" stop trying to turn the browser into a platform."
The reason why they are doing this, is the big push by major industries for more DRM. Although current DRM is ineffective against more technically inclined people. They want to eventually be able to encrypt and split up programs and data tying them to the server. Just like how diablo 3 took part of the program hostage across the internet and you had to constantly 'get permission' to continue playing the game.
If you think big companies are not looking at what the game industry and others are doing locking down apps, then you haven't been paying attention.
History also says there are a lot of dead console compaines, let us not forget Sega was pushed out of the console business. MS and Sony were already huge companies with tonnes of money to establish themselves in the console market. Sony got lucky that Nintendo in the 90's didn't understand the importance of technology (and to some extent it still doesn't).
If I were Valve and entering the console market I'd be snapping up developers to make exclusives. Half-life 3 is not enough for anyone to get a steambox. Without software why would anyone get a steambox?
"said, but I think you are wrong to assume there is no other way those things could impose costs on a polluter."
I'm sorry but in the real world you have limited ability to enforce behavior. The US is one of the most corrupt nations on earth, if you look hard enough you'll notice all companies engaging in criminal behavior, or making their criminal behavior legal through putting themselves in government. Reducing government won't change the fact that people with money tend to get what they want (human nature) and damn everyone else.
Citizens don't have a bottomless supply of money by which to game the system and just wait out any citizen outrage then go back to undoing/bending/getting rid of the law, big corporations do unfortunately.
How people really work and the rules you want to apply to them are at odds.
"After all, PCs have brute forced their way past consoles."
And here you LOSE all credibility. PC's have ALWAYS BEEN AHEAD of consoles since the 3dfx era. By GPU power alone, PC's have NEVER been behind consoles. It's a myth propagated by moronic developers who never were part of the PC game era. You are just too obviously historically illiterate.
The xbox and gamecube used chips from PC graphics card vendors because.. GASP the PC was way ahead of console land. Xbox 360 and PS3 were never ahead, and Xbox 1 and GC were NEVER AHEAD of the PC EVER.
This myth is propagated only because developers jumped ship from PC around the 2000's, it's not because the PC was behind it's simply because console gaming was where the money was.
"Yeah, I definitely can't find any current day console ports that are limited on draw calls,"
Thank you. This is all we needed. All AAA game console ports worth playing are not limited on draw calls... and even then the AAA ports are still underutilizing PC CPU and GPU power by a huge grotesque margin (i.e. lower resolution texture models, etc, etc). You were telling us how it was going to miraculously change performance for ever, yet even the most advanced AAA games are not limited on draw calls, and games don't even use high enough quality textures/models to even make use of the massive underutilized power we already have.
You said " video cards have brute forced their way out of the problem. "
Duh... you ignored this part of my post I said "They found ways around it and to make it faster. Same deal."
Nothing you said in any way disproved what I said, I said the key factor was memory bandwidth and you didn't prove that with you draw call thesis and you just said 'they brute forced their way out of it' (aka transistors/memory advancements).
Thanks buddy for PROVING WHAT I JUST SAID ALL ALONG.
The worst part is you have no AAA game examples, where mantle would add anything to the most popular AAA ports, why is that? Because we already have more then enough performance on the PC already. The real bottleneck for PC games has always been fucking consoles. We'd be so much more advanced if PC had been the main platform to begin with and we didn't have to tolerate sloppy low quality textures and severely cut down content (smaller levels, etc) of AAA console games to fit them in the limits of the console's memory.
The reality is all your talk of mantle centers around being a console centric game programmer (and it's obvious you are) there are alternative models that would have emerged if PC had remained the main platform. Optimization and software models would have just taken a different (and more accelerated) path.
The fact that you harp on Draw calls, means your a console fanboy who's never done any serious PC development. This is really about your hard-on for game consoles and nothing else.
I know all about this you stupid fuck, the problem is -- 99% of games don't need the marginal increase performance and that's EXACTLY what it would be. When looking at performance of games you have to look at total system performance of the entire system and the ecosystem of games. Say you increase draw calls by 900% it doesn't mean those draw calls are spent doing anything necessary to the game, in that there is no added value.
You're narrow minded thinking regarding performance is the issue, out of all the current cross platform games from consoles, you wouldn't even be able to name ONE where draw calls were a significant barrier to performance (i.e. the performance boost would be irrelevant).
Drawcall performance is only relevant on consoles because consoles are always slower and have less memory than PC's. PC's have had massive game and graphics headroom for years. Head and shoulders above the PS3 and Xbox 360. Graphics cards have been lightyears ahead in terms of memory and texture size on PC. But textures and gamecode/levels have to be dumbed down for the LIMITED MEMORY of consoles.
So draw calls are only one small marginal thing that goes into game quality. You can have the best hardware on the planet drawing tree's, but they only add marginal value to the game, especially if you console company cheaps out on memory. Epic's #1 concern with consoles was main memory and video memory, not drawcalls. Why would that be? because they take a systemic view of what adds value to games.
