OpenGL rendering in HL is better than Direct3D rendering, so being 'stuck' with OpenGL is pretty much a non-issue. It's been so long since I dealt with the rendering options in that game that I didn't think about it until I hit submit on the last reply.
With HL, your only real hope is the following set of steps, unless there's a known problem that's been addressed in another way (though this is usually the way to fix problems known and unknown):
-Install the latest version of DirectX (yeah, 9 iirc, even though HL doesn't use it, there may be minor fixes to DX7 somewhere along the way)
-Install the latest drivers for your video card (preferably not 'leaked' drivers, although in some cases leaked drivers fix some problems)
-Make sure you're not overclocking the card or the CPU
-Reinstall HL and the latest HL patch
if it works at that point, it's safe to start screwing with the overclocking again (if you were doing that).
A couple of other notes: once you start playing HL, it's unlikely you'll be able to safely do anything else until you quit. Enable the console (you can find instructions for that on about a thousand different websites), and type quit in the console when you're done. Setup your options before starting the game (ie go through the options menus before you start playing, if you want to adjust something after you've started, your best bet is often to just quit and start the game again). Use an external server browser, such as All Seeing Eye, instead of the internal browser. In other words, do everything you can to avoid using the ESC or ALT+TAB sequences when playing Half-Life, it's not the most stable game in the world in this regard, not even close.
Personally, I won't be buying a new system or even graphics card for any game in the near future, so until I see a fix, no HL2.
Valve has a history of this crap with HL. They had a bug where player skins didn't show up correctly (in fact, not at all, the player would be completely white) on nVidia cards, which only showed up after one specific HL patch. Valve blamed it on nVidia for about a year, and then magically fixed it.
Another, more recent, patch caused the game to crash if you tried to render it on an ATI card, meaning it was completely unplayable on ATI hardware, until they released a patch for the patch a few days later.
They also had to patch HL a couple of times to prevent ATI users from seeing through walls with somewhat normal graphics card settings (not the defaults, but not obscure settings, either).
and FSAA on HL? Not if you want to read the chat...
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I think we do agree a lot and are looking at it differently, but really the only reason I know much of anything about this is because it's something I've spent a lot of time looking into over the last couple of years (especially when I first heard that Valve had licensed MRM from Intel for TF2), both from an end-user perspective and as someone that is trying to start developing games. The technology in hardware develops fast, but the software world moves so quickly that it's hard for anyone to keep up, and I could spend a lot of time reading source material just to understand some of Carmack's.plan files.
I'm not going over the whole thing, but I will give you an idea of where my mind is at. I see polygons going away for the most part. Future, I know, but I'm picturing 3D models being sculpted with curves that are expressed mathmaticaly.
That's really just a matter of getting the tools in the hands of model designers. As it is, the game will treat the model as a series of mathematic expressions, and curves are just another level of math to deal with on the software and hardware fronts (and every curve is usually just broken up into approximations in polygons anyway, even in math).
Instead of coloring 10,000 2D tiles why not have 1 object expressed as a formula that renders the entire object?
This is the way it's already handled by most 3D engines. If you have a 3000 polygon character model, the model was designed as a whole by the artist, and is stored as a whole, and one texture (skin) is applied to the whole model. The formula that renders it, on the other hand, has to break it up into polygons (or it's broken up during compilation and stored as a series of polygons) because the graphics cards handle triangles and polygons (because they're easier to work with).
This would allow it to scale tremendously, and if the output does require polygons (variable by the capabilities of the hardware) a driver or engine update could increase the end result rendered polygons.
This sounds similar to the MRM technology from Intel licensed by Valve and others (the only released game I know uses it is Dark Reign 2). The idea is that you design a model with as many polygons as you want, and then the mesh (the exterior of the model if you will) is reduced in the number of polygons by a mathematical model according to how many polygons are on screen. It only works in one direction (and only ever could), which is to reduce the number of polygons. Increasing the number of polygons requires a human eye. However, if there were unlimited budgets and infinitely patient designers out there, developers could have models that are well beyond the polygon count that any current system could produce, even if it was the only thing on the screen. Of course, this works (once it's implemented) without any changes to the engine or drivers, because it's based on what the machine can handle under that engine. In theory, the perfect model could look like just another Half-Life model today, and almost exactly the same as what the designer put together in 2 years, on the same version of the game with new hardware.
As long as old games are created with something vectorish they should be able to scale upwards quite well. Maybe there will be new features in the engine the old games wont use, but as long as the engine contains improved pieces that are compatible with the objects of the older engine it should work better.
Vectors, unfortunately, don't improve the quality of 3D objects when they're scaled. You could use vectors to resize models and (hopefully, depending on the angles used) preserve the model's quality at different sizes, but it wouldn't change the number of polygons.
For example take a MIDI file. I've played MIDI files on cheap hardware that sounds better than an ATARI 2600, but it still beeps, boops, and sounds electronic. I've played the same MIDI files through really good high end sound cards and pro-audio equipment and it sounds like a real instrument. Maybe thats a bad example, but the input source was the same.
This is the same example that you would find with polygon-based models and any technology that scales them well for the hardware. That MIDI file is only going to sound as good as the source, regardless of how much better your hardware gets. If it was designed on an Atari, the individual instruments may sound better, but it will still be limited by the Atari's capabilities (ie you won't get massive 128-voice sound from the MIDI file if the source had a maximum of 8 simultaneous voices). Or, just like you can play most ster
It's becoming much more common to use 3D engines to make 2D-style games. Off-hand most of the ones I can think of are console games, but Ikaruga is a great example of a very old style of game built on a 3D engine without becoming '3D'. I believe there was at least one version of Asteroids that did this, as well, though it wasn't very successful, iirc. Diablo 2's use of 3D effects is the same way, and over time more and more people will do it, in part simply because the support for building a strictly 2D engine is very limiting (and if you're using DirectX it's gone unless you want to use the old versions).
because the potential rewards for founding a whole new chreode branch has the capacity to exceed the value of mining out existing chreodes.
