I don't blame them for not branching out into other as it seems as though the audience doesn't care too much about anything new and wants more of the same. That might not be healthy for the industry, but why should a company invest massive amounts in flashy graphics, new tech, and marketing for something that's probably going to flop when they can just push out something using the same engine as their last game, reuse some of the art assets, and have an install base that will probably pick it up without a huge marketing push? If there's money to be made in something new, someone will make it, even if it's not the established players.
This is it. Avid gamers often have tunnel vision on this topic. Everyone has a finite number of hours per week to use for leasure. The majority of players do not play 5 hours each day.
Many modern western games update rather than innovate. To enthusiasts this is painfully obvious, but when you only spend 3 hours a week playing, it's not so apparent. So, the games still sell and the companies continue on with Halo IX.
And those who want perfect copies can just buy the bluray. Me? I'm OK with 1080p h264 encodes, I can't see any difference and they take up less space.
If you're watching a Blu-Ray, you're quite possibly watching a "1080p h264 encode" anyway. If you mean an x264 re-encode at much lower bitrate, then fine. Depending on the content, the spec of your display, your viewing distance not to mention your eyes, there may be little or no discernible difference to you. You'd probably also be fine with upscaled NTSC or PAL.
25-50GB of space used no matter what doing a fully perfect Blu-Ray rip right from the cable.
Maybe once you've re-compressed your stream with something like VC1 or H.264. The raw stream coming over the wire from the player will be very significant. As a previous poster pointed out 1920 x 1080 x 24 bits per pixel x 24 fps = 145MB/sec. 2hrs of that will cost you around 1TB, provided your chosen disk system can take the pounding. Realistically, right now it's going to have to be a RAID of some kind.
Of course, you could put down some money on a realtime encoder board that can manage the task. I'm sure they exist, but I'm not sure which approach is more cost-effective.
Sadly, even id have noted that porting their games to Linux is largely a waste of their time.
During his annual QuakeCon address this year, John Carmack said that every time they have done so, the number of Linux users is miniscule. As such, it becomes harder and harder to justify the time and effort. It didn't bode well.
He spoke a little about installing Ubuntu on his machine and being pleasantly surprised at how all his hardware worked and that the GUI was not a terrible mess. He did say that Quake Live gets greater support under Linux than OS X, but I didn't get the impression that we could at all count on Linux clients for Rage or Doom 4.
Nowhere. But right now it's the most widely adopted and implemented
For what? Actual video content? I don't think so. Would some of us like to see it more popular than, say, Flash to serve up video? Sure. But that's not the way it is now.
To suggest it's the most adopted is wishful thinking.
This doesn't make much sense. h264 is a codec and Flash is a container. Using one does preclude you from using the other. Most of the 'flash' video you watch is encoded by h.264.
I never once said Quake Live was a better idea than Quake 3 Arena, I played that game non-stop for 5 years from q3test and loved it. I admin'd servers and games and helped out with running team ladders. I know what you're talking about. I was just trying to give counterpoint to your post and explain that until now, the Quakes have always ended up catering to an elite minority and ultimately dying because of it, which is a shame.
Sure, I get that you'd prefer id sell you a game, give it over to the community and only get involved when a bug needs fixing. That's one way to go, but they've been there and done that. All Quake Live is, is an id experiment to see if there's a market for Quake as a subscription service. That's all. It may dilute the experience somewhat, but I don't think it quite deserves the vitriol it gets from veteran players.
It's fraud if you don't know the definition of the word.
But seriously, it's probable that they've taken this approach to avoid monthly transaction costs. They could add up to a sizable chunk of change. (citation needed)
1. no unsanctioned user content
2. no 3rd party independent servers.
3. it's a stupid browser dll. why? just have the javascript call quake3.exe with the params...
It's a game delivered as a service. These restrictions are necessary to maintain a level of quality and consistency for all. This seems obvious to me and shouldn't really need to be pointed out.
