Because it's a lot harder to seperate the framerate from the back-end after the engine's coded than if you do it that way from the start. Why he did it this way in Doom 3 I couldn't tell you, except that it's the way he did it in the rest of his engines, too.
I can tell a difference between 60 fps and higher. It's easy to test, just set your refresh rate to 60 Hz and see if you can see nice flickering.
Umm, you're not testing whether or not you can see the difference between 60 fps and higher, you're testing whether or not your lights run at 60 hz, and since you see the flicker, they do.
A real test is to drop a random frame into an animation that will run at 60 fps and see if you can see the random frame. Almost everyone can. On the other hand, that has nothing to do with whether or not 60 fps is an acceptable framerate for a game, because even 30 fps is, as long as it's consistent (lower than 30 fps can give you some very real problems, but regardless of the framerate you'll never see a real flicker in the images displayed as long as your refresh rate is not being interfered with by lighting conditions).
By the way, I get headaches when my monitor runs at 60Hz refresh rates, but since games simply display the same frame over again, it's not like your monitor goes blank between frames (like a movie does, though most movie projectors display the same frame 2 or 3 times). If your game is running at 60 fps and your monitor is displaying the game at 72Hz it just means that your card isn't sending a new image to be drawn for 12 of your 72 cycles in that second, it's just redrawing what was already there. Mine's currently running at 100Hz at 1280x1024@32bpp, but that doesn't mean there's anything new from the first image displayed to the second, or that I'll notice unless there is.
The 60fps is the average maximum that most of us can see.... The only time I have heard this being a problem in computer games was with quick turns and other high speed events.
This just isn't true (the part about movies and refresh rates is close enough and mostly true). 60fps is simply a point at which most people see most actions as fairly smooth, when the framerate is consistent. The same is true of 30fps, but very few people would be happy to see the game capped there. Putting it close to the refresh rate is the most probable reason for capping it there. Most people can discern a change in frames at significantly higher rates than most computers can produce, but we don't need to display anywhere near the maximum framerates to make a clear, smoothly animated game/movie/etc. The only reason that you may have heard of problems with turns and so forth is simply because these are the types of things, when done at high speeds, that can cause framearates to drop or cause an increase in tearing when v-synch is disabled. If you cap your framerates to a fairly low number, the difference between your lowest framerate and your average framerate is smaller (assuming that you can hit the framerate cap most of the time). When framerates drop by significant amounts, there's a much greater chance that the player will notice, and this will make the game seem slower. This is what causes the perception among some people that 30 or 60 fps is simply not enough. When you're playing with v-synch off and you've got 120 or 100 fps and your framerate drops to 60 fps, it feels and looks like a stutter-fest because you've just cut your framerate in half. If you had been playing at 60 fps the whole time, it wouldn't matter as long as your framearate stayed at 60, because there's no change in the number of frames being rendered and displayed, and there's no loss of information in most situations.
I was wondering when some game maker was going to decided to cap the fps rate and concentrate on other things.
The only real concentration here is to correct a problem that is most easily corrected with a framerate cap. Otherwise, Carmack would have to learn how to make his physics and hit detection independent of the graphics display rate. Some games have managed this, some have not. Most people that actually learn game programming specifically learn that this is something you should do from day one. Trying to hack it in after the engine is built is a pain in the ass, if not nearly impossible, so you get a framerate cap that means you won't have the problems that existed in QuakeWorld, Quake 2, and Quake 3 when people acheived higher framerates.
We are close to the point where the computers we play these games on will all be able to exceed the 60 fps limit. (thank you Mr. Moore)
This is only the case when the computer is relatively new compared to the game. The technology that people like John Carmack develop will continue to push the limits of the hardware for a long time to come. There are still a lot more things that he would like to do with a graphics engine that simply can't be done at 30 fps on any current graphics card, and I'm sure he'd be the first one to give you plenty of minute details on those things, including how they should be implemented on the API and hardware sides.
By not having to draw more frames then 99% of the pop can see, the game can focus on gameplay, and as a side effect, eliminate slowdowns affecting the # of fps outputted, say when everyone in the room gets fragged by someone suiciding with a big grenade.
The gameplay is a combination of different effects, but when it comes to things like physics and AI is a simple matter of leveraging the CPU overhead that was freed up by the move to more powerful (and feature-filled) graphics cards. The more of the graphics processing that gets off-loaded the better, but the number of fps you limit the game to has little effect overall, because the graphics card is the part d
A little over a year ago Carmack stated that the Parhelia would run Doom 3, just not nearly as well as the then-current nVidia and ATI parts.
If I remember correctly, the Parhelia is a significantly newer card than the g400, just as Doom 3 is a significantly newer engine than Quake 3 (although they've been working on the engine for 3 years).
Cards that were putting out 100+ fps in Quake 3 quite easily are being crippled by Doom 3, if they work at all, so I'd say good luck, but I don't think there's a chance.
Perhaps, if the system could handle it consistently. On the other hand, if the system can handle 85 fps only 50% of the time and drops 10-25% of the time to 40fps or less, would you prefer to cap at 60fps and only suffer a 33% hit in the performance 10-25% of the time or keep it at 85 fps and suffer a 50% hit in the performance 10-25% of the time?
It didn't take me long playing online to decide that I was better off with a lower framerate most of the time to minimize the difference between the highest and lowest framerate being displayed.
