The article states that they were assessed on two pieces of music both before and after the experiment by a panel of judges.
I'd assume they were known pieces of music. At that point, it'd be quite easy to judge on at least the accuracy of the performance, though they also judged on imagination and communication with the audience (the latter would be pretty hard to judge imo, but the former should be easy if the pieces have some portion in which the student could experiment a bit).
Most long-time students can make at least simple judgments of a musician's skill based on their performance of a couple of pieces that the students are familiar with, although in every case it would be extremely biased by outside influences (the performance would be, not neccessarily the judgment). The idea of the musicians learning to put their mind into a certain state should lead to reducing those outside influences, and therefore a better performance. They won't become better musicians just through this technique, but it should help them become better musicians by making it easier for them to perform, practice, and learn.
Almost anyone that's played an instrument (and perhaps even a singer, though I wouldn't know on that part) has experienced times at which their mind was in the correct state and their performance (even if it was not in front of others) benefitted accordingly. Being able to put your mind in (or even near) that state at will would truly be a great help to any musician.
I think the reason most RTS games have been moving towards PRS-style units is simply because the previous incarnations (mostly due to C&C and Warcraft) had become too much of a get(resources)-build(uber-unit)-send(wave of units) affair. Even with StarCraft there are a couple of units in each race that you can do this with, assuming you can hold out against the early rush. You don't need to pay attention to battle because you're just doing the get-build-send cycle, and once they're sent they either win or lose, but if you can get-build-send some more the backup will finish the job.
Yes, and I usually find that the people that make the distinction the most often are the same people that want to look down their noses at the 'Best Seller' lists and the like. For instance, those that want to crap all over Stephen King's writing.
No, I mean that some people make a distinction in that they think of literature as a higher form of each of those. (I'm not saying they're necessarily right, but just pointing out that there are a lot of people with a rather different idea of what literature is).
heh, I have Soul Blade and Soul Calibur at home, so it's not a major worry to me (and I think I made a mistake up there, because on reflection I'm pretty sure it's a Soul Calibur machine). I usually crank through the fighting games on easy to unlock everything and then turn the difficulty to the top to actually play anyway (yeah, maybe it's a little cheap, but I really don't want to play the game for an hour just trying to unlock the last character because I have to beat the game with every character to do it; some people might enjoy learning every single character in a fighting game, but I prefer to stick with a small number of characters because my memory sucks). I'm still trying to decide which console I want Soul Calibur 2 on, though;)
Something else that got me with some of the arcades in San Diego was just the quality of the machines. Things like buttons that don't work right (stick, or have to be mashed to register a press) and coin slots that also don't work right can get really old when I could better spend my money on a disc and a good arcade stick for my console (of course, some of these games DO take a really long time to go from arcade to console, but many of the arcades take a long time to get the machines for the new games, too).
I concur that LAN team games are harder to organize however, please, consider, if the money was there, physical travel, i.e. in-town LANparties and larger less frequent regional tournaments, would be no more difficult for a team of ten players than it would for any ten individual; players. Ten trips is ten trips.
but, again, the best teams online are not usually groups of people living in the same area. There are occasions where a small number of them are, or where the core of a team is, but in most cases they're spread across the country, or even over the world. I joined a clan who's server was in San Diego (as was I at the time), and found that many of our members were in the area, but that a great deal of our players were not (and we had a lot of members that didn't play much any more, due to policies allowing pretty much lifetime membership unless you really screwed up, and the fact that the clan started with QuakeDM and officially played TFC at the time). Ten trips is ten trips, but try getting 10 members of a team that's spread across the country together. The most members of the clan I belong to that I've met in one place was a little more than half that, and was still less than the total number of local members.
Which brings me to my main point again. There is money being paid to gamers. The people who can make money are professional or "serious" gamers. When these "serious" gamers play head to head, Quake, or RA/OSP/CPM, is more often than not, the game that's played. This is what I seem to know.
Like I said before, the money has to be enough for the number of people playing if it's going to draw teams, and even then it's an issue of bringing people that are familiar with each other together. To date, no tournament has offered the kind of money for a team that they offer to an individual in a 1v1 tournament, and then they bitch about participation rates (even though the game they're bitching about is being played by most of the people in the cheap seats). I know a handful of people that have played in team tournaments, and in none of those cases were they playing with a group that was even half made up of people they always played with online. The only exception to that is the TFC launch, which wasn't a tournament in the first place and was specifically aimed at getting 2 fairly well known TF teams in the building to play the game.
Yes, but that is only you. I've found what gets the top guys is totally about matching skillz. These players are only interested in one thing. Who is the top dog. There are a lot of people interested in that. Just check out quakecon sometime.
I would check it out normally, but that really doesn't interest me. I'd rather match my skills in a team environment. I don't care if I'm a better soldier than everyone else in the world (because I know that I'm not even close to the top 10% of soldiers, since I don't play the class), all I care about is whether or not I can play the supporting offense position I'm usually given in such a way that my team can be better than the opponent's team, which at various times has meant having to be a lighter class than a soldier and taking on 2 or 3 of the top 20 soldiers in the US in each and every run. In my mind that's a bigger accomplishment, especially so long as my teammates held up their roles and the game turned out well, than winning a 1vs1 tournament. I'll take a 40-0 record in the TFC leagues over a 40-0 1v1 record any day, and I'd be willing to bet that a lot of those 1v1 tournament players couldn't handle a mulch_dm tournament against the top 50 or so TFC soldiers (soldier would be the closest class to the average Quake-guy that you can probably find in TFC), with whatever lead time they wished to have.
My point is, is that if you play on a team, it's not just your skill, it's your teammates and the teamwork. In 1v1, it's simply you and me.
Except that there is a larger amount of time spent in 1v1 conflict in a team-based game than in many 1v1 matches (
a bad evening anyway, but that's over, shit happens;p
Tournaments, esp. professional, are where you'll find the top players, which is, from my perspective, exciting.
What I was trying to point out is that while you may find the top 1v1 players in 1v1 tournaments (although it's more than likely just as limited by location as team tournaments), you won't find the top teams in team tournaments, because of the limitations involved in getting a top team to the event together. The 'serious' gaming community is online, compensating for lag, and is much larger in team-based games than in 1v1 (in part because the overall community in team-based games has been larger since TF eclipsed all other forms of Quake). For all anyone knows, the top DM'ers don't even play DM these days, because it's not what interests them and not what most people are playing anyway.
b+W, GU35$ 4wAy, $INc3 J00 O8VioU5ly DON'+ kN0w.
Nobody knows, just another point.
And yes, you don't see, maybe cause you haven't looked?
More like I've done both, and find that the only thing even remotely interesting about 1v1 is the hunt, which loses it's interest once you learn the player's patterns. Learning their most basic patterns takes a couple of minutes, especially when you're not trying to learn multiple players' patterns at once.
So if popularity is such a great guide, the MacDonalds would be a fine dining establishment. I wasn't talking about the most popular games. I was talking about the most talented players. Sheesh.