4. the stock q3 maps were not much to rave about. only a few were serviceable during q3's lifetime (q3dm6,q3dm7,q3dm13, q3dm16, and everyone lived q3dm17 for some reason). the rest were rarely if ever played. the meat and potatoes were the maps that came with the various large mod projects that came later.
Agreed, there's no excuse for not developing many more new maps, or running a competition for the community to design them. They should be free for all to access, of course.
5. the rest of the 'premium' content is just the team arena maps. big deal. paying for map packs = lame bullshit.
Basically, id said that advertising alone cannot support the project, which was their original plan. It's a shame, but I expect the subscriptions will be needed to cover the bulk of running and development costs.
To be fair, you're missing out:
Private Servers
Clan Support
Stored stats
By-pass ad messages
6. sure it has a 'community' but then so did q3. q3's community is/was far superior in many ways. many were active producers of content and the consumers played active roles in testing prereleases. many of them cared.. that makes a BIG difference in the intrinsic value of something like a game community. people paying subscriptions have a completely different attitude.
Q3A's community failed to maintain the interest of all but a small minority. QL is an attempt to broaden the audience and the tier system is designed to allow new players to enter the community without being destroyed by the old-timers. This is what killed Q3A, as it got to the point where the barrier for entry was impossibly high and the only players were the hardcore elite.
7. no blood, censored language chat in game and in the forums.. really? since when was quake rated PG? the quake I remember was full of piss and vinegar and attitude, game and players both. that was its charm. pantywaists with thin skin need not apply.
(if there are dupes to this post, I'm sorry, but slashdots' scripts are buggin out again).
Come on, do these things honestly bother you that much? My guess is that certain companies are not interested in having their products associated with ultraviolence and childish swearing. These changes mean more potential ad revenue, lowering the subscription price.
If id somehow made it impossible for people to continue playing Q3A, then you'd have an argument. As it stands, I can't see what the problem is.
Its crazy buggy and the java in it slows my computer to a crawl. I have a fairly modern machine, and Quake 3 was making it bog down. Seriously?
Not only that, but I wanted to play with a friend of mine who lives about 100 miles away. Neither of us could figure out how to start a game that was just private for the two of us.
I don't know what you're doing that makes it unstable. The only time I've had a problem with it crashing was in its first week when I tried to exec my Q3A config (duh).
As for your second point, in the beta there was no way to run private servers. This was common knowledge to anyone with 5 minutes and a web browser and id announced at QuakeCon 2009 that private servers would be a feature of the subscription service when it arrived.
On another note, there's a whole lot of whining from people who are objecting to having to pay for community maps and features that are free in Q3A. All I can say is Q3A is effectively over and has been for some time. You can run Q3A servers all day long and play for free on your private server, no-one is stopping you. QL is not Q3A, it's designed to attract new players by lowering the barrier for entry. All you need is a web browser and a PC made in the last 10 years. Yes, paying for access to maps made 10 years ago by a 3rd party is cheeky and I don't think that was a good decision, but it's not hard to imagine that choice was made by the marketeers.
I've chosen to support the idea, at least for this year. To those who are wetting the bed on this, let's see how things go. After all, the subscription is less than most people would spend on a typical night out.
This is what happens when your product is secondary to your profits.
In the video games industry, this started to become more noticable in the 90s and over the last decade has gone into overdrive. Publishers attempt to monetize every aspect of the medium and expect continual financial growth for the least amount of effort. Most titles released today are sequels or worse, expansions, as the suits attempt to minimise risk, build brands and all the other toss that comes with making sure the guys at the top are kept in the life to which they are acustomed. The higher-ups at these firms are ruining everything that was fun about games and the sooner the next gaming industry crash sends them all scurrying back to the industries they came from, the better.
Sorry, your idea of an 'old game' differs somewhat from mine. No, I wont need to care if OnLive fails because I and others like me can run our own servers for the titles we love.