This can only succeed if a publisher has unusually good instincts.
I think there's also another example in the games industry that shows there really doesn't have to be a lot of risk involved (and it really points to a larger trend). Valve has shown that they can make use of the risks others have taken and make money off of that. TF was the biggest mod for Quake, so they hired TFS (the group that made TF), CS proved the most popular mod for Half-life (after TFC's initial success as the first mod for HL, since it was built to test the capabilities of the SDK by Valve/TFS themselves), so they bought the rights to that mod and worked on it, then packaged and sold it. Even Half-Life itself is an example of this, built on id's engine with people hired from all over the industry that proved themselves on other projects (and they've been hiring people ever since for work on HL2, TF2, and the tools to build their games).
Other developers have done much the same thing, and it's really no different from any other industry. A great deal of the innovation in the FPS world has come from small groups of people that work with the tools FPS developers release for their games to build something innovative with that game's engine. They may not have the art talent, or even the programming talent to build the engine from the ground up, but they had an idea and got it working on an existing platform, and then the smarter developers picked them up, ideas, personnel, and all, and brought in the talent and marketing to make some real money off of it. People would be hard pressed to say that the idea of TF was pushed by the material they started with. CS, on the other hand, was a different take on an existing model, that, for one reason or another, caught a bigger market than it's predecessors.
Then came systems that could actually SCROLL their screens. You had Mario hopping around, you had 9,000 games that required moving right and beating up the bad guys (i.e. Double Dragon, Batman) and you had some zooming space ships. Zelda came along and was different, but before long that was coppied. So now we have scrolling games.
But if you look at it from an engine perspective, there are different requirements to make each one possible, especially with the limitations of the hardware at that time. Just making side-scrollers possible in the first place was a big achievment, and required optimization of routines to add the next line on the screen and remove the previous one (in most cases these were done in blocks instead of individual scan lines, and it was done off screen, so the actual screen buffer was slightly larger than the screen). Zelda used the one-screen-at-a-time approach, but then scrolled the next screen into place when you moved onto it. Then you had the up/down scrollers instead of side-scrollers, and games came along (Metroid-style) that let you move in any of the 4 directions. Most of us that were too young to appreciate the technical difficulties just saw the game content and were sold.
Eventually came true 3D. We are on a convergence. A big convergence. No longer is coding an engine from the ground up for each game a substainable buisness model, or even necessary. Compare Alice to Quake III. I would say they were remarkably different. Alice is a platformer, Quake III is a first person shooter. They both run on the same core engine.
They also have the same core requirements from a game engine, though. On the other hand, RPGs have had more problems with FPS engines (but they're getting there), and though you have racing and flight mods for FPS game engines, the engine usually isn't optimum for those types of games, so you don't see them used in full-blown products. As first-person engines get better there's a stronger possibility of cross-over into genres that have different requirements from their engines, but for now you're only going to see some minor bleed-over into the areas where it can best be done.
Right now there are different 3D engines for different types of games, but there's becoming less of a reason to seperate engines between game types. It wont be long until one engine can be a first person shooter, a platformer, and a racing or flying game. I would venture to say it's already possible, Conkers Bad Fur day for example embraces all of these elements at one part of the game or another.
A true racing or flight sim game is a long ways away from most fps engines, though. There are certain things in those engines that need far less detail than they would get in an fps engine, and that need to be rendered a certain way to give a realistic appearance. Let's not even start about id's physics, either, as that has been a major hurdle for anyone that wanted to include flight or vehicles in anything based on their games. In a racing game you tweak the physics so they feel right with your style of racing game, and those same physics would feel really bad from an fps perspective, at the very least because you're a biped travelling at a significantly lower speed than any of the cars the game was designed around. Similarly, flight sims need to model physics related to flight and the planes they are dealing with. Even a WW1-era flight sim (the simulation, not the era in which it was made) would feel wrong with modern planes in many cases. Of course, eventually we may be able to model 'real-world' physics in a way that doesn't involve cutting corners and making specific design choices for the game being made, but that's still a bit off from now, too (has anyone seen evidence of the Havok engine (HL2's physics engine) being used in racing or flight sims?).
The reason this is percieved is the better 3D engines get, the more games are going to look alike reguardless of what core type it is.
Oh, and a final issue, purely to play Devil's Advocate, I understand Half Life 2 uses DirectX and some might suggest that it is the reason why HL2 apparently is more scalable and achieves more effects more easily across many performance levels.
One thing Valve has never been afraid to do is license whatever they need to get the job done. In HL it was the Quake engine (and they licensed some Q2 code as well, but how much they used has been a long-standing debate). In the years since HL was released, Valve has licensed 2 things of note: - technology from Intel for scaling the polygon count of models based on system capabilities (the technology is called MRM, or multi-resolution mesh) - the Havok physics engine which someone else already linked to in this story's thread (http://www.havok.com/newsletter/0503.html)
Whether the Intel technology is at least partially responsible for HL2's 'scalability' or not I don't know, as the only announcements regarding MRM and Valve were about TF2, which still hasn't been released but was the only announced product Valve was working on at the time of the announcements. Valve may have simply scrapped MRM for an in-house technology, but that seems doubtful.
