The folks I'm talking about will read right past that, to the "this is what you need to play at highest settings at 1600x1200" part.
Just like the guy at CompUSA didn't want to hear that Dual channel DDR would yield him a 5-10% performance boost on paper, and wouldnt affect his gaming experience whatsoever.
Fixing up your computer to run Doom 3 well will mean likely other games using its engine will run well too.
Not necessarily. The system you need to play Call of Duty is a world away from the system you need to play Q3A. Similarly compare Quake 1 and the first Half Life.
Now, when the framerate drops to 7fps when theres monsters on the screen (ie; you're actually playing and not just wandering around gushing about how well-rendered the floor tiles are - this is the point I stopped reading, btw), how can you say that's a good gaming experience?
When I actually encounter an enemy in an FPS, and the game goes to 7fps, that's what I call a frustrating and shitty gaming experience.
"Gaming" to the HardOCP/TomsHardware crowd is standing there, looking at the wall textures, and seeing how anti-aliased they are.
The original Doom broke new ground, though. Noone really regarded the PC as a platform for games. There were mild amusements, stuff like Liesure Suit Larry and Cmdr Keen, but it was no competition for a Sega Genesis. Not only that, gaming was still coming of age.
Doom 3, however, is just another FPS title. Will it drive console die-hards to the PC? Maybe, maybe not. The effect it has, though, won't be nearly the effect that the original Doom had.
I bought a z-board a couple weeks ago. If I had have waited I could have gotten a free Doom 3 keyset.
Oh well, all the FPS keysets are the same as the (generic) Crossfire keyset, they just have game-specific doodles on them.
Btw, I love the zBoard, even as a regular keyboard. I was really skeptical of it when I first saw it. But, the base is solid and a bit heavy, the key action is great, and the gaming keysets rock.
That's easy, you're pretty much limited to nVidia, since ATi's OpenGL support is blowful under Windows.
Couple that with the general crappiness of their drivers under linux and you've got yourself one hell of a losing combination.
In fact, like every other premiere title, Windows ATi users will probably have to wait a couple driver releases, or jump through some hoops, to play at all.
Call of Duty was horribly broken on ATi (hardlocks every 20 seconds). Thief 3 was broken (badly rendered shadows, which if you know anything about the Thief series, makes the game all-but unplayable). Far Cry was giving people problems. TRON 2.0 had problems, Halo had problems (you had to disable pixel shading to play it and it looked worse than Xbox!) Splinter Cell had problems, etc, etc, etc, etc..
And release after release comes out with bugfixes for esoteric shit that nobodies ever heard of.
Doom 3 should be no different. I can't wait to spend some time on the rage3d forums trying to figure out how to get it to run.
I don't know, but I can tell you that Far Cry kicks ass. It supports the latest in rendering techniques, but more importantly, it's a fun game with great level design and awesome enemy AI.
Doom 3 isn't going to impress me nearly as much as it would have if Far Cry hadn't beat them to the punch. Id didn't set the bar this time, CryTech did.
It may be what's needed to get console junkies to spend some time gaming on the PC again, though.
A lot of people abandoned PC gaming about the time PS2 came out, or even Dreamcast. Suddenly the console had the same, even better, visual quality, didn't require you to spend 500 bucks on hardware every 6 months, and had a wider range of genre's and titles.
I'll pick up Doom 3, and regret spending the 60 bucks a week later, just like I did with Quake 3, RTCW, Unreal 2, and every other "revolutionary" PC title.
In the end, it's really just another FPS that bumps the eyecandy level up a notch.
These things always make me laugh. HardOCP, TomsHardware, all the "hardcore modder" sites.
No doubt this article will convince a bunch of clueless wannabe's that they MUST piss away $1000 in hardware over the next week else they won't be playing Doom 3.
Which, of course, drives "obsolete" stuff, like the (now over 6 months old!) Radeon 9800 XT into the bargain bin for me!
Between these moron sites, and morons at Best Buy and CompUSA, it's a great time to be a tech bargain hunter.
Not too long ago, I overheard an employee at CompUSA telling some customer "Oh, you have DDR333? You really should get a new motherboard that supports dual-channel DDR 400, it'll make a huge difference in your frame rates".
I lurked about as the customer picked out a new mobo and two new sticks of Kingston HyperX RAM - and of course payed 3 times what the stuff would cost on newegg. He hung around as the "upgrade specialists" installed it for him. Before he left I offered him 100 bucks for his old motherboard (an Asus P4PE), 2.4ghz CPU (just a Celeron, but they frankly perform MUCH better than morons give them credit for) and "obsolete" gigabyte of DDR333, and went home with a bag full of "obsolete" goodies.