On the other hand, I would prefer that the game calculated it's physics at a rate independent of the framerate, because the two do not have to be dependant on one another. The frame being rendered should simply be the graphical representation of the game world as it is when the rendering started. The physics should be calculating changes in the game world as needed, regardless of framerates. You don't need to re-calculate the precise trajectory of a bullet every frame to render it's path, nor does the accuracy of the path need to be decided by how fast that path can be rendered.
If I calculate the game state 200 times per second and only display it 60 times per second, or 50 times per second (for a more accurate division of frames vs physics calculations per second), does it matter that the game state was calculated 3 or 4 times without being rendered? No, it just means the rendered state may be more accurate because there is no rounding involved that isn't being performed on other systems. It's not like the Quake games have been pegging mid-to-high-end CPUs since moving to OpenGL renderers, either, so it's not unreasonable to calculate physics more often than is strictly needed.
In a PvP server I would normally think that agreeing to a duel was the only implication of consent.
On the other hand, you could be in a PvP server and kill someone from off-screen (depending on the type of game this could be simply with a knife from behind or from a distance using a spell or a bow) without warning and it would probably be similar to murder.
There's a lot more to playing an RPG PvP than simply running around randomly killing people, and some games have more or less etiquette involved than others. People generally don't like to die when it causes some sort of penalty, so the level of etiquette and formality often comes with the level of severity in the penalties. At the same time, if there's no penalty at all, it becomes more like a free-for-all DM game, or maybe a team-based DM game (though the teams being enforced mostly by the players themselves in many RPGs). In that kind of situation you expect to die at just about any moment.
As an addition, you could make the cap on the per-hour (or per-5-hour, or whatever) payments at 1.5 times the maximum per-month fee, or maybe $3 above the monthly fee, giving people a reason to pay the monthly fee rather than the hourly rate, without royally screwing the hourly players when they have a high-usage month.
Just trying to put in some ideas that might actually make sense to people in places like Sony. If the hourly rate was capped at the monthly rate, I doubt anyone would pay the monthly rate (though some might still pay for the larger blocks of time).
The biggest issue with "unique" events in a MMORPG is that they attract users. Of course, you'll say that's the entire point. The problem is that they attract too many users.
This is pretty simple to counteract, though some players may not like it. All you have to do is make the 'unique' events a little more unique by not having them repeated and by having them only available to players that are already in a certain area at a certain time, and not announcing them. Maybe have the same event happen in multiple areas, but in an hour or two it's all over, so you have a fair limit to how many people actually even find out about it (at least while it's still active) and take part in it. Maybe you'll get a few stragglers and site-seers after the fact, but it's not nearly as bad as having an event in one place that everyone knows is occuring and draws everyone to that area.
Of course, you'd have to spread things out over different times and areas, or make some of them class specific or race specific and spread them out in that manner as well, but it'll make the individual player's experience more unique and allow for some new experiences in the games, maybe some good stories for players to tell, and give players something else to expect and hope for from the game.
If you don't give out absolute super-1337 items with every one of these (but maybe one every once in a while), while still making the rewards worthwhile for the level of effort the player puts out, you won't get massive floods of people towards every one of these events, but will still get people interested in actually participating.
" The ability to kill and maim without consequence"
He isn't saying we should have Restricted PvP. He wants PvP on EVERYONE in the game.
I don't think those two statements are the same by neccessity, whether it's what he meant or not.
Having PvP and non-PvP servers allows PvP players to have that ability, assuming the game allows the 'without consequence' portion. Even Diablo 2 allows it to a certain extent, even though there are very specific conditions to PvP.
Far be it for a lowly coder to question Mr. Carmack, but this seems like a hack.
Don't worry, it doesn't just seem like a hack, it actually is a hack.
Unfortunately, there aren't many people out there in the same league as Carmack, so it may be a while before we see him finally decide to fix this properly, rather than just capping the framerate. Personally, I prefer the capped framerate to nothing at all, but I'd much rather see it fixed properly.
All of that being said, I haven't gone into say the Quake or Q2 code and tried to fix it myself, so I'm just spinning my wheels.
Now's where it goes from being an interesting demonstration of all the technologies to being a fabulous game, and that really does all happen at the end.
Is it just me or does that sound horribly wrong? Actually, we also enjoy good plots, character design, thoughtful level layout, adequate difficulty, intuitive user menus, goodies to unlock...
I think the reference has nothing to do with the technical points, but rather with the point in time of the development of the game. Id typically develops their engines first and then straps a game around them. At this point, they're in exactly the place that you are discussing: plot, character design, level design, difficulty, possibly menus and goodies. The engine is for the most part done (probably still some tweaking for various cards), so the majority of their current focus is on gameplay elements.
if timedemo permits the game to render at higher framerates, what it stresses will be completely determined by the requirements of the game itself. In the Quake games, this was typically the video card.
Some monitors can achieve 100hz, but very few of them. If you run at an FPS higher than the monitor's refresh rate, it doesn't display the extra frames, it just displays tearing artifacts.
It can also happen if you're running at lower fps than the monitor's refresh rate. This is why someone invented v-synch. As long as v-synch's enabled, tearing should be a thing you never see, regardless of your framerate.
Of course, since v-synch limits your framerate to your refresh rate (since it waits for the vertical refresh of the monitor before displaying the frame), it's disabled for benchmarking purposes. If you want to strut around about how cool your new video card is in your system, you disable v-synch. If you want the game to actually look good, you enable it.
Bollocks. read the article. they are not promising a minimum frame rate. Capping to 60fps doesnt mean that it can somehow magically deal with more things on screen at once
I never said anything about a minimum framerate. Just because you can't read what I typed doesn't mean I'm saying something I did not.
