Take a look at these pages for alleged quality differences between recent home releases of the films, including the 2004 DVD release. - Episode IV - Episode V - Episode VI
Surely this is completely subjective and any "answer" is simply an opinion? Anyhow, the features that appeal the most to me are Mononoke Hime, Jin-Roh and Ghost in the Shell.
Honourable mentions go to Grave of the Fireflies (if you don't mind having your heart strings tugged) and Cowboy Bebop -Knockin' on Heaven's Door. But, if you could bend the rules slightly and allow Kenshin: Meiji Kenkaku Romantan -Tsuiokuhen through as a feature (the four parts add up to just over 2 hours) then that would be my runaway favourite.
Comments on shoryuken.com indicate that it is not the arcade board.
Until a few weeks ago, the Dreamcast was the only home console to have a converstion of Street Fighter 3 -3rd strike, but a PS2 conversion was released in Japan last month. I'm not sure which is used here, but they are both identical to the arcade version (or can be adjusted to be).
It is Half-Life all the way, from the dying co-workers who use ther last breath to tell you something, to the monsters appearing in a lightning bolt, to the failed-scientific-experiment scenario, to the vending machines in the cafeterias, to the various scientific heavy machinery, and the list could go on...
Sorry, but Half Life didn't create these things, they are stolen from a miriad of films and books and (gasp) real life (vending machines in cafeterias? Who'd have thunk?). Everything is plagurism, the key to commercial success and praise is hitting the sweet spot by re-using things that your audience may not have seen yet.
Personally I am loving Doom 3 and I think it represents a large step in design, style and atmosphere as well as technology. I can't help wondering if these people moaning about boredom and rubbish AI are playing on a difficulty below Veteran. Suspension of disbelief is far more effective when you feel like you are likely to die.
Direct3D is only one component of a suite of APIs known as DirectX. The Quake 3 engine uses DirectX; Directsound and DirectInput. It the former was used from release and the latter included in one of the point releases, I believe. Why waste time doing work that has already been done?
After Carmack swore so long ago that he wouldn't use Direct3D, Doom 3 is indeed a DirectX game.
Carmack hasn't ever used Direct3D as a renderer for his engines. They have been OpenGL since GLQuake, and that hasn't changed with Doom 3. DirectInput is needed for Doom 3's peripheral interface and DirectSound is possibly needed in some way (how many speakers it uses depends on your Control Panel settings), but the sound engine is proprietary.
I'm really looking forward to playing around with the console and experimenting with cvars to tweak performance. The evolution of my Quake 3 config is one factor that makes me still play it today, 5 years later. Remember, there're tons of little tweaks for the q3 engine, not accessible through menus that can have a dramatic effect on frame rate at little or no cost. Yay for Carmack's engines.
Precisely. I see several posts here lamenting the fact that Carmack has switched Doom 3's audio engine from software/CPU to EAX. This is not the case, the original engine remains, now you just have the option to utilise EAX should you want to.
OK, I phrased that badly. What I mean is, if you're going to spend money on buying enough RAM and a motherboard to do what you suggested in your first post, and getting average performance, then you may as well just spend it on a 512MB card instead.
Are 512MB adapters even out?
They will be shortly. nVidia and ATI are due to release 512MB versions of their top line cards. Yes, they are expensive, but who said playing Doom 3 properly was going to be cheap? Using PCI-Express to allocate system memory as video memory would be roughly equal to playing Doom 3 on a 512MB radeon 9600 or a 512MB FX5600. Theoretically, of course.
I think, for something like Doom 3, the answer is no.
Cards such as the nVidia 6800 Ultra have about 35GB/s bandwidth internally (from its own memory to GPU).
AGP 8x provides 2GB/s bandwidth to your system memory and PCI-Express x16 can achieve 14GB/s.
Besides, if you're going to buy enough RAM and a new PCI-Express motherboard, you may as well upgrade to a 512MB graphics adapter.