If you're looking for the best hamburger in the world, you obviously wouldn't find it in McDonald's. However, if you had never had a McDonald's hamburger, you would never really know they didn't make the best hamburgers. That wasn't the point, though, because the comparison doesn't fit. When you're trying to find the most talented FPS players you have to look at everyone in all FPS games. Just because Quake 3 attracts the most 1vs1 players at the moment doesn't mean that it has the talent, just that it's where people choose to compete if they play 1vs1 primarily (in fact, a lot of people play 1vs1 TFC, mostly soldiers, and that was where my reference to mulch_dm came from).
Whatever the reasons, they weren't used as common benchmarks but Quake was, and is.
Again, that's because Carmack is known for tweaking the game for the best video cards available at the time of release, and it's reflected in benchmark scores (plus it has a very simple interface for benchmarking). Half-Life was built to run on lower-end computers, so it's usefulness as a benchmark is limited, but it obviously is going to cater to a wider audience (including a number of people that never played Quake). Whether or not a game is used as a benchmark has no bearing on whether or not the most talented players are in that game.
Get over it already. Not everyone has to look at it your way. The peeps I hang with are quite happy with Q3A and, at this point, there's nothing that offers a better 1v1 experience.
I was over it a long time ago. I'm glad you're happy with Q3A, I have no problems with the game myself. My point was simply that the game is not the most likely place to find the most talented FPS players.
Of course, that's my perspective and really, it doesn't depend upon whether it upsets you
Neither does my perspective depend on whether or not you understand my points. It doesn't even have anything to do with whether or not either of us is actually correct, because that's something that can't be known.
Why don't Americans read their own literature and need Russian to remind them?
Most Americans that bother to read literature also bother to discern between literature and books. The literature you've referenced is probably widely considered (if it's widely considered at all) a book, rather than literature. We were brought up to read Mark Twain as the example of American literature...
That being said, I just don't care for much outside of sci-fi and fantasy, which is probably more the 'nerd' realm of books/literature anyway.
You're wrong lumping terrorists into the "witch, sorcerer, communist, etc" category. While our fear of the latter was purely unsubstantiated, the fear of terrorists is a little different. People were afraid of "witches" because either they hated that particular person anyway, were trying to gain monetray/political ground, or were just bored. We were "afraid" of communists because their ideology threatened ours and the gov needed a scapegoat (better dead than red).
Terrorists used flight sims to practice for 9/11 so we need to ban flight sims. That's what this is about, it's what people were actually saying after 9/11 (though in reference specifically to MS Flight Sim.). People weren't being extremely loud about it, probably because there's no violence in MS Flight Sim (beyond crashing, which normally isn't in the same realm as the standard definition of violence in games) to lump it together with school shootings and every-day violence, but they were talking about it.
Fear is not something that you can get your hands on, or something that you can see coming after you. It doesn't need reasons grounded in reality and logic. The government passed a lot of laws grounded purely in passifying people's fears after 9/11, with no basis in what they are actually permitted to make into law nor reason or logic. Allowing people to continue using 'prevention of terrorism' as their entire explanation is not sufficient.
In the meantime, our borders are still open, and we have no control over passports and visas issued by foreign countries. Smart criminals break as few laws as possible, because a series of crimes can lead to getting caught before completing your plan. You can't stop teaching people to fly airplanes, because you'll undercut the industry. There are legitimate uses, and, most importantly, those legitimate uses are far more common than uses related to terrorism, whether it's a pilot school, a flight sim, or any other video game.
Assuming that there will be console versions, whether FSAA is on or not doesn't really make a difference.
Considering that standard TVs have extremely limited resolutions, it's really one of the only places that it makes sense to have FSAA in the first place. Just seeing Soul Calibur (DreamCast version, FSAA supported) next to Tekken Tag (PS2 version, no FSAA) in the store is all it takes to make this blatantly obvious.
I guess if you're still playing computer games on a 15" monitor it might matter, as well...
I wonder if its a case of driver bugs being used as features.
It's actually just a combination of a few different things.
1) Most developers, if they absolutely must pack textures into larger textures, learn pretty quickly to put a border on their textures so that oversampling of any type will still pick up the right texture (or at least a similar texture), they even tell you to do this in some of the books aimed at teaching 3d game programming to new developers.
2) 'Centroid' antialiasing techniques is a shortcut to do antialiasing without the high overhead of 'true' antialiasing, but it looks so bad (because it averages the values) that it's normally only used on these edge cases (which tend to be problematic in many antialiasing algorithms), where people are unlikely to notice.
3) depending on how antialiasing algorithms are implemented by nVidia, the centroid algorithms may never be available. For instance, if the entire process is done in hardware, it's unlikely that they'd change the hardware unless they felt it would improve their algorithm. Even then, those with older hardware would still not gain the benefit.
For whatever reason, nVidia doesn't use centroid algorithms in their antialiasing, you could either look at this as a quality choice, or as just a simple matter of using a different set of algorithms. More than likely, not using this is part of the reason that nVidia's antialiasing has usually been slower than competitors' antialiasing (first 3dfx and now ATI). That being said, not using this may also result in more accurate antialiasing, even though the edge cases may have more obvious problems when developers don't compensate for it. Chances are that if nVidia utilized a centroid algorithm in a newer driver without specifying the games it should be used for or giving an option to enable/disable it, then those games that actually border their textures would look worse with the centroid algorithm when they previously had no problems.
Centroid antialiasing takes the average of the sampled pixels and applies it to the entire sampled area (or, in most cases, just the edges of the area, as centroid antialiasing does not look good over a large surface, but can smooth out problem cases like the edges of polygons). This will make some situations look better, and some look worse (the example in the white paper I read mentions that as two objects move towards the camera the colour may 'snap' from one to the other, although it's still only in the edge cases that Valve is discussing).
Basically, it's an algorithm used to reduce the memory (and memory bandwidth) requirements of high-sample anti-aliasing techniques (for example 4x FSAA, which at say 1280x1024@32bpp would require ~160MB of RAM and/or slow rendering 16x). Algorithms that work for high accuracy without the slow-downs of full antialiasing will use centroid algorithms in combination with a number of other algorithmic shortcuts which, when combined, can produce nearly the same image, though with more artifacts and problem cases.
the modern games companies would be in great need of 'this sucks' testing department that would test the games after the 'final' gold version came bout, and have the absolute power to say that the product sucks and should not be wasted any money on bringing to the market
The gold version is considered final because it's sent for production. The 'this sucks' testing department has to approve the title before it hits gold. Some companies just don't have decent testing, or bypass it to meet a date.
If you don't believe that all Nintendo games are simple games, why did they make the controller have one main giant button?
The more I use the Nintendo controllers, the more I realize this is just good design, and has nothing to do with whether or not the games are simple (though I'm sure Nintendo has a philosophy of making simple games, or at least games that are simple to learn).
If you keep your thumb over the A button (the giant green one), you can basically roll it to any of the other buttons on the face of the controller (except the start button, which you have to move your hand a bit to get to) with very little movement, and you can discern which button it is by touch (based on it's shape , size, and location relative to the A button).