Could HL2's apparent conquering of Doom 3 at the moment be the defining moment of DirectX's conquering of OpenGL?
I think DirectX and OpenGL will always have back and forth moments, though I doubt OpenGL will ever have the kind of lead it had when GLQuake was released. The process for updates to the core of OpenGL simply takes too long, with a lot of proprietary extensions from all sides, and a lot of pain getting some manufacturers to fully support it (in which Carmack has probably had the most influence of any one man). DirectX, on the other hand, has been updated almost yearly since around DirectX 5, with more input from the card vendors ever year. That means, of course, that DirectX's revisions should be smaller than OpenGL's, but that they come often enough to gain ground fairly quickly and are now pretty much out ahead in terms of gaming graphics.
I think the "it'll be out when it is done" is a dumb way to run a business. A better motto would be "it BETTER be out before there are a dozen games on the market that top what we are making." Because that is EXACTLY what is happeining. At some point they need to freeze the technology, and move toward release.
Valve works on the 'itll be out when its done' model as well, they've just learned a new motto: stfu about it until it's done. Of course, they learned this by having 2 of the biggest vaporware titles this side of DNF: the original Half-life (scrap the whole engine and start over), and Team Fortress 2 (scrap it and ship TFC, scrap the HL engine entirely, they finally just shut up about it).
Nerds being nerds, if they had fired up dual p3s running Quake 3 Test with Voodoo3s, the tech of that time, maybe they would have just played some DM on Q3Test2.bsp on that terrible day, instead of what they really did.
Nah, once they saw some screenshots and the numbers from a GeForce card running the same thing they would've gotten pissed off all over again over buying a V3.
Erm... Tomb Raider... Not shite? Erm... Congratulations. You're one of the three people who liked it.
I don't know a single website or person who saw that movie who thought it was anything other than crap.
I'm simply going by the fact that I know several people who did like the movie, though many (if not most) didn't know it had anything to do with a video game.
As for Resident Evil... Let's see, Res Evil, Tomb Raider, either you're a troll, or wouldn't know a decent movie if it bit you on the ass since BOTH movies were panned by fans of the games (well, in TR's case those who only went to see Lara's tits were probably not disappointed.) Unless you're being sarcastic, in which case you need to work on your sarcasm skills.
I thought the only fans of Tomb Raider were people that would be going to a movie to see Lara's tits in the first place (ok, so that is almost a troll). I seriously can't think of one good movie based on a video game, although those two movies are probably the closest to good movies I can think of (which only goes to show how bad most of the others are). As for my sarcasm skills, I always believed the point of sarcasm was believable delivery.
And Mortal Kombat 3 has been in production hell for sometime now. (At one point the makers were soliciting ideas from fans after MK2 sucked so badly compared to the first one.)
Yeah, because the first one was a great example of a movie made from a video game and deserved 2 sequels, riiight. That's right up there with the idea that the Mortal Kombat games are more realistic than any other fighting games 'because they use motion capture' (as if the rest didnt, MK is only distinguished by fatalities and the fact that most of the moves in the game play like they were playing back a pre-recorded sequence without any connection to the last sequence).
Not to mention that the first Shenmue was a Dreamcast title, and the Dreamcast sold fewer units than the XBox has, meaning good luck finding a lot of people that own the first one and the XBox and were itching for the sequel.
I may go out and buy the sequel eventually (I own an XBox and a Dreamcast and Shenmue), but at the moment I can't really justify it with the number of games I'm still playing on my 4 consoles + GBA.
As for which system has the best games, I'm really having at least as hard a time finding games I want on the PS2 any more as I am on the XBox (and at least with the handful of Sega XBox titles I just haven't picked up yet there are some there).
The big things that sold me on the GBA, besides the SP finally having a light built into it, was the GB Player and the games. When I'm at home I don't have to play on the tiny screen just because I'm hopelessly addicted to Wario Ware or I want to play the great Castlevania and Metroid games available for the GBA, but at the same time if someone else wants to use that TV or I am going on a trip, I can still play the same games.
Of course, that doesn't mean I haven't bought a boatload of GC games that I play quite a bit, either.
On the other hand, if I wanted to play Tony Hawk, Tomb Raider, or Red Faction, I would have already bought those games for my PS1/2 (and could probably pick them up for $5-20 a piece).
While Summer is always slow for games, the numbers they're comparing are for the same period last year. The difference is basically that there were more spring/late spring releases (which would carry sales into the summer as people are looking for games to fill the slow time) that people were willing to shell out money for last year than there are this year.
Of course, as another poster pointed out, there are a good number of big name titles slated for a fall release, so it's quite possible that some people are holding onto their money (or putting it on pre-orders) for those titles instead of spending now.
What we need is more games to movies. And no, I don't mean shite like Tomb Raider,
So you pick one of the few movies anyone could ever point to as a decent movie from a game license, and call it 'shite', and then ask for more movies from game licenses, riight. Come on, where's Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 3? Maybe if we can find more games based on movies to make new movies from we can get more great movies like Resident Evil...
I first heard w00t playing MegaTF (an old CTF mod for Quake 1: has a small but hardcore fanbase to this day) back in the day. We're talking 1997ish. No one there knew where it came from.
I first heard woot long before I played online games, and w00t is just the obvious 1337 spelling. MegaTF also has a small but hardcore base of players that hate it, myself included;p
"pwned" was another one. I saw it a lot not only in MegaTF, but more recently in Weapons Factory and CounterStrike. This one, however, I know the origins of...