There's something suspicious about companies that don't bother with demos.
I don't why you would say this. A few things:
1. id have already stated they are making a Doom 3 demo available. Yes, it'll arrive after the full release, but you can wait, right? Plus, they made their reasons this very clear; they reasoned that more people are waiting for the full game than are waiting for a demo. I think they're right.
2. id have, in the past, ALWAYS released a test or shareware version of their latest game. With their track record, it's fairly obvious that they don't have anything to hide in this respect.
1) PC games are too obsessed with hardware requirements (especially your video card) no one wants to upgrade their card every 1 to 2 years at 300 and 400+ a pop for the latest and greatest and possibly on top of that a CPU/Motherbaord + ram and/or powersupply.
True. The PC gamer's expectations are higher than those of the average console gamer. PC games today do not have a chance unless they have the latest pixel shader, filter and bump-map effects. The monitor is far less forgiving than the television.
These features are complex to implement and artwork must be of a higher standard, because there will be someone, somewhere running the thing at 2048x1536. Together with mods and other improvements, this is also partly the reason why games on the PC have a longer life and sales are slower; people return to titles with their upgraded PC to enjoy the experience anew.
Supporting the PC platform properly costs time and money and I for one am very grateful that developers who do so, like id, still exist.
Will this be the first Linux game to support 6 channel audio?
Can someone here with the know-how speculate on what API id are likely to have used? I was under the impression that the Windows version mixes OpenGL for rendering with DirectInput for interface and probably DirectSound for audio.
Is OpenAL the likely candidate for Doom 3 Linux audio, or am I misunderstanding how the engine works?
Bandai have the U.S. rights for a DVD release. Although there is no date yet, Bandai recently confirmed some details:
We've learned that the release will definitely be anamorphic, both language tracks will be in 5.1 and Bandai does have the Tachikomatic Days Animated Shorts. We should know later this week what the final US release date is as well.
Most of the music I buy is not released domestically in my country (UK), and I don't use CD-WOW, so this doesn't affect me directly. However, I'd like to know why the relevant organisations haven't jumped on companies like CD-WOW and Play.com for R1 DVD sales? It's the same situation, is it not?
It seems to me to just be a way for the music industry to protect their artificially high prices. I presume also, the only reason I've not been stopped from importing Japanese music CDs, is because there's no bloated UK market for me to damage.
Yes, it is feasibly possible to create a feature-length, live-action presentation from the animated TV series. But what will this film add to the Eva experience that'll make it worth me spending money to see it?
As a serious fan of the series, the answer is almost certainly, nothing.
What will it take away? Plenty.
I think it was put best by someone else in this thread when they said that people who enjoy the TV series as much as I, are not the target audience here. They have their Eva, they have Special Director's Cuts, they have two film-length features and they are (largely) satisfied.
Of course, this film (like most) is about making money and unfortunately with films that cost as much as this is likely to, the only way to do this is to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. This'll almost certainly mean losing the edgier themes and events and a lot of the small story details. They just aren't compatible with the format they are working within.
Will it be worth seeing? Who can tell at this early stage? Personally I think the bashing of the concept art is slightly cruel, but I do hope that the creators do not continue in the direction some of these drawings indicate.
I'm not wanting it to fail, I wish the filmmakers luck, there aren't many projects more ambitious than this.
If it's a truely awful raping of the TV series, then I shall simply forget it as quickly as I have so many other disappointing Hollywood ventures. Let's hope that wont be necessary.
Our broadband is so expensive/poor because BT have a monopoly, and generally appear to sit around twiddling their thumbs as opposed to doing anything.
Yes, it certainly seems that way sometimes. They're getting there though, I've several friends living way out in the styx who've had their exchanges DSL-enabled recently.
BT set up a system, whereby they invite people living in certain non-DSL areas to register their interest in the service. A trigger level is set of say, 500 registrations and if the level is reached, the exchange is enabled and DSL service offered.