There is this thing called 'good enough' and we've been there for the last 6-8 years. Most games target the lowest common denominator because they don't have massive AAA budgets. 99% of games are made for cheap out-dated hardware.
You couldn't find me any current console port that would benefit in any major way from increased drawcalls... why? because the PC is light-years ahead of the console space in terms of performance.
You're splitting hairs like dumbass, you're not 'correct' in anyway because what a gamer cares about is whether a game is any good, they could care less about the technical details of drawcalls.
Drawcalls and minor performance boost it would add are the LEAST important thing when it comes to making a fun game, this is LOST on you.
"I'm sorry, but you're the one who's clearly full of shit. GP clearly has some experience doing console/PC game programming."
I'm sorry but the OPPOSITE is true, perhaps you don't know the theory behind ITANIUM. Do a bit of research you dumb cunt. Right now in the hardware world ALL SOFTWARE both GPU and CPU is suffering performance penalty from the memory bottleneck.
"The rate of improvement in microprocessor speed exceeds the rate of improvement in DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) speed. So although the disparity between processor and memory speed is already an issue, downstream someplace it will be a much bigger one. Hence computer designers are faced with an increasing Processor - Memory Performance Gap [1] , which now is the primary obstacle to improved computer system performance."
"but I'm curious about the second: what genres have ceased to exist?"
What I mean by this is : GOOD GAMES in these genre's have ceased to exist, aka, if you have a constant stream of bad low budget, low quality (unfinished) games in niche genre's, that's the same as having no genre at all. Because it's been reduced to niche status because the people publishing crap there aren't competent or have enough finances to build and polish these games to sufficient quality.
It's all about quality. The word 'genre' can't really capture the complexity of games anyway.
"Dude had the funding, but he didn't want to share his profits with the people that were giving him money. Ergo, excessive greed."
At this point, many of us old gamers could give less of a fuck. Publishers have single handledly:
-Dumbed down games -Stopped making many genre's that used to exist in the past
Gamers are throwing money at projects because we know nothing will get made otherwise. We know some projects will fail, some will take our money, etc. But how's that different from publishers, DRM, Steam, etc? These people have taken our money and fucked us anyway with DRM and all sorts of onerous bullshit rules.
At this point we could care less, the whole gaming world is just once giant exploitation circle jerk with MMO's, F2P and DRM.
When games like wow and diablo 3 are selling virtual items, and Diablo 3 has single player lag... just how exactly are we not getting fucked six ways to sunday?
I didn't buy any of these games, but kids, illiterates and dumbasses who feed corporations aren't going to stop. So what choice to gamers who want games not being made have?
"The difference in performance will be MASSIVE when the rendering features made viable by Mantle are enabled."
I'm sorry but you are full of shit. Memory bandwidth has been the KEY factor in framerates. Not drawcalls. That drawcall bs is propaganda. Transistors > software (provides software developer isn't braindead). Always. The same way CISC was 'slower' then RISC, and the itanium was supposed to be the death of x86 but we still have X86. They found ways around it and to make it faster. Same deal.
"That is really what we don't want though - a return to the bad old days of game developers having to write code specifically for each vendor's cards"
It doesn't really matter since there are only two videocard vendors now, and the pace of graphics card innovation has slowed to a crawl. Not only that a vendor API would not prevent anyone from doing a direct X and OGL executable. The same way many games have DX9 and Dx10 exe's.
More importantly EA is big enough to afford to do native API + OGL + Direct X if they wanted to. I don't see the problem.
"Steam's DRM has not cause anyone I know any issues playing their game"
If you haven't connected to steam in a month, there are a tonne of games that won't work in offline mode. you're forced to download cracked versions to play them. I know because I bought some games who are fully integrated with steamworks on steam for deep discounts.
Now you might say "That's your fault for not connecting to the internet for a month!" and I'd say I shouldn't be forced to when I've already paid for the fucking games and they already know I have a legitimate licesnse. Games should automatically be de-steamed a few months after their release window NOT REQUIRING any internet permission at all. Why? Because you fucking paid, thats why.
Anyone who believes valves contract is valid and not con-artist bullshit doesn't have the intelligence to even take part in the discussion.
We'll take Gabe seriously when he releases a tool to de-steam games that are at least 6 months old, no one should need to get permission to play old games they've bought.
I'll give gabe the 'benefit of the doubt' that some percentage of REALLY stupid gamers will buy through steam because the are too braindead to figure out torrents and understand how their DRM works.
The reality is there was no need to create these hurdles at all, right now gaming is sick. Diablo 3 is proof of this, we have SINGLE PLAYER LAG for fuck sakes. Anyone who would defend further abuset is a cancer on gaming.
... going to stop voting for wars killing people in foreign countries? I am always amazed at human's ability to compartmentalize their thoughts. A sizable chunk of america complaining about videogames has no problem killing people in foreign countries or voting for people that support doing so, has the GALL to complain about videogames? Get. The. Fuck. Out.
