User Information - Jeremy

News Comments > Prey Sequel Plans

Sony has been claiming that games are already filling blue ray discs, though I find that really hard to believe unless some developers are abandoning all use of compression altogether, which would be pretty retarded of them.

Re: No subject

Oct 24, 2006, 10:48

News Comments > Saturday Consolidation

Prey was a turd. I don't understand how it sold so well. They practically ignored multiplayer options that might have been interesting with the portal stuff too, leaving it firmly in the realm of a mediocrity.

Re: UMK3

Oct 22, 2006, 21:48

News Comments > Saturday Consolidation

No, their 'fact sheet' and their repeated public statements that are completely full of shit.

Re: UMK3

Oct 21, 2006, 23:05

Christ Sony is so full of shit.

News Comments > Evening Q&As

Re: No subject

Oct 21, 2006, 14:41

Apparently more than just slow ass muskets. Chris Owen: One of the interesting things that I learned when researching weapons was that the Civil War was one of our nation’s greatest periods of greatest military innovation as both sides were trying to find weaponry advancements to win the war. Weapons such as Gatling guns, repeating rifles, hand grenades and exploding artillery were used by both sides in the Civil War and are featured in the game. All of the weapons are authentic to the Civil War era and also include period muskets, revolvers, sniper rifles, sabers, and knives. Here is the full list of weapons: # Sheffield Bowie Knife # U.S. M1860 Light Calvary Saber # Colt Army Revolver Model 1860 # Remington Revolver # 1861 Springfield Musket # Whitworth Rifle # Sharps 1855 # Colt M1855 # Spencer Rifle # Henry Rifle # Target Rifle (i.e. Sniper) # Grenades # Howitzer 9 lb Cannon # Gatling Gun

68.

Re: And so it begins.

Oct 17, 2006, 19:54

With Valve being a private company and with Steam being closed-source and having encrypted or obfuscated network traffic, the public will never know what is being collected or how it is being used. Just like every other piece of software out there. I'm not going to get into the steam debate with you. You are easily the biggest steam/valve conspiracy theorist out there, and no matter what is said you will believe that valve and steam is out to fuck you, despite absolutely no evidence supporting the claims. We all are entitled to our opinions, but frankly most of the blues crowd is sick of hearing your valve/steam drivel. If only we could convince you to keep it to yourself it would be a wonderful achievement.

56.

Re: And so it begins.

Oct 17, 2006, 17:20

In addition to using the collected data for its own sales and marketing purposes, Valve could and may be selling that information to advertisers and marketers who would certainly be eager to have it. Right, and they could be skinning small children at their office. Until it is known that they are in fact using such information for these evil purpose I don't give a rats ass. I've yet to see anything harmful in compiling playtimes, death stats, completion time, etc of the single player and multi player games. I'm not going to live in fear of something that has yet to be verified as anything but a what if. EA on the other hand is pretty public about their shady bullshit, with which I will choose not to participate, not that I would have gotten this turd game anyways. I can only hope they are just testing the waters and it will fail miserably, but thats probably wishful thinking. With your definition, most software that does any sort of data transfer could be considered spyware. Every OS is spyware, every software that checks for automatic updates is spyware. Many games are spyware. I choose to go by a looser definition, which is basically malware or spyware with the intent of delivering me unwanted spam, ads, etc. Tracking usage of their games doesn't fit into that category, and may even help help make better shit in the future, and I see no harm in it, though it would be nice to have such things more obvious to the user. It's a compromise I'm willing to make as long as there isn't any misuse of the data, which there doesn't appear to be yet. When steam pops up Victorias Secret ads based on how long it tracked me looking a Alyxs tits I'll be pissed at them too.

54.

Re: No subject

Oct 17, 2006, 17:02

Maybe if their stock price takes a deep dive they'll pay attention. Probably would just blame it on piracy.

46.

Re: And so it begins.

Oct 17, 2006, 16:36

Care to post a source that they are tracking single player too? The stats on that page have been available for every game since the beginning of internet gaming and master servers. Server contact a master server with information, thats how clients find games. Nothing new or steam specific about that. It wouldn't be hard for them to track player play time through the same system. http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/ Has similar stats, though in a not so pretty graph format. The hardware survey has also always been optional as well. Where is the spyware bit? Using that logic every MMORPG in existance is also spyware, as they have detailed information of your playtime as well. Nothing on that stats page says to me of adware/spyware/etc. If there's any truth to that link, the specific part that makes it spyware is monitoring surfing habits for the purpose of giving to ad companies for targeted ads. Steam doesn't do that. I could give a rats ass if steam compiles information on players online playing their game and optional hardware surveys. Even if they compile single player playtimes it doesn't mean shit. When they start targeting ads at me with that information they will be just as big of dickheads. In fact, I'd welcome them or any other developer compiling playtime throughout a game if it meant they would use it to see what parts of games people like best to do more of it. Until the information is used for evil(like these EA fags seem to be doing) I couldn't care less.

35.

Re: Place yer bets..

Oct 17, 2006, 15:12

Another reason EA sucks ass. http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4010&Itemid=2 You're right. Everything they do is about the bottom line.

27.

Re: And so it begins.

Oct 17, 2006, 14:17

I havent played Swat4, or SC3, but what spyware are you referring to in steam? It's more than enough reason to pass on this shit game, above and beyond the fact that it's a shit game.

11.

Re: And so it begins.

Oct 17, 2006, 13:19

News Comments > Trade Wars Remake?

Here's an even better reason to pass on this turd. http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/centipedes/battlefield-2142-with-a-dash-of-spyware-207955.php oops yall beat me to it. This comment was edited on Oct 17, 13:21.