I suspect the release of the Croft title corresponds to the new movie, though I am not sure.
If that were the case, they would've had at least a couple more weeks to work on the title. There is an older Slashdot story that gives the reasons for it's rushed release: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid =03/06/18/ 067235&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=186&tid=206&tid=212
Already delayed twice, 'Lara Croft: The Angel of Darkness' is slotted for a release on June 20th. But that's looking less likely.. the game has to be in stores by June 30th in order for the company to recognize sales [estimated to be 1.5 to 2.5 million units] for its current financial year."
The game didn't look like it would be ready for release by the 20th, but Eidos needed the sales by the 30th to meet their estimates for the fiscal year. SOSDD
For that matter, ETM was in this neat little spot where the Wal-Mart crowd went and snatched it up en masse as soon as it came out. Wal-Mart of course has no take-back policy on games. You bought it, you keep it (unless it's defective, in which you trade it for a different copy of the same game). So it's impossible to punish the game companies by demanding their money back (or at least not through most retail channels), and most people won't bother anyway.
That's not just Wal-Mart, it's every game retailer in the US, and most of them won't even take a defective product back more than 7 days after the purchase date.
That being said, just go to Wal-Mart with your EtM game and tell them it's defective, regardless of whether you bought it there or not. 2 days later go to another Wal-Mart and return the defective copy you got from the other Wal-Mart, and so on. Maybe they'll get the hint after they get a few dozen defective copies that are just the same as every other copy they sent out (in other words, defective).
Of course, I feel obligated to mention that I haven't come upon any bugs in EtM on the XBox, though it may be simply because I only played it for a few hours.
The same thing happened with Global Operations--It was released unfinished. You see, Global Operations was going to be the counterstrike killer. It had guns modeled more realistically than any FPS, even to this day, it had spectacular visual effects and creative and strategic maps.
The publisher tanked that game. The developers admitted it was unfinished before it was even released, and patches weren't funded (iirc, of course, I don't pay much attention to the 'realistic FPS' genre). Nothing new, just like Eidos pushed the new Tomb Raider out the door to meet their quarter earnings, or like Activision pushed Quake 2 out the door (leading to the current terms where Activision has no say over when an id game is released).
As for GTA3, well, let's just say I'm glad I bought it for the PS2: not only was it basically bug-free, but it came out well over a year earlier.
Vice City is just an expansion pack. It was released 5 months after the original, and contains almost zero original code.
While I agree that it's basically just another game on an almost-the-same engine (minor changes such as indoor areas similar to State of Emergency and motorcycles), Vice City was released almost a year after GTA 3 (Nov. 2001, Oct 2002).
So, my original point remains. Quake III Arena is the top game used by the top gamers to decide who is "personally better". I'm only speaking about who is the best single person at First Person Shooters.
My point is that the best single person at FPS games isn't playing 1vs1 Quake anything. Most people don't bother any more, it's not much of a challenge unless you want to work your way up to the point of playing tournaments.
In my humble opinion, that would be Fatal1ty, who grew up a Quaker. Now, there are team games, but the best teams are not made of the best individual players but those who play best as a team. If you're interested in awesome skillz by an individual player, seek out a 1v1 match between two top Q3 or RA players.
If I was interested in watching a 1337 5k1llz match in 1v1 I'd go sit in a mulch_dm server, but then I'm guessing you don't know what that is.
CS and other games simply don't come close to allowing the same intensity of personal combat.
I fail to see how the personal combat in a 1v1 match can be anywhere near the intensity of bolting into a room and taking on 3 defenders so your light offense can break through. CS I might agree with you on, but I'm biased against it because I outright do not like the game (unlike say Quake 3 or UT).
I'm not against team games, but the relay race is not as glamorous as the marathon or dash (period).
Umm last I checked everyone watched football (which one depends on where you live, now doesn't it? Americans don't watch Soccer and Europeans don't watch American Football). Anyone doing the marathon or the dash are doing it for personal achievment, not fame or glamour, as it's very rare that anyone knows who you are even if you are extremely good at them. A good football or basketball player, though, is known by all real fans. Hit a TFC board sometime and ask who the best medics or soldiers of all time are, and you'll get a lot of names with a lot of reasons (and probably some flames for bringing it up again). Ask who the best HWGuys are and you should get a much smaller number of names and a lot more agreement (because it's a less-played class, though not as much as it used to be).
So, for the pinnacle of mad skillz, I'm sorry, but that still belongs to Id's Quake III Arena and it's mods. We will see if Half-Life, UT or Quake will come out on top next round, but this round's been decided. So sorry, get over it, move along.
Some day you'll look around and realize you're extinct. The place where you see the 'mad skillz' is not of any meaning, it's what games are being played the most. Being the best of the players of a game that has 300 people doesn't mean much next to a game that has 1000, now does it?
PS. I don't remember seeing HL or UT being used as a benchmark standard either for that matter.
UT scales too much with the CPU power to be used for a benchmark, and HL was designed to run on hardware that was old when it was released, never mind 4 years later (ie today).
Lots of people talk about using Direct3D for 2D stuff--getting free hardware transparency and linear transformations as a bonus.
Not to mention most of the other features of current 3D cards, such as lighting, shaders, etc, although the impact of that sort of thing isn't explored much in 2D.
It's an approach that has a lot of aesthetic appeal, because art designer knows exactly what camera angle their art will be viewed at, and can do a better job optimizing for that angle/distance.
It also offers the developer better control of what's displayed on screen at any one time (in other words, there's a definite limit to how much is visible at once in a 2D game, whereas once the user has control of the camera or the camera adjusts to the user's viewpoint, you lose some or all control of how much may be drawn on screen at once). In 3D space you spend a lot of time designing to keep the user from being able to get to a point at which they may see too far, so that the polygon count is within a reasonable range. Of course, with newer engines and more powerful computers this has become less and less an issue, but it still is kept in mind by good level designers.
On the other hand, there's more changed in the transition from pixels to polygons than just an added dimension. Pixels are discrete, blocky, integer-based objects, while polygon meshes exist in approximately continuous space. When playing a pixel-based plaform game, if the game is designed properly, you can tell exactly when the character is standing on the platform and when they've walked one pixel too far. I don't think any polygon-based platform game yet created has had that level of exact precision. A friend of mine even suggested voxels would be a good idea in platform games for this very reason.
Good collision detection and a fixed camera view can fix a lot of the issues with platforms, though. Many of those issues come from camera angles that may distort the viewpoint or may leave the character in the way (in 3rd person views). Maybe it would be too costly to get pixel-level collision detection from polygon-based graphics, but it could be a good excuse to get designers to shy away from their need to force players to utilize pixel-level accuracy in their jumps.
Voxels are good when you have time to do the render, have a lot of space (and more importantly volume) to render, and so on, but with all current 3D cards being optimized for polygon rendering, I don't think you're going to see voxel engines taking off in gaming (though there are a handful of them out there).
You're right, I just tried mine again and found that the connector barely clears the front of the SP. I guess I was either just concerned about forcing it, or not pushing at the right angle.
