Either this article is old or these PC World people don't use current material for their stories; Firefox RC3 has been out for a couple weeks already...
It was okay with me in Project Gotham Racing when there were ads on the screens in Times Square, because that fit the setting. But when I was playing the second level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory the other day, in-game advertising just pissed me off.
The level is a cargo ship controlled by terrorists in the middle of the ocean, and it's a dark and rainy night. Quite atmospheric. And right there at the beginning of the level, on the sides of the crates, are HUGE FUCKING INTEL GAMING ADVERTISEMENTS. They're seriously about 3 times as large as your character in the game, and there's two identical ads right next to each other.
That pulled me right out of the atmosphere of the game, because I couldn't stop thinking about how I wanted to punch the head of Ubisoft in the face. I immediately uninstalled the game, took the disc out of the drive, took a big dump on it, lit it on fire, drove my car to a nearby river, and threw the flaming, shitty DVD-ROM out the window into to the flowing water.
Besides, AMD processors are better for gaming anyway.
As with many new technologies, the p0rn industry will probably be the first to deploy this 33,177,600 pixel technology.
I might have to disagree. The recent "Weapons of Ass Destruction" was said to be cutting-edge--but it appeared to have been filmed with a 20 dollar webcam, and it was on a VHS in SLP mode!
my halloween webcam (goes offline Saturday night) only has 337,920 pixels (704x480)
If I watched that tape with this new technology, each testicle could take up as many pixels as your webcam!
Paying 99 bucks for a wireless controller, media remote, hard drive, and headset won't rankle anyone smart enough to realize they're really only paying 59 extra bucks for all that (since they'd have to buy a $40 memory card anyway).
No - the journal work was done with Tribunal (v1.3) and the Xbox version had Tribunal and Bloodmoon (v1.6).
The proof is that you could convert your Morrowind save file to Morrowind GOTY on the Xbox, but you couldnt re-open that file with regular Morrowind, because it had converted the Journal (that's what the one-time long-ass progress bar was for).
It's not adding more than the author intended. HDR levels in Source have to be made for HDR; Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source don't just work with HDR now that Source supports it, the levels still have to be made for it.
It's a lot more than just a bass boost, since it's not just a brightness increase, but an increase in the range of brightness, allowing for very high contrast. If you go back and look at a Source game without HDR after seeing HDR for awhile, it looks like it has a dark film over it, similar to a digital camera picture looks before being run through auto-contrast in Photoshop.
I have used Office 2003 and 2002 extensively and never experienced a single crash (although now I use OpenOffice because I'm too lazy to put a CD in my drive to install Office after I format).
I'm sick of people who will make concessions about a Microsoft product being good, and then just throw in at the end "but its m$ so it crashes all teh time lolol!". Very original with the dollar sign in Microsoft's name, now we all know we can take you seriously.
Not sloppy of you, since you're completely right that optimizations won't help Q3 or HL1 at all on current hardware.
I'm sure you're right about HL1 defaulting to software, I just remembered having to manually change to OpenGL, so I assumed it was D3D it defaulted to.
I had heard that CoR did what D3 did (real-time lighting, normal mapping) so I guess I took it literally to mean everything D3 did. Apparently not so, but I'm sure we can both agree that CoR and D3 both look amazing:-)
And we can also agree that Carmack's latest engine will always be used for years to come, and that's a good thing:-)
HL1 was OpenGL, Direct3D, and Software. When it came out, D3D was the default setting, although now with Steam OpenGL is (and it always ran way better in OpenGL on both ATI and NVidia).
I believed for a long time, too, that the fps in HL1 was capped at 100fps, but not so. If you enable developer mode (either "developer 1" in console, or -developer added to the shortcut, I don't remember exactly), it uncaps it.
In addition to D3/Q4, Starbreeze's Chronicles of Riddick uses OpenGL (and has all the features of the Doom3 engine). I'd consider that a major game. Other than that, though, I'd only note Far Cry's OpenGL renderer (which isn't officially supported and has minor rendering issues), and Q3-engine games (which are falling out of the "current" realm, although CoD is current enough).
Anyway, just some minor things I thought I'd clarify. I agree with you on the whole.
Yes, HL1's engine was based on the Quake engine, but basically only for really low-level rendering stuff (I think the figure Valve gave was something like 10% of the final engine was Quake code).
You've got a good point with the Q3 engine, it was really widely used in major games and D3 probably will be too.
And as far as Oblivion goes, great choice;-) Morrowind is my all-time favorite game, and I upgraded to a 6800GT just for Oblivion (since it'll use lots of SM3.0 optimizations).
you dumbass. The OS only needs.01% of hardware to work on it. The.01% that the consoll is actually built from.
If you knew what the fuck you were talking about, you'd notice the discussion is about extra devices to connect to the 360, not the 360 hardware itself.
I don't know where you got.01%, but hey, everyone likes arbitrary numbers made up on the spot!
He wasn't posting a review of the games, he was posting a review of the Xbox 360, so the graphical/control/hardware aspects are more important to note. And if you play lots of games with the framerate display on, it's easy to pretty accurately guess a framerate you're seeing, especially if you can control the movement yourself.
That screenshot doesn't do it justice. The demo at Wal-Mart is on a dark, rainy level with lightning. I have all the best-looking PC games (Doom 3, Far Cry, DoD Source, Black & White 2, Chronicles of Riddick, FEAR) which I run on high settings, and the King Kong demo still wowed me. It needs to be seen in motion.
An age-old argument, to be sure. But the allure of consoles around their launch time remains: they typically will play the newest games on high settings flawlessly (I never saw the 360's Call of Duty 2 demo drop below 60 fps), and still for less than a gaming-quality PC costs.
Wow. Were you molested in high school when the jocks found out you played games, or what?