When your framerate is 60 fps, the most your framerate can drop by is 60 fps. If it drops from 60 to 30 then you're not going to have as big a slowdown as you would if it dropped from 100 to 30. In one case your framerate cuts in half (60 to 30) in the other it goes down 2/3rds. There is a very noticable difference between 30 and 100 as compared to 30 and 60. If it only drops to 50 because your card can handle 2 people on the screen reasonably well, there's even less of a problem when you're capped at 60.
Many people tend to play fps without a framerate cap and with v-synch turned off because this is the way it's done in benchmarks. Then they complain that their card isn't fast enough or that 60 fps isn't good enough because it feels very slow when their framerate drops from 150 to 60 in Quake 3. The reality is that v-synch gives you better image quality when cards start to have problems with a scene (or set of scenes) by limiting tearing, and capping your framerate somewhere closer to the minimum framerates you see in the game gives you a better experience because it minimizes drastic changes in framerate.
Of course, no one wants to play a game at 10 fps, so if your card sucks it's still going to suck. However, if you cap your framerate at a level where your framerate will rarely, if ever, be cut in half, you're far less likely to notice any slowdowns at all in the game. Unfortunately, with the way that the Quake games have previously handled their physics, you were screwed in certain situations if you didn't have a significantly high framerate. With this cap, there's a solution to that particular problem, although it is most certainly not the most elegant solution to the problem. Maybe some people will finally understand, in a couple of years when everyone's cards can pump out 60 fps consistantly on Doom 3, that your maximum or average framerate is not nearly as important as your minimum framerate and the difference between that minimum and the average.
Not to mention that per-polygon hit detection also reduces splash damage. Considering the number of people I've seen in almost any Quake-based game that rely heavily on the rocket launcher and the shotgun, I can only say this is a good thing, but that there will be complaints.
He didn't say anything about controlling your refresh rate with the game code, so it's unlikely that'll be an issue, as long as you have your refresh rate set properly.
Look at it this way, with v-synch on if your card can produce a solid 60 fps average or higher, at least it's less likely that you'll actually drop any of the 60 frames at 72hz.
The problem really has nothing to do with how many frames the human eye can see in a second. As was almost implied by the previous reply, it has a lot more to do with your monitor's refresh rate at a given resolution. If your monitor is at 60hz, you're not getting more than 60fps whether your card puts it out or not, because the monitor isn't going to draw them (this is why v-sync is good for games, but is disabled for benchmarks, where the monitor shouldn't have any influence on the test).
Obviously, capping the framerate was the easiest way for id to solve this particular problem, and 60 fps is generally accepted as good enough. Anyone that thinks it isn't probably hasn't played many games capped at a certain framerate (for instance, you can cap your framerate in Half-Life and many other games). Once it's capped at a certain rate, it limits the possibility for severe slow-downs when framerates drop on complicated scenes. This is the real reason that having a card that plays 200 fps on the latest game (besides the obvious issues with previous Quake games) is important, because the higher average values mean higher values for the lowest framerate in a round. If you're playing with an average of 100 fps and the game slows to 60 fps, it's going to feel like it's crawling, but if you're playing at 60 fps and it drops to 50 fps you might have trouble even noticing it. If it never drops, even better;)
In the end, at least they've done something to address a problem typical with their past engines. I wish they had found a more elegant solution that allowed individuals to choose higher framerates without affecting the gameplay, but something's better than nothing. The only people that will complain are the ones that spend most of their time staring at fps counters while they play or benchmarking their graphics cards with the latest demos. Maybe some people will finally figure out that their games would be more playable if they capped their framerates at a reasonable level rather than trying to buy faster hardware and tweaking their systems all day to acheive a 100fps average that gets slammed to 30 fps every time 5 people are on the screen at once.
Highly unlikely I'll get to play KI now. Did it even have a home console version? If so was it any good?
Super Nintendo.
Best part, imo, was that it had a full tournament mode that allowed you to enter names and then it'd simply tell you who was playing the next round. It worked out great for my friends and I, since we usually played after parties or even just while sitting around having a few (dozen) beers. That and Mario Kart pretty much is all I remember from my first year of college.
Everyone always says that "Yeah Macs are more expensive, but the cost of ownership is lower compared to Microsoft".
And it's made under the assumption that people buy new computers every time Microsoft releases a new operating system.
It's just false for at least some percentage of users, just as it's true for some percentage of Mac users. There are plenty of people still running Windows 98, and there are plenty of people running Mac OS 9. There are some people that buy new Macs as often as upgrades are released, and there are some people that buy new computers as often as Service Packs are released for Windows.
Personally, if I had to buy an OS upgrade every year just to keep it up to date, I think I'd go nuts. If I had to replace the entire computer to make a significant processor and motherboard upgrade I'd lose it.
On the other hand, if I buy a laptop, Apple becomes much more pallatable, because very few companies allow significant hardware upgrades on laptops (I heard Alienware makes a laptop with upgradeable graphics cards, but I'd like to see how that plays out in the long run). It'd also help if they made Tablet-style notebooks, although many people seem to think these are fairly useless.
However using the key that is held on your Mac to encrypt data that is on your iPad would be cool, as then it really can only be read where they key is available (home & work & wherever else).
Or use your iPod to store the key for the data on your computer, since it's much more conceivable that you would want to access the data on your iPod when you're away from your computer than access the data on your computer when your iPod's nowhere nearby (but then what if someone steals your iPod? No real worries about them finding your computer and stealing your data, but can you get to your data? Not likely).
