Comparing TF2 to Quake 3 is dumb. They aren't even trying to do anything close to the same thing.

They are both FPSes on the PC platform that are only played online, and generally involve two teams of human players. How aren't they doing the same thing, especially when you consider TF's lineage, and how many of the weapons are your basic weapons that have existed in every FPS for decades?

Quake 3 is so dated now in graphics and gameplay mechanics.

Dated gameplay mechanics? What is that supposed to mean? You have guns, you shoot them. Is it dated because it's not some trendy psuedo-realism like CoD, or is it dated because it's not dumbed down like TF2?

Once again, comments here never cease to fail in lowering my expectations of the internet.

This comment was edited on Dec 15, 2008, 18:17.

I was going off of my roomate's PC, who gets only a pathetic 20-30FPS or so, so my judgements on the specific stuff in the game are based off of him.

Clock speed on the CPU can't really be compared, as the Intel and AMD wars earlier on proved. The G4 Macs were often as fast or faster than their PC equivalents at sometimes half the clock speed. The CPUs shouldn't be anymore or less general purpose. Consoles nowadays aren't like the N64, SNES, etc, used to be.

It's hard to compare GPUs. I don't know that much about the 360 GPU compared to modern GPUs, but they're both made by the same companies using the same core technologies.

The big difference in power comes from, at least from what I know, the streamlined OS with little to no overhead, background services, and so forth. The other would be a fixed platform, only having to get it to work once.

The game 'seems' poorly optimized for x86 but I know that the CPU in the X360 is much faster than comparable Intel/AMD cpu's for certain tasks so maybe it was so very well optimized for X360 that it can't be ported without a major/expensive undertaking. The CPU in the X360 is a specialized chip unlike a PC CPU. I presume R* spent a lot of money optimizing the engine for the console CPU's.

Are you able to explain how an engine can be optimized towards the specific PowerPC architecture used inside the XBox360? The Doom and all three Quake engines have been ported over to nearly every platform in existence. Out of every port I can think of, the most common issues were a lack of an FPU, lack of RAM. And they were all engines that certainly were not planned to be ported the way they have.

Processor architecture can make a difference. But I could not even remotely agree that it accounts for the huge gap in performance that exists between the versions of GTA4. I feel this is especially true when you consider that the game runs better when turning down graphic quality, likely indicating a GPU bottleneck, and the fact that the 360 and PS3 use completely different rendering APIs (DirectX vs. OpenGL ES, if I'm not mistaken) throws a vastly different rendering pipeline out of the equation.

I thought PC gaming was dying?

If Grooves here doesn't have to make sense in his argumemnts, then neither do I!

While the moronic PC crowd continues to buy DRM encumbered games in record numbers.

I figured they were doing this so people wouldn't abuse it and constantly change their looks and name, but that's just crazy ol' not-as-cynical me.

That's because Flash can't process complex 3D games fast enough. Even on the fastest systems you're going to see performance problems. The better alternative would've been Java or Shockwave (though I'm not sure if Adobe is supporting it much these days).

It has very little to do with the platform being good with "3d games." The concept doesn't even exist in this context. Although Flash 10 can do some GPU-accelerated stuff, the port of Doom is strictly a software rasterizer. It is not much different in concept than running the game in DOSbox or VMWare.

The reason is entirely due to the fact that it is C code compiled into AS bytecode. It doesn't use Flash drawing classes, Flash data handling, etc. This could not be done in Shockwave or Java because every line would have to be rewritten from scratch. It would not be the Doom engine, it would be a raycasting engine that could read Doom data.

Flash with all their recent developments is a pretty cool and mature platform, especially for something crossplatform.

The awesome thing about that Flash Doom is that it is actually a port of the original Doom engine code, thanks to Adobe Alchemy.

The not so neat thing is that it is still ~10x slower than native compiled code.

Wow, 2 posts in and the virtual chest beating is through the roof...

MY CHEST IS BIGGER.

I really hope this makes the PS3 version sell a boatload more.

Maybe Microsoft will realize stuff like this is costing sales of the game and the DLC.

So which is it? Is it not costing sales, or is it costing sales?

I also seriously question the sanity of someone who will not buy a game based on the fact that there's optional content that they don't want to buy.

In before run-on sentence... oh too late.

What also pisses me off is how easily it is done, the lack of punishment and detection by punk buster, and just how many fucking assholes are willing to cheat. People suck, not the games.

Punkbuster will NEVER catch in-game exploits like the tanks falling out of the air and the like. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that stuff doesn't require any external programs, right?

They will only ever detect external programs hooking into the game, like aimbots, wallhacks, etc. There is no feasible way to detect game exploits, for instance going underneath the world/map through a map glitch. (Not saying BF2 has issues like that, but many other games do.)

Also, EvenBalance update their detection patterns as long as the company are paying for the contract. If EA/DICE stop paying, then EB won't be updating. It even rhymes, so you know it's true,

A linux version of steam wont do much to address the fact that most of the games on steam are windows only.

This, as the rumours indicate, would include a Linux version of the Source engine.

I would've been in complete agreeance with Overon, but then Adobe CS4 came out with all sorts of 3D acceleration that is just too slow in Virtualbox.

Maybe one of these days I'll get a Mac that's good enough for Photoshop/InDesign, and game on Linux, with Steam and the various Wine/Cedega shenanigans.

So Blue, does this make the PC version 'gimped' too?

Blizzard are updating the game because it is still one of the most played games in the world today. The time from release means little to me, except as an interesting statistic.

Blame the sad state of the gaming press. There are so many interesting questions one could ask someone like JC, and yet the most we get is stupid shit like "WAT DO U LIEK PC OR CONSOLE?!" This isn't even an issue of softball or hardball questions, this is an issue of dumb questions.

The idea is to make a lot of money, so if it makes just a little money, well, that's not enough to be deemed "profitable".

In our humble eyes, it probably would be, but you know these suits, they want enough to be able to have their cake AND eat it too.

Incidentally, 4% seems awfully low for an industry where so many sequels tend to get released. You know, Sims, Need for Speed, Neverwinter Nights, all the CSI games, Command and Conquer, all of the Blizzard and EASports sequels, GTA, Fallout, Tomb Raider, Far Cry, Call of Duty... etc... etc... etc...

If only 4% of games returned a significant profit, we wouldn't have nearly so many sequels.

Except we don't know how profitable they are exactly. The armchair economists/market researches/developers that people here act like automatically jump on a completely unfounded assumption based on their dislike of corporations. A game that breaks even plus one dollar I would not consider profitable and if included, would make the number even more meaningless. Of course by definition it would be, but the purpose isn't to be a scientific study, it's to be of value to the purchaser of the info.

Plus, the measurement takes into account games gone into production, not games released. I would expect games the percentage of games released to be higher than games in production, but we don't know how many games go into production and are canned, especially at big studios like EA or Ubi, where it is treated more like an industry of producers than some new art form.

If anything, a low percentage of profit seems like reason for more sequels. Stick with what's worked in the past.

This comment was edited on Nov 24, 2008, 21:19.

Emulations aren't perfect. I too have one of those XBoxes (except it's my Wii) but I still prefer to take out the original games every now and then. It's just not the same thing.