Rubberbanding really shouldn't use up any significant additional CPU power on a game like Halo. The players are usually moving anyway, so the only difference is a quick calculation to say "Oops, he is really here, not there." (And that should only be on the server end, really - the player's PC should just be given new coordinates for the other player, which would happen regardless of movement.) But we are talking about Gearbox, so who knows. I am surprised they can't at least simulate predicted movement better, like say every other popular FPS on the planet...
(I haven't tried to play Halo online via my PC, because the demo ran ridiculously poorly. I know the Xbox has some underrated hardware advantages compared to PCs, but I have enough spare juice that I should have at least got a framerate in the 20s or so. Gearbox really sucks.)
Halo, on the other hand, is a total bitch lagwise. There are only two maps it is even tolerable on and most (like Prison) are impossible to play because the framerate drops to about 4 frames per second - if that.
(The new screenshots show off the game looking much better than it has otherwise recently looked. I make no claims whether the game will actually not suck, though.:D)
Dune 2 sequels sucked I agree with what you wrote otherwise (Warcraft I was a huge step backwards from Dune2, overall), but I thought Emperor was a fun game. Some really nice, interesting unit design in that game. The atmosphere was perfect, too.
The designers at Big Huge Games obviously played a lot of TA, as many of its innovations can be found in Rise of Nations. The inexhaustible resources, along with a pretty intelligent infinite queuing system, and lots of useful shortcut keys (not as many as TA, but to be honest, the game is also a little more elegantly designed, so it doesn't need them). A really fun game - it also features some great innovations that would be appreciated in a TA-style game (you fight over cities, for example, but can't destroy them).
The one problem I always had with TA was (besides the too many unit types... really, half would have been more than enough - it just makes the game too hard to get into) is that it really should have given a higher macro level of control with building. Most RTSs would benefit from this, really. I would have loved to have saved standard defense configs based around walls and turrets, and then just tell a worked to build one of those configs there and there and here, etc. The base building micromanagement just got a little too heavy at times, largely because of the destructiveness of certain weapons (though TA did make micro easier than most).
Great game, though. I need to give it another spin one of these days.
Actually, if this thing has 3 main CPUs (which I personally doubt, BTW - I think these rumors are, at best, MS just fishing for some reactions from the public) it will be considerably harder to develop games for. The Xbox1 already is the 3D console with the easiest game development on it, though the GC is close in some ways.
They are really very different games, excepting the fact that both of them take place in some kind of ship in space. D3 is a lot like, well, Descent, whereas FS2 plays a lot like Tie Fighter or Wing Commander. I personally love the game (better than the first FS, which I still liked). Great story, great art, great tech (the nebulas are just amazing, and the framerate was great even on middle-power hardware when it was released), great music, great mission design, great voice-acting (especially Admiral Bosch), great fun. Easily one of the best PC games ever, IMO. How it didn't sell well is beyond my imagination - the only thing I can think of is that it really needs a joystick, and maybe not many PC gamers had one any more when it came out.
People are usually talking about new games in this kind of case, not used. (I personally feel too guilty to usually buy used - I want the devs to make some money off their game.) Though you won't find all of them in every store, the PS2 has literally dozens and dozens of big games that cost $20 retail. Xbox has only a couple dozen of games like that, but still does it far more than the Cube. Online is really your best bet for many of these discount games, since the selection is always bigger.
For cheap non-"greatest hits"/whatever games I usually check out this site. Sometimes it has some exceptionally good deals listed, though the interface does leave a lot to be desired.
And the reason Eternal Darkness was so cheap is because it bombed. Same thing exists for games like Panzer Dragoon Orta for Xbox (which didn't really bomb that bad in comparison) - you can pick it up for $30 or under pretty much any place that has it.
The Havoc engine is actually just a physics engine - you will find it in a lot of games out and coming out. It has nothing to do with graphics and gameplay engine stuff, excepting the physics parts of course.:D
And for a survival horror game, I would personally maybe use the latest Unreal engine/editor, or perhaps wait for Doom3 if your game would do better with an advanced lighting model like that. Both engines are very flexible. Unreal probably slightly moreso, as the engine is less focused on certain aspects - but the Doom3 engine's limitations may not matter depending on your survival horror design (big, open maps would be the main problem). Lots of info available on how to use both of them (well, there will be for Doom3, as it uses a modified version of the editor that has powered all previous Quake games, AFAIK, and will definitelyu be popular). UT2K4 DVD edition will include apparently a lot of vids on how to use the editor - might be really useful to a newbie!