My point remains, Where is Half_LifeCon? Did the CPL and the WCG use Half-Life for thier tournaments as often as they used Quake? No, they didn't. I never said Half-Life wasn't a big or popular game, It just wasn't the top dog in the professional 1v1 FPS tournament scene.
Half-Life isn't good for 1vs1, that's an accurate statement and easy enough to admit. However, it completely ignores one blatantly obvious fact: 1vs1 accounts for a small niche in the overall multiplayer gaming scene today, whether amongst serious or casual gamers. The only reason the 'professional' scene is still stuck in 1v1 is because of the complexity in organising an event with full teams that are used to working together. Imagine what it took for Valve to get together enough CE and MP members to play TFC in Texas when they first showed it off to the world. Maybe this will help get your imagination going: there weren't a lot of active CE members in Texas at the time, most of the people that played were from Arizona and California (and that's not even close to being a good representation of where most CE members are located), and got there on their own dime. What kind of reward are you going to give to an 8-10 player team that takes the time and money to get themselves to a tournament to make it worth their while to do so? At best even the most well known tournaments get a lot of slapped-together teams of people that were going anyway and found others that would be there as well to arrange the team beforehand.
In fact to this day, the guys I think are the best FPS's all started with an Id engine and spent a majority of thier time playing some variation of Quake.
One of the best TFC soldiers I ever had the pleasure of having on my side had never played an FPS before Half-Life. That being said, most of the best TFC players I'd ever had on my side spent more time in QuakeTF than in TFC. Many of them started with Quake DM (NetQuake I might add), but that doesn't mean that they wanted to play DM forever, especially 1vs1.
Also, please consider that recently even the top UT players got beat by the top Quake III Arena player at the last CPL, and after only sevveral months to switch.
I don't consider that much of a feat, since the UT physics feel a great deal more like Quake 1 physics to me than Quake 3's physics. The primary adjustment is the weapons.
What killed the fighting games IMHO was the more and more complicated control schemes (ki, wargods). Early fighting games were simple to learn, difficult to master which is the correct formula for any game.
What killed them for me was simply that the local arcades did not have Tekken 4 or Soul Calibur 2, and the Tekken/2/3 and Soul Blade/Calibur games were set to 'kill player instantly on 4th round' because any other setting would mean that any good player could beat the game on 1 play in a couple minutes. Even my local laundry has a Soul Blade cabinet that'll kill me on the 4th round, but at least there I'm pretty much a captive audience unless I remembered my GBA.
Arcades can still enjoy a return to glory, it will take a new genre or something radical (a internet connection in every major arcade and tournaments for money? A new VR game that can only be played in arcades?)
I agree, but I think they also need something more than just the games to get people in the doors. Chuck e Cheese used to have decent arcade games, but last time I went there they just had old games and screaming kids (the latter can be ignored if you have a good game to play). The D&B places seem to have it right, but they don't usually have any games I enjoy playing (seems mostly sports titles in there, bleh). A store in San Diego used to have a couple of huge televisions and couches setup where you could play all of the latest consoles and a handful of games, and you would have to pretty much wait in line there even though you could easily pick up the consoles and the games in the same damned store. Maybe charging money would've tapered off the number of people willing to play, but it's hard to say. Even games you can just play at home over an internet connection are more fun with other people right there next to you (though I must admit I don't like playing 2-player games with people I don't know on most arcade cabinets because the cabinets just aren't wide enough most of the time for 2 grown men to stand next to each other without knocking each other around).
I think the arcades flux a lot more than the console/PC market especially in the past 10 years because they really have to innovate to get people to play. Also, I think internet gaming is killing them. 10 years ago, you had to go to an arcade to play other people. Now everyone I know that was into the arcade scene plays at home..(mostly FPS games, some MMO's). The fact is, they still play they just have no reason to go to the arcade anymore except to re-live the glory years.
Not saying you're wrong, but from what I understand each of those problems was a specific idiosyncracy in either the driver or the hardware. Since they were (respectively) for a company's whole line of cards, I think it was an issue with the way they programmed their drivers. Probably nVidia could have fixed the first problem (skins not showing up) with a driver update if Valve did it in an industry-standard sort of way.
I agree to some degree, in that it *could* have been some issue with the video card drivers/hardware. However, it still remains that the problem came from something that Valve did in one patch (it didn't exist in the game that shipped originally, and the first 3 or so patches), and disappeared after Valve did something else in another patch. Most of the time the skins were fine, but occasionally one would not show up and it would remain that way until you restarted the graphics engine (reconnect to the server, restart the game, whatever). The point is simply that even if it was a problem with nVidia's hardware/drivers, they not only caused the problem by changing something in their own software, but also fixed the problem themselves despite saying much earlier that it was something they could not fix. What changes caused the problem in the first place I don't know, because Valve was not forthcoming about what it was, other than 'its a problem with nVidias drivers'. Considering the number of bugs in Half-Life that still exist that have nothing to do with rendering, it's easy to believe it was Valve either not reproducing the problem easily enough to track it down quickly (and pawning it off on nVidia) or just hoping that nVidia would fix a problem that had a possible workaround in the game code.
The problem comes with the fact that stuff comes out "optimized" for a particular vendor's card and it includes non-standard graphics implementation.
I agree, but at the same time Valve's stuff was at least never advertised (or claimed) to be 'optimized' for any particular card. In fact, the first card I used it on was a Voodoo 2 SLI setup, which required the usual crap-tastic miniGL from 3dfx.
Now, I know this may be a case of Valve extending the OpenGL spec cause it didn't do everything they wanted, but you saying that Valve has done this crap before (with no proof that it *was* Valve's fault) doesn't hold any water.
Of course, because we all know that we can just look at the code and say 'see, this is where Valve f*d up'. Valve's had problems with their (currently) only released title on both major card manufacturer's boards (they may have had problems with various 3dfx boards as well, but since I dropped them after the GeForce outperformed my V2SLI setup and didn't really hear much except for complaints that the MiniGL wasn't supported at some point...) which they were able to fix in their software at a later time. That was all I was trying to say, but if I wanted to assign fault, it would certainly go to Valve and/or Sierra (who did most of the testing on HL and all of it's patches, or at least did a lot of testing which delayed the game and several patches) for not finding and correcting those bugs before the release of those patches. Bugs introduced by patches is nothing new, but it's not an enjoyable experience with games, and is a good part of the reason I've bought far more console games than PC games in the last year.
Yeah, after taking the time to read a few more things, it looks like something that wouldn't have an effect on me at all.
That being said, it's just Half-Life, and while that statement may seem counter to what most gamers think of this title, it means that whether or not I buy the title probably has a lot more to do with how bored I am when I walk into a game store than anything else. I don't even use FSAA on any of the games I own, I'd rather just turn the resolution up if my card/CPU can handle it. I tend to tweak for looks whenever my system can handle it, but FSAA is not a 'looks good' feature in my book unless you have a crappy monitor that can't handle a higher resolution (ie console games on a standard TV).