In MegaTF, there were a handful of players who were so good it was sickening. "Owned!" was a common taunt when someone capped the flag or spectacularly fragged someone. One of those really good players made a typo one day in a pretty big clan match: "pwned" instead of "owned."
It spread faster than that GODS-BE-DAMNED All Your Base thing. It's getting "cool" again, though, probably due to its "old-school" nature
pwned, owned, 0wn3d, and all it's permutations came from either Quake or Doom-era Deathmatch, before TF came around (which by neccessity pre-dates MegaTF). Of course, it always seemed to hold more popularity in the TF scene (or scenes, since it's also popular in MegaTF and TFC, and Q3F, etc), who knows why. The idea that pwned came out of a match is just classic because of the connotations (I'm so cool I need to let you know I just 'owned' you, but I can't type), though it may have happened accidentally from time to time.
Doubt it...if they try to play on the American servers, nobody will want to play with them if they speak gook. The few who can speak fluent engrish might get along....but most will be ridiculed for pidgeon.
By its very nature as a MMORPG, WoW will require much more player interaction and socialization, and the language barrier will be a big stumbling block for the Koreans who want to play with Americans.
It didn't stop them in Diablo 2, although admittedly you need much less english to get by in that game. The phrases most of them learned that got them by were 'Korea Only' (in game names), 'Give Item' (which eventually some of us figured out was usually closer to 'show me what you got'), and maybe a handful of other phrases. The rest of the time you just got Korean text across your screen throughout the game as they talked back and forth. It's not like it was a small number of Koreans playing on US West, it was 1/3rd or so of the people on the server. It also had nothing to do with them wanting to play with Americans (as noted by the 'Korean Only' games), but rather wanting either to play the game at all (when the Asia server was down) or wanting to continue playing the game with the character(s) they had built up while the Asia server was down.
Of course, then a few players found a little 'bug' in the game that crashed the Korean client, and you saw that in a lot of games for about a month, until Blizzard squashed it.
The e-Reader works with the GBASP as well. It just looks wierd comming out of the bottom of the unit instread of sitting on the top.
How does this work when the e-Reader has a connector on it that lines up on the GBA but is located opposite the game port on the SP? (ie there's a second connector on the e-Reader that connects right above the game port on the GBA, but the mating connector is on the top of the SP, while it's game port is on the bottom)
Well, in Europe, where I live, people have had phones for years, and they do buy the fancy-dan ones with colour screens and cameras and what not.
The cameras are running into a few problems in the US, with a couple of companies banning them from their buildings, and if you do any work in government facilities, the government has made it known that they will not be returning your phone if they confiscate it and find that it has a camera built into it. It does appear that most of the cell phone companies are brining their bottom line phones further up the scale as far as the extra features go, but the polyphonic ring tones are about the only things I see getting around to more and more people (with colour screens behind that).
It's how companies like Nokia make their money. If you just look at the phones most Europeans have, you'll realise that they like spending quite a bit of cash on them.
It's how Nokia would like to make their money, but the reality is that most of their worldwide sales are on the lower model phones. They certainly would make more money if more people would buy the more expensive phones.
The N-Gage seems to be fundamentally a mobile phone. It doesn't need 100s of games, just a few good ones.
Well, it can be looked at either way: it's a big cell phone that plays games roughly equivalent to PSOne games (in a smaller format, of course, the limitations of which I do not know); or it's a small game system that also makes phone calls (and therefore has far more buttons than a game system needs, and has an odd method for changing games).
In a sense, to compare it to the PSP or GBA is false, because those are only gaming machines. I think it will just be an advance on the simple games that phones have now, but with better graphics, gameplay and recognisable characters.
http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/groups/n-gage/cab.asp (thanks to another poster for the link)
The games look like they're mostly ports of other handheld systems' games or ports of home console system games (ie PSOne and N64 games, one or two PS2 titles in there as well). It seems to me that it's more like they can't figure out what exactly they want it to be, but I can't say there's anything there that leads me to want to buy the thing. At least they hit the same price point for the games as the GBA.
You'll be able to develop games and software for it... for free! In Java and C++, no dodgy assembly language required!
When you couple this with Bluetooth connectivity and access to GPRS, dialling voice calls, sending SMS, I fail to see why people aren't excited. The platform is a bedroom developer's dream, and hence there should be a large number of innovative games developed for it - and its potential successors.
Anyone else thinking what I'm thinking here?
I see a new platform for the next generation of virus, cell phones around the world will be getting text messages and data calls that make absolutely no sense, but if they're lucky enough to have an N-Gage or compatible phone they pick up the virus and continue to spread it.
Further, if they're targeting the young new cell owners, success could kill them. Schools already have a dim view of cellphones as it is. If cell gaming in the classroom gets notices, they might outright ban the things from schools. Bad business and bad PR.
When I was in school (not counting college, of course, where they just tell you to turn off your phone or put it on silent) they banned basically all electronic devices. We had to hide our walkman and game boy, nevermind cell phones and pagers (which were the things being hidden in high school). I don't know if that's common throughout the country, but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more common.
Looking at that page I realized one other thing I don't like about cell phone manufacturers: they rape you on the accessories. $70 for a memory card? Well, at least it's a 64MB memory card, but that only begs the question: who needs a 64MB memory card?
The GBA-SP really is the only GBA worth speaking of, though, unless you want to use the e-Reader (which as far as I've been able to tell, only works with the older GBA and the GB Player). That being said, I picked up the older GBA with a game (Super Mario World) and a case for the GBA for $70.