"it is to make shallow and hateful generalizations about the US or Americans."
The problem is in the interpretation, i.e. dumb people who think people make shallow and hateful comments about the US are in fact incapable of perceiving they've interpreted those facts incorrectly.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that there are some of those, but 9/10 times the opposite is true. Whenever facts are posted americans suffering from Dunning-Kruger misinterpret reality. Especially when it comes to Slashdot.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.
I really dislike these comments, now what he said was said in a nice way but he's being purposely deceptive. i.e. he's being sophsitic. Sophist : The use of fallacious arguments, esp. with the intention of deceiving.
"Think that the teleology of the universe points to a cosmic designer?"
This is not the problem, the problem is that you don't state what your religion is if you have one. You don't give us any information and so you come off as 'reasonable'. Most religious comments are made by people who haven't thought long and hard about their claims.
There is a reason why people downvote, because many people are uninformed and JUST WRONG and they are blissfully unaware that they are wrong. Most people who say 'you don't respect my opinion' HAVE NEVER CHECKED whether their opinion is uninformed or not. That is, they don't put any effort into checking whether their opinion is true or not. Religion is bullshit that's why people who are religious are downvoted because a sizable chunk of slashdotters have religion in their family and are more familiar with religion and god then people who espouse such nonsense. Many of them were once religious in their youth and ended up rejecting it because - I know this is hard for you to believe THEY studied and read many religious and scientific books and came to the conclusion religion is bullshit. They put in the damn effort.
The hate comes from people who are blissfully unaware they haven't done their intellectual homework when they espouse their 'opinions'.
When's the last time you've seen an exorcist?
Matthew 8:30-34
30 Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. 31 The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.” 32 He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. 33 Those tending the pigs ran off, went into the town and reported all this, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. 34 Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus. And when they saw him, they pleaded with him to leave their region.
When people say "the universe points to a designer" they 90% of the time mean "the god of the holy text/bible in the family I was raised" they DON'T MEAN. "I've examined the scientific evidence and have come to the tentative conclusion that deism is a reasonable hypothesis".
... became widespread and new generations grew up with the internet, 99% of internet comments are mostly garbage. I've found that Websites run by intelligent, educated people who put their real face, name, background on the net tend to be more informative than random commenters as the net has grown. Since as more of the general population and new generation of kids begin to lurk and comment on websites comment quality goes through surges of greatness and mediocrity as generations come and go.
As an adult I find partisan comments the most uninformed, history and politics for anyone with any intelligence is IMMENSELY complex. Trying to apply black and white solutions and old out-dated 19th century political ideologies to complex problems is not sign of intelligence. Most of slashdot tends to fall into the extremely distorted american political spectrum since most slashdot commenters/moderators are american.
I find as the internet became a mass phenomenon slashdot comment quality has become almost as awful as the rest of the internet. The political comments tend to be the most uninformed since it highlights the deep indoctrination of the american public. Since most comments tend to be from the most populous country (america), 300 million vs say 30 million in canada.
So you get a massive boatload of nonsense when anyone mentions politics, anything deep and requiring serious thought and analysis can only usually be found through those who are honest and open and put a face to their opinions.
Those of us who see the world through technical eyes know many of our current values, ideals and institutions are not in line with what is actually true about the universe. We're doing all sorts of irrational bone headed shit in all areas. I find america and americans bizarre in their adherence to simple minded political and values based sloganeering. It's not the sign of an erudite mind.
In order to find solutions you have to study how institutions change over time and they must be informed by how the universe and nature actually operate, all of our institutions are totally out of line with this kind of thinking.
The FPS FAD is not a fad, it started way back in 1992-1994 with Wolf3D, doom and others. 20 years of yearly FPS games is not a fad. FPS is the sports games of shooters.
FPS is so popular because people experience life in the first person so its difficult to tire of that style of gameplay, if you go pickup Quake 3 or UT2004 and force yourself to play it, you'll get immediately immersed back into the fun of playing. The reason we (gameplay) players move on is to see different gameplay modes/etc. But gameplay is hard (tm), and most of the gaming masses don't really like the videogame aspect of games. They like the movie/story aspect.... and they make up the bulk of gamers now. So the game industry makes games like Mass effect 2, which is just a movie with the most basic fps gameplay, but they compensate for it with 'being part of an action movie' bit. We've moved from an era of gameplay focused games to set-pieces, story and virtual theme park experiences. Most people don't want to be challenged or play videogames, they want a themepark in which they are given the illusion they are good at playing videogames. This is why videogames have been dumbed down so much. Most modern gaming audiences are SBG's ('story based gamers') and they really despise gameplay that veers away from simple, dumbed down and easy.
The industry right now is a giant chimera, it's created a generation of 'gamers' who want movies and not anything too vidoegame like. There's a bifurcation between what I call "VR people" and "gamers". VR people want non games like Journey and the walking dead.
These games are primarily are all just about using computers to render stories/movies and are closer to visual novels / virtual experiences, than games.
