Community features are the way to give extra value to the legal product.
Most games still have their primary experience offline. Requiring downloads of any assets would just mean they get added into a cracked version. And piss off legitimate customers who dont want to go online to play.
But when you can post your highscores to online leaderboards, get your stats, configs and save-games saved to an account. So when you reinstall you have all your settings back -- that gives actual value to the cd key thingy that games ask you to put in.
The A640 i bought recently has the swivel viewfinder which is indeed very handy. Especially if you like taking pictures of stuff from mad angles.
I found that for £169 new, so prolly not a great deal more than a 550. Prices seem to be much higher now for some reason tho.
Id like to enable RAW mode on mine, but without loosing the functionality of the official firmware... guess i better RTFA.
DX10 misses out most of Windows AND the 360 as well. 360 is pre-DX10 hardware. Only developers that have piles of cash shoveled at them by MS, or are MS owned will make DX10 only games. Until it makes financial sense to do otherwise developers would be stupid to go DX10 only.
From what we have seen so far DX10 doesn't make an awful lot of difference anyway, UE3 is primarily DX9 and Crysis doesn't look a whole lot different in DX9 compared to 10.
It's a choice between Windows XP and some minor visual enhancements. At the moment Windows XP is winning for me.
I work with a Citrix/Server 2003 based network at a school and there have never been any problems with the connection to the servers. This is with half the kids on flash game sites or streaming video from mtv.com (good fun can be had shadowing them while they are on game sites:p).
I would say that your problems are with the IT department being clueless, or someone skimped on hardware are the servers are loaded too heavily.
The thing, is its not just global authentication systems like this that ask you to put in your login details on multiple websites. Facebook, Flixster and i imagine some other social networks actually ASK you for your email address (or login name) and password so they can mine the contents of your contact list from the competing site or email provider, and use it to populate the list of contacts on their site.
This is madness, security conscious websites and people (like me) are trying to educate the average user to never ever give out their login details to a third party. This is made much harder when popular sites like social networks are actually asking their users to hand over information that should never be disclosed under any circumstances.
All that needs to happen is for someone to get spam advertising a fake social network and during the sign up process they are asked if they want to copy their contacts from their web mail account (gmail, hotmail, whatever) or other social network. They wont think twice because they have already been through the process when they created a Facebook account.
I couldn't believe it when i was asked to hand over my Gmail email address and password so that my contacts could be added to the Flixster account i was creating a little while ago!
Ive noticed similar situations in other games. I've been playing Far Cry recently, and its a very good game. The AI especially considering it is ~3 years old.
Anyway, when you act irrationally, eg. charge an NPC and get up close; they freeze up and stand looking at you, or fire at you madly but miss totally.
I suppose the AI is tuned for the most common situations in the game. And in Far Cry that often mid to long range firearms encounters, not mêlée. It does seem strange that the AI can be a better shot at 50m than 5:)
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Community features are the way to give extra value to the legal product.
Most games still have their primary experience offline. Requiring downloads of any assets would just mean they get added into a cracked version. And piss off legitimate customers who dont want to go online to play.
But when you can post your highscores to online leaderboards, get your stats, configs and save-games saved to an account. So when you reinstall you have all your settings back -- that gives actual value to the cd key thingy that games ask you to put in.
No valid CD key, no account.
The A640 i bought recently has the swivel viewfinder which is indeed very handy. Especially if you like taking pictures of stuff from mad angles. I found that for £169 new, so prolly not a great deal more than a 550. Prices seem to be much higher now for some reason tho. Id like to enable RAW mode on mine, but without loosing the functionality of the official firmware... guess i better RTFA.
DX10 misses out most of Windows AND the 360 as well. 360 is pre-DX10 hardware. Only developers that have piles of cash shoveled at them by MS, or are MS owned will make DX10 only games. Until it makes financial sense to do otherwise developers would be stupid to go DX10 only. From what we have seen so far DX10 doesn't make an awful lot of difference anyway, UE3 is primarily DX9 and Crysis doesn't look a whole lot different in DX9 compared to 10. It's a choice between Windows XP and some minor visual enhancements. At the moment Windows XP is winning for me.
I work with a Citrix/Server 2003 based network at a school and there have never been any problems with the connection to the servers. This is with half the kids on flash game sites or streaming video from mtv.com (good fun can be had shadowing them while they are on game sites :p).
I would say that your problems are with the IT department being clueless, or someone skimped on hardware are the servers are loaded too heavily.
The thing, is its not just global authentication systems like this that ask you to put in your login details on multiple websites. Facebook, Flixster and i imagine some other social networks actually ASK you for your email address (or login name) and password so they can mine the contents of your contact list from the competing site or email provider, and use it to populate the list of contacts on their site.
This is madness, security conscious websites and people (like me) are trying to educate the average user to never ever give out their login details to a third party. This is made much harder when popular sites like social networks are actually asking their users to hand over information that should never be disclosed under any circumstances.
All that needs to happen is for someone to get spam advertising a fake social network and during the sign up process they are asked if they want to copy their contacts from their web mail account (gmail, hotmail, whatever) or other social network. They wont think twice because they have already been through the process when they created a Facebook account.
I couldn't believe it when i was asked to hand over my Gmail email address and password so that my contacts could be added to the Flixster account i was creating a little while ago!Ive noticed similar situations in other games. I've been playing Far Cry recently, and its a very good game. The AI especially considering it is ~3 years old. Anyway, when you act irrationally, eg. charge an NPC and get up close; they freeze up and stand looking at you, or fire at you madly but miss totally. I suppose the AI is tuned for the most common situations in the game. And in Far Cry that often mid to long range firearms encounters, not mêlée. It does seem strange that the AI can be a better shot at 50m than 5 :)