The reality is that it appears they will only need to brute force their way into your account, and then your data is mounted and unencrypted on the fly, thereby making the level of encryption almost totally useless (unless for some reason they don't want to take the easy route).
I've got no problem shelling out for the new features - if I didn't like doing that, I'd use Linux exclusively - but I think an upgrade path for existing users (short of buying a new machine) would be nice. Panther is 100 in the UK; 70 would seem like a reasonable price point for those who paid for 10.2. Still, I know people who still scrabble after cracked copies of XP Pro because they can't afford to buy a copy at 250 RRP; Panther is a bargain by comparison...
I don't think there are many people that have problems with the idea of buying upgrades once in a while, and if you look at it, there is no 'full version' to buy with a Mac OS anyway, since you have to have bought a full version in the past when you bought the hardware. The real problem is that they're releasing paid upgrades about every year (give or take a few weeks/a month or two), and have done so since the release of OS X. Going from 2000 to XP was pushing it for a lot of people on the Windows side, but 98 to XP was more reasonable (though if you went 98 to Me then XP was questionable).
As for XP Pro, well, go with Home and it should be cheaper than Panther, at least at the upgrade price, though there are some situations in which you need Pro over Home (ie dual CPUs). The other alternative is buying an OEM copy of XP Pro when you do a small hardware upgrade.
I think a dozen or so people pointed it out last time the game was mentioned, and the time before that, and no one in the US really cared about the UK developers' particular use of slang to try to put a pun in the title when the literal title is fairly mundane for the story.
That, or maybe I just don't get too excited about Beavis & Butthead style in-jokes. 'huhu he said Ghoulies' 'Yeah, he said he grabbed them too, heh'
What really bothers me is that this is truly "lazy man's crypto." MS could have made a nice GUI for gpg and better PGP support in its XP products, but they deliver this instead? MS is in a position where it can bring crypto to the masses and other goodies. Its a shame really.
I think you're looking at this in a different way from Microsoft (well, that should be obvious). On one hand, you have a set of features that businesses have asked Microsoft to implement for one reason or another. Things like self-destructing documents (not really much different from say cancelling a document from the server-side, except that this will actually get rid of the document to some degree) and preventing people from printing documents, and limiting the forwarding of documents. On the other hand, you have PGP, which has a corporation backing it which could put it's own efforts into developing software that's easy to use with MS' email software, but hasn't done so (or hasn't made it widely known).
Not to mention they can't plug the "analog hole" namely the fact that your monitor is a passive listening device and as such screenshots cannot be blocked. Even if they block it on the OS level a cheap digital camera will do in a pinch.
And the same can be said of PGP. All any of this does is stop people from doing things mindlessly, ie accidentally sending out that confidential internal document to the marketing droids, or to a customer, or to whatever email list you signed yourself up to in order to look busier than you really are when people walk by your desk.
ok, maybe I'm biting on the obvious here, but anyway:
Sensible? User choice? This is Microsoft you are talking about. Remember the company that makes you stick in your orignal CD and reboot if you change your hostname or IP number.
Use an NT based OS if you have to use Windows. You can destroy the CD and only worry about it if you're doing a complete reinstall. Hell, last time I used a 9x-based OS I gave up the extra hard drive space and copied the CD to the hard drive before installing, and installed from the hard drive. Windows handled that perfectly fine.
It's also the company that won't let you store M$ updates locally, so everytime a computer gets adware or virus hosed, you have do download everything all over again but don't give you a choice on which updates you want and stick nasty EULAs in the updates.
Updates are all stored locally, and you can download them from the 'Windows Update Catalog' (go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com, select 'Personalize Windows Update', select the check box for 'Display Windows Update Catalog'). You could also find this feature from most of the IT-centric support sections of Microsoft's site, as it's fairly critical for business support. The local directory where the Windows Update Setup files are usually stored is generally found in the Windows directory, and there's usually a note in that directory letting you know you can delete the contents safely (unless you need those patches again for some reason, of course).
We are talking about one paranoid control freak of a company that has demonstrated it could care less about user choice or reason when those things get in the way of user control. When has Microsoft ever made a peer computing modeled product where the end user's machine was an equal player? If there is a way Bill Gates can charge anyone money for the service, you can bet that his software will force the user to pay. A central server completely out of the user's control offered as a "service" to enable this "feature" is very much a possibility.
And off you go into speculation. In order to even use the feature you pretty much have to setup an Exchange Server (2003 no less, which is a gripe I'm sure has been brought up already). It's a 'central' server only in the sense that it's central to a particular group of users, not to all users. Many businesses already run Exchange Server, and if they're going to upgrade to Office 2003 there's a chance that they'll upgrade to Exchange Server 2003 as well, and possibly Windows Server 2003 (which is needed for many of the other DRM-style features of Office 2003). Those businesses are already running a 'central' server for their email, this is just adding features to it.
So perhaps games that play online where others can actually see your creation they should allow for user created content as well.
Of course they are not going to want that. First time someone adds a topless piece of clothing all hell is going to break loose.
The other problem will be with people having to download all of that custom content, whether it's done from outside the game or inside (especially inside). No matter how much great work has been done on Quake, there is still a large percentage of the players that have never seen any of it.
As for credit-card based stuff, I think Sony has almost got this right. You can always buy game time at most of the stores that sell the games themselves, so as long as the stores accept your chosen method of payment, you're set. Of course, this still relies on the stores to carry the game cards, which is why I said 'almost'.
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Considering that I owned neither a GB nor an N64, this seems pretty likely. Actually I didn't own an SNES, either, my roomate did.