Nothing ironic about it, the world works on inertia, energy, habit and gravity. Think of steam and all the other digital download services, steam is still the big one. So big that Brad wardell gave up his Impulse game store/service to gamestop because he knew it was pointless because people form habits and communities around software. People don't want to have to change once they find something that serves their needs/interests.
"Yeah, don't get it either. Best Zelda they ever did was on the N64. And Mario 64 kicks ass too. N64 rocks."
The problem wasn't FIRST PARTY games, the problem was the LACK of games and franchises from the super nintendo and their non-existence on the N64 because of nintendo's bone headed move to stick with cartridges. The storage size of a CD allowed games like Final fantasy 7. JRPG's like FF, Xenogears, Fighting games like street fighter and derivatives totally skipped the N64. THAT IS A HUGE DEAL. Only an idiot that didn't play any third party franchises would say the N64 was wonderful. It was the key event in Nintendo's history that lead to Nintendo's long deflation and decline as a game company with much intelligence.
They became more about selling console hardware and not enough about supporting game developers. They are a technically illiterate bone headed game company. Why would you not go with DVD standard for the gamecube and make porting games from other platforms a huge chore/time sink for everyone? Another total idiot move. They make totally idiot technological moves every console generation. This is what caused me to stop buying their consoles. They don't grasp game development from a third party developer perspective. Not to mention how bad they screwed up Metroid with Other M and then the huge clusterfuck with the Starfox franchise, SF assault was just a travesty.
That is why the N64 was the worst decision in Nintendo's history they went from #1 game company with the super nintendo with all the popular franchises and they lost ALL the third parties that were pushing the gaming envelope OVERNIGHT to a brand new competitor with no track record. Nintendo didn't grasp their also ran status because they never took third party developers that make you successful seriously.
Many of us old timers fondly remember the super nintendo era and we hate what those dumbasses running nintendo did with the N64, the gamecube, and just anti-developer practices in general did to videogaming.
... if people can get riled up about fantasy characters in mass effect 3's bad ending, then having them be emotionally invested in tools that do stuff veering on what humans can is not that far fetched.
" Precisely that you had to grind endlessly to perhaps get the good stuff gave people a sense of achievement."
Not quite, what made borderland and diablo was the combat and SECONDLY getting awesome stuff. In diablo 2 the combat for melee classes like paladin acted closer to traditional fighting game mechanics (sword + shield bash + dash). Diablo was beginning to do interesting things with combat that balanced more action oriented game style with ease of use interface that is missed by the non-observant population.
If you thought diablo was only about loot, the joke was on you. Sure loot was a part of it, but the class design and atmopshere of diablo's world was beginning to gain it's legs in diablo 2. It was sadly was cut short by World of warcraft and the huge gap it created from diablo 2 to diablo 3 and the diablo 2 team going to work elsewhere.
The original teams behind D1 and D2 were stellar. The D3 team, lets face it, were a bunch of green devs (in terms of game design) trying to understand a decades old franchise. This is seen in how the items and class design were just awful. The WoW / MMO developer generation just doesn't get diablo, let's face this fact. Most modern RPG players have been raised on MMO's which is far from the oldschool RPG design of yore. If you grew up playing Eye of the beholder, Lands of Lore and the early utlima's, Final fantasy 1, etc, most mmo's are just so far removed from real dungeon crawling gameplay and challenges. To anyone who's oldschool, modern MMO's are giant theme parks which players are hand held and lead by the nose through the content with the challenging videogame part almost completely removed.
While that may be true, it still cant' compete with the boost in frequency that performance got in the past. Technically a 3570K is 3 generations better then a core 2 duo, but it's barely 2x as fast. Usually you get an almost doubling of performance every generation. The performance gained from i920 to i2500 and to 3570 has been abysmal. Less then 40% increase from i920 to i2500, less then 20% going from i2500 to 3570. That is a huge deal.
"Not really. The "Users" in RMS's time WERE developers of some ability"
Open source would ENORMOUSLY benefit PC gaming. In fact the few games that were open sourced have all had amazing work done to them. Who cares if only a small subset of the gaming community/fans have the potential to fix/work on the code? That's true of anything requiring serious effort. I can only imagine where we'd be if it was required by law to open source all games. So many classic games would not have to have 'gangrene' code. Where would Mechwarrior 2 and other classic DOS games be if their source was required to go to a library and then be opened after a decade (after the sales window)? Right now companies are allowed to confiscate software and purposely break it or neglect it. There's no good reason why games have to break at all, and they could continue to be updated as hardware changes if not for the backwards and completely corrupt IP law.
Slashdot Mirror
" stop trying to turn the browser into a platform."
The reason why they are doing this, is the big push by major industries for more DRM. Although current DRM is ineffective against more technically inclined people. They want to eventually be able to encrypt and split up programs and data tying them to the server. Just like how diablo 3 took part of the program hostage across the internet and you had to constantly 'get permission' to continue playing the game.