I pay 50 GBP/month (92 USD, 72 Euro) with no set-up fee for a 256/1024Kb/s ADSL line. It's not the cheapest I could have got, but I opted for a 20:1 contention line as opposed to the 50:1 standard choice. This seems to help as I get top speed at all times of day or night.
My ISP's prices start at 22.50 GBP/month (41 USD, 32 Euro) for a standard 256/512Kb. This is pretty typical of UK ISPs entry-level pricing and services for home users generally go up to 256/2Mb in bandwidth.
With Kyoto, it's not just wires--it's general shoddy urbanization. The city has no metro, so public transportation consists of fairly shabby buses
Not true about the metro, when were you there last?
I didn't use the subway myself, I opted for the buses, which I was pretty impressed with (I am from England though;).
the traffic is insane, and in between historical landmarks, the place is laid out in a grid pattern filled with boxy, unattractive 1960s office buildings (at least the downtown areas.)
You're bang on with these points. Still, out of all the cities I visited during my stay, Kyoto was my favourite.
I'm with you. Recently, as a complete 'nix beginner, I downloaded Fedora and set it up on an FX5600 with 4496 drivers.
They broke Enemy Territory and some other OGL apps, but 15 minutes, google and the Unofficial Fedora FAQ got things working perfectly.
Now I've got sideband addressing and fast writes working too, performance is a more than a match for Windows. I get no lockups at all and I don't consider 15 minutes of my time too much to ask.
I'm just wondering if most of these people with stability problems have looked into all the FAQs and message boards, like this one linked from nVidia's own driver page.
I didn't see any optical audio ins/outs. I paid top dollar for the ability to use optical audio on my home system, why doesn't this device have it? You are paying a premium for super quality video, why skimp on the audio??? Any ideas?
You answer your own question, sort of. This device is cheap, really cheap as far as HDMPEG2 decoders go, so you're not paying a premium for super quality video, quite the opposite.
The market they are aiming for will be quite happy with digital coaxial SPDIF audio output.
Having said that, I'm sure if this device takes off, it will be revised and optical output could be added. That tends to be how these things go.
As accurate as your pricing info might be, what you say about plasmas is slightly misleading. It is inappropriate to call a plasma screen an HDTV, it's merely a display device. You'll need a decoder to watch the broadcast, so add that to your costing.
More importantly (in my opinion) is that there are no plasma screens that can actually resolve 1920x1080i natively. The best you'll get is 1280x720p and only with 50" or greater screens. I'd be surprised if those cost $1250.
If I'm spending money on an 'HDTV' I want it to support all the resolutions in the standard. Watch LCD displays overtake plasma in the very near future, both for resolution and value.
Slashdot Mirror
The first patch fixes a bug which should make the weapon sounds a little richer. From the readme:
-Fixed weapon sounds always playing the first sound in a sound shader instead of randomly picking one.
WTF? Too small? Don't tell me you're just looking at the thumbnails? I'm at 1600x1200 here and the comparison shots are perfectly adequate imho.
Take a look at these pages for alleged quality differences between recent home releases of the films, including the 2004 DVD release.
- Episode IV
- Episode V
- Episode VI
Honourable mentions go to Grave of the Fireflies (if you don't mind having your heart strings tugged) and Cowboy Bebop -Knockin' on Heaven's Door. But, if you could bend the rules slightly and allow Kenshin: Meiji Kenkaku Romantan -Tsuiokuhen through as a feature (the four parts add up to just over 2 hours) then that would be my runaway favourite.
Until a few weeks ago, the Dreamcast was the only home console to have a converstion of Street Fighter 3 -3rd strike, but a PS2 conversion was released in Japan last month. I'm not sure which is used here, but they are both identical to the arcade version (or can be adjusted to be).