Slashdot Mirror
The article states that they were assessed on two pieces of music both before and after the experiment by a panel of judges.
I'd assume they were known pieces of music. At that point, it'd be quite easy to judge on at least the accuracy of the performance, though they also judged on imagination and communication with the audience (the latter would be pretty hard to judge imo, but the former should be easy if the pieces have some portion in which the student could experiment a bit).
Most long-time students can make at least simple judgments of a musician's skill based on their performance of a couple of pieces that the students are familiar with, although in every case it would be extremely biased by outside influences (the performance would be, not neccessarily the judgment). The idea of the musicians learning to put their mind into a certain state should lead to reducing those outside influences, and therefore a better performance. They won't become better musicians just through this technique, but it should help them become better musicians by making it easier for them to perform, practice, and learn.
Almost anyone that's played an instrument (and perhaps even a singer, though I wouldn't know on that part) has experienced times at which their mind was in the correct state and their performance (even if it was not in front of others) benefitted accordingly. Being able to put your mind in (or even near) that state at will would truly be a great help to any musician.
I think the reason most RTS games have been moving towards PRS-style units is simply because the previous incarnations (mostly due to C&C and Warcraft) had become too much of a get(resources)-build(uber-unit)-send(wave of units) affair. Even with StarCraft there are a couple of units in each race that you can do this with, assuming you can hold out against the early rush. You don't need to pay attention to battle because you're just doing the get-build-send cycle, and once they're sent they either win or lose, but if you can get-build-send some more the backup will finish the job.
Yes, and I usually find that the people that make the distinction the most often are the same people that want to look down their noses at the 'Best Seller' lists and the like. For instance, those that want to crap all over Stephen King's writing.
No, I mean that some people make a distinction in that they think of literature as a higher form of each of those. (I'm not saying they're necessarily right, but just pointing out that there are a lot of people with a rather different idea of what literature is).
heh, I have Soul Blade and Soul Calibur at home, so it's not a major worry to me (and I think I made a mistake up there, because on reflection I'm pretty sure it's a Soul Calibur machine). I usually crank through the fighting games on easy to unlock everything and then turn the difficulty to the top to actually play anyway (yeah, maybe it's a little cheap, but I really don't want to play the game for an hour just trying to unlock the last character because I have to beat the game with every character to do it; some people might enjoy learning every single character in a fighting game, but I prefer to stick with a small number of characters because my memory sucks). I'm still trying to decide which console I want Soul Calibur 2 on, though ;)
Something else that got me with some of the arcades in San Diego was just the quality of the machines. Things like buttons that don't work right (stick, or have to be mashed to register a press) and coin slots that also don't work right can get really old when I could better spend my money on a disc and a good arcade stick for my console (of course, some of these games DO take a really long time to go from arcade to console, but many of the arcades take a long time to get the machines for the new games, too).
I concur that LAN team games are harder to organize however, please, consider, if the money was there, physical travel, i.e. in-town LANparties and larger less frequent regional tournaments, would be no more difficult for a team of ten players than it would for any ten individual; players. Ten trips is ten trips.
but, again, the best teams online are not usually groups of people living in the same area. There are occasions where a small number of them are, or where the core of a team is, but in most cases they're spread across the country, or even over the world. I joined a clan who's server was in San Diego (as was I at the time), and found that many of our members were in the area, but that a great deal of our players were not (and we had a lot of members that didn't play much any more, due to policies allowing pretty much lifetime membership unless you really screwed up, and the fact that the clan started with QuakeDM and officially played TFC at the time). Ten trips is ten trips, but try getting 10 members of a team that's spread across the country together. The most members of the clan I belong to that I've met in one place was a little more than half that, and was still less than the total number of local members.
Which brings me to my main point again. There is money being paid to gamers. The people who can make money are professional or "serious" gamers. When these "serious" gamers play head to head, Quake, or RA/OSP/CPM, is more often than not, the game that's played. This is what I seem to know.
Like I said before, the money has to be enough for the number of people playing if it's going to draw teams, and even then it's an issue of bringing people that are familiar with each other together. To date, no tournament has offered the kind of money for a team that they offer to an individual in a 1v1 tournament, and then they bitch about participation rates (even though the game they're bitching about is being played by most of the people in the cheap seats). I know a handful of people that have played in team tournaments, and in none of those cases were they playing with a group that was even half made up of people they always played with online. The only exception to that is the TFC launch, which wasn't a tournament in the first place and was specifically aimed at getting 2 fairly well known TF teams in the building to play the game.
Yes, but that is only you. I've found what gets the top guys is totally about matching skillz. These players are only interested in one thing. Who is the top dog. There are a lot of people interested in that. Just check out quakecon sometime.
I would check it out normally, but that really doesn't interest me. I'd rather match my skills in a team environment. I don't care if I'm a better soldier than everyone else in the world (because I know that I'm not even close to the top 10% of soldiers, since I don't play the class), all I care about is whether or not I can play the supporting offense position I'm usually given in such a way that my team can be better than the opponent's team, which at various times has meant having to be a lighter class than a soldier and taking on 2 or 3 of the top 20 soldiers in the US in each and every run. In my mind that's a bigger accomplishment, especially so long as my teammates held up their roles and the game turned out well, than winning a 1vs1 tournament. I'll take a 40-0 record in the TFC leagues over a 40-0 1v1 record any day, and I'd be willing to bet that a lot of those 1v1 tournament players couldn't handle a mulch_dm tournament against the top 50 or so TFC soldiers (soldier would be the closest class to the average Quake-guy that you can probably find in TFC), with whatever lead time they wished to have.
My point is, is that if you play on a team, it's not just your skill, it's your teammates and the teamwork. In 1v1, it's simply you and me.
Except that there is a larger amount of time spent in 1v1 conflict in a team-based game than in many 1v1 matches (
Having a bad day, eh.
;p
a bad evening anyway, but that's over, shit happens
Tournaments, esp. professional, are where you'll find the top players, which is, from my perspective, exciting.
What I was trying to point out is that while you may find the top 1v1 players in 1v1 tournaments (although it's more than likely just as limited by location as team tournaments), you won't find the top teams in team tournaments, because of the limitations involved in getting a top team to the event together. The 'serious' gaming community is online, compensating for lag, and is much larger in team-based games than in 1v1 (in part because the overall community in team-based games has been larger since TF eclipsed all other forms of Quake). For all anyone knows, the top DM'ers don't even play DM these days, because it's not what interests them and not what most people are playing anyway.
b+W, GU35$ 4wAy, $INc3 J00 O8VioU5ly DON'+ kN0w.
Nobody knows, just another point.
And yes, you don't see, maybe cause you haven't looked?
More like I've done both, and find that the only thing even remotely interesting about 1v1 is the hunt, which loses it's interest once you learn the player's patterns. Learning their most basic patterns takes a couple of minutes, especially when you're not trying to learn multiple players' patterns at once.
So if popularity is such a great guide, the MacDonalds would be a fine dining establishment. I wasn't talking about the most popular games. I was talking about the most talented players. Sheesh.