If you think big companies are not looking at what the game industry and others are doing locking down apps, then you haven't been paying attention.
"Yeah, I think history says it can be done."
History also says there are a lot of dead console compaines, let us not forget Sega was pushed out of the console business. MS and Sony were already huge companies with tonnes of money to establish themselves in the console market. Sony got lucky that Nintendo in the 90's didn't understand the importance of technology (and to some extent it still doesn't).
If I were Valve and entering the console market I'd be snapping up developers to make exclusives. Half-life 3 is not enough for anyone to get a steambox. Without software why would anyone get a steambox?
"said, but I think you are wrong to assume there is no other way those things could impose costs on a polluter."
I'm sorry but in the real world you have limited ability to enforce behavior. The US is one of the most corrupt nations on earth, if you look hard enough you'll notice all companies engaging in criminal behavior, or making their criminal behavior legal through putting themselves in government. Reducing government won't change the fact that people with money tend to get what they want (human nature) and damn everyone else.
Citizens don't have a bottomless supply of money by which to game the system and just wait out any citizen outrage then go back to undoing/bending/getting rid of the law, big corporations do unfortunately.
How people really work and the rules you want to apply to them are at odds.
"What objective measures of art, or even film specifically, can you think of?"
Aesthetics, if we replaced realistic imagery with black and white stickmen and stick buildings/environment, would it still be the same movie?
"After all, PCs have brute forced their way past consoles."
And here you LOSE all credibility. PC's have ALWAYS BEEN AHEAD of consoles since the 3dfx era. By GPU power alone, PC's have NEVER been behind consoles. It's a myth propagated by moronic developers who never were part of the PC game era. You are just too obviously historically illiterate.
The xbox and gamecube used chips from PC graphics card vendors because.. GASP the PC was way ahead of console land. Xbox 360 and PS3 were never ahead, and Xbox 1 and GC were NEVER AHEAD of the PC EVER.
This myth is propagated only because developers jumped ship from PC around the 2000's, it's not because the PC was behind it's simply because console gaming was where the money was.
"Yeah, I definitely can't find any current day console ports that are limited on draw calls,"
Thank you. This is all we needed. All AAA game console ports worth playing are not limited on draw calls... and even then the AAA ports are still underutilizing PC CPU and GPU power by a huge grotesque margin (i.e. lower resolution texture models, etc, etc). You were telling us how it was going to miraculously change performance for ever, yet even the most advanced AAA games are not limited on draw calls, and games don't even use high enough quality textures/models to even make use of the massive underutilized power we already have.
You said " video cards have brute forced their way out of the problem. "
Duh... you ignored this part of my post I said "They found ways around it and to make it faster. Same deal."
Nothing you said in any way disproved what I said, I said the key factor was memory bandwidth and you didn't prove that with you draw call thesis and you just said 'they brute forced their way out of it' (aka transistors/memory advancements).
Thanks buddy for PROVING WHAT I JUST SAID ALL ALONG.
The worst part is you have no AAA game examples, where mantle would add anything to the most popular AAA ports, why is that? Because we already have more then enough performance on the PC already. The real bottleneck for PC games has always been fucking consoles. We'd be so much more advanced if PC had been the main platform to begin with and we didn't have to tolerate sloppy low quality textures and severely cut down content (smaller levels, etc) of AAA console games to fit them in the limits of the console's memory.
The reality is all your talk of mantle centers around being a console centric game programmer (and it's obvious you are) there are alternative models that would have emerged if PC had remained the main platform. Optimization and software models would have just taken a different (and more accelerated) path.
The fact that you harp on Draw calls, means your a console fanboy who's never done any serious PC development. This is really about your hard-on for game consoles and nothing else.
I know all about this you stupid fuck, the problem is -- 99% of games don't need the marginal increase performance and that's EXACTLY what it would be. When looking at performance of games you have to look at total system performance of the entire system and the ecosystem of games. Say you increase draw calls by 900% it doesn't mean those draw calls are spent doing anything necessary to the game, in that there is no added value.
You're narrow minded thinking regarding performance is the issue, out of all the current cross platform games from consoles, you wouldn't even be able to name ONE where draw calls were a significant barrier to performance (i.e. the performance boost would be irrelevant).
Drawcall performance is only relevant on consoles because consoles are always slower and have less memory than PC's. PC's have had massive game and graphics headroom for years. Head and shoulders above the PS3 and Xbox 360. Graphics cards have been lightyears ahead in terms of memory and texture size on PC. But textures and gamecode/levels have to be dumbed down for the LIMITED MEMORY of consoles.
So draw calls are only one small marginal thing that goes into game quality. You can have the best hardware on the planet drawing tree's, but they only add marginal value to the game, especially if you console company cheaps out on memory. Epic's #1 concern with consoles was main memory and video memory, not drawcalls. Why would that be? because they take a systemic view of what adds value to games.
There is this thing called 'good enough' and we've been there for the last 6-8 years. Most games target the lowest common denominator because they don't have massive AAA budgets. 99% of games are made for cheap out-dated hardware.