Woohoooo! God bless people who refuse to accept their own ignorance. The system works!
Never forget, don't believe your eyes. It may look really smooth and good on your screen, you may think you're having fun, but if those benchmarks say it's old, then damn you it's time to spend money!
Apple is pissed that it's competition wants to play by the same rules as them.
Apple has it's DRM. The very fact that they have that DRM opens a lot of doors as far as content for iTunes, RIAA members dont want the stuff downloadable if it isn't locked somehow. Ie; un-DRMed mp3s.
Real's "hack" was being able to impose the same DRM on their downloads. Apple didn't have a problem if they were offering unlocked downloads, because RIAA members wouldn't allow Real to carry their stuff, hence, Real would have no library and thus provide no competition to iTunes.
They don't like the idea that some company like Real or MSFT may one day offer a better service, with a wider library, lower rates, etc..
Real wants to play by the exact same rules as Apple, and that's something Apple won't allow.
Dont forget those career criminals who figured out how to boot linux on an Xbox.
Bunnie Huang and the rest should definately see some jail time. Filthy criminals.
And when Microsoft said "no" to Sun and Netscape, they should have just folded up and went home. No means no, right? No, we don't want your JVM, and no, we don't want your browser.
I love the grandparents depiction of it as though Real had performed some sort of corporate rape. "No means no" indeed.
The DMCA expicitly allows reverse-engineering for interoperability. That's exactly what Real did, they reversed engineered so it would be interoperable with their service.
I don't think Apple could win this fight. There's plenty case law to support Real, and the DMCA doesn't seem to trump it.
For instance, GameGear vs Nintendo back in the day. They reverse engineered the NES, came up with a cheat device. Nintendo fought tooth and nail, and lost. To this day, there are gamesharks for every console, none of which officially licensed by the console maker. All of which were reverse engineered, and perfectly legal.
Nintendo tried something similar against that little company that was putting out unlicensed NES titles, after they reverse engineered the NES' copy protection. Nintendo lost.
I hope Apple brings the fight on, and Real wins this, they are in the right. Which companies software you like better is really irrelevant in this case.
I really don't look forward to being locked in to a provider for media based on the device I buy, do you? Do you want a Sony Walkman that only plays Sony songs?
Maybe the RIAA and MPAA will get what they want, and Apple will drive the final nail into Fair Use's coffin.
Just remember, when it happens, to take Steve Jobs' dick out of your mouthes long enough to thank him for your shiney new mandated Palladium chip.
Bunch of fanboy asshats. Remeber, a year ago SCO was your "great friend of Open Source" too.
The only thing that would make me consider an iPod would be if it worked with all the major music download services. Not through hacks or bullshit, not to be broken by iPod firmware 2.0, etc..
Their desire to lock me in to iTunes doesn't excite me anymore than the idea of a DVD player or game console that only plays stuff I bought at Wal-Mart.
I don't understand the Apple fanaticism here. It truly puzzles me. Time and time again they act like every bit the dickhead corporation that every corporation is. Apples goal is the same as MSFTs or Reals, to suck money out of my pockets.
Music is dying, iPod is helping kill it. No more standards, and I just can't wait for the future where you can only play music or video that you bought from the people that sold you the device on which you plan to play it.
I agree. The first movie was about an hour too long, and I found myself getting restless and bored.
Return of the King had about 3 endings too many, 45 minutes of midgets crying and hugging. I could barely restrain myself from screaming "Just get in the fucking boat already".
All in all, I thought they were good. As good as any big-budget Hollywood blockbuster could be. But in the end, thats what they were. They didnt speak to me any more than the Terminator or Batman movies. They were entertaining, and that was about it.
I didn't like LOTR. I didn't like the style of writing, I didn't like chapters upon chapters of purple prose, descriptions of crap I didn't care about, histories of people inconsequential to the story.
In short, I wanted to read a good story, and instead got a narritive-styled encyclopedia that sought to teach me every piece of minutia about Tolkeins made-up fantasy land. No I don't care what the elvish word for donut is, nor do I care about Fogobors ancient heritage.
I found the books without a sense of humour, which of course made it funny to me, since all my friends were taking all the Tolkein stuff so seriously, buying elvish dictionaries and whatnot.