If you're looking for the best hamburger in the world, you obviously wouldn't find it in McDonald's. However, if you had never had a McDonald's hamburger, you would never really know they didn't make the best hamburgers. That wasn't the point, though, because the comparison doesn't fit. When you're trying to find the most talented FPS players you have to look at everyone in all FPS games. Just because Quake 3 attracts the most 1vs1 players at the moment doesn't mean that it has the talent, just that it's where people choose to compete if they play 1vs1 primarily (in fact, a lot of people play 1vs1 TFC, mostly soldiers, and that was where my reference to mulch_dm came from).
Whatever the reasons, they weren't used as common benchmarks but Quake was, and is.
Again, that's because Carmack is known for tweaking the game for the best video cards available at the time of release, and it's reflected in benchmark scores (plus it has a very simple interface for benchmarking). Half-Life was built to run on lower-end computers, so it's usefulness as a benchmark is limited, but it obviously is going to cater to a wider audience (including a number of people that never played Quake). Whether or not a game is used as a benchmark has no bearing on whether or not the most talented players are in that game.
Get over it already. Not everyone has to look at it your way. The peeps I hang with are quite happy with Q3A and, at this point, there's nothing that offers a better 1v1 experience.
I was over it a long time ago. I'm glad you're happy with Q3A, I have no problems with the game myself. My point was simply that the game is not the most likely place to find the most talented FPS players.
Of course, that's my perspective and really, it doesn't depend upon whether it upsets you
Neither does my perspective depend on whether or not you understand my points. It doesn't even have anything to do with whether or not either of us is actually correct, because that's something that can't be known.
Why don't Americans read their own literature and
need Russian to remind them?
Most Americans that bother to read literature also bother to discern between literature and books. The literature you've referenced is probably widely considered (if it's widely considered at all) a book, rather than literature. We were brought up to read Mark Twain as the example of American literature...
That being said, I just don't care for much outside of sci-fi and fantasy, which is probably more the 'nerd' realm of books/literature anyway.
You're wrong lumping terrorists into the "witch, sorcerer, communist, etc" category. While our fear of the latter was purely unsubstantiated, the fear of terrorists is a little different. People were afraid of "witches" because either they hated that particular person anyway, were trying to gain monetray/political ground, or were just bored. We were "afraid" of communists because their ideology threatened ours and the gov needed a scapegoat (better dead than red).
Terrorists used flight sims to practice for 9/11 so we need to ban flight sims. That's what this is about, it's what people were actually saying after 9/11 (though in reference specifically to MS Flight Sim.). People weren't being extremely loud about it, probably because there's no violence in MS Flight Sim (beyond crashing, which normally isn't in the same realm as the standard definition of violence in games) to lump it together with school shootings and every-day violence, but they were talking about it.
Fear is not something that you can get your hands on, or something that you can see coming after you. It doesn't need reasons grounded in reality and logic. The government passed a lot of laws grounded purely in passifying people's fears after 9/11, with no basis in what they are actually permitted to make into law nor reason or logic. Allowing people to continue using 'prevention of terrorism' as their entire explanation is not sufficient.
In the meantime, our borders are still open, and we have no control over passports and visas issued by foreign countries. Smart criminals break as few laws as possible, because a series of crimes can lead to getting caught before completing your plan. You can't stop teaching people to fly airplanes, because you'll undercut the industry. There are legitimate uses, and, most importantly, those legitimate uses are far more common than uses related to terrorism, whether it's a pilot school, a flight sim, or any other video game.
Assuming that there will be console versions, whether FSAA is on or not doesn't really make a difference.
Considering that standard TVs have extremely limited resolutions, it's really one of the only places that it makes sense to have FSAA in the first place. Just seeing Soul Calibur (DreamCast version, FSAA supported) next to Tekken Tag (PS2 version, no FSAA) in the store is all it takes to make this blatantly obvious.
I guess if you're still playing computer games on a 15" monitor it might matter, as well...
I wonder if its a case of driver bugs being used as features.
It's actually just a combination of a few different things.
1) Most developers, if they absolutely must pack textures into larger textures, learn pretty quickly to put a border on their textures so that oversampling of any type will still pick up the right texture (or at least a similar texture), they even tell you to do this in some of the books aimed at teaching 3d game programming to new developers.
2) 'Centroid' antialiasing techniques is a shortcut to do antialiasing without the high overhead of 'true' antialiasing, but it looks so bad (because it averages the values) that it's normally only used on these edge cases (which tend to be problematic in many antialiasing algorithms), where people are unlikely to notice.
3) depending on how antialiasing algorithms are implemented by nVidia, the centroid algorithms may never be available. For instance, if the entire process is done in hardware, it's unlikely that they'd change the hardware unless they felt it would improve their algorithm. Even then, those with older hardware would still not gain the benefit.
For whatever reason, nVidia doesn't use centroid algorithms in their antialiasing, you could either look at this as a quality choice, or as just a simple matter of using a different set of algorithms. More than likely, not using this is part of the reason that nVidia's antialiasing has usually been slower than competitors' antialiasing (first 3dfx and now ATI). That being said, not using this may also result in more accurate antialiasing, even though the edge cases may have more obvious problems when developers don't compensate for it. Chances are that if nVidia utilized a centroid algorithm in a newer driver without specifying the games it should be used for or giving an option to enable/disable it, then those games that actually border their textures would look worse with the centroid algorithm when they previously had no problems.
Centroid antialiasing takes the average of the sampled pixels and applies it to the entire sampled area (or, in most cases, just the edges of the area, as centroid antialiasing does not look good over a large surface, but can smooth out problem cases like the edges of polygons). This will make some situations look better, and some look worse (the example in the white paper I read mentions that as two objects move towards the camera the colour may 'snap' from one to the other, although it's still only in the edge cases that Valve is discussing).
Basically, it's an algorithm used to reduce the memory (and memory bandwidth) requirements of high-sample anti-aliasing techniques (for example 4x FSAA, which at say 1280x1024@32bpp would require ~160MB of RAM and/or slow rendering 16x). Algorithms that work for high accuracy without the slow-downs of full antialiasing will use centroid algorithms in combination with a number of other algorithmic shortcuts which, when combined, can produce nearly the same image, though with more artifacts and problem cases.
the modern games companies would be in great need of 'this sucks' testing department that would test the games after the 'final' gold version came bout, and have the absolute power to say that the product sucks and should not be wasted any money on bringing to the market
The gold version is considered final because it's sent for production. The 'this sucks' testing department has to approve the title before it hits gold. Some companies just don't have decent testing, or bypass it to meet a date.
If you don't believe that all Nintendo games are simple games, why did they make the controller have one main giant button?
The more I use the Nintendo controllers, the more I realize this is just good design, and has nothing to do with whether or not the games are simple (though I'm sure Nintendo has a philosophy of making simple games, or at least games that are simple to learn).
If you keep your thumb over the A button (the giant green one), you can basically roll it to any of the other buttons on the face of the controller (except the start button, which you have to move your hand a bit to get to) with very little movement, and you can discern which button it is by touch (based on it's shape , size, and location relative to the A button).