You couldn't find me any current console port that would benefit in any major way from increased drawcalls... why? because the PC is light-years ahead of the console space in terms of performance.
You're splitting hairs like dumbass, you're not 'correct' in anyway because what a gamer cares about is whether a game is any good, they could care less about the technical details of drawcalls.
Drawcalls and minor performance boost it would add are the LEAST important thing when it comes to making a fun game, this is LOST on you.
"I'm sorry, but you're the one who's clearly full of shit. GP clearly has some experience doing console/PC game programming."
I'm sorry but the OPPOSITE is true, perhaps you don't know the theory behind ITANIUM. Do a bit of research you dumb cunt. Right now in the hardware world ALL SOFTWARE both GPU and CPU is suffering performance penalty from the memory bottleneck.
https://epic.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/pub/Home/TrendsAndConceptsII2010/HW_Trends_The_Processor-Memory_bottleneck___Problems_and_Solutions..pdf
"The rate of improvement in microprocessor speed exceeds the rate of improvement in DRAM (Dynamic
Random Access Memory) speed. So although the disparity between processor and memory speed is
already an issue, downstream someplace it will be a much bigger one. Hence computer designers are
faced with an increasing Processor - Memory Performance Gap [1] , which now is the primary
obstacle to improved computer system performance."
"but I'm curious about the second: what genres have ceased to exist?"
What I mean by this is : GOOD GAMES in these genre's have ceased to exist, aka, if you have a constant stream of bad low budget, low quality (unfinished) games in niche genre's, that's the same as having no genre at all. Because it's been reduced to niche status because the people publishing crap there aren't competent or have enough finances to build and polish these games to sufficient quality.
It's all about quality. The word 'genre' can't really capture the complexity of games anyway.
"Dude had the funding, but he didn't want to share his profits with the people that were giving him money. Ergo, excessive greed."
At this point, many of us old gamers could give less of a fuck. Publishers have single handledly:
-Dumbed down games
-Stopped making many genre's that used to exist in the past
Gamers are throwing money at projects because we know nothing will get made otherwise. We know some projects will fail, some will take our money, etc. But how's that different from publishers, DRM, Steam, etc? These people have taken our money and fucked us anyway with DRM and all sorts of onerous bullshit rules.
At this point we could care less, the whole gaming world is just once giant exploitation circle jerk with MMO's, F2P and DRM.
When games like wow and diablo 3 are selling virtual items, and Diablo 3 has single player lag... just how exactly are we not getting fucked six ways to sunday?
I didn't buy any of these games, but kids, illiterates and dumbasses who feed corporations aren't going to stop. So what choice to gamers who want games not being made have?
"The difference in performance will be MASSIVE when the rendering features made viable by Mantle are enabled."
I'm sorry but you are full of shit. Memory bandwidth has been the KEY factor in framerates. Not drawcalls. That drawcall bs is propaganda. Transistors > software (provides software developer isn't braindead). Always. The same way CISC was 'slower' then RISC, and the itanium was supposed to be the death of x86 but we still have X86. They found ways around it and to make it faster. Same deal.
"That is really what we don't want though - a return to the bad old days of game developers having to write code specifically for each vendor's cards"
It doesn't really matter since there are only two videocard vendors now, and the pace of graphics card innovation has slowed to a crawl. Not only that a vendor API would not prevent anyone from doing a direct X and OGL executable. The same way many games have DX9 and Dx10 exe's.
More importantly EA is big enough to afford to do native API + OGL + Direct X if they wanted to. I don't see the problem.
"Steam's DRM has not cause anyone I know any issues playing their game"
If you haven't connected to steam in a month, there are a tonne of games that won't work in offline mode. you're forced to download cracked versions to play them. I know because I bought some games who are fully integrated with steamworks on steam for deep discounts.
Now you might say "That's your fault for not connecting to the internet for a month!" and I'd say I shouldn't be forced to when I've already paid for the fucking games and they already know I have a legitimate licesnse. Games should automatically be de-steamed a few months after their release window NOT REQUIRING any internet permission at all. Why? Because you fucking paid, thats why.
Anyone who believes valves contract is valid and not con-artist bullshit doesn't have the intelligence to even take part in the discussion.
We'll take Gabe seriously when he releases a tool to de-steam games that are at least 6 months old, no one should need to get permission to play old games they've bought.
I'll give gabe the 'benefit of the doubt' that some percentage of REALLY stupid gamers will buy through steam because the are too braindead to figure out torrents and understand how their DRM works.
The reality is there was no need to create these hurdles at all, right now gaming is sick. Diablo 3 is proof of this, we have SINGLE PLAYER LAG for fuck sakes. Anyone who would defend further abuset is a cancer on gaming.
... going to stop voting for wars killing people in foreign countries? I am always amazed at human's ability to compartmentalize their thoughts. A sizable chunk of america complaining about videogames has no problem killing people in foreign countries or voting for people that support doing so, has the GALL to complain about videogames? Get. The. Fuck. Out.