And I agree with you about game prices - I really think we need to get them down to more DVD-style cost, so they become more of an impulse buy. Budgets will probably have to be shrunk a little, but a lot of that can come from good design (say, going for a more stylized graphics style - realism is expensive) or clever tools (autogeneration of environments that the player never gets close to or interacts with, perhaps). Taking more of a film approach to development might help, with groups of teams working together, and we are starting to see this - iD has been having separate, smaller companies do its recent multiplayer segments, for example. You wouldn't expect for a film that the director, screenwriter, composer, lead actors, and SFX crew were all members of one big company - the same logic makes sense for games. And probably shorter games would help, too. IMO, players wouldn't mind $20 for a game that lasted four or so hours, especially if it included decent multiplayer of some kind. The goal should be to sell more games that are also shorter and cheaper.
I am not sure I would say that any of the main FF games sold via the the 'merits' of their gameplay. That's because sometimes other things than gameplay are more important to people. That is okay with me, even if I wish games like Panzer Dragoon Orta, etc. would sell better. Storyline, setting, graphics (including the oft-overlooked art design), music/sound, are all important to people, too, and oftentimes they will compensate for lesser gameplay quality.
I mean, hell, even though Super Mario Bros. was a great game, the wonderful music probably helped quite a few sales.
The article is about exclusive games FROM NINTENDO. Roughly two thirds of your list is published by third parties.
And I am pretty sure the argument was for quality exclusives, too. (Your list has a lot of B-quality and niche titles.) And I can't believe you are counting games that were released on other domestic console systems not four years ago. I personally wouldn't count compilations of games I already have owned for 5+ years, either.
Unless they totally forget about it, of course. After seeing the trailer at E3, I think most of us decided forgetting about it is really the best option available.:D
The act of removing enjoyable and involving gameplay from a promising video game in order to accommodate the less mature and undiscerning tastes of 14 year olds for the purposes of selling more units sooner.
Haven't looked at console games and gamers recently, have you? Or PC games, for that matter...
Do you have to be so nasty? Relax already - your argument would read a lot better if it wasn't filled with stuff that makes you sound like you spend too much time on a third-grade playground.
And apart from the 'real gun' info, the rest of the article was factual and well-reasoned.
The author wasn't really talking about class-based games as being the problem, as the primary example was Counter-strike. Class balance doesn't help a game without classes! The primary game that 'does it right' in the article is Enemy Territory, which of course does use classes.
I think the biggest problem that exists here regarding widespread sexism is that it is ingrained into our very lives, and has been for the entirety of human history. I am not arguing that women haven't faced plenty of sexism, especially in recent history. But your 'entirety of human history' claim is simply wrong. Various cultures have given women power, tremendous power, and women have had fairly equal rights in other periods and places too. This certainly isn't universal, but neither is this 'women have always been oppressed' propoganda.
Wrong. The difference is apparent even when watching a rolling demo or someone else playing. There is a reason many devs brag about reaching a steady 60 fps on a console game, or why developers like Bizarre Creatures get all defensive when they dropped their framerate in PGR2 to 30, or why Namco included a prototype 60 FPS version of Ridge Racer on a bonus disc for one of the later Ridge Racer games that couldn't reach 60 (forget its name). The visual difference is there, and it is obvious with a little experience.
I am not sure I even buy the 'it is twice as much input' play control argument anyway, as a developer could put input speed as fast as they want (within hardware limits) and ignore the framerate entirely. What's more, I find it unlikely that a player would notice a reaction-time of 1/30 a second vs. 1/60 anyway - the body's reflexes simply aren't that fast/accurate, and the controller doesn't really allow radical enough changes in that short period of time (can't move an analog stick from side to side that quickly, for example). Unlike vision, which also has the advantage of a more constant example being presented.