Anyway, we essentially agree that this system will only cater for those who are locked in to the publisher's release cycle.
Exactly. I don't care what EA, Activision or Ubisoft do with this technology, if anything. But then, I only play old games. The kind of game I love will never be moved to the cloud and streamed to a thin client. Even if it did happen, the user base would just ignore it and organise their own alternative. The source code for all the decent Quake games is available for anyone to use and the very best version of Quake yet made is a mod created by talented fans.
As long as there are people to play against and I still enjoy games, I don't think Quake will ever get boring.
If I were to extrapolate wildly, I could conceive of a situation where the hardest of hardcore gamers may well get driven to a handful of niche titles, whilst most publishers serve up subscription cloud gaming to the vast majority of casual players through their set top entertain-o-box.
All very good points and I agree with what you say, except that you can fit a couple of 3.5" disks inside a Mini-ITX case. I've just done so myself to build a NAS that can provide enough storage and still be small, quiet and unobtrusive enough to live in the lounge. The trick is finding a case with the cc and an SFX PSU.
i want all quake players united! but not in fucking QL they have castrated MG which makes it almost impossible for noobs to learn to aim properly...
Offtopic, but I'm curious. I play QL a lot and I thought I was aware of the changes to the weapons over Q3, but what's changed about the MG? 5 damage per shot and a maximum of 50 damage per second. Hasn't it always been that way? Edumacate me!
Everyone knows six is better than three. Three axis movement is for n00bs who don't know how to bind zoomfov to changes in your 6th dimension presence.
I think most people reading this would sympathize with that DoW situation, but remember that Relic are a business, with commercial interests behind them.
It's a fine line to tread for developers; making a title accessible enough to the enthusiasts to create, erm, enthusiasm for the game via a community (which in turn creates sales and good-will), but at the same time they want you to buy DoW II, III, IV and all the expansion packs.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else around here wondering why Cisco is not suing the shit out of Apple for using the name IOS? I'd expect that.
No. No-one else around here is wondering.
I don't blame them for not branching out into other as it seems as though the audience doesn't care too much about anything new and wants more of the same. That might not be healthy for the industry, but why should a company invest massive amounts in flashy graphics, new tech, and marketing for something that's probably going to flop when they can just push out something using the same engine as their last game, reuse some of the art assets, and have an install base that will probably pick it up without a huge marketing push? If there's money to be made in something new, someone will make it, even if it's not the established players.
This is it. Avid gamers often have tunnel vision on this topic. Everyone has a finite number of hours per week to use for leasure. The majority of players do not play 5 hours each day.
Many modern western games update rather than innovate. To enthusiasts this is painfully obvious, but when you only spend 3 hours a week playing, it's not so apparent. So, the games still sell and the companies continue on with Halo IX.
And those who want perfect copies can just buy the bluray. Me? I'm OK with 1080p h264 encodes, I can't see any difference and they take up less space.
If you're watching a Blu-Ray, you're quite possibly watching a "1080p h264 encode" anyway. If you mean an x264 re-encode at much lower bitrate, then fine. Depending on the content, the spec of your display, your viewing distance not to mention your eyes, there may be little or no discernible difference to you. You'd probably also be fine with upscaled NTSC or PAL.
25-50GB of space used no matter what doing a fully perfect Blu-Ray rip right from the cable.
Maybe once you've re-compressed your stream with something like VC1 or H.264. The raw stream coming over the wire from the player will be very significant. As a previous poster pointed out 1920 x 1080 x 24 bits per pixel x 24 fps = 145MB/sec. 2hrs of that will cost you around 1TB, provided your chosen disk system can take the pounding. Realistically, right now it's going to have to be a RAID of some kind.
Of course, you could put down some money on a realtime encoder board that can manage the task. I'm sure they exist, but I'm not sure which approach is more cost-effective.
Does ARM have a strategy for getting past 4GB?
Yes.
Good luck, he's behind 7 proxies.