Nope, didn't care for it. Gave up about 3/4 through Fellowship. I did like the movies.
I'll tell you something else. I don't like Harry Potter. I read the first one, and no matter what anyone tells me, these are childrens books. Stuff I would have read in 3rd grade.
And, furthermore, I'll tell you this. I read the first 3 chapters of the Da Vinci code, and tossed it aside. I'm not one for hype, I found it to just plain suck. Perhaps the hype ruined it, so many people telling me what a piece of genious it is. Maybe I just didn't stick with it until the genious part. Forget it, I'll wait for the movie.
Someone tell me why I want this. The Usenet post doesn't seem to explain what's so exciting about it, besides a bunch of boring bug-fixes, and some esoteric-sounding syntax changes.
Windows does provide non-admin access to all those low-level resources. It's called DirectX. I've never had to be Administrator to run any game under XP, and really, not even to install them (unless the game decides that it needs to install the latest DirectX for you, then it needs Admin rights, and that's why installshield likes to ask for it by default)
It's no more fair to criticize XP because legacy games designed for Windows 95 were poorly written and need to be run as root, no more than it is to criticize the new Gentoo 2004.2 because the original linux Doom and Quake ports required svgalib, and thus had to be run as root.
And there were exploits, oh boy, were there ever. Those were my asshole script-kiddy days. Camping, huh? Well just wait until you load the next map, complete with buffer-overflow giving me root access, etc.
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The folks I'm talking about will read right past that, to the "this is what you need to play at highest settings at 1600x1200" part.
Just like the guy at CompUSA didn't want to hear that Dual channel DDR would yield him a 5-10% performance boost on paper, and wouldnt affect his gaming experience whatsoever.
Fixing up your computer to run Doom 3 well will mean likely other games using its engine will run well too.
Not necessarily. The system you need to play Call of Duty is a world away from the system you need to play Q3A. Similarly compare Quake 1 and the first Half Life.
Doom didn't start the genre, it popularized it.
And it doesn't automagically make Doom 3 a unique and inspired title. Until I see it, it's just another FPS.
HardOCP says it "ran great", yet they say it dropped to 7 fps when monsters were on screen. That sounds like it's running pretty shitty to me.
Now, when the framerate drops to 7fps when theres monsters on the screen (ie; you're actually playing and not just wandering around gushing about how well-rendered the floor tiles are - this is the point I stopped reading, btw), how can you say that's a good gaming experience?
When I actually encounter an enemy in an FPS, and the game goes to 7fps, that's what I call a frustrating and shitty gaming experience.
"Gaming" to the HardOCP/TomsHardware crowd is standing there, looking at the wall textures, and seeing how anti-aliased they are.
The original Doom broke new ground, though. Noone really regarded the PC as a platform for games. There were mild amusements, stuff like Liesure Suit Larry and Cmdr Keen, but it was no competition for a Sega Genesis. Not only that, gaming was still coming of age.
Doom 3, however, is just another FPS title. Will it drive console die-hards to the PC? Maybe, maybe not. The effect it has, though, won't be nearly the effect that the original Doom had.
Ahh! Piss me off.
I bought a z-board a couple weeks ago. If I had have waited I could have gotten a free Doom 3 keyset.
Oh well, all the FPS keysets are the same as the (generic) Crossfire keyset, they just have game-specific doodles on them.
Btw, I love the zBoard, even as a regular keyboard. I was really skeptical of it when I first saw it. But, the base is solid and a bit heavy, the key action is great, and the gaming keysets rock.
X + fluxbox seemingly takes up more memory than Windows XP does just sitting there.
But then again, they manage memory in different ways. Linux tends to abhor swapping, while Windows tends to do it opportunistically.
But then again, again, Xfree (that includes X.org) sucks from the "lean and mean window drawin' machine" point of view.
Gameplay? It moves, you shoot it. What's to say about the gameplay?
That's easy, you're pretty much limited to nVidia, since ATi's OpenGL support is blowful under Windows.
Couple that with the general crappiness of their drivers under linux and you've got yourself one hell of a losing combination.
In fact, like every other premiere title, Windows ATi users will probably have to wait a couple driver releases, or jump through some hoops, to play at all.
Call of Duty was horribly broken on ATi (hardlocks every 20 seconds). Thief 3 was broken (badly rendered shadows, which if you know anything about the Thief series, makes the game all-but unplayable). Far Cry was giving people problems. TRON 2.0 had problems, Halo had problems (you had to disable pixel shading to play it and it looked worse than Xbox!) Splinter Cell had problems, etc, etc, etc, etc..