Sorry, but Half Life didn't create these things, they are stolen from a miriad of films and books and (gasp) real life (vending machines in cafeterias? Who'd have thunk?). Everything is plagurism, the key to commercial success and praise is hitting the sweet spot by re-using things that your audience may not have seen yet.
Personally I am loving Doom 3 and I think it represents a large step in design, style and atmosphere as well as technology. I can't help wondering if these people moaning about boredom and rubbish AI are playing on a difficulty below Veteran. Suspension of disbelief is far more effective when you feel like you are likely to die.
Direct3D != DirectX
Direct3D is only one component of a suite of APIs known as DirectX. The Quake 3 engine uses DirectX; Directsound and DirectInput. It the former was used from release and the latter included in one of the point releases, I believe. Why waste time doing work that has already been done?
After Carmack swore so long ago that he wouldn't use Direct3D, Doom 3 is indeed a DirectX game.
Carmack hasn't ever used Direct3D as a renderer for his engines. They have been OpenGL since GLQuake, and that hasn't changed with Doom 3. DirectInput is needed for Doom 3's peripheral interface and DirectSound is possibly needed in some way (how many speakers it uses depends on your Control Panel settings), but the sound engine is proprietary.
Hand in your nerd card.
I'm really looking forward to playing around with the console and experimenting with cvars to tweak performance. The evolution of my Quake 3 config is one factor that makes me still play it today, 5 years later. Remember, there're tons of little tweaks for the q3 engine, not accessible through menus that can have a dramatic effect on frame rate at little or no cost. Yay for Carmack's engines.
Precisely. I see several posts here lamenting the fact that Carmack has switched Doom 3's audio engine from software/CPU to EAX. This is not the case, the original engine remains, now you just have the option to utilise EAX should you want to.
Are 512MB adapters even out?
They will be shortly. nVidia and ATI are due to release 512MB versions of their top line cards. Yes, they are expensive, but who said playing Doom 3 properly was going to be cheap? Using PCI-Express to allocate system memory as video memory would be roughly equal to playing Doom 3 on a 512MB radeon 9600 or a 512MB FX5600. Theoretically, of course.
I think, for something like Doom 3, the answer is no. Cards such as the nVidia 6800 Ultra have about 35GB/s bandwidth internally (from its own memory to GPU). AGP 8x provides 2GB/s bandwidth to your system memory and PCI-Express x16 can achieve 14GB/s. Besides, if you're going to buy enough RAM and a new PCI-Express motherboard, you may as well upgrade to a 512MB graphics adapter.
I don't why you would say this. A few things:
1. id have already stated they are making a Doom 3 demo available. Yes, it'll arrive after the full release, but you can wait, right? Plus, they made their reasons this very clear; they reasoned that more people are waiting for the full game than are waiting for a demo. I think they're right.
2. id have, in the past, ALWAYS released a test or shareware version of their latest game. With their track record, it's fairly obvious that they don't have anything to hide in this respect.
True. The PC gamer's expectations are higher than those of the average console gamer. PC games today do not have a chance unless they have the latest pixel shader, filter and bump-map effects. The monitor is far less forgiving than the television.
These features are complex to implement and artwork must be of a higher standard, because there will be someone, somewhere running the thing at 2048x1536. Together with mods and other improvements, this is also partly the reason why games on the PC have a longer life and sales are slower; people return to titles with their upgraded PC to enjoy the experience anew.
Supporting the PC platform properly costs time and money and I for one am very grateful that developers who do so, like id, still exist.
Can someone here with the know-how speculate on what API id are likely to have used? I was under the impression that the Windows version mixes OpenGL for rendering with DirectInput for interface and probably DirectSound for audio.
Is OpenAL the likely candidate for Doom 3 Linux audio, or am I misunderstanding how the engine works?
CD Japan are rarely wrong.
We've learned that the release will definitely be anamorphic, both language tracks will be in 5.1 and Bandai does have the Tachikomatic Days Animated Shorts. We should know later this week what the final US release date is as well.