The PC game industry simply isn't very healthy anymore (if it ever really was). So it isn't a surprise that you see little innovation or niche products nowadays. Consoles are where most of the game variety is nowadays - though honestly that has been true since probably the SNES/Genesis days. The PC industry is just particularly lacking in variety compared to its usual low amount. Doesn't look like it is going to get better anytime soon, either. A shame, since the barrier to entry for PC game creation is so much lower...
Point is, if you want variety pick up a console gaming system (especially the PS2 or Xbox, which both have more game variety than the GC).
Just thought I would note that I have found that the headphones problem generally doesn't exist. Not sure if it is because of some software trickery (either filtering out the sound the game is creating, or optimized algorithms that really only do voice?) or just the general short range of most PC mics, but loud speaker noise from games like Enemy Territory (and I like to play it LOUD:D) simply doesn't seem to transfer when I tried it out. Same with the Xbox Communicator - can blast the music in Amped2, no one else hears it via my mic, and I don't hear any of their music.
And I don't think you really need all that nice of a PC mic to just do some relatively low-bandwidth voicecomm.
Certainly agree about the bandwidth issue, and a bigger problem is just the lack of mic usage on the PC, as well as lack of proper integration in most games. Xbox Live has a definite edge in this.
That 32 megs is already mostly compressed data (textures, music, etc.). So you won't really get any serious compression savings. Likewise, the PS2 design for most effective/efficient game programming is to have near constant streaming of new content from the disc to the RAM. You can see this in games like GTA3, the various platformer games, etc. They stream huge levels with lots of textures. Console games in general work this way nowadays, assuming they are programmed well and the design fits.
I agree that you probably wouldn't need a whole DVD at once if downloading your game, but very few games would get by with under 50 megs of download, and some would require many hundreds before they were truly playable.
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Rubberbanding really shouldn't use up any significant additional CPU power on a game like Halo. The players are usually moving anyway, so the only difference is a quick calculation to say "Oops, he is really here, not there." (And that should only be on the server end, really - the player's PC should just be given new coordinates for the other player, which would happen regardless of movement.) But we are talking about Gearbox, so who knows. I am surprised they can't at least simulate predicted movement better, like say every other popular FPS on the planet...
(I haven't tried to play Halo online via my PC, because the demo ran ridiculously poorly. I know the Xbox has some underrated hardware advantages compared to PCs, but I have enough spare juice that I should have at least got a framerate in the 20s or so. Gearbox really sucks.)
One - The vehicles control wonderfully with a mouse.
But not wonderfully compared to the Xbox controller, which does the vehicle thing a lot better.
Halo, on the other hand, is a total bitch lagwise. There are only two maps it is even tolerable on and most (like Prison) are impossible to play because the framerate drops to about 4 frames per second - if that.
Why would lag affect framerate?
...and we've heard nothing from Argonaut Games in the last year or so.
:D)
I am not so sure about that...
(The new screenshots show off the game looking much better than it has otherwise recently looked. I make no claims whether the game will actually not suck, though.
It isn't like the people who voted for Gore decided that he should concede. Of course they are going to still complain about it.
Dune 2 sequels sucked
I agree with what you wrote otherwise (Warcraft I was a huge step backwards from Dune2, overall), but I thought Emperor was a fun game. Some really nice, interesting unit design in that game. The atmosphere was perfect, too.
The designers at Big Huge Games obviously played a lot of TA, as many of its innovations can be found in Rise of Nations. The inexhaustible resources, along with a pretty intelligent infinite queuing system, and lots of useful shortcut keys (not as many as TA, but to be honest, the game is also a little more elegantly designed, so it doesn't need them). A really fun game - it also features some great innovations that would be appreciated in a TA-style game (you fight over cities, for example, but can't destroy them).
The one problem I always had with TA was (besides the too many unit types... really, half would have been more than enough - it just makes the game too hard to get into) is that it really should have given a higher macro level of control with building. Most RTSs would benefit from this, really. I would have loved to have saved standard defense configs based around walls and turrets, and then just tell a worked to build one of those configs there and there and here, etc. The base building micromanagement just got a little too heavy at times, largely because of the destructiveness of certain weapons (though TA did make micro easier than most).
Great game, though. I need to give it another spin one of these days.