And release after release comes out with bugfixes for esoteric shit that nobodies ever heard of.
Doom 3 should be no different. I can't wait to spend some time on the rage3d forums trying to figure out how to get it to run.
I don't know, but I can tell you that Far Cry kicks ass. It supports the latest in rendering techniques, but more importantly, it's a fun game with great level design and awesome enemy AI.
Doom 3 isn't going to impress me nearly as much as it would have if Far Cry hadn't beat them to the punch. Id didn't set the bar this time, CryTech did.
It may be what's needed to get console junkies to spend some time gaming on the PC again, though.
A lot of people abandoned PC gaming about the time PS2 came out, or even Dreamcast. Suddenly the console had the same, even better, visual quality, didn't require you to spend 500 bucks on hardware every 6 months, and had a wider range of genre's and titles.
I'll pick up Doom 3, and regret spending the 60 bucks a week later, just like I did with Quake 3, RTCW, Unreal 2, and every other "revolutionary" PC title.
In the end, it's really just another FPS that bumps the eyecandy level up a notch.
These things always make me laugh. HardOCP, TomsHardware, all the "hardcore modder" sites.
No doubt this article will convince a bunch of clueless wannabe's that they MUST piss away $1000 in hardware over the next week else they won't be playing Doom 3.
Which, of course, drives "obsolete" stuff, like the (now over 6 months old!) Radeon 9800 XT into the bargain bin for me!
Between these moron sites, and morons at Best Buy and CompUSA, it's a great time to be a tech bargain hunter.
Not too long ago, I overheard an employee at CompUSA telling some customer "Oh, you have DDR333? You really should get a new motherboard that supports dual-channel DDR 400, it'll make a huge difference in your frame rates".
I lurked about as the customer picked out a new mobo and two new sticks of Kingston HyperX RAM - and of course payed 3 times what the stuff would cost on newegg. He hung around as the "upgrade specialists" installed it for him. Before he left I offered him 100 bucks for his old motherboard (an Asus P4PE), 2.4ghz CPU (just a Celeron, but they frankly perform MUCH better than morons give them credit for) and "obsolete" gigabyte of DDR333, and went home with a bag full of "obsolete" goodies.
Woohoooo! God bless people who refuse to accept their own ignorance. The system works!
Never forget, don't believe your eyes. It may look really smooth and good on your screen, you may think you're having fun, but if those benchmarks say it's old, then damn you it's time to spend money!
Benchmarks are everything!
Apple is pissed that it's competition wants to play by the same rules as them.
Apple has it's DRM. The very fact that they have that DRM opens a lot of doors as far as content for iTunes, RIAA members dont want the stuff downloadable if it isn't locked somehow. Ie; un-DRMed mp3s.
Real's "hack" was being able to impose the same DRM on their downloads. Apple didn't have a problem if they were offering unlocked downloads, because RIAA members wouldn't allow Real to carry their stuff, hence, Real would have no library and thus provide no competition to iTunes.
They don't like the idea that some company like Real or MSFT may one day offer a better service, with a wider library, lower rates, etc..
Real wants to play by the exact same rules as Apple, and that's something Apple won't allow.
They didn't invent the PC, the GUI or the mouse either, yet slashbots here widely give them credit for all of it.
They invented the laptop too, apparently. With Al Gore on their board of directors, they can now rightfully claim to have invented the internet.
Dont forget those career criminals who figured out how to boot linux on an Xbox.
Bunnie Huang and the rest should definately see some jail time. Filthy criminals.
And when Microsoft said "no" to Sun and Netscape, they should have just folded up and went home. No means no, right? No, we don't want your JVM, and no, we don't want your browser.
I love the grandparents depiction of it as though Real had performed some sort of corporate rape. "No means no" indeed.
Go Real. Apple zealots are indeed annoying.
10 bucks says you're using their TrueType fonts!
The DMCA expicitly allows reverse-engineering for interoperability. That's exactly what Real did, they reversed engineered so it would be interoperable with their service.
I don't think Apple could win this fight. There's plenty case law to support Real, and the DMCA doesn't seem to trump it.
For instance, GameGear vs Nintendo back in the day. They reverse engineered the NES, came up with a cheat device. Nintendo fought tooth and nail, and lost. To this day, there are gamesharks for every console, none of which officially licensed by the console maker. All of which were reverse engineered, and perfectly legal.