I suspect the release of the Croft title corresponds to the new movie, though I am not sure.
d =03/06/18/ 067235&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=186&tid=206&tid=212
If that were the case, they would've had at least a couple more weeks to work on the title. There is an older Slashdot story that gives the reasons for it's rushed release:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?si
Already delayed twice, 'Lara Croft: The Angel of Darkness' is slotted for a release on June 20th. But that's looking less likely.. the game has to be in stores by June 30th in order for the company to recognize sales [estimated to be 1.5 to 2.5 million units] for its current financial year."
The game didn't look like it would be ready for release by the 20th, but Eidos needed the sales by the 30th to meet their estimates for the fiscal year. SOSDD
For that matter, ETM was in this neat little spot where the Wal-Mart crowd went and snatched it up en masse as soon as it came out. Wal-Mart of course has no take-back policy on games. You bought it, you keep it (unless it's defective, in which you trade it for a different copy of the same game). So it's impossible to punish the game companies by demanding their money back (or at least not through most retail channels), and most people won't bother anyway.
That's not just Wal-Mart, it's every game retailer in the US, and most of them won't even take a defective product back more than 7 days after the purchase date.
That being said, just go to Wal-Mart with your EtM game and tell them it's defective, regardless of whether you bought it there or not. 2 days later go to another Wal-Mart and return the defective copy you got from the other Wal-Mart, and so on. Maybe they'll get the hint after they get a few dozen defective copies that are just the same as every other copy they sent out (in other words, defective).
Of course, I feel obligated to mention that I haven't come upon any bugs in EtM on the XBox, though it may be simply because I only played it for a few hours.
The same thing happened with Global Operations--It was released unfinished. You see, Global Operations was going to be the counterstrike killer. It had guns modeled more realistically than any FPS, even to this day, it had spectacular visual effects and creative and strategic maps.
The publisher tanked that game. The developers admitted it was unfinished before it was even released, and patches weren't funded (iirc, of course, I don't pay much attention to the 'realistic FPS' genre). Nothing new, just like Eidos pushed the new Tomb Raider out the door to meet their quarter earnings, or like Activision pushed Quake 2 out the door (leading to the current terms where Activision has no say over when an id game is released).
As for GTA3, well, let's just say I'm glad I bought it for the PS2: not only was it basically bug-free, but it came out well over a year earlier.
Vice City is just an expansion pack. It was released 5 months after the original, and contains almost zero original code.
While I agree that it's basically just another game on an almost-the-same engine (minor changes such as indoor areas similar to State of Emergency and motorcycles), Vice City was released almost a year after GTA 3 (Nov. 2001, Oct 2002).
So, my original point remains. Quake III Arena is the top game used by the top gamers to decide who is "personally better". I'm only speaking about who is the best single person at First Person Shooters.
My point is that the best single person at FPS games isn't playing 1vs1 Quake anything. Most people don't bother any more, it's not much of a challenge unless you want to work your way up to the point of playing tournaments.
In my humble opinion, that would be Fatal1ty, who grew up a Quaker. Now, there are team games, but the best teams are not made of the best individual players but those who play best as a team. If you're interested in awesome skillz by an individual player, seek out a 1v1 match between two top Q3 or RA players.
If I was interested in watching a 1337 5k1llz match in 1v1 I'd go sit in a mulch_dm server, but then I'm guessing you don't know what that is.
CS and other games simply don't come close to allowing the same intensity of personal combat.
I fail to see how the personal combat in a 1v1 match can be anywhere near the intensity of bolting into a room and taking on 3 defenders so your light offense can break through. CS I might agree with you on, but I'm biased against it because I outright do not like the game (unlike say Quake 3 or UT).
I'm not against team games, but the relay race is not as glamorous as the marathon or dash (period).
Umm last I checked everyone watched football (which one depends on where you live, now doesn't it? Americans don't watch Soccer and Europeans don't watch American Football). Anyone doing the marathon or the dash are doing it for personal achievment, not fame or glamour, as it's very rare that anyone knows who you are even if you are extremely good at them. A good football or basketball player, though, is known by all real fans. Hit a TFC board sometime and ask who the best medics or soldiers of all time are, and you'll get a lot of names with a lot of reasons (and probably some flames for bringing it up again). Ask who the best HWGuys are and you should get a much smaller number of names and a lot more agreement (because it's a less-played class, though not as much as it used to be).
So, for the pinnacle of mad skillz, I'm sorry, but that still belongs to Id's Quake III Arena and it's mods. We will see if Half-Life, UT or Quake will come out on top next round, but this round's been decided. So sorry, get over it, move along.
Some day you'll look around and realize you're extinct. The place where you see the 'mad skillz' is not of any meaning, it's what games are being played the most. Being the best of the players of a game that has 300 people doesn't mean much next to a game that has 1000, now does it?
PS. I don't remember seeing HL or UT being used as a benchmark standard either for that matter.
UT scales too much with the CPU power to be used for a benchmark, and HL was designed to run on hardware that was old when it was released, never mind 4 years later (ie today).
Lots of people talk about using Direct3D for 2D stuff--getting free hardware transparency and linear transformations as a bonus.
Not to mention most of the other features of current 3D cards, such as lighting, shaders, etc, although the impact of that sort of thing isn't explored much in 2D.
It's an approach that has a lot of aesthetic appeal, because art designer knows exactly what camera angle their art will be viewed at, and can do a better job optimizing for that angle/distance.
It also offers the developer better control of what's displayed on screen at any one time (in other words, there's a definite limit to how much is visible at once in a 2D game, whereas once the user has control of the camera or the camera adjusts to the user's viewpoint, you lose some or all control of how much may be drawn on screen at once). In 3D space you spend a lot of time designing to keep the user from being able to get to a point at which they may see too far, so that the polygon count is within a reasonable range. Of course, with newer engines and more powerful computers this has become less and less an issue, but it still is kept in mind by good level designers.
On the other hand, there's more changed in the transition from pixels to polygons than just an added dimension. Pixels are discrete, blocky, integer-based objects, while polygon meshes exist in approximately continuous space. When playing a pixel-based plaform game, if the game is designed properly, you can tell exactly when the character is standing on the platform and when they've walked one pixel too far. I don't think any polygon-based platform game yet created has had that level of exact precision. A friend of mine even suggested voxels would be a good idea in platform games for this very reason.
Good collision detection and a fixed camera view can fix a lot of the issues with platforms, though. Many of those issues come from camera angles that may distort the viewpoint or may leave the character in the way (in 3rd person views). Maybe it would be too costly to get pixel-level collision detection from polygon-based graphics, but it could be a good excuse to get designers to shy away from their need to force players to utilize pixel-level accuracy in their jumps.
Voxels are good when you have time to do the render, have a lot of space (and more importantly volume) to render, and so on, but with all current 3D cards being optimized for polygon rendering, I don't think you're going to see voxel engines taking off in gaming (though there are a handful of them out there).
You're right, I just tried mine again and found that the connector barely clears the front of the SP. I guess I was either just concerned about forcing it, or not pushing at the right angle.