10.

Re: No subject

Oct 16, 2006, 12:06

News Comments > Vietcong 2 Fist Bravo Released

As one of the people who never played TW back in its day, a friend talked me into participating in a game that he had set up for the workplace. I was bored to tears, but managed to stick with it for a couple weeks to try and give it a fair chance. Unfortunately it never got much better so I eventually just stopped playing. So many people talk about all the classic of the old days, but today expectations are higher and the same stuff won't impress gamers like they did back then. Even a remake of TW with graphics wouldn't be much fun to me, I would expect them to add significantly more features and gameplay elements, almost to the point that it turns into a Master of Orion type game, but more focused on your fleet of ships. My 2c.

Re: No subject

Oct 16, 2006, 11:19

I enjoyed the first one quite a bit, mainly coop with some friends. Haven't tried the 2nd.

55.

Re: No subject

Oct 9, 2006, 21:00

I'm sure there is a alot of bloat, and I even commented on the movies in the rant also. I'm also not going to try to pretend that their artists made the best use of texture space. My rant was addressing the comments that said it was the coders fault. Coders rarely put together the demos in my experience. There's plenty they could have done to make it smaller, but thats rarely at the top of many developers todo list, even though it should be. I fully agree this demo is bloated, but I don't agree it is the coders fault. They would be the last people I would point a finger at. That was my whole point. I welcome procedural texture formats that don't cripple an artists ability to create what they want. Until that happens it's unlikely to change the industrys use of our current texture formats. This comment was edited on Oct 9, 21:24.

30.

Re: No subject

Oct 9, 2006, 14:44

Isn't that precisely the problem? Standard formats and standard textures, standard terrain. While that makes things easier from a development standpoint you make a tradeoff in filesize. Or the demo could not have been trimmed enough for the demo, or requiring assets in the engine that aren't ever used. No that precisely isn't the problem. High quality assets take space. They could use formats that compress the hell out of it and it'd look like shit. We're in an era of high detail games. High res textures, normal maps, specular maps, light maps, huge terrains with the same. 64k fps demo used horrible procedurally generated content. There's only so much you can do with procedural content. Last generation games, pre hl2,doom3,etc mostly didn't have all these extra textures. This game, along with most other games are using industry standard file formats, most of which are a good balance in compression and conserving quality. The alternative is to down scale and down quality everything, so everyone gets the impression the game looks like ass, just because you want a smaller demo? It makes no sense, both from their marketing perspective, and even from a gamer standpoint. They aren't going to purposely make their game look like ass. The people with high end machines should be able to run the game as high of a res as they could run the full retail version. That's common sense. So they could cut out a bunch of characters and vehicles. Some games do this, mostly with characters when they are just visual choices for the player. Most commonly they only include a level or 2. People bitch about that too usually. I think the bf games a turds myself, but wake up to modern game content and understand why they are as big as they are. We are well past games with 1 texture per model, and consider the scale of the particular game. And least of all don't support ignorant comments that the demo bloat is the coders fault. Blame the coders for the bugs, the slow load times to some extent, stability, etc. but not for the size. Let's see, we have 650 megs worth of textures, 600 of which is using dds with DXT compression, which is a commonly used lossy format. 170M for sound, 55M in wav, 127M in ogg. 120M of movie files, 100M of which is the map tutorial, the rest being the trash they make you watch when the game loads. 340M of meshes. Why so much in meshes? Alot of objects in the game, they might have pre-processed lod levels, its very unlikely due to file format bloat. You'd have to go out of your want to add significant bloat to a mesh file format. ~20M in dlls(5 of which are standard windows dlls that many peoples system wont have), 6M in exe files. < 2M in scripts and shaders. So why is the demo so big? Compression doesn't work well on files that are already compressed, which is the case with dds, ogg, and the bik movie files, which easily make up the majority of the demo. Could they have been more efficient? Sure, but mostly by sacrificing quality, or removing additional content. They could drop all the lightmaps from the download and have the game generate them the first time you start up, destroying the load times at least once. Would you have preferred that? I wouldn't. I can multi-task while I download. I'd take installation size over load time anyday. I do feel a bit for 56k users, these demos I'm sure are painful for those users, but demo quality can't be crippled to those users. Am I defending DICE/EA? Hell no, I'm not a fan of either. I'm defending game developers in general from the ignorant comments of arm chair know it alls who run their mouth all while not having any real idea what they are talking about. As a game developer myself it's a real drain to read some of the trash that you people spew out, as if game developers are bloating the demo just to piss you off. You are essentially getting pissed off that games are getting higher quality(at least art wise, gameplay wise is debatable, especially with the BF series). Ok, I've ranted enough. Edit: requiring assets in the engine that aren't ever used. This is a valid possibility for bloat, but it's hard to tell exactly how much of that applies. They might have been able to do better in that area. This comment was edited on Oct 9, 14:56.

19.

Re: No subject

Oct 9, 2006, 12:29

Even an inefficient file format is an insignificant part of file sizes. Besides, their file format is zip files, with standard texture formats contained within. The closest to bloat there is are 50 meg terrain raw files and the huge number of textures, neither of which have much to do with coders. This comment was edited on Oct 9, 12:34.

14.

Re: No subject

Oct 9, 2006, 11:54

News Comments > Morning Consolidation

Those DICE coders must ROCK. Right, because the bloat of a game has everything to do with the coders. Maybe EA uses coders for all the art and mapping?

15.

Re: Guitar Hero Tyke Edition

Oct 5, 2006, 23:17

News Comments > Morning Consolidation

American football is shit.

Re: EA perfecting Mediocrity

Oct 5, 2006, 15:12