg, that's $120. The higher gas prices go, the better cost savings the Volt brings. Add in the recent possibility of actual progress in new nuclear power installations and not only is a well-engineered gas/electric hybrid a cost-saver to the consumer, it could significantly reduce the load on the oil infrastructure in the foreseeable future. I'm not saying the Volt itself is "awesomesauce", as I haven't even seen one in my area, but the idea of an efficient gas/diesel/whatever engine purely as a generator to an entirely electrically driven car is a very solid move forward. Now if they can just produce a good one that fits in the "college kid/honda/pontiac" price range instead of the "business porche/rolls/land rover" tax bracket, at a scale that doesn't result in years-long back orders.
It has nothing to do with hardware compatibility, it's all about the network. In the PS2, it was pretty much up to the developer to create whatever "online" ability a game would have. In one version of Tony Hawk, the devs actually encoded drivers for a handful of USB ethernet adapters so that you could get online and play without buying the official PS2 harddrive/ethernet add-on. That is no longer the case, in both the PS3 and X360, the manufacturers have created proprietary networks. Some X360 games can be cross-platform compatible with PC games because MS allows it, and it's "possible but improbable" that could also happen with the PS3, but it's very unlikely that MS and Sony will ever agree to allow cross-communication and interpretation between the 2 consoles.
Are there no other slashdot'rs that remember Quake 3? If you kept a copy of Quake 3 patched to version 1.06n, it used the same network protocol as the retail release of Quake 3 for the Dreamcast system, and you could get on GameSpy with your PC and beat the ever-loving crap out of Dreamcast players. That was definitely not a matter of hardware compatibility, it was all about using the same network.
Incidentally, that was also the empirical evidence for "end of discussion" re: gamepad vs mouse/keyboard in an FPS. Assuming equal base skill and hardware performance, Gamepad user = horrid death at the hands of the PC player, every time.
My gripe with Apple's take on the "sizzling 3D graphics" is that they shoved in the weakest video card they could find. The 5200 is the absolute bottom of the barrel. Sure, it can handle all of the "features", but it just doesn't have the raw power to pull off a decent performance in any modern game. It's what you put in a PC for your incoherent relative who might eventually try his hand at Warcraft 2, or Counterstrike on the OLD Half-Life engine, or maybe even Mahjonng. If you're going to stick people with the lowest possible performance, with no ability to upgrade, it shows a contempt for the consumer's happiness, and preying on their ignorance, to tout it as a gaming platform of any sort.
Catacomb Abyss worked on my 4.77 MHz Tandy 1000 RL back in the late late late 80's. Sometimes, it pays to have low requirements. At least for your first PC.
The big thing was that there WERE NO "OPTIMIZATIONS" for Quake 3. What ATi did was NOT to make their card perform better on Quake 3. They crippled the benchmark so it was less demanding on their hardware. Try http://firingsquad.gamers.com for another article on the same issue. Here's the facts:
ATi hard-coded image quality settings into their drivers. When you run Quake3, it FORCES you to uses 16-bit color for your HUD, a lowered texture quality, and lower geometric detail, and possibly bilinear filtering instead of trilinear. In other words, if you select HIGH detail, you're still only running MEDIUM detail, except Quake3 doesn't know it.
Instead of making large-scale 32-bit textures faster, what ATi did for the Q3 benchmark was force it to use small 16-bit textures in places. Imagine that, you can get better framerates at low quality than you can at hight quality.
They didn't change the performance. They changed the benchmark. The same crap they've pulled periodically for the past decade. This is not a driver-quality issue. They deliberately hard-coded lower values for texture quality for Quake3 so that the user would be incapable of using a high texture quality.
Don't flame about nVidia or 3Dfx doing the same thing. They haven't. If their texture quality was low, it was low in every application, and it was because of a hardware deficiency or bad driver. A driver "upgrade" is supposed to make the HARDWARE perform better with the DATA it is given. Notice those key words. What ATi did was lower the amount of DATA that was being given to the hardware and pretend the hardware was magically faster.
Generic explanation: When other companies "optimize" drivers, they try to make "Feature X" go faster.
ATi decided to disable "Feature X" because it made their hardware run slower on benchmarks which, *gasp* rated it's ability to handle "Feature X".
Yes, I'm an nVidia supporter, but only because of the products they've released, and the support behind those products. As far as I'm concerned, ANY hardware company is always one generation away from extinction. 3Dfx forgot that, and it cost them dearly. I was actually hoping ATi would give nVidia some real competition this time around. After all, competition is a catalyst for improvement. The Radeon 8500 is still a good hunk of hardware, possibly even preferrable to a GF3 variant, depending on the needs of the individual. However, in the same manner I refuse to buy ASUS on grounds of their twice-released 3D cheating drivers, I personally refuse to buy any ATi product until they stop their methods of deliberate bait-and-switch. Let your hardware do it's thang in the real world. Don't go changing the world to pretend you're something you're not.
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Too bad for Activision that they already lost the talent involved in making CoD a great franchise. After Activition withheld millions and millions of dollars of royalties, then fired Zampanella and West for trying to do something about it, Infinity Ward was reduced to basically an empty shell. Many of its former employees now work for Zampanella and West again at Respawn Entertainment building a new franchise, and I can't wait to see what they make for us.