Anyway, I played the sequel in the arcade once, and it seemed to be missing something the original had, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
Why doesn't he just fix the code?
Because it's a lot harder to seperate the framerate from the back-end after the engine's coded than if you do it that way from the start. Why he did it this way in Doom 3 I couldn't tell you, except that it's the way he did it in the rest of his engines, too.
I can tell a difference between 60 fps and higher. It's easy to test, just set your refresh rate to 60 Hz and see if you can see nice flickering.
Umm, you're not testing whether or not you can see the difference between 60 fps and higher, you're testing whether or not your lights run at 60 hz, and since you see the flicker, they do.
A real test is to drop a random frame into an animation that will run at 60 fps and see if you can see the random frame. Almost everyone can. On the other hand, that has nothing to do with whether or not 60 fps is an acceptable framerate for a game, because even 30 fps is, as long as it's consistent (lower than 30 fps can give you some very real problems, but regardless of the framerate you'll never see a real flicker in the images displayed as long as your refresh rate is not being interfered with by lighting conditions).
By the way, I get headaches when my monitor runs at 60Hz refresh rates, but since games simply display the same frame over again, it's not like your monitor goes blank between frames (like a movie does, though most movie projectors display the same frame 2 or 3 times). If your game is running at 60 fps and your monitor is displaying the game at 72Hz it just means that your card isn't sending a new image to be drawn for 12 of your 72 cycles in that second, it's just redrawing what was already there. Mine's currently running at 100Hz at 1280x1024@32bpp, but that doesn't mean there's anything new from the first image displayed to the second, or that I'll notice unless there is.
The 60fps is the average maximum that most of us can see. ...
The only time I have heard this being a problem in computer games was with quick turns and other high speed events.
This just isn't true (the part about movies and refresh rates is close enough and mostly true). 60fps is simply a point at which most people see most actions as fairly smooth, when the framerate is consistent. The same is true of 30fps, but very few people would be happy to see the game capped there. Putting it close to the refresh rate is the most probable reason for capping it there. Most people can discern a change in frames at significantly higher rates than most computers can produce, but we don't need to display anywhere near the maximum framerates to make a clear, smoothly animated game/movie/etc. The only reason that you may have heard of problems with turns and so forth is simply because these are the types of things, when done at high speeds, that can cause framearates to drop or cause an increase in tearing when v-synch is disabled. If you cap your framerates to a fairly low number, the difference between your lowest framerate and your average framerate is smaller (assuming that you can hit the framerate cap most of the time). When framerates drop by significant amounts, there's a much greater chance that the player will notice, and this will make the game seem slower. This is what causes the perception among some people that 30 or 60 fps is simply not enough. When you're playing with v-synch off and you've got 120 or 100 fps and your framerate drops to 60 fps, it feels and looks like a stutter-fest because you've just cut your framerate in half. If you had been playing at 60 fps the whole time, it wouldn't matter as long as your framearate stayed at 60, because there's no change in the number of frames being rendered and displayed, and there's no loss of information in most situations.
I was wondering when some game maker was going to decided to cap the fps rate and concentrate on other things.
The only real concentration here is to correct a problem that is most easily corrected with a framerate cap. Otherwise, Carmack would have to learn how to make his physics and hit detection independent of the graphics display rate. Some games have managed this, some have not. Most people that actually learn game programming specifically learn that this is something you should do from day one. Trying to hack it in after the engine is built is a pain in the ass, if not nearly impossible, so you get a framerate cap that means you won't have the problems that existed in QuakeWorld, Quake 2, and Quake 3 when people acheived higher framerates.
We are close to the point where the computers we play these games on will all be able to exceed the 60 fps limit. (thank you Mr. Moore)
This is only the case when the computer is relatively new compared to the game. The technology that people like John Carmack develop will continue to push the limits of the hardware for a long time to come. There are still a lot more things that he would like to do with a graphics engine that simply can't be done at 30 fps on any current graphics card, and I'm sure he'd be the first one to give you plenty of minute details on those things, including how they should be implemented on the API and hardware sides.
By not having to draw more frames then 99% of the pop can see, the game can focus on gameplay, and as a side effect, eliminate slowdowns affecting the # of fps outputted, say when everyone in the room gets fragged by someone suiciding with a big grenade.
The gameplay is a combination of different effects, but when it comes to things like physics and AI is a simple matter of leveraging the CPU overhead that was freed up by the move to more powerful (and feature-filled) graphics cards. The more of the graphics processing that gets off-loaded the better, but the number of fps you limit the game to has little effect overall, because the graphics card is the part d
A little over a year ago Carmack stated that the Parhelia would run Doom 3, just not nearly as well as the then-current nVidia and ATI parts.
If I remember correctly, the Parhelia is a significantly newer card than the g400, just as Doom 3 is a significantly newer engine than Quake 3 (although they've been working on the engine for 3 years).
Cards that were putting out 100+ fps in Quake 3 quite easily are being crippled by Doom 3, if they work at all, so I'd say good luck, but I don't think there's a chance.
Perhaps, if the system could handle it consistently. On the other hand, if the system can handle 85 fps only 50% of the time and drops 10-25% of the time to 40fps or less, would you prefer to cap at 60fps and only suffer a 33% hit in the performance 10-25% of the time or keep it at 85 fps and suffer a 50% hit in the performance 10-25% of the time?
It didn't take me long playing online to decide that I was better off with a lower framerate most of the time to minimize the difference between the highest and lowest framerate being displayed.