"it is to make shallow and hateful generalizations about the US or Americans."
The problem is in the interpretation, i.e. dumb people who think people make shallow and hateful comments about the US are in fact incapable of perceiving they've interpreted those facts incorrectly.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that there are some of those, but 9/10 times the opposite is true. Whenever facts are posted americans suffering from Dunning-Kruger misinterpret reality. Especially when it comes to Slashdot.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.
I really dislike these comments, now what he said was said in a nice way but he's being purposely deceptive. i.e. he's being sophsitic. Sophist : The use of fallacious arguments, esp. with the intention of deceiving.
"Think that the teleology of the universe points to a cosmic designer?"
This is not the problem, the problem is that you don't state what your religion is if you have one. You don't give us any information and so you come off as 'reasonable'. Most religious comments are made by people who haven't thought long and hard about their claims.
There is a reason why people downvote, because many people are uninformed and JUST WRONG and they are blissfully unaware that they are wrong. Most people who say 'you don't respect my opinion' HAVE NEVER CHECKED whether their opinion is uninformed or not. That is, they don't put any effort into checking whether their opinion is true or not. Religion is bullshit that's why people who are religious are downvoted because a sizable chunk of slashdotters have religion in their family and are more familiar with religion and god then people who espouse such nonsense. Many of them were once religious in their youth and ended up rejecting it because - I know this is hard for you to believe THEY studied and read many religious and scientific books and came to the conclusion religion is bullshit. They put in the damn effort.
The hate comes from people who are blissfully unaware they haven't done their intellectual homework when they espouse their 'opinions'.
When's the last time you've seen an exorcist?
Matthew 8:30-34
30 Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. 31 The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.” 32 He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. 33 Those tending the pigs ran off, went into the town and reported all this, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. 34 Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus. And when they saw him, they pleaded with him to leave their region.
When people say "the universe points to a designer" they 90% of the time mean "the god of the holy text/bible in the family I was raised" they DON'T MEAN. "I've examined the scientific evidence and have come to the tentative conclusion that deism is a reasonable hypothesis".
... became widespread and new generations grew up with the internet, 99% of internet comments are mostly garbage. I've found that Websites run by intelligent, educated people who put their real face, name, background on the net tend to be more informative than random commenters as the net has grown. Since as more of the general population and new generation of kids begin to lurk and comment on websites comment quality goes through surges of greatness and mediocrity as generations come and go.
As an adult I find partisan comments the most uninformed, history and politics for anyone with any intelligence is IMMENSELY complex. Trying to apply black and white solutions and old out-dated 19th century political ideologies to complex problems is not sign of intelligence. Most of slashdot tends to fall into the extremely distorted american political spectrum since most slashdot commenters/moderators are american.
I find as the internet became a mass phenomenon slashdot comment quality has become almost as awful as the rest of the internet. The political comments tend to be the most uninformed since it highlights the deep indoctrination of the american public. Since most comments tend to be from the most populous country (america), 300 million vs say 30 million in canada.
So you get a massive boatload of nonsense when anyone mentions politics, anything deep and requiring serious thought and analysis can only usually be found through those who are honest and open and put a face to their opinions.
Those of us who see the world through technical eyes know many of our current values, ideals and institutions are not in line with what is actually true about the universe. We're doing all sorts of irrational bone headed shit in all areas. I find america and americans bizarre in their adherence to simple minded political and values based sloganeering. It's not the sign of an erudite mind.
In order to find solutions you have to study how institutions change over time and they must be informed by how the universe and nature actually operate, all of our institutions are totally out of line with this kind of thinking.
"once the FPS fad is up "
The FPS FAD is not a fad, it started way back in 1992-1994 with Wolf3D, doom and others. 20 years of yearly FPS games is not a fad. FPS is the sports games of shooters.
FPS is so popular because people experience life in the first person so its difficult to tire of that style of gameplay, if you go pickup Quake 3 or UT2004 and force yourself to play it, you'll get immediately immersed back into the fun of playing. The reason we (gameplay) players move on is to see different gameplay modes/etc. But gameplay is hard (tm), and most of the gaming masses don't really like the videogame aspect of games. They like the movie/story aspect.... and they make up the bulk of gamers now. So the game industry makes games like Mass effect 2, which is just a movie with the most basic fps gameplay, but they compensate for it with 'being part of an action movie' bit. We've moved from an era of gameplay focused games to set-pieces, story and virtual theme park experiences. Most people don't want to be challenged or play videogames, they want a themepark in which they are given the illusion they are good at playing videogames. This is why videogames have been dumbed down so much. Most modern gaming audiences are SBG's ('story based gamers') and they really despise gameplay that veers away from simple, dumbed down and easy.
The industry right now is a giant chimera, it's created a generation of 'gamers' who want movies and not anything too vidoegame like. There's a bifurcation between what I call "VR people" and "gamers". VR people want non games like Journey and the walking dead.
http://www.telltalegames.com/walkingdead/
These games are primarily are all just about using computers to render stories/movies and are closer to visual novels / virtual experiences, than games.