Slashdot Mirror
The vast majority I hear about are Korean or Japanese, so maybe it's just the types of films you pay attention to ;)
Oh, and one other note:
OpenGL rendering in HL is better than Direct3D rendering, so being 'stuck' with OpenGL is pretty much a non-issue. It's been so long since I dealt with the rendering options in that game that I didn't think about it until I hit submit on the last reply.
With HL, your only real hope is the following set of steps, unless there's a known problem that's been addressed in another way (though this is usually the way to fix problems known and unknown):
-Install the latest version of DirectX (yeah, 9 iirc, even though HL doesn't use it, there may be minor fixes to DX7 somewhere along the way)
-Install the latest drivers for your video card (preferably not 'leaked' drivers, although in some cases leaked drivers fix some problems)
-Make sure you're not overclocking the card or the CPU
-Reinstall HL and the latest HL patch
if it works at that point, it's safe to start screwing with the overclocking again (if you were doing that).
A couple of other notes:
once you start playing HL, it's unlikely you'll be able to safely do anything else until you quit. Enable the console (you can find instructions for that on about a thousand different websites), and type quit in the console when you're done. Setup your options before starting the game (ie go through the options menus before you start playing, if you want to adjust something after you've started, your best bet is often to just quit and start the game again). Use an external server browser, such as All Seeing Eye, instead of the internal browser. In other words, do everything you can to avoid using the ESC or ALT+TAB sequences when playing Half-Life, it's not the most stable game in the world in this regard, not even close.
Personally, I won't be buying a new system or even graphics card for any game in the near future, so until I see a fix, no HL2.
Valve has a history of this crap with HL. They had a bug where player skins didn't show up correctly (in fact, not at all, the player would be completely white) on nVidia cards, which only showed up after one specific HL patch. Valve blamed it on nVidia for about a year, and then magically fixed it.
Another, more recent, patch caused the game to crash if you tried to render it on an ATI card, meaning it was completely unplayable on ATI hardware, until they released a patch for the patch a few days later.
They also had to patch HL a couple of times to prevent ATI users from seeing through walls with somewhat normal graphics card settings (not the defaults, but not obscure settings, either).
and FSAA on HL? Not if you want to read the chat...
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I think we do agree a lot and are looking at it differently, but really the only reason I know much of anything about this is because it's something I've spent a lot of time looking into over the last couple of years (especially when I first heard that Valve had licensed MRM from Intel for TF2), both from an end-user perspective and as someone that is trying to start developing games. The technology in hardware develops fast, but the software world moves so quickly that it's hard for anyone to keep up, and I could spend a lot of time reading source material just to understand some of Carmack's .plan files.
I'm not going over the whole thing, but I will give you an idea of where my mind is at. I see polygons going away for the most part. Future, I know, but I'm picturing 3D models being sculpted with curves that are expressed mathmaticaly.
That's really just a matter of getting the tools in the hands of model designers. As it is, the game will treat the model as a series of mathematic expressions, and curves are just another level of math to deal with on the software and hardware fronts (and every curve is usually just broken up into approximations in polygons anyway, even in math).
Instead of coloring 10,000 2D tiles why not have 1 object expressed as a formula that renders the entire object?
This is the way it's already handled by most 3D engines. If you have a 3000 polygon character model, the model was designed as a whole by the artist, and is stored as a whole, and one texture (skin) is applied to the whole model. The formula that renders it, on the other hand, has to break it up into polygons (or it's broken up during compilation and stored as a series of polygons) because the graphics cards handle triangles and polygons (because they're easier to work with).
This would allow it to scale tremendously, and if the output does require polygons (variable by the capabilities of the hardware) a driver or engine update could increase the end result rendered polygons.
This sounds similar to the MRM technology from Intel licensed by Valve and others (the only released game I know uses it is Dark Reign 2). The idea is that you design a model with as many polygons as you want, and then the mesh (the exterior of the model if you will) is reduced in the number of polygons by a mathematical model according to how many polygons are on screen. It only works in one direction (and only ever could), which is to reduce the number of polygons. Increasing the number of polygons requires a human eye. However, if there were unlimited budgets and infinitely patient designers out there, developers could have models that are well beyond the polygon count that any current system could produce, even if it was the only thing on the screen. Of course, this works (once it's implemented) without any changes to the engine or drivers, because it's based on what the machine can handle under that engine. In theory, the perfect model could look like just another Half-Life model today, and almost exactly the same as what the designer put together in 2 years, on the same version of the game with new hardware.
As long as old games are created with something vectorish they should be able to scale upwards quite well. Maybe there will be new features in the engine the old games wont use, but as long as the engine contains improved pieces that are compatible with the objects of the older engine it should work better.
Vectors, unfortunately, don't improve the quality of 3D objects when they're scaled. You could use vectors to resize models and (hopefully, depending on the angles used) preserve the model's quality at different sizes, but it wouldn't change the number of polygons.
For example take a MIDI file. I've played MIDI files on cheap hardware that sounds better than an ATARI 2600, but it still beeps, boops, and sounds electronic. I've played the same MIDI files through really good high end sound cards and pro-audio equipment and it sounds like a real instrument. Maybe thats a bad example, but the input source was the same.