On the other hand, I would prefer that the game calculated it's physics at a rate independent of the framerate, because the two do not have to be dependant on one another. The frame being rendered should simply be the graphical representation of the game world as it is when the rendering started. The physics should be calculating changes in the game world as needed, regardless of framerates. You don't need to re-calculate the precise trajectory of a bullet every frame to render it's path, nor does the accuracy of the path need to be decided by how fast that path can be rendered.
If I calculate the game state 200 times per second and only display it 60 times per second, or 50 times per second (for a more accurate division of frames vs physics calculations per second), does it matter that the game state was calculated 3 or 4 times without being rendered? No, it just means the rendered state may be more accurate because there is no rounding involved that isn't being performed on other systems. It's not like the Quake games have been pegging mid-to-high-end CPUs since moving to OpenGL renderers, either, so it's not unreasonable to calculate physics more often than is strictly needed.
In a PvP server I would normally think that agreeing to a duel was the only implication of consent.
On the other hand, you could be in a PvP server and kill someone from off-screen (depending on the type of game this could be simply with a knife from behind or from a distance using a spell or a bow) without warning and it would probably be similar to murder.
There's a lot more to playing an RPG PvP than simply running around randomly killing people, and some games have more or less etiquette involved than others. People generally don't like to die when it causes some sort of penalty, so the level of etiquette and formality often comes with the level of severity in the penalties. At the same time, if there's no penalty at all, it becomes more like a free-for-all DM game, or maybe a team-based DM game (though the teams being enforced mostly by the players themselves in many RPGs). In that kind of situation you expect to die at just about any moment.
As an addition, you could make the cap on the per-hour (or per-5-hour, or whatever) payments at 1.5 times the maximum per-month fee, or maybe $3 above the monthly fee, giving people a reason to pay the monthly fee rather than the hourly rate, without royally screwing the hourly players when they have a high-usage month.
Just trying to put in some ideas that might actually make sense to people in places like Sony. If the hourly rate was capped at the monthly rate, I doubt anyone would pay the monthly rate (though some might still pay for the larger blocks of time).
The biggest issue with "unique" events in a MMORPG is that they attract users. Of course, you'll say that's the entire point. The problem is that they attract too many users.
This is pretty simple to counteract, though some players may not like it. All you have to do is make the 'unique' events a little more unique by not having them repeated and by having them only available to players that are already in a certain area at a certain time, and not announcing them. Maybe have the same event happen in multiple areas, but in an hour or two it's all over, so you have a fair limit to how many people actually even find out about it (at least while it's still active) and take part in it. Maybe you'll get a few stragglers and site-seers after the fact, but it's not nearly as bad as having an event in one place that everyone knows is occuring and draws everyone to that area.
Of course, you'd have to spread things out over different times and areas, or make some of them class specific or race specific and spread them out in that manner as well, but it'll make the individual player's experience more unique and allow for some new experiences in the games, maybe some good stories for players to tell, and give players something else to expect and hope for from the game.
If you don't give out absolute super-1337 items with every one of these (but maybe one every once in a while), while still making the rewards worthwhile for the level of effort the player puts out, you won't get massive floods of people towards every one of these events, but will still get people interested in actually participating.
" The ability to kill and maim without consequence"
He isn't saying we should have Restricted PvP. He wants PvP on EVERYONE in the game.
I don't think those two statements are the same by neccessity, whether it's what he meant or not.
Having PvP and non-PvP servers allows PvP players to have that ability, assuming the game allows the 'without consequence' portion. Even Diablo 2 allows it to a certain extent, even though there are very specific conditions to PvP.
Far be it for a lowly coder to question Mr. Carmack, but this seems like a hack.
Don't worry, it doesn't just seem like a hack, it actually is a hack.
Unfortunately, there aren't many people out there in the same league as Carmack, so it may be a while before we see him finally decide to fix this properly, rather than just capping the framerate. Personally, I prefer the capped framerate to nothing at all, but I'd much rather see it fixed properly.
All of that being said, I haven't gone into say the Quake or Q2 code and tried to fix it myself, so I'm just spinning my wheels.
Now's where it goes from being an interesting
demonstration of all the technologies to being a
fabulous game, and that really does all happen at
the end.
Is it just me or does that sound horribly wrong? Actually, we also enjoy good plots, character design, thoughtful level layout, adequate difficulty, intuitive user menus, goodies to unlock...
I think the reference has nothing to do with the technical points, but rather with the point in time of the development of the game. Id typically develops their engines first and then straps a game around them. At this point, they're in exactly the place that you are discussing: plot, character design, level design, difficulty, possibly menus and goodies. The engine is for the most part done (probably still some tweaking for various cards), so the majority of their current focus is on gameplay elements.
if timedemo permits the game to render at higher framerates, what it stresses will be completely determined by the requirements of the game itself. In the Quake games, this was typically the video card.
Some monitors can achieve 100hz, but very few of them. If you run at an FPS higher than the monitor's refresh rate, it doesn't display the extra frames, it just displays tearing artifacts.
It can also happen if you're running at lower fps than the monitor's refresh rate. This is why someone invented v-synch. As long as v-synch's enabled, tearing should be a thing you never see, regardless of your framerate.
Of course, since v-synch limits your framerate to your refresh rate (since it waits for the vertical refresh of the monitor before displaying the frame), it's disabled for benchmarking purposes. If you want to strut around about how cool your new video card is in your system, you disable v-synch. If you want the game to actually look good, you enable it.
Bollocks. read the article. they are not promising a minimum frame rate.