I'm in college (the second one I've been to) and in my experience, no one gives a shit what anyone else likes to do in their free time at college, and no one really gets picked on.
From what I've seen, not only do most jocks play games too, but they attend the Halo LAN parties held in the dorm complex's movie theater on the big screens (yes, it's Halo, a typical "jock game", but it's still a gaming meeting).
Slashdot Mirror
Either this article is old or these PC World people don't use current material for their stories; Firefox RC3 has been out for a couple weeks already...
I love Penny Arcade :-)
The level is a cargo ship controlled by terrorists in the middle of the ocean, and it's a dark and rainy night. Quite atmospheric. And right there at the beginning of the level, on the sides of the crates, are HUGE FUCKING INTEL GAMING ADVERTISEMENTS. They're seriously about 3 times as large as your character in the game, and there's two identical ads right next to each other.
That pulled me right out of the atmosphere of the game, because I couldn't stop thinking about how I wanted to punch the head of Ubisoft in the face. I immediately uninstalled the game, took the disc out of the drive, took a big dump on it, lit it on fire, drove my car to a nearby river, and threw the flaming, shitty DVD-ROM out the window into to the flowing water.
Besides, AMD processors are better for gaming anyway.
He assumes all programmers like stupid bullshit like Star Trek.
And I suppose Sergey will be raping little boys soon?
Breakfast of Champions is a great book.
It sucks that even your mind's camera man zooms up on the guy's ass. I guess some things will never change.
I might have to disagree. The recent "Weapons of Ass Destruction" was said to be cutting-edge--but it appeared to have been filmed with a 20 dollar webcam, and it was on a VHS in SLP mode!
my halloween webcam (goes offline Saturday night) only has 337,920 pixels (704x480)
If I watched that tape with this new technology, each testicle could take up as many pixels as your webcam!
I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic when he implied that it actually exists.
All he has left to do is get someone to design an invisible logo for it!
You played Deus Ex: Invisible War on PC, I take it? :-)
Paying 99 bucks for a wireless controller, media remote, hard drive, and headset won't rankle anyone smart enough to realize they're really only paying 59 extra bucks for all that (since they'd have to buy a $40 memory card anyway).
The proof is that you could convert your Morrowind save file to Morrowind GOTY on the Xbox, but you couldnt re-open that file with regular Morrowind, because it had converted the Journal (that's what the one-time long-ass progress bar was for).
Or did you mean scary to attempt to understand?
It's a lot more than just a bass boost, since it's not just a brightness increase, but an increase in the range of brightness, allowing for very high contrast. If you go back and look at a Source game without HDR after seeing HDR for awhile, it looks like it has a dark film over it, similar to a digital camera picture looks before being run through auto-contrast in Photoshop.
I'm sick of people who will make concessions about a Microsoft product being good, and then just throw in at the end "but its m$ so it crashes all teh time lolol!". Very original with the dollar sign in Microsoft's name, now we all know we can take you seriously.
I'm sure you're right about HL1 defaulting to software, I just remembered having to manually change to OpenGL, so I assumed it was D3D it defaulted to.
I had heard that CoR did what D3 did (real-time lighting, normal mapping) so I guess I took it literally to mean everything D3 did. Apparently not so, but I'm sure we can both agree that CoR and D3 both look amazing :-)
And we can also agree that Carmack's latest engine will always be used for years to come, and that's a good thing :-)
I believed for a long time, too, that the fps in HL1 was capped at 100fps, but not so. If you enable developer mode (either "developer 1" in console, or -developer added to the shortcut, I don't remember exactly), it uncaps it.
In addition to D3/Q4, Starbreeze's Chronicles of Riddick uses OpenGL (and has all the features of the Doom3 engine). I'd consider that a major game. Other than that, though, I'd only note Far Cry's OpenGL renderer (which isn't officially supported and has minor rendering issues), and Q3-engine games (which are falling out of the "current" realm, although CoD is current enough).
Anyway, just some minor things I thought I'd clarify. I agree with you on the whole.
You've got a good point with the Q3 engine, it was really widely used in major games and D3 probably will be too.
And as far as Oblivion goes, great choice ;-) Morrowind is my all-time favorite game, and I upgraded to a 6800GT just for Oblivion (since it'll use lots of SM3.0 optimizations).
If you knew what the fuck you were talking about, you'd notice the discussion is about extra devices to connect to the 360, not the 360 hardware itself.
I don't know where you got .01%, but hey, everyone likes arbitrary numbers made up on the spot!
And it's spelled console.
Hey fuckass! Why don't you make like a tree, and get the fuck out of Slashdot!
He wasn't posting a review of the games, he was posting a review of the Xbox 360, so the graphical/control/hardware aspects are more important to note. And if you play lots of games with the framerate display on, it's easy to pretty accurately guess a framerate you're seeing, especially if you can control the movement yourself.
That screenshot doesn't do it justice. The demo at Wal-Mart is on a dark, rainy level with lightning. I have all the best-looking PC games (Doom 3, Far Cry, DoD Source, Black & White 2, Chronicles of Riddick, FEAR) which I run on high settings, and the King Kong demo still wowed me. It needs to be seen in motion.
An age-old argument, to be sure. But the allure of consoles around their launch time remains: they typically will play the newest games on high settings flawlessly (I never saw the 360's Call of Duty 2 demo drop below 60 fps), and still for less than a gaming-quality PC costs.
I'm in college (the second one I've been to) and in my experience, no one gives a shit what anyone else likes to do in their free time at college, and no one really gets picked on.
From what I've seen, not only do most jocks play games too, but they attend the Halo LAN parties held in the dorm complex's movie theater on the big screens (yes, it's Halo, a typical "jock game", but it's still a gaming meeting).