This is the same example that you would find with polygon-based models and any technology that scales them well for the hardware. That MIDI file is only going to sound as good as the source, regardless of how much better your hardware gets. If it was designed on an Atari, the individual instruments may sound better, but it will still be limited by the Atari's capabilities (ie you won't get massive 128-voice sound from the MIDI file if the source had a maximum of 8 simultaneous voices). Or, just like you can play most ster
It's becoming much more common to use 3D engines to make 2D-style games. Off-hand most of the ones I can think of are console games, but Ikaruga is a great example of a very old style of game built on a 3D engine without becoming '3D'. I believe there was at least one version of Asteroids that did this, as well, though it wasn't very successful, iirc. Diablo 2's use of 3D effects is the same way, and over time more and more people will do it, in part simply because the support for building a strictly 2D engine is very limiting (and if you're using DirectX it's gone unless you want to use the old versions).
because the potential rewards for founding a whole new chreode branch has the capacity to exceed the value of mining out existing chreodes.
This can only succeed if a publisher has unusually good instincts.
I think there's also another example in the games industry that shows there really doesn't have to be a lot of risk involved (and it really points to a larger trend). Valve has shown that they can make use of the risks others have taken and make money off of that. TF was the biggest mod for Quake, so they hired TFS (the group that made TF), CS proved the most popular mod for Half-life (after TFC's initial success as the first mod for HL, since it was built to test the capabilities of the SDK by Valve/TFS themselves), so they bought the rights to that mod and worked on it, then packaged and sold it. Even Half-Life itself is an example of this, built on id's engine with people hired from all over the industry that proved themselves on other projects (and they've been hiring people ever since for work on HL2, TF2, and the tools to build their games).
Other developers have done much the same thing, and it's really no different from any other industry. A great deal of the innovation in the FPS world has come from small groups of people that work with the tools FPS developers release for their games to build something innovative with that game's engine. They may not have the art talent, or even the programming talent to build the engine from the ground up, but they had an idea and got it working on an existing platform, and then the smarter developers picked them up, ideas, personnel, and all, and brought in the talent and marketing to make some real money off of it. People would be hard pressed to say that the idea of TF was pushed by the material they started with. CS, on the other hand, was a different take on an existing model, that, for one reason or another, caught a bigger market than it's predecessors.
Then came systems that could actually SCROLL their screens. You had Mario hopping around, you had 9,000 games that required moving right and beating up the bad guys (i.e. Double Dragon, Batman) and you had some zooming space ships. Zelda came along and was different, but before long that was coppied. So now we have scrolling games.
But if you look at it from an engine perspective, there are different requirements to make each one possible, especially with the limitations of the hardware at that time. Just making side-scrollers possible in the first place was a big achievment, and required optimization of routines to add the next line on the screen and remove the previous one (in most cases these were done in blocks instead of individual scan lines, and it was done off screen, so the actual screen buffer was slightly larger than the screen). Zelda used the one-screen-at-a-time approach, but then scrolled the next screen into place when you moved onto it. Then you had the up/down scrollers instead of side-scrollers, and games came along (Metroid-style) that let you move in any of the 4 directions. Most of us that were too young to appreciate the technical difficulties just saw the game content and were sold.
Eventually came true 3D. We are on a convergence. A big convergence. No longer is coding an engine from the ground up for each game a substainable buisness model, or even necessary. Compare Alice to Quake III. I would say they were remarkably different. Alice is a platformer, Quake III is a first person shooter. They both run on the same core engine.
They also have the same core requirements from a game engine, though. On the other hand, RPGs have had more problems with FPS engines (but they're getting there), and though you have racing and flight mods for FPS game engines, the engine usually isn't optimum for those types of games, so you don't see them used in full-blown products. As first-person engines get better there's a stronger possibility of cross-over into genres that have different requirements from their engines, but for now you're only going to see some minor bleed-over into the areas where it can best be done.
Right now there are different 3D engines for different types of games, but there's becoming less of a reason to seperate engines between game types. It wont be long until one engine can be a first person shooter, a platformer, and a racing or flying game. I would venture to say it's already possible, Conkers Bad Fur day for example embraces all of these elements at one part of the game or another.
A true racing or flight sim game is a long ways away from most fps engines, though. There are certain things in those engines that need far less detail than they would get in an fps engine, and that need to be rendered a certain way to give a realistic appearance. Let's not even start about id's physics, either, as that has been a major hurdle for anyone that wanted to include flight or vehicles in anything based on their games. In a racing game you tweak the physics so they feel right with your style of racing game, and those same physics would feel really bad from an fps perspective, at the very least because you're a biped travelling at a significantly lower speed than any of the cars the game was designed around. Similarly, flight sims need to model physics related to flight and the planes they are dealing with. Even a WW1-era flight sim (the simulation, not the era in which it was made) would feel wrong with modern planes in many cases. Of course, eventually we may be able to model 'real-world' physics in a way that doesn't involve cutting corners and making specific design choices for the game being made, but that's still a bit off from now, too (has anyone seen evidence of the Havok engine (HL2's physics engine) being used in racing or flight sims?).
The reason this is percieved is the better 3D engines get, the more games are going to look alike reguardless of what core type it is.
This is not quite true, beca
Oh, and a final issue, purely to play Devil's Advocate, I understand Half Life 2 uses DirectX and some might suggest that it is the reason why HL2 apparently is more scalable and achieves more effects more easily across many performance levels.
One thing Valve has never been afraid to do is license whatever they need to get the job done. In HL it was the Quake engine (and they licensed some Q2 code as well, but how much they used has been a long-standing debate). In the years since HL was released, Valve has licensed 2 things of note:
- technology from Intel for scaling the polygon count of models based on system capabilities (the technology is called MRM, or multi-resolution mesh)
- the Havok physics engine which someone else already linked to in this story's thread (http://www.havok.com/newsletter/0503.html)
Whether the Intel technology is at least partially responsible for HL2's 'scalability' or not I don't know, as the only announcements regarding MRM and Valve were about TF2, which still hasn't been released but was the only announced product Valve was working on at the time of the announcements. Valve may have simply scrapped MRM for an in-house technology, but that seems doubtful.