Capping to 60fps doesnt mean that it can somehow magically deal with more things on screen at once
I never said anything about a minimum framerate. Just because you can't read what I typed doesn't mean I'm saying something I did not.
When your framerate is 60 fps, the most your framerate can drop by is 60 fps. If it drops from 60 to 30 then you're not going to have as big a slowdown as you would if it dropped from 100 to 30. In one case your framerate cuts in half (60 to 30) in the other it goes down 2/3rds. There is a very noticable difference between 30 and 100 as compared to 30 and 60. If it only drops to 50 because your card can handle 2 people on the screen reasonably well, there's even less of a problem when you're capped at 60.
Many people tend to play fps without a framerate cap and with v-synch turned off because this is the way it's done in benchmarks. Then they complain that their card isn't fast enough or that 60 fps isn't good enough because it feels very slow when their framerate drops from 150 to 60 in Quake 3. The reality is that v-synch gives you better image quality when cards start to have problems with a scene (or set of scenes) by limiting tearing, and capping your framerate somewhere closer to the minimum framerates you see in the game gives you a better experience because it minimizes drastic changes in framerate.
Of course, no one wants to play a game at 10 fps, so if your card sucks it's still going to suck. However, if you cap your framerate at a level where your framerate will rarely, if ever, be cut in half, you're far less likely to notice any slowdowns at all in the game. Unfortunately, with the way that the Quake games have previously handled their physics, you were screwed in certain situations if you didn't have a significantly high framerate. With this cap, there's a solution to that particular problem, although it is most certainly not the most elegant solution to the problem. Maybe some people will finally understand, in a couple of years when everyone's cards can pump out 60 fps consistantly on Doom 3, that your maximum or average framerate is not nearly as important as your minimum framerate and the difference between that minimum and the average.
Not to mention that per-polygon hit detection also reduces splash damage. Considering the number of people I've seen in almost any Quake-based game that rely heavily on the rocket launcher and the shotgun, I can only say this is a good thing, but that there will be complaints.
He didn't say anything about controlling your refresh rate with the game code, so it's unlikely that'll be an issue, as long as you have your refresh rate set properly.
Look at it this way, with v-synch on if your card can produce a solid 60 fps average or higher, at least it's less likely that you'll actually drop any of the 60 frames at 72hz.
The problem really has nothing to do with how many frames the human eye can see in a second. As was almost implied by the previous reply, it has a lot more to do with your monitor's refresh rate at a given resolution. If your monitor is at 60hz, you're not getting more than 60fps whether your card puts it out or not, because the monitor isn't going to draw them (this is why v-sync is good for games, but is disabled for benchmarks, where the monitor shouldn't have any influence on the test).
;)
Obviously, capping the framerate was the easiest way for id to solve this particular problem, and 60 fps is generally accepted as good enough. Anyone that thinks it isn't probably hasn't played many games capped at a certain framerate (for instance, you can cap your framerate in Half-Life and many other games). Once it's capped at a certain rate, it limits the possibility for severe slow-downs when framerates drop on complicated scenes. This is the real reason that having a card that plays 200 fps on the latest game (besides the obvious issues with previous Quake games) is important, because the higher average values mean higher values for the lowest framerate in a round. If you're playing with an average of 100 fps and the game slows to 60 fps, it's going to feel like it's crawling, but if you're playing at 60 fps and it drops to 50 fps you might have trouble even noticing it. If it never drops, even better
In the end, at least they've done something to address a problem typical with their past engines. I wish they had found a more elegant solution that allowed individuals to choose higher framerates without affecting the gameplay, but something's better than nothing. The only people that will complain are the ones that spend most of their time staring at fps counters while they play or benchmarking their graphics cards with the latest demos. Maybe some people will finally figure out that their games would be more playable if they capped their framerates at a reasonable level rather than trying to buy faster hardware and tweaking their systems all day to acheive a 100fps average that gets slammed to 30 fps every time 5 people are on the screen at once.
Highly unlikely I'll get to play KI now. Did it even have a home console version? If so was it any good?
Super Nintendo.
Best part, imo, was that it had a full tournament mode that allowed you to enter names and then it'd simply tell you who was playing the next round. It worked out great for my friends and I, since we usually played after parties or even just while sitting around having a few (dozen) beers. That and Mario Kart pretty much is all I remember from my first year of college.
Everyone always says that "Yeah Macs are more expensive, but the cost of ownership is lower compared to Microsoft".
And it's made under the assumption that people buy new computers every time Microsoft releases a new operating system.
It's just false for at least some percentage of users, just as it's true for some percentage of Mac users. There are plenty of people still running Windows 98, and there are plenty of people running Mac OS 9. There are some people that buy new Macs as often as upgrades are released, and there are some people that buy new computers as often as Service Packs are released for Windows.
Personally, if I had to buy an OS upgrade every year just to keep it up to date, I think I'd go nuts. If I had to replace the entire computer to make a significant processor and motherboard upgrade I'd lose it.
On the other hand, if I buy a laptop, Apple becomes much more pallatable, because very few companies allow significant hardware upgrades on laptops (I heard Alienware makes a laptop with upgradeable graphics cards, but I'd like to see how that plays out in the long run). It'd also help if they made Tablet-style notebooks, although many people seem to think these are fairly useless.
However using the key that is held on your Mac to encrypt data that is on your iPad would be cool, as then it really can only be read where they key is available (home & work & wherever else).
Or use your iPod to store the key for the data on your computer, since it's much more conceivable that you would want to access the data on your iPod when you're away from your computer than access the data on your computer when your iPod's nowhere nearby (but then what if someone steals your iPod? No real worries about them finding your computer and stealing your data, but can you get to your data? Not likely).