Check out Anime On DVD for any update. The forum is a friendly place to pick up info too.
It seems to me to just be a way for the music industry to protect their artificially high prices. I presume also, the only reason I've not been stopped from importing Japanese music CDs, is because there's no bloated UK market for me to damage.
As a serious fan of the series, the answer is almost certainly, nothing.
What will it take away? Plenty.
I think it was put best by someone else in this thread when they said that people who enjoy the TV series as much as I, are not the target audience here. They have their Eva, they have Special Director's Cuts, they have two film-length features and they are (largely) satisfied.
Of course, this film (like most) is about making money and unfortunately with films that cost as much as this is likely to, the only way to do this is to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. This'll almost certainly mean losing the edgier themes and events and a lot of the small story details. They just aren't compatible with the format they are working within.
Will it be worth seeing? Who can tell at this early stage? Personally I think the bashing of the concept art is slightly cruel, but I do hope that the creators do not continue in the direction some of these drawings indicate.
I'm not wanting it to fail, I wish the filmmakers luck, there aren't many projects more ambitious than this. If it's a truely awful raping of the TV series, then I shall simply forget it as quickly as I have so many other disappointing Hollywood ventures. Let's hope that wont be necessary.
Yes, it certainly seems that way sometimes. They're getting there though, I've several friends living way out in the styx who've had their exchanges DSL-enabled recently.
BT set up a system, whereby they invite people living in certain non-DSL areas to register their interest in the service. A trigger level is set of say, 500 registrations and if the level is reached, the exchange is enabled and DSL service offered.
I pay 50 GBP/month (92 USD, 72 Euro) with no set-up fee for a 256/1024Kb/s ADSL line. It's not the cheapest I could have got, but I opted for a 20:1 contention line as opposed to the 50:1 standard choice. This seems to help as I get top speed at all times of day or night.
My ISP's prices start at 22.50 GBP/month (41 USD, 32 Euro) for a standard 256/512Kb. This is pretty typical of UK ISPs entry-level pricing and services for home users generally go up to 256/2Mb in bandwidth.
Not true about the metro, when were you there last?
I didn't use the subway myself, I opted for the buses, which I was pretty impressed with (I am from England though ;).
the traffic is insane, and in between historical landmarks, the place is laid out in a grid pattern filled with boxy, unattractive 1960s office buildings (at least the downtown areas.)
You're bang on with these points. Still, out of all the cities I visited during my stay, Kyoto was my favourite.
I'm with you. Recently, as a complete 'nix beginner, I downloaded Fedora and set it up on an FX5600 with 4496 drivers.
They broke Enemy Territory and some other OGL apps, but 15 minutes, google and the Unofficial Fedora FAQ got things working perfectly.
Now I've got sideband addressing and fast writes working too, performance is a more than a match for Windows. I get no lockups at all and I don't consider 15 minutes of my time too much to ask.
I'm just wondering if most of these people with stability problems have looked into all the FAQs and message boards, like this one linked from nVidia's own driver page.
Care to point it out? There is no optical audio out from this device.
You answer your own question, sort of. This device is cheap, really cheap as far as HDMPEG2 decoders go, so you're not paying a premium for super quality video, quite the opposite.
The market they are aiming for will be quite happy with digital coaxial SPDIF audio output. Having said that, I'm sure if this device takes off, it will be revised and optical output could be added. That tends to be how these things go.
Heh, if it's Gateway's own model, it's merely a re-badged Sampo screen. Not the best around and certainly not worth $4000. You were being kind.
More importantly (in my opinion) is that there are no plasma screens that can actually resolve 1920x1080i natively. The best you'll get is 1280x720p and only with 50" or greater screens. I'd be surprised if those cost $1250.
If I'm spending money on an 'HDTV' I want it to support all the resolutions in the standard. Watch LCD displays overtake plasma in the very near future, both for resolution and value.