Then you've never met an IT guy who can report HIPAA security violations directly to federal authorities in order to keep himself from being put in jail. IT guy catches you violating company policy at a regular corporate job, probably no big deal depending on who you are. IT guy catches you committing mutiple federal offenses in a medical facility, probably a bigger deal.
I wouldn't say that DRM drives people to "pirate" the games, per se, but it definitely does drive them to look for the ability to bypass the DRM for games that they own. I always look for a DRM hack for any game that requires the disc to be in my PC. My monster rig is up on a cabinet for proper cooling and the DVD drive is in no way convenient to access. Add to that the fact that swapping discs all the time is the best way to get them scratched to an unusable state.
Not only that, but I've had several games that actually would not run on my PC until I circumvented their DRM. I've even bought one game that I've NEVER been able to play. I believe it was Space Rangers 2, supposedly a surprisingly good game, but I'll never know. I paid $40 for it at a retail store, took it home, and the early version StarDock DRM fully prevented not only that game from running, but several other retail purchased games from operating properly. Took me 3 days to get it off of my system, and I've since thrown the disc away. I bought Battlefield 2 + all the expansions through the EA online store, and I think it took 3 months for me to get it to let me actually log in without crashing. When people who actually paid retail money for your game STILL have to "steal" it in order to play it, something is horribly, horribly wrong.
Notice what they were demoing on the screen? Quake 3. That's 12 years ago, sir. Not even Call of Duty, or Joint Operations, or Battlefield 1942? And you're talking about modern gaming in the portable platform? As a developer, I would be simply too ashamed of myself to show that in public, as if my target audience wouldn't be able to identify it. "Oh look, flashy pictures and things that move! Is that a new awesome game? Yeah, sure it is..." I'm sure it's probably a licensing thing, they could have even done enough changes with the open source to say that it's not actually Quake 3, so there's no licensing issues. I wouldn't think Razer would have a hard time getting a game publisher to let them demo something better. Still, I just couldn't believe my eyes. Not to mention that it's "portable", except you still need to have a desktop surface for the mouse in order to actually play the game. At least that's better than them thinking you could use the 7" screen as a touch-mouse, since we've all seen how much that sucks on smaller devices. "I think I'm aiming at it, but I can't see what's under my finger".
And I love how the first guy is just so serious the entire time. It could be a complete parody, and he wouldn't even have to change the tone of his voice, and it would be hilarious. In fact, for the first minute, I thought it WAS a some sort of industry comedy sketch by The Onion sponsored by Razer, and was waiting for the final punch line. "PC gaming has always been impossible in a portable form factor." My immediate thoughts were "Hah, you mean my laptop? The joke must be some huge desktop gaming rig in a backpack with an armrest for the new Razer mouse... Oh, the punch line is, they're demoing Quake 3, and they're serious? Wow."
This thing could actually be a significantly awesome device, but that preview was just so misguided and self-detrimental that I can hardly bring myself to care.
Depending on the cost of the e-books, the iPad/tablet/whatever solution may actually be less expensive over the course of 4 years than just textbooks. 6 to 8 books a year, at 40 to 100 dollars each (college books are freaking insane) is a cost of anywhere from about $1000 to $3000 over the course of a 4-year education. At that level, it doesn't take too much of a discount on e-books to cover the cost of a tablet device. Also, as much as I dislike Apple's stone grip on their devices (being a software dev, I like to have options and hate being told I can't build something), the iPad is a better real-world fit because of it's restrictions. Less work for IT when you have technology that won't let you do anything "cool" enough to screw it up. As for it's use in general as a replacement for paper books, I still prefer the physical book for many things, but the possibilities for the device in this context are very interesting.
I want to like this game, I want it to be great, but shame on anybody who participates in this beta, or pre-orders this game. Less than a subscription period away from launching, and they haven't even announced the subscription model yet. There is talk that $15/mo time cards have been seen at a GameStop retail store that wasn't supposed to shelve them yet, but the amount is not the issue. It's the fact that they excpect us to NOT EVEN CARE how much it costs. We don't deserve to know. We are but red-shirts paying taxes to the almighty captains and should be glad for the opportunity to die in their service. While fighting level 1 BORG?!?!? Screw that. I'll be playing Global Agenda for the slow-but-acceptable action and Aion for the omg-it-makes-sense-for-me subscription model. Call me when you care about the franchise and have some modicum of respect for the fanbase.
Sure, everybody has a difficult job some days. But really, how often does a waitress get killed by a customer when she asks for their order, or a tech get murdered on the job because he saw something he wasn't supposed to? The border police in this case are in all likelihood over-inflated bullies, but you should never generalize a police officer's job as "no more difficult than anybody else's job" unless that "anybody else's job" includes the real daily threat of sudden violent death.
However, I wonder if the final outcome will be the same. In the end, they found a way to make the meat strong, healthy and delicious, but it was a commercial failure because it cost $10,000 per pound.
Then via logical progression, 240hz is useful in that it can provide 3D at 120hz, just like 120hz tv's now can be used to display 3D at 60hz.