FYI, Nintendo actually is still taking a bit of a hit on the $99 GC. They were in December, at least.
Actually, if this thing has 3 main CPUs (which I personally doubt, BTW - I think these rumors are, at best, MS just fishing for some reactions from the public) it will be considerably harder to develop games for. The Xbox1 already is the 3D console with the easiest game development on it, though the GC is close in some ways.
They are really very different games, excepting the fact that both of them take place in some kind of ship in space. D3 is a lot like, well, Descent, whereas FS2 plays a lot like Tie Fighter or Wing Commander. I personally love the game (better than the first FS, which I still liked). Great story, great art, great tech (the nebulas are just amazing, and the framerate was great even on middle-power hardware when it was released), great music, great mission design, great voice-acting (especially Admiral Bosch), great fun. Easily one of the best PC games ever, IMO. How it didn't sell well is beyond my imagination - the only thing I can think of is that it really needs a joystick, and maybe not many PC gamers had one any more when it came out.
People are usually talking about new games in this kind of case, not used. (I personally feel too guilty to usually buy used - I want the devs to make some money off their game.) Though you won't find all of them in every store, the PS2 has literally dozens and dozens of big games that cost $20 retail. Xbox has only a couple dozen of games like that, but still does it far more than the Cube. Online is really your best bet for many of these discount games, since the selection is always bigger.
For cheap non-"greatest hits"/whatever games I usually check out this site. Sometimes it has some exceptionally good deals listed, though the interface does leave a lot to be desired.
And the reason Eternal Darkness was so cheap is because it bombed. Same thing exists for games like Panzer Dragoon Orta for Xbox (which didn't really bomb that bad in comparison) - you can pick it up for $30 or under pretty much any place that has it.
The Havoc engine is actually just a physics engine - you will find it in a lot of games out and coming out. It has nothing to do with graphics and gameplay engine stuff, excepting the physics parts of course. :D
And for a survival horror game, I would personally maybe use the latest Unreal engine/editor, or perhaps wait for Doom3 if your game would do better with an advanced lighting model like that. Both engines are very flexible. Unreal probably slightly moreso, as the engine is less focused on certain aspects - but the Doom3 engine's limitations may not matter depending on your survival horror design (big, open maps would be the main problem). Lots of info available on how to use both of them (well, there will be for Doom3, as it uses a modified version of the editor that has powered all previous Quake games, AFAIK, and will definitelyu be popular). UT2K4 DVD edition will include apparently a lot of vids on how to use the editor - might be really useful to a newbie!
And I agree with you about game prices - I really think we need to get them down to more DVD-style cost, so they become more of an impulse buy. Budgets will probably have to be shrunk a little, but a lot of that can come from good design (say, going for a more stylized graphics style - realism is expensive) or clever tools (autogeneration of environments that the player never gets close to or interacts with, perhaps). Taking more of a film approach to development might help, with groups of teams working together, and we are starting to see this - iD has been having separate, smaller companies do its recent multiplayer segments, for example. You wouldn't expect for a film that the director, screenwriter, composer, lead actors, and SFX crew were all members of one big company - the same logic makes sense for games. And probably shorter games would help, too. IMO, players wouldn't mind $20 for a game that lasted four or so hours, especially if it included decent multiplayer of some kind. The goal should be to sell more games that are also shorter and cheaper.
I am not sure I would say that any of the main FF games sold via the the 'merits' of their gameplay. That's because sometimes other things than gameplay are more important to people. That is okay with me, even if I wish games like Panzer Dragoon Orta, etc. would sell better. Storyline, setting, graphics (including the oft-overlooked art design), music/sound, are all important to people, too, and oftentimes they will compensate for lesser gameplay quality.
I mean, hell, even though Super Mario Bros. was a great game, the wonderful music probably helped quite a few sales.
The article is about exclusive games FROM NINTENDO. Roughly two thirds of your list is published by third parties.
And I am pretty sure the argument was for quality exclusives, too. (Your list has a lot of B-quality and niche titles.) And I can't believe you are counting games that were released on other domestic console systems not four years ago. I personally wouldn't count compilations of games I already have owned for 5+ years, either.