Nintendo tried something similar against that little company that was putting out unlicensed NES titles, after they reverse engineered the NES' copy protection. Nintendo lost.
I hope Apple brings the fight on, and Real wins this, they are in the right. Which companies software you like better is really irrelevant in this case.
I really don't look forward to being locked in to a provider for media based on the device I buy, do you? Do you want a Sony Walkman that only plays Sony songs?
Maybe the RIAA and MPAA will get what they want, and Apple will drive the final nail into Fair Use's coffin.
Just remember, when it happens, to take Steve Jobs' dick out of your mouthes long enough to thank him for your shiney new mandated Palladium chip.
Bunch of fanboy asshats. Remeber, a year ago SCO was your "great friend of Open Source" too.
The only thing that would make me consider an iPod would be if it worked with all the major music download services. Not through hacks or bullshit, not to be broken by iPod firmware 2.0, etc..
Their desire to lock me in to iTunes doesn't excite me anymore than the idea of a DVD player or game console that only plays stuff I bought at Wal-Mart.
I don't understand the Apple fanaticism here. It truly puzzles me. Time and time again they act like every bit the dickhead corporation that every corporation is. Apples goal is the same as MSFTs or Reals, to suck money out of my pockets.
Music is dying, iPod is helping kill it. No more standards, and I just can't wait for the future where you can only play music or video that you bought from the people that sold you the device on which you plan to play it.
I agree. The first movie was about an hour too long, and I found myself getting restless and bored.
Return of the King had about 3 endings too many, 45 minutes of midgets crying and hugging. I could barely restrain myself from screaming "Just get in the fucking boat already".
All in all, I thought they were good. As good as any big-budget Hollywood blockbuster could be. But in the end, thats what they were. They didnt speak to me any more than the Terminator or Batman movies. They were entertaining, and that was about it.
I wouldn't be surprised. Star Wars was a shitty movie, with cheesy effects, a pretty weak plot, predictable dialog, and bad (hell, horrific!) acting.
Same thing goes for Star Trek, IMO. Noone's going to tell me that "even numbered movies are good". They aren't, they all sucked in my eyes.
Geeks tend to latch on to crap for some reason.
I didn't like LOTR. I didn't like the style of writing, I didn't like chapters upon chapters of purple prose, descriptions of crap I didn't care about, histories of people inconsequential to the story.
In short, I wanted to read a good story, and instead got a narritive-styled encyclopedia that sought to teach me every piece of minutia about Tolkeins made-up fantasy land. No I don't care what the elvish word for donut is, nor do I care about Fogobors ancient heritage.
I found the books without a sense of humour, which of course made it funny to me, since all my friends were taking all the Tolkein stuff so seriously, buying elvish dictionaries and whatnot.
Nope, didn't care for it. Gave up about 3/4 through Fellowship. I did like the movies.
I'll tell you something else. I don't like Harry Potter. I read the first one, and no matter what anyone tells me, these are childrens books. Stuff I would have read in 3rd grade.
And, furthermore, I'll tell you this. I read the first 3 chapters of the Da Vinci code, and tossed it aside. I'm not one for hype, I found it to just plain suck. Perhaps the hype ruined it, so many people telling me what a piece of genious it is. Maybe I just didn't stick with it until the genious part. Forget it, I'll wait for the movie.
Not everyone is ready to canonize Tolkeins work.
Read some of the Horatio Hornblower stuff, great series of books if you want to read about adventures on the high seas.
Why a major version release with only minor point-release changes?
From what I can tell, bash 3.0 doesn't do anything that 2.x didn't do. Except, no doubt, break every script in my system if I were to install it.
Someone tell me why I want this. The Usenet post doesn't seem to explain what's so exciting about it, besides a bunch of boring bug-fixes, and some esoteric-sounding syntax changes.
Windows does provide non-admin access to all those low-level resources. It's called DirectX. I've never had to be Administrator to run any game under XP, and really, not even to install them (unless the game decides that it needs to install the latest DirectX for you, then it needs Admin rights, and that's why installshield likes to ask for it by default)
It's no more fair to criticize XP because legacy games designed for Windows 95 were poorly written and need to be run as root, no more than it is to criticize the new Gentoo 2004.2 because the original linux Doom and Quake ports required svgalib, and thus had to be run as root.
And there were exploits, oh boy, were there ever. Those were my asshole script-kiddy days. Camping, huh? Well just wait until you load the next map, complete with buffer-overflow giving me root access, etc.