"It's ironic"
Nothing ironic about it, the world works on inertia, energy, habit and gravity. Think of steam and all the other digital download services, steam is still the big one. So big that Brad wardell gave up his Impulse game store/service to gamestop because he knew it was pointless because people form habits and communities around software. People don't want to have to change once they find something that serves their needs/interests.
"Yeah, don't get it either. Best Zelda they ever did was on the N64. And Mario 64 kicks ass too. N64 rocks."
The problem wasn't FIRST PARTY games, the problem was the LACK of games and franchises from the super nintendo and their non-existence on the N64 because of nintendo's bone headed move to stick with cartridges. The storage size of a CD allowed games like Final fantasy 7. JRPG's like FF, Xenogears, Fighting games like street fighter and derivatives totally skipped the N64. THAT IS A HUGE DEAL. Only an idiot that didn't play any third party franchises would say the N64 was wonderful. It was the key event in Nintendo's history that lead to Nintendo's long deflation and decline as a game company with much intelligence.
They became more about selling console hardware and not enough about supporting game developers. They are a technically illiterate bone headed game company. Why would you not go with DVD standard for the gamecube and make porting games from other platforms a huge chore/time sink for everyone? Another total idiot move. They make totally idiot technological moves every console generation. This is what caused me to stop buying their consoles. They don't grasp game development from a third party developer perspective. Not to mention how bad they screwed up Metroid with Other M and then the huge clusterfuck with the Starfox franchise, SF assault was just a travesty.
That is why the N64 was the worst decision in Nintendo's history they went from #1 game company with the super nintendo with all the popular franchises and they lost ALL the third parties that were pushing the gaming envelope OVERNIGHT to a brand new competitor with no track record. Nintendo didn't grasp their also ran status because they never took third party developers that make you successful seriously.
Many of us old timers fondly remember the super nintendo era and we hate what those dumbasses running nintendo did with the N64, the gamecube, and just anti-developer practices in general did to videogaming.
... if people can get riled up about fantasy characters in mass effect 3's bad ending, then having them be emotionally invested in tools that do stuff veering on what humans can is not that far fetched.
" Precisely that you had to grind endlessly to perhaps get the good stuff gave people a sense of achievement."
Not quite, what made borderland and diablo was the combat and SECONDLY getting awesome stuff. In diablo 2 the combat for melee classes like paladin acted closer to traditional fighting game mechanics (sword + shield bash + dash). Diablo was beginning to do interesting things with combat that balanced more action oriented game style with ease of use interface that is missed by the non-observant population.
If you thought diablo was only about loot, the joke was on you. Sure loot was a part of it, but the class design and atmopshere of diablo's world was beginning to gain it's legs in diablo 2. It was sadly was cut short by World of warcraft and the huge gap it created from diablo 2 to diablo 3 and the diablo 2 team going to work elsewhere.
The original teams behind D1 and D2 were stellar. The D3 team, lets face it, were a bunch of green devs (in terms of game design) trying to understand a decades old franchise. This is seen in how the items and class design were just awful. The WoW / MMO developer generation just doesn't get diablo, let's face this fact. Most modern RPG players have been raised on MMO's which is far from the oldschool RPG design of yore. If you grew up playing Eye of the beholder, Lands of Lore and the early utlima's, Final fantasy 1, etc, most mmo's are just so far removed from real dungeon crawling gameplay and challenges. To anyone who's oldschool, modern MMO's are giant theme parks which players are hand held and lead by the nose through the content with the challenging videogame part almost completely removed.
While that may be true, it still cant' compete with the boost in frequency that performance got in the past. Technically a 3570K is 3 generations better then a core 2 duo, but it's barely 2x as fast. Usually you get an almost doubling of performance every generation. The performance gained from i920 to i2500 and to 3570 has been abysmal. Less then 40% increase from i920 to i2500, less then 20% going from i2500 to 3570. That is a huge deal.
"having a perfect track record and all."
They were right about CPU clockspeed. We've been stuck below 10ghz for a long time now.
"Not really. The "Users" in RMS's time WERE developers of some ability"
Open source would ENORMOUSLY benefit PC gaming. In fact the few games that were open sourced have all had amazing work done to them. Who cares if only a small subset of the gaming community/fans have the potential to fix/work on the code? That's true of anything requiring serious effort. I can only imagine where we'd be if it was required by law to open source all games. So many classic games would not have to have 'gangrene' code. Where would Mechwarrior 2 and other classic DOS games be if their source was required to go to a library and then be opened after a decade (after the sales window)? Right now companies are allowed to confiscate software and purposely break it or neglect it. There's no good reason why games have to break at all, and they could continue to be updated as hardware changes if not for the backwards and completely corrupt IP law.
Freespace 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhAR8rWPluQ
FS2 SCP mod community
http://www.hard-light.net/