Unless they totally forget about it, of course. :D
After seeing the trailer at E3, I think most of us decided forgetting about it is really the best option available.
The act of removing enjoyable and involving gameplay from a promising video game in order to accommodate the less mature and undiscerning tastes of 14 year olds for the purposes of selling more units sooner.
Haven't looked at console games and gamers recently, have you? Or PC games, for that matter...
Do you have to be so nasty? Relax already - your argument would read a lot better if it wasn't filled with stuff that makes you sound like you spend too much time on a third-grade playground.
And apart from the 'real gun' info, the rest of the article was factual and well-reasoned.
This article gives no basis to its arguments whatsoever.
I fashion myself a bit of a sniper, thats the roll I play for the most part in Battlefield 1942.
And the author said Battlefield 1942 does sniping perfectly fine and balanced. Did you even read the whole article?
The author wasn't really talking about class-based games as being the problem, as the primary example was Counter-strike. Class balance doesn't help a game without classes! The primary game that 'does it right' in the article is Enemy Territory, which of course does use classes.
I think the biggest problem that exists here regarding widespread sexism is that it is ingrained into our very lives, and has been for the entirety of human history.
I am not arguing that women haven't faced plenty of sexism, especially in recent history. But your 'entirety of human history' claim is simply wrong. Various cultures have given women power, tremendous power, and women have had fairly equal rights in other periods and places too. This certainly isn't universal, but neither is this 'women have always been oppressed' propoganda.
Wrong. The difference is apparent even when watching a rolling demo or someone else playing. There is a reason many devs brag about reaching a steady 60 fps on a console game, or why developers like Bizarre Creatures get all defensive when they dropped their framerate in PGR2 to 30, or why Namco included a prototype 60 FPS version of Ridge Racer on a bonus disc for one of the later Ridge Racer games that couldn't reach 60 (forget its name). The visual difference is there, and it is obvious with a little experience.
I am not sure I even buy the 'it is twice as much input' play control argument anyway, as a developer could put input speed as fast as they want (within hardware limits) and ignore the framerate entirely. What's more, I find it unlikely that a player would notice a reaction-time of 1/30 a second vs. 1/60 anyway - the body's reflexes simply aren't that fast/accurate, and the controller doesn't really allow radical enough changes in that short period of time (can't move an analog stick from side to side that quickly, for example). Unlike vision, which also has the advantage of a more constant example being presented.
Yeah, but it was a bit part, which was the original poster's point.
The PC game industry simply isn't very healthy anymore (if it ever really was). So it isn't a surprise that you see little innovation or niche products nowadays. Consoles are where most of the game variety is nowadays - though honestly that has been true since probably the SNES/Genesis days. The PC industry is just particularly lacking in variety compared to its usual low amount. Doesn't look like it is going to get better anytime soon, either. A shame, since the barrier to entry for PC game creation is so much lower...
Point is, if you want variety pick up a console gaming system (especially the PS2 or Xbox, which both have more game variety than the GC).
Just thought I would note that I have found that the headphones problem generally doesn't exist. Not sure if it is because of some software trickery (either filtering out the sound the game is creating, or optimized algorithms that really only do voice?) or just the general short range of most PC mics, but loud speaker noise from games like Enemy Territory (and I like to play it LOUD :D) simply doesn't seem to transfer when I tried it out. Same with the Xbox Communicator - can blast the music in Amped2, no one else hears it via my mic, and I don't hear any of their music.
And I don't think you really need all that nice of a PC mic to just do some relatively low-bandwidth voicecomm.
Certainly agree about the bandwidth issue, and a bigger problem is just the lack of mic usage on the PC, as well as lack of proper integration in most games. Xbox Live has a definite edge in this.
That 32 megs is already mostly compressed data (textures, music, etc.). So you won't really get any serious compression savings. Likewise, the PS2 design for most effective/efficient game programming is to have near constant streaming of new content from the disc to the RAM. You can see this in games like GTA3, the various platformer games, etc. They stream huge levels with lots of textures. Console games in general work this way nowadays, assuming they are programmed well and the design fits.
I agree that you probably wouldn't need a whole DVD at once if downloading your game, but very few games would get by with under 50 megs of download, and some would require many hundreds before they were truly playable.