Could HL2's apparent conquering of Doom 3 at the moment be the defining moment of DirectX's conquering of OpenGL?
I think DirectX and OpenGL will always have back and forth moments, though I doubt OpenGL will ever have the kind of lead it had when GLQuake was released. The process for updates to the core of OpenGL simply takes too long, with a lot of proprietary extensions from all sides, and a lot of pain getting some manufacturers to fully support it (in which Carmack has probably had the most influence of any one man). DirectX, on the other hand, has been updated almost yearly since around DirectX 5, with more input from the card vendors ever year. That means, of course, that DirectX's revisions should be smaller than OpenGL's, but that they come often enough to gain ground fairly quickly and are now pretty much out ahead in terms of gaming graphics.
I think the "it'll be out when it is done" is a dumb way to run a business. A better motto would be "it BETTER be out before there are a dozen games on the market that top what we are making." Because that is EXACTLY what is happeining. At some point they need to freeze the technology, and move toward release.
Valve works on the 'itll be out when its done' model as well, they've just learned a new motto: stfu about it until it's done. Of course, they learned this by having 2 of the biggest vaporware titles this side of DNF: the original Half-life (scrap the whole engine and start over), and Team Fortress 2 (scrap it and ship TFC, scrap the HL engine entirely, they finally just shut up about it).
Nerds being nerds, if they had fired up dual p3s running Quake 3 Test with Voodoo3s, the tech of that time, maybe they would have just played some DM on Q3Test2.bsp on that terrible day, instead of what they really did.
Nah, once they saw some screenshots and the numbers from a GeForce card running the same thing they would've gotten pissed off all over again over buying a V3.
Erm... Tomb Raider... Not shite? Erm... Congratulations. You're one of the three people who liked it.
I don't know a single website or person who saw that movie who thought it was anything other than crap.
I'm simply going by the fact that I know several people who did like the movie, though many (if not most) didn't know it had anything to do with a video game.
As for Resident Evil... Let's see, Res Evil, Tomb Raider, either you're a troll, or wouldn't know a decent movie if it bit you on the ass since BOTH movies were panned by fans of the games (well, in TR's case those who only went to see Lara's tits were probably not disappointed.) Unless you're being sarcastic, in which case you need to work on your sarcasm skills.
I thought the only fans of Tomb Raider were people that would be going to a movie to see Lara's tits in the first place (ok, so that is almost a troll). I seriously can't think of one good movie based on a video game, although those two movies are probably the closest to good movies I can think of (which only goes to show how bad most of the others are). As for my sarcasm skills, I always believed the point of sarcasm was believable delivery.
And Mortal Kombat 3 has been in production hell for sometime now. (At one point the makers were soliciting ideas from fans after MK2 sucked so badly compared to the first one.)
Yeah, because the first one was a great example of a movie made from a video game and deserved 2 sequels, riiight. That's right up there with the idea that the Mortal Kombat games are more realistic than any other fighting games 'because they use motion capture' (as if the rest didnt, MK is only distinguished by fatalities and the fact that most of the moves in the game play like they were playing back a pre-recorded sequence without any connection to the last sequence).
Not to mention that the first Shenmue was a Dreamcast title, and the Dreamcast sold fewer units than the XBox has, meaning good luck finding a lot of people that own the first one and the XBox and were itching for the sequel.
I may go out and buy the sequel eventually (I own an XBox and a Dreamcast and Shenmue), but at the moment I can't really justify it with the number of games I'm still playing on my 4 consoles + GBA.
As for which system has the best games, I'm really having at least as hard a time finding games I want on the PS2 any more as I am on the XBox (and at least with the handful of Sega XBox titles I just haven't picked up yet there are some there).
The big things that sold me on the GBA, besides the SP finally having a light built into it, was the GB Player and the games. When I'm at home I don't have to play on the tiny screen just because I'm hopelessly addicted to Wario Ware or I want to play the great Castlevania and Metroid games available for the GBA, but at the same time if someone else wants to use that TV or I am going on a trip, I can still play the same games.
Of course, that doesn't mean I haven't bought a boatload of GC games that I play quite a bit, either.
On the other hand, if I wanted to play Tony Hawk, Tomb Raider, or Red Faction, I would have already bought those games for my PS1/2 (and could probably pick them up for $5-20 a piece).
While Summer is always slow for games, the numbers they're comparing are for the same period last year. The difference is basically that there were more spring/late spring releases (which would carry sales into the summer as people are looking for games to fill the slow time) that people were willing to shell out money for last year than there are this year.
Of course, as another poster pointed out, there are a good number of big name titles slated for a fall release, so it's quite possible that some people are holding onto their money (or putting it on pre-orders) for those titles instead of spending now.
What we need is more games to movies. And no, I don't mean shite like Tomb Raider,
So you pick one of the few movies anyone could ever point to as a decent movie from a game license, and call it 'shite', and then ask for more movies from game licenses, riight. Come on, where's Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 3? Maybe if we can find more games based on movies to make new movies from we can get more great movies like Resident Evil...
I first heard w00t playing MegaTF (an old CTF mod for Quake 1: has a small but hardcore fanbase to this day) back in the day. We're talking 1997ish. No one there knew where it came from.
;p
I first heard woot long before I played online games, and w00t is just the obvious 1337 spelling. MegaTF also has a small but hardcore base of players that hate it, myself included
"pwned" was another one. I saw it a lot not only in MegaTF, but more recently in Weapons Factory and CounterStrike. This one, however, I know the origins of...