During his annual QuakeCon address this year, John Carmack said that every time they have done so, the number of Linux users is miniscule. As such, it becomes harder and harder to justify the time and effort. It didn't bode well.
He spoke a little about installing Ubuntu on his machine and being pleasantly surprised at how all his hardware worked and that the GUI was not a terrible mess. He did say that Quake Live gets greater support under Linux than OS X, but I didn't get the impression that we could at all count on Linux clients for Rage or Doom 4.
For what? Actual video content? I don't think so. Would some of us like to see it more popular than, say, Flash to serve up video? Sure. But that's not the way it is now.
To suggest it's the most adopted is wishful thinking.
This doesn't make much sense. h264 is a codec and Flash is a container. Using one does preclude you from using the other. Most of the 'flash' video you watch is encoded by h.264.
I regularly say "teh" instead of "the" when speaking...
Looking at your id, I'm expecting that most people you speak to mistake this behaviour for dementia.
Sure, I get that you'd prefer id sell you a game, give it over to the community and only get involved when a bug needs fixing. That's one way to go, but they've been there and done that. All Quake Live is, is an id experiment to see if there's a market for Quake as a subscription service. That's all. It may dilute the experience somewhat, but I don't think it quite deserves the vitriol it gets from veteran players.
But seriously, it's probable that they've taken this approach to avoid monthly transaction costs. They could add up to a sizable chunk of change. (citation needed)
1. no unsanctioned user content 2. no 3rd party independent servers. 3. it's a stupid browser dll. why? just have the javascript call quake3.exe with the params...
It's a game delivered as a service. These restrictions are necessary to maintain a level of quality and consistency for all. This seems obvious to me and shouldn't really need to be pointed out.
4. the stock q3 maps were not much to rave about. only a few were serviceable during q3's lifetime (q3dm6,q3dm7,q3dm13, q3dm16, and everyone lived q3dm17 for some reason). the rest were rarely if ever played. the meat and potatoes were the maps that came with the various large mod projects that came later.
Agreed, there's no excuse for not developing many more new maps, or running a competition for the community to design them. They should be free for all to access, of course.
5. the rest of the 'premium' content is just the team arena maps. big deal. paying for map packs = lame bullshit.
Basically, id said that advertising alone cannot support the project, which was their original plan. It's a shame, but I expect the subscriptions will be needed to cover the bulk of running and development costs.
To be fair, you're missing out:
Private Servers
Clan Support
Stored stats
By-pass ad messages
6. sure it has a 'community' but then so did q3. q3's community is/was far superior in many ways. many were active producers of content and the consumers played active roles in testing prereleases. many of them cared.. that makes a BIG difference in the intrinsic value of something like a game community. people paying subscriptions have a completely different attitude.
Q3A's community failed to maintain the interest of all but a small minority. QL is an attempt to broaden the audience and the tier system is designed to allow new players to enter the community without being destroyed by the old-timers. This is what killed Q3A, as it got to the point where the barrier for entry was impossibly high and the only players were the hardcore elite.
7. no blood, censored language chat in game and in the forums.. really? since when was quake rated PG? the quake I remember was full of piss and vinegar and attitude, game and players both. that was its charm. pantywaists with thin skin need not apply.
(if there are dupes to this post, I'm sorry, but slashdots' scripts are buggin out again).
Come on, do these things honestly bother you that much? My guess is that certain companies are not interested in having their products associated with ultraviolence and childish swearing. These changes mean more potential ad revenue, lowering the subscription price.
If id somehow made it impossible for people to continue playing Q3A, then you'd have an argument. As it stands, I can't see what the problem is.
I've played around with Quake Live now and then.
Its crazy buggy and the java in it slows my computer to a crawl. I have a fairly modern machine, and Quake 3 was making it bog down. Seriously?
Not only that, but I wanted to play with a friend of mine who lives about 100 miles away. Neither of us could figure out how to start a game that was just private for the two of us.