My point remains, Where is Half_LifeCon? Did the CPL and the WCG use Half-Life for thier tournaments as often as they used Quake? No, they didn't. I never said Half-Life wasn't a big or popular game, It just wasn't the top dog in the professional 1v1 FPS tournament scene.
Half-Life isn't good for 1vs1, that's an accurate statement and easy enough to admit. However, it completely ignores one blatantly obvious fact: 1vs1 accounts for a small niche in the overall multiplayer gaming scene today, whether amongst serious or casual gamers. The only reason the 'professional' scene is still stuck in 1v1 is because of the complexity in organising an event with full teams that are used to working together. Imagine what it took for Valve to get together enough CE and MP members to play TFC in Texas when they first showed it off to the world. Maybe this will help get your imagination going: there weren't a lot of active CE members in Texas at the time, most of the people that played were from Arizona and California (and that's not even close to being a good representation of where most CE members are located), and got there on their own dime. What kind of reward are you going to give to an 8-10 player team that takes the time and money to get themselves to a tournament to make it worth their while to do so? At best even the most well known tournaments get a lot of slapped-together teams of people that were going anyway and found others that would be there as well to arrange the team beforehand.
In fact to this day, the guys I think are the best FPS's all started with an Id engine and spent a majority of thier time playing some variation of Quake.
One of the best TFC soldiers I ever had the pleasure of having on my side had never played an FPS before Half-Life. That being said, most of the best TFC players I'd ever had on my side spent more time in QuakeTF than in TFC. Many of them started with Quake DM (NetQuake I might add), but that doesn't mean that they wanted to play DM forever, especially 1vs1.
Also, please consider that recently even the top UT players got beat by the top Quake III Arena player at the last CPL, and after only sevveral months to switch.
I don't consider that much of a feat, since the UT physics feel a great deal more like Quake 1 physics to me than Quake 3's physics. The primary adjustment is the weapons.
What killed the fighting games IMHO was the more and more complicated control schemes (ki, wargods). Early fighting games were simple to learn, difficult to master which is the correct formula for any game.
What killed them for me was simply that the local arcades did not have Tekken 4 or Soul Calibur 2, and the Tekken/2/3 and Soul Blade/Calibur games were set to 'kill player instantly on 4th round' because any other setting would mean that any good player could beat the game on 1 play in a couple minutes. Even my local laundry has a Soul Blade cabinet that'll kill me on the 4th round, but at least there I'm pretty much a captive audience unless I remembered my GBA.
Arcades can still enjoy a return to glory, it will take a new genre or something radical (a internet connection in every major arcade and tournaments for money? A new VR game that can only be played in arcades?)
I agree, but I think they also need something more than just the games to get people in the doors. Chuck e Cheese used to have decent arcade games, but last time I went there they just had old games and screaming kids (the latter can be ignored if you have a good game to play). The D&B places seem to have it right, but they don't usually have any games I enjoy playing (seems mostly sports titles in there, bleh). A store in San Diego used to have a couple of huge televisions and couches setup where you could play all of the latest consoles and a handful of games, and you would have to pretty much wait in line there even though you could easily pick up the consoles and the games in the same damned store. Maybe charging money would've tapered off the number of people willing to play, but it's hard to say. Even games you can just play at home over an internet connection are more fun with other people right there next to you (though I must admit I don't like playing 2-player games with people I don't know on most arcade cabinets because the cabinets just aren't wide enough most of the time for 2 grown men to stand next to each other without knocking each other around).
I think the arcades flux a lot more than the console/PC market especially in the past 10 years because they really have to innovate to get people to play. Also, I think internet gaming is killing them. 10 years ago, you had to go to an arcade to play other people. Now everyone I know that was into the arcade scene plays at home..(mostly FPS games, some MMO's). The fact is, they still play they just have no reason to go to the arcade anymore except to re-live the glory years.
Not saying you're wrong, but from what I understand each of those problems was a specific idiosyncracy in either the driver or the hardware. Since they were (respectively) for a company's whole line of cards, I think it was an issue with the way they programmed their drivers. Probably nVidia could have fixed the first problem (skins not showing up) with a driver update if Valve did it in an industry-standard sort of way.
I agree to some degree, in that it *could* have been some issue with the video card drivers/hardware. However, it still remains that the problem came from something that Valve did in one patch (it didn't exist in the game that shipped originally, and the first 3 or so patches), and disappeared after Valve did something else in another patch. Most of the time the skins were fine, but occasionally one would not show up and it would remain that way until you restarted the graphics engine (reconnect to the server, restart the game, whatever). The point is simply that even if it was a problem with nVidia's hardware/drivers, they not only caused the problem by changing something in their own software, but also fixed the problem themselves despite saying much earlier that it was something they could not fix. What changes caused the problem in the first place I don't know, because Valve was not forthcoming about what it was, other than 'its a problem with nVidias drivers'. Considering the number of bugs in Half-Life that still exist that have nothing to do with rendering, it's easy to believe it was Valve either not reproducing the problem easily enough to track it down quickly (and pawning it off on nVidia) or just hoping that nVidia would fix a problem that had a possible workaround in the game code.
The problem comes with the fact that stuff comes out "optimized" for a particular vendor's card and it includes non-standard graphics implementation.
I agree, but at the same time Valve's stuff was at least never advertised (or claimed) to be 'optimized' for any particular card. In fact, the first card I used it on was a Voodoo 2 SLI setup, which required the usual crap-tastic miniGL from 3dfx.
Now, I know this may be a case of Valve extending the OpenGL spec cause it didn't do everything they wanted, but you saying that Valve has done this crap before (with no proof that it *was* Valve's fault) doesn't hold any water.
Of course, because we all know that we can just look at the code and say 'see, this is where Valve f*d up'. Valve's had problems with their (currently) only released title on both major card manufacturer's boards (they may have had problems with various 3dfx boards as well, but since I dropped them after the GeForce outperformed my V2SLI setup and didn't really hear much except for complaints that the MiniGL wasn't supported at some point...) which they were able to fix in their software at a later time. That was all I was trying to say, but if I wanted to assign fault, it would certainly go to Valve and/or Sierra (who did most of the testing on HL and all of it's patches, or at least did a lot of testing which delayed the game and several patches) for not finding and correcting those bugs before the release of those patches. Bugs introduced by patches is nothing new, but it's not an enjoyable experience with games, and is a good part of the reason I've bought far more console games than PC games in the last year.
Yeah, after taking the time to read a few more things, it looks like something that wouldn't have an effect on me at all.
That being said, it's just Half-Life, and while that statement may seem counter to what most gamers think of this title, it means that whether or not I buy the title probably has a lot more to do with how bored I am when I walk into a game store than anything else. I don't even use FSAA on any of the games I own, I'd rather just turn the resolution up if my card/CPU can handle it. I tend to tweak for looks whenever my system can handle it, but FSAA is not a 'looks good' feature in my book unless you have a crappy monitor that can't handle a higher resolution (ie console games on a standard TV).