The reality is that it appears they will only need to brute force their way into your account, and then your data is mounted and unencrypted on the fly, thereby making the level of encryption almost totally useless (unless for some reason they don't want to take the easy route).
I've got no problem shelling out for the new features - if I didn't like doing that, I'd use Linux exclusively - but I think an upgrade path for existing users (short of buying a new machine) would be nice. Panther is 100 in the UK; 70 would seem like a reasonable price point for those who paid for 10.2. Still, I know people who still scrabble after cracked copies of XP Pro because they can't afford to buy a copy at 250 RRP; Panther is a bargain by comparison...
I don't think there are many people that have problems with the idea of buying upgrades once in a while, and if you look at it, there is no 'full version' to buy with a Mac OS anyway, since you have to have bought a full version in the past when you bought the hardware. The real problem is that they're releasing paid upgrades about every year (give or take a few weeks/a month or two), and have done so since the release of OS X. Going from 2000 to XP was pushing it for a lot of people on the Windows side, but 98 to XP was more reasonable (though if you went 98 to Me then XP was questionable).
As for XP Pro, well, go with Home and it should be cheaper than Panther, at least at the upgrade price, though there are some situations in which you need Pro over Home (ie dual CPUs). The other alternative is buying an OEM copy of XP Pro when you do a small hardware upgrade.
I think a dozen or so people pointed it out last time the game was mentioned, and the time before that, and no one in the US really cared about the UK developers' particular use of slang to try to put a pun in the title when the literal title is fairly mundane for the story.
That, or maybe I just don't get too excited about Beavis & Butthead style in-jokes. 'huhu he said Ghoulies' 'Yeah, he said he grabbed them too, heh'
What really bothers me is that this is truly "lazy man's crypto." MS could have made a nice GUI for gpg and better PGP support in its XP products, but they deliver this instead? MS is in a position where it can bring crypto to the masses and other goodies. Its a shame really.
I think you're looking at this in a different way from Microsoft (well, that should be obvious). On one hand, you have a set of features that businesses have asked Microsoft to implement for one reason or another. Things like self-destructing documents (not really much different from say cancelling a document from the server-side, except that this will actually get rid of the document to some degree) and preventing people from printing documents, and limiting the forwarding of documents. On the other hand, you have PGP, which has a corporation backing it which could put it's own efforts into developing software that's easy to use with MS' email software, but hasn't done so (or hasn't made it widely known).
Not to mention they can't plug the "analog hole" namely the fact that your monitor is a passive listening device and as such screenshots cannot be blocked. Even if they block it on the OS level a cheap digital camera will do in a pinch.
And the same can be said of PGP. All any of this does is stop people from doing things mindlessly, ie accidentally sending out that confidential internal document to the marketing droids, or to a customer, or to whatever email list you signed yourself up to in order to look busier than you really are when people walk by your desk.
ok, maybe I'm biting on the obvious here, but anyway:
Sensible? User choice? This is Microsoft you are talking about. Remember the company that makes you stick in your orignal CD and reboot if you change your hostname or IP number.
Use an NT based OS if you have to use Windows. You can destroy the CD and only worry about it if you're doing a complete reinstall. Hell, last time I used a 9x-based OS I gave up the extra hard drive space and copied the CD to the hard drive before installing, and installed from the hard drive. Windows handled that perfectly fine.
It's also the company that won't let you store M$ updates locally, so everytime a computer gets adware or virus hosed, you have do download everything all over again but don't give you a choice on which updates you want and stick nasty EULAs in the updates.
Updates are all stored locally, and you can download them from the 'Windows Update Catalog' (go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com, select 'Personalize Windows Update', select the check box for 'Display Windows Update Catalog'). You could also find this feature from most of the IT-centric support sections of Microsoft's site, as it's fairly critical for business support. The local directory where the Windows Update Setup files are usually stored is generally found in the Windows directory, and there's usually a note in that directory letting you know you can delete the contents safely (unless you need those patches again for some reason, of course).
We are talking about one paranoid control freak of a company that has demonstrated it could care less about user choice or reason when those things get in the way of user control. When has Microsoft ever made a peer computing modeled product where the end user's machine was an equal player? If there is a way Bill Gates can charge anyone money for the service, you can bet that his software will force the user to pay. A central server completely out of the user's control offered as a "service" to enable this "feature" is very much a possibility.
And off you go into speculation. In order to even use the feature you pretty much have to setup an Exchange Server (2003 no less, which is a gripe I'm sure has been brought up already). It's a 'central' server only in the sense that it's central to a particular group of users, not to all users. Many businesses already run Exchange Server, and if they're going to upgrade to Office 2003 there's a chance that they'll upgrade to Exchange Server 2003 as well, and possibly Windows Server 2003 (which is needed for many of the other DRM-style features of Office 2003). Those businesses are already running a 'central' server for their email, this is just adding features to it.
So perhaps games that play online where others can actually see your creation they should allow for user created content as well.
Of course they are not going to want that. First time someone adds a topless piece of clothing all hell is going to break loose.
The other problem will be with people having to download all of that custom content, whether it's done from outside the game or inside (especially inside). No matter how much great work has been done on Quake, there is still a large percentage of the players that have never seen any of it.
As for credit-card based stuff, I think Sony has almost got this right. You can always buy game time at most of the stores that sell the games themselves, so as long as the stores accept your chosen method of payment, you're set. Of course, this still relies on the stores to carry the game cards, which is why I said 'almost'.