I don't know what you're doing that makes it unstable. The only time I've had a problem with it crashing was in its first week when I tried to exec my Q3A config (duh).
As for your second point, in the beta there was no way to run private servers. This was common knowledge to anyone with 5 minutes and a web browser and id announced at QuakeCon 2009 that private servers would be a feature of the subscription service when it arrived.
On another note, there's a whole lot of whining from people who are objecting to having to pay for community maps and features that are free in Q3A. All I can say is Q3A is effectively over and has been for some time. You can run Q3A servers all day long and play for free on your private server, no-one is stopping you. QL is not Q3A, it's designed to attract new players by lowering the barrier for entry. All you need is a web browser and a PC made in the last 10 years. Yes, paying for access to maps made 10 years ago by a 3rd party is cheeky and I don't think that was a good decision, but it's not hard to imagine that choice was made by the marketeers.
I've chosen to support the idea, at least for this year. To those who are wetting the bed on this, let's see how things go. After all, the subscription is less than most people would spend on a typical night out.
they cannot use software to make the display be like those displayed in Arnold's Running Man movie.
I think you mean Total Recall.
True. This is 50 Gigabits per second we're talking about here, not GigaBytes. So this tech could have high latency and only 6.25 GBps of bandwidth.
5% is way too generous. Try 0.5%.
This is what happens when your product is secondary to your profits.
In the video games industry, this started to become more noticable in the 90s and over the last decade has gone into overdrive. Publishers attempt to monetize every aspect of the medium and expect continual financial growth for the least amount of effort.
Most titles released today are sequels or worse, expansions, as the suits attempt to minimise risk, build brands and all the other toss that comes with making sure the guys at the top are kept in the life to which they are acustomed.
The higher-ups at these firms are ruining everything that was fun about games and the sooner the next gaming industry crash sends them all scurrying back to the industries they came from, the better.
Sorry, your idea of an 'old game' differs somewhat from mine.
No, I wont need to care if OnLive fails because I and others like me can run our own servers for the titles we love.
Anyway, we essentially agree that this system will only cater for those who are locked in to the publisher's release cycle.
Exactly. I don't care what EA, Activision or Ubisoft do with this technology, if anything. But then, I only play old games.
The kind of game I love will never be moved to the cloud and streamed to a thin client. Even if it did happen, the user base would just ignore it and organise their own alternative. The source code for all the decent Quake games is available for anyone to use and the very best version of Quake yet made is a mod created by talented fans.
As long as there are people to play against and I still enjoy games, I don't think Quake will ever get boring.
If I were to extrapolate wildly, I could conceive of a situation where the hardest of hardcore gamers may well get driven to a handful of niche titles, whilst most publishers serve up subscription cloud gaming to the vast majority of casual players through their set top entertain-o-box.
All very good points and I agree with what you say, except that you can fit a couple of 3.5" disks inside a Mini-ITX case. I've just done so myself to build a NAS that can provide enough storage and still be small, quiet and unobtrusive enough to live in the lounge. The trick is finding a case with the cc and an SFX PSU.
i want all quake players united! but not in fucking QL they have castrated MG which makes it almost impossible for noobs to learn to aim properly...
Offtopic, but I'm curious.
I play QL a lot and I thought I was aware of the changes to the weapons over Q3, but what's changed about the MG?
5 damage per shot and a maximum of 50 damage per second. Hasn't it always been that way? Edumacate me!
A good list here.
You'll be disappointed about MW2.
Everyone knows six is better than three. Three axis movement is for n00bs who don't know how to bind zoomfov to changes in your 6th dimension presence.
It's a fine line to tread for developers; making a title accessible enough to the enthusiasts to create, erm, enthusiasm for the game via a community (which in turn creates sales and good-will), but at the same time they want you to buy DoW II, III, IV and all the expansion packs.
Hmm. Best not go to Horseguards on the first day, then.
Or Camden.