Yes and no. If a Chevy Volt costs 60 mpg + $50/mo to travel 1200 mi/mo, that's $100 at $2.50/gal. If a traditional car got a straight 25 mpg, that's $120. The higher gas prices go, the better cost savings the Volt brings. Add in the recent possibility of actual progress in new nuclear power installations and not only is a well-engineered gas/electric hybrid a cost-saver to the consumer, it could significantly reduce the load on the oil infrastructure in the foreseeable future. I'm not saying the Volt itself is "awesomesauce", as I haven't even seen one in my area, but the idea of an efficient gas/diesel/whatever engine purely as a generator to an entirely electrically driven car is a very solid move forward. Now if they can just produce a good one that fits in the "college kid/honda/pontiac" price range instead of the "business porche/rolls/land rover" tax bracket, at a scale that doesn't result in years-long back orders.
It has nothing to do with hardware compatibility, it's all about the network. In the PS2, it was pretty much up to the developer to create whatever "online" ability a game would have. In one version of Tony Hawk, the devs actually encoded drivers for a handful of USB ethernet adapters so that you could get online and play without buying the official PS2 harddrive/ethernet add-on. That is no longer the case, in both the PS3 and X360, the manufacturers have created proprietary networks. Some X360 games can be cross-platform compatible with PC games because MS allows it, and it's "possible but improbable" that could also happen with the PS3, but it's very unlikely that MS and Sony will ever agree to allow cross-communication and interpretation between the 2 consoles. Are there no other slashdot'rs that remember Quake 3? If you kept a copy of Quake 3 patched to version 1.06n, it used the same network protocol as the retail release of Quake 3 for the Dreamcast system, and you could get on GameSpy with your PC and beat the ever-loving crap out of Dreamcast players. That was definitely not a matter of hardware compatibility, it was all about using the same network. Incidentally, that was also the empirical evidence for "end of discussion" re: gamepad vs mouse/keyboard in an FPS. Assuming equal base skill and hardware performance, Gamepad user = horrid death at the hands of the PC player, every time.
My gripe with Apple's take on the "sizzling 3D graphics" is that they shoved in the weakest video card they could find. The 5200 is the absolute bottom of the barrel. Sure, it can handle all of the "features", but it just doesn't have the raw power to pull off a decent performance in any modern game. It's what you put in a PC for your incoherent relative who might eventually try his hand at Warcraft 2, or Counterstrike on the OLD Half-Life engine, or maybe even Mahjonng. If you're going to stick people with the lowest possible performance, with no ability to upgrade, it shows a contempt for the consumer's happiness, and preying on their ignorance, to tout it as a gaming platform of any sort.
Catacomb Abyss worked on my 4.77 MHz Tandy 1000 RL back in the late late late 80's. Sometimes, it pays to have low requirements. At least for your first PC.
The big thing was that there WERE NO "OPTIMIZATIONS" for Quake 3. What ATi did was NOT to make their card perform better on Quake 3. They crippled the benchmark so it was less demanding on their hardware. Try http://firingsquad.gamers.com for another article on the same issue. Here's the facts:
ATi hard-coded image quality settings into their drivers. When you run Quake3, it FORCES you to uses 16-bit color for your HUD, a lowered texture quality, and lower geometric detail, and possibly bilinear filtering instead of trilinear. In other words, if you select HIGH detail, you're still only running MEDIUM detail, except Quake3 doesn't know it.
Instead of making large-scale 32-bit textures faster, what ATi did for the Q3 benchmark was force it to use small 16-bit textures in places. Imagine that, you can get better framerates at low quality than you can at hight quality.
They didn't change the performance. They changed the benchmark. The same crap they've pulled periodically for the past decade. This is not a driver-quality issue. They deliberately hard-coded lower values for texture quality for Quake3 so that the user would be incapable of using a high texture quality.
Don't flame about nVidia or 3Dfx doing the same thing. They haven't. If their texture quality was low, it was low in every application, and it was because of a hardware deficiency or bad driver. A driver "upgrade" is supposed to make the HARDWARE perform better with the DATA it is given. Notice those key words. What ATi did was lower the amount of DATA that was being given to the hardware and pretend the hardware was magically faster.
Generic explanation: When other companies "optimize" drivers, they try to make "Feature X" go faster.
ATi decided to disable "Feature X" because it made their hardware run slower on benchmarks which, *gasp* rated it's ability to handle "Feature X".
Yes, I'm an nVidia supporter, but only because of the products they've released, and the support behind those products. As far as I'm concerned, ANY hardware company is always one generation away from extinction. 3Dfx forgot that, and it cost them dearly. I was actually hoping ATi would give nVidia some real competition this time around. After all, competition is a catalyst for improvement. The Radeon 8500 is still a good hunk of hardware, possibly even preferrable to a GF3 variant, depending on the needs of the individual. However, in the same manner I refuse to buy ASUS on grounds of their twice-released 3D cheating drivers, I personally refuse to buy any ATi product until they stop their methods of deliberate bait-and-switch. Let your hardware do it's thang in the real world. Don't go changing the world to pretend you're something you're not.