In MegaTF, there were a handful of players who were so good it was sickening. "Owned!" was a common taunt when someone capped the flag or spectacularly fragged someone. One of those really good players made a typo one day in a pretty big clan match: "pwned" instead of "owned."
It spread faster than that GODS-BE-DAMNED All Your Base thing. It's getting "cool" again, though, probably due to its "old-school" nature
pwned, owned, 0wn3d, and all it's permutations came from either Quake or Doom-era Deathmatch, before TF came around (which by neccessity pre-dates MegaTF). Of course, it always seemed to hold more popularity in the TF scene (or scenes, since it's also popular in MegaTF and TFC, and Q3F, etc), who knows why. The idea that pwned came out of a match is just classic because of the connotations (I'm so cool I need to let you know I just 'owned' you, but I can't type), though it may have happened accidentally from time to time.
Doubt it...if they try to play on the American servers, nobody will want to play with them if they speak gook. The few who can speak fluent engrish might get along....but most will be ridiculed for pidgeon.
By its very nature as a MMORPG, WoW will require much more player interaction and socialization, and the language barrier will be a big stumbling block for the Koreans who want to play with Americans.
It didn't stop them in Diablo 2, although admittedly you need much less english to get by in that game. The phrases most of them learned that got them by were 'Korea Only' (in game names), 'Give Item' (which eventually some of us figured out was usually closer to 'show me what you got'), and maybe a handful of other phrases. The rest of the time you just got Korean text across your screen throughout the game as they talked back and forth. It's not like it was a small number of Koreans playing on US West, it was 1/3rd or so of the people on the server. It also had nothing to do with them wanting to play with Americans (as noted by the 'Korean Only' games), but rather wanting either to play the game at all (when the Asia server was down) or wanting to continue playing the game with the character(s) they had built up while the Asia server was down.
Of course, then a few players found a little 'bug' in the game that crashed the Korean client, and you saw that in a lot of games for about a month, until Blizzard squashed it.
The e-Reader works with the GBASP as well. It just looks wierd comming out of the bottom of the unit instread of sitting on the top.
How does this work when the e-Reader has a connector on it that lines up on the GBA but is located opposite the game port on the SP? (ie there's a second connector on the e-Reader that connects right above the game port on the GBA, but the mating connector is on the top of the SP, while it's game port is on the bottom)
Well, in Europe, where I live, people have had phones for years, and they do buy the fancy-dan ones with colour screens and cameras and what not.
p
The cameras are running into a few problems in the US, with a couple of companies banning them from their buildings, and if you do any work in government facilities, the government has made it known that they will not be returning your phone if they confiscate it and find that it has a camera built into it. It does appear that most of the cell phone companies are brining their bottom line phones further up the scale as far as the extra features go, but the polyphonic ring tones are about the only things I see getting around to more and more people (with colour screens behind that).
It's how companies like Nokia make their money. If you just look at the phones most Europeans have, you'll realise that they like spending quite a bit of cash on them.
It's how Nokia would like to make their money, but the reality is that most of their worldwide sales are on the lower model phones. They certainly would make more money if more people would buy the more expensive phones.
The N-Gage seems to be fundamentally a mobile phone. It doesn't need 100s of games, just a few good ones.
Well, it can be looked at either way: it's a big cell phone that plays games roughly equivalent to PSOne games (in a smaller format, of course, the limitations of which I do not know); or it's a small game system that also makes phone calls (and therefore has far more buttons than a game system needs, and has an odd method for changing games).
In a sense, to compare it to the PSP or GBA is false, because those are only gaming machines. I think it will just be an advance on the simple games that phones have now, but with better graphics, gameplay and recognisable characters.
http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/groups/n-gage/cab.as
(thanks to another poster for the link)
The games look like they're mostly ports of other handheld systems' games or ports of home console system games (ie PSOne and N64 games, one or two PS2 titles in there as well). It seems to me that it's more like they can't figure out what exactly they want it to be, but I can't say there's anything there that leads me to want to buy the thing. At least they hit the same price point for the games as the GBA.
You'll be able to develop games and software for it... for free! In Java and C++, no dodgy assembly language required!
When you couple this with Bluetooth connectivity and access to GPRS, dialling voice calls, sending SMS, I fail to see why people aren't excited. The platform is a bedroom developer's dream, and hence there should be a large number of innovative games developed for it - and its potential successors.
Anyone else thinking what I'm thinking here?
I see a new platform for the next generation of virus, cell phones around the world will be getting text messages and data calls that make absolutely no sense, but if they're lucky enough to have an N-Gage or compatible phone they pick up the virus and continue to spread it.
Further, if they're targeting the young new cell owners, success could kill them. Schools already have a dim view of cellphones as it is. If cell gaming in the classroom gets notices, they might outright ban the things from schools. Bad business and bad PR.
When I was in school (not counting college, of course, where they just tell you to turn off your phone or put it on silent) they banned basically all electronic devices. We had to hide our walkman and game boy, nevermind cell phones and pagers (which were the things being hidden in high school). I don't know if that's common throughout the country, but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more common.
Looking at that page I realized one other thing I don't like about cell phone manufacturers:
they rape you on the accessories. $70 for a memory card? Well, at least it's a 64MB memory card, but that only begs the question: who needs a 64MB memory card?
The GBA-SP really is the only GBA worth speaking of, though, unless you want to use the e-Reader (which as far as I've been able to tell, only works with the older GBA and the GB Player). That being said, I picked up the older GBA with a game (Super Mario World) and a case for the GBA for $70.