Look, City of Heroes had a great launch. Dark Age had a great launch. And now Everquest 2 has had a great launch.
Games are rightly knocked for having bad launches. People need to stop making excuses for them.
Okay, if we were talking about some small company, maybe a bad launch would be okay, but Blizzard? Come on, this isn't a start-up by a bunch of newbies.
I don't know what all the hype about WoW is for.
I rarely can't log on to EQ2 (only once in over 2 months, when they had a bad update), but oftentimes, the WoW login server is down, or the server's lagged horribly when I go there. This has happened continuously since opening, and happened as recently as last Friday night.
As for the game quality, I guess it's subjective, but even without the server problems, WoW was just okay. If you like to solo most the time, or you're hardcore into MMO PvP, it's a pretty good choice I think. EQ2 and CoH are both in my opinion better, but everyone looks for different things.
First, OpenGl is far more stable than DX on NVidia cards. It is only outside that market that this is sometimes not true. However, you have to keep your drivers updated. Graphics programmers typically push the newest extensions and that will break old drivers. In practice, I virtually never lock up my computer using GL. However, it is trivial to lock up a system in DX. Of course, we won't even go into the compatibility of non-Windows systems with DX because that's, well, obvious, yes?
Now don't take this as a diatribe against DX. I use it frequently, and for some projects it's the thing to use. It's easy to develop quick apps, prototypes in particular, and obviously with the Xbox it's the thing to do.
As for whether a generic shader language should go into OpenGL 2, well, everyone has their opinion on that. Personally, I think it's a bad, bad, bad idea. Any pixel or vertex shader language that is implemented now will be out of date in short order. Anyone who has used these shader languages knows how crippled they are. Ergo, you'd implement these standards in OpenGl 2 and everyone would use the vendor supplied extensions instead anyway. How does that improve OpenGL?
DX has made many mistakes with regard to implementing these kind of features. They're barely used in one version of D3D and become white elephants in subsequent versions.
Fundamentally, the OpenGL standard is an API core. It only supports a minimal core level of functionality that can reasonably be expected to persist over time. Everything else should be an extension. It's not like it's hard to figure extensions out, after all. The vendors do supply documentation, and the Opengl repository maintains a list of all extension documentation. Then you can freely recognize which extensions are garbage and not use them, rather than be saddled with them for a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
This excuse it a total farce.
Look, City of Heroes had a great launch. Dark Age had a great launch. And now Everquest 2 has had a great launch.
Games are rightly knocked for having bad launches. People need to stop making excuses for them.
Okay, if we were talking about some small company, maybe a bad launch would be okay, but Blizzard? Come on, this isn't a start-up by a bunch of newbies.
I don't know what all the hype about WoW is for. I rarely can't log on to EQ2 (only once in over 2 months, when they had a bad update), but oftentimes, the WoW login server is down, or the server's lagged horribly when I go there. This has happened continuously since opening, and happened as recently as last Friday night. As for the game quality, I guess it's subjective, but even without the server problems, WoW was just okay. If you like to solo most the time, or you're hardcore into MMO PvP, it's a pretty good choice I think. EQ2 and CoH are both in my opinion better, but everyone looks for different things.
Public CD key, not private CD key.
First, OpenGl is far more stable than DX on NVidia cards. It is only outside that market that this is sometimes not true. However, you have to keep your drivers updated. Graphics programmers typically push the newest extensions and that will break old drivers. In practice, I virtually never lock up my computer using GL. However, it is trivial to lock up a system in DX. Of course, we won't even go into the compatibility of non-Windows systems with DX because that's, well, obvious, yes?
Now don't take this as a diatribe against DX. I use it frequently, and for some projects it's the thing to use. It's easy to develop quick apps, prototypes in particular, and obviously with the Xbox it's the thing to do.
As for whether a generic shader language should go into OpenGL 2, well, everyone has their opinion on that. Personally, I think it's a bad, bad, bad idea. Any pixel or vertex shader language that is implemented now will be out of date in short order. Anyone who has used these shader languages knows how crippled they are. Ergo, you'd implement these standards in OpenGl 2 and everyone would use the vendor supplied extensions instead anyway. How does that improve OpenGL?
DX has made many mistakes with regard to implementing these kind of features. They're barely used in one version of D3D and become white elephants in subsequent versions.
Fundamentally, the OpenGL standard is an API core. It only supports a minimal core level of functionality that can reasonably be expected to persist over time. Everything else should be an extension. It's not like it's hard to figure extensions out, after all. The vendors do supply documentation, and the Opengl repository maintains a list of all extension documentation. Then you can freely recognize which extensions are garbage and not use them, rather than be saddled with them for a decade.
John Bible
Bioware