Oh, I might also note that raytracing might be bad for employees of the game community, as it will likely decrease the amount of specialized art resources needed for production.

But looking at the id5 tech, we were probably headed that way anyway. Procedural or at least additive textures will shave a crapload of man-hours of available work for artists.

The advantage of raytracing is that, compared to standard raster graphics, raytracing is massively parallelizable.

Dividing a standard multipass polygon based rendering system across multiple processor cores is very VERY difficult.

The people who do it well charge a fortune for their products, and rightly so.

With raytracing you can very literally divide the scene up into sections, and distribute those segments amongst the cores. They're discrete chunks, each with a pointer to the scene description.

This makes raytracing something that'll be much easier to do in the near future and strongly supports Intel's "more cores" architecture drive, vs AMD's focus on "better cores".

Things like diffraction and radiosity are always going to be computationally expensive, but when you're throwing it on a 20 core custom-built chip designed strictly for raytracing with a smart routing system, they become possible, especially if game developers use intelligently built LOD degradation (like approximating reflected light at X distance from an object rather than actually tracing it).

Not saying it's going to look better, though, but in the long run, mixing that with Nvidia's hardware physics push (they bought Aegeia and are using CUDA based physics now) and rapidly improving processor power, we may see games with realistic water before much longer.

Actually, we're ignoring 95.5% of the world's population.

Which is also known as "sloppy QA". A build takes very little time to do, comparatively speaking

That entirely depends on how deeply interlaced into the project's sources the calls to StarForce's APIs were.

If it calls from every menu call, for instance, plus device set/reset, that could take a bit of time to strip out those API calls.

Further, if it's a very segmented program and they have a number of static libs with StarForce interlaced with them, it could take a great deal of time and effort to not only disable those calls, but to recompile all of the static libs and re-link the whole project.

Even if it was simply an include statement and a couple of imports which were never called, they'd still have to strip those out and recompile any libs linked against that.

Then they have to run a QA process to make sure nothing was broken accidentally during the process of stripping out that interface, which if you know anything about QA is a nightmare - they have to run the full set of tests again on every subsystem that was changed or every connected subsystem.

Basically, yeah, it takes a lot of time.

This comment was edited on Jul 2, 16:20.

What makes you think duke nukem will be released?

(couldn't resist)

Who is this theoretical "everyone?"

I don't even play HL multiplayer. Since my 20s, my reflexes for that shit have gone downhill, but that doesn't stop me from wanting a good story with great special effects. Being able to shoot Orwellian cops in the face with a toilet is just an advantage.

The only thing that would make the Half-Life series about multiplayer for me is if they ever bothered to add co-op.

Serious, where the hell did co-op go?
The last good co-op FPS I've played was Serious Sam (the first one).

I'm always happy whenever a new FPS with a promising storyline comes out. I'm looking forward to Crysis, I loved Prey, if I could run FEAR on my crap system, I'd probably have enjoyed that.
This comment was edited on Apr 12, 14:17.

Who are you kidding? If it comes out and 3 friends tell you it's great, does it really matter what else you're playing?

You're probably still going to drop the $20 or $30.

The quality of a product made by a good developer is usually directly proportional to the time they take to put it out.

That is provided they're actually working on it - which rules out the counterexamples of DNF and TF2, as some serious flaking off had to have been occurring there.

I'd have to say it's possible to make even the most dated game engines look good, provided you choose your subject matter appropriately and are clever with art resources.

I don't think bad graphics will fail to sell a game either, if the rest of the game tries for innovation and excellence.

The Wii is certainly selling well despite the dated graphics featured in even its top-of-the-line games.

The original Q1 GLQuake engine, with intelligent use of particles and well-done models, on modern machines could produce a game that looks as crisp and sharp as Darwinia, for instance.

The primary limits that Q1 faced were lower polycounts and low texture resolutions to account for the fact that the game was targetted at a pentium class software renderer without 3d acceleration.

There are a lot of tricks which work to create apparent detail, as used by the aforementioned HL2 which, well, did look a bit dated by the time it eventually made release. The normal maps helped matters, and later effects added in the Episode 1 and Lost Coast engine patches sharpened things up considerably. I felt the overall look was a bit more stark and realistic than its primary competitor at the time, Doom3, but I'm a color and contrast kinda guy.

Only minor changes to the Painkiller engine could make some serious improvements in the quality which was already fairly sharp. If stencil shadows and self-shadowing were tacked onto the engine's renderer, it would look as good as anything they're throwing on the next-gen systems these days.

This comment was edited on Apr 2, 15:40.

You mean a PSP. PCP is less expensive.

Edit: Please note, I have nothing against the PSP, but I am broke.
This comment was edited on Mar 19, 14:59.

If some decent developers were in place on this thing, I could see there being some serious potential in a LEGO mmorpg for lasting appeal.

Consider a system of scenarios and puzzles in which people are afforded an allotment of miscellaneous lego bits by completing small-scale single-player building puzzles. These collectable bits may be rare.

Then a group of players gets together in a central meeting area (think Guild Wars) and collaborates using their collectable bits together with more common bits of various sizes in their inventory and a pool of bits belonging to the group inventory to do an instanced building puzzle where they must solve some complicated problem with a number of different sub-objectives.

For instance, perhaps they have to build a flimsy scaffold which reaches some high location. They get bonus objectives if they do it without bracing it on some lower level, another bonus if they have pieces left over, and another bonus if they have sufficient parts to build a bridge to another location. Various areas might have more parts which could be ferried over after solving the problem of how to get to them.

Puzzle arenas of this sort could be added periodically by designers, and the vanity construction and collection aspects which are so popular in other games such as Ultima Online or Second Life could be easily satisified by making certain pieces rarer than others and only awarded based on outcomes of various puzzles.

Apply a little creativity to just about any idea and you can get a decent game.

Edit: Now imagine adding a theme to each central hub area from which like-themed puzzle arena instances are launched, like Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, distant future, space, any of the various licenses that LEGO has, etc.

Edit Again: Assign point values to the bits and then decide how much inventory you can bring into a puzzle based on the total point value of your inventory vs the point value of the puzzle. Like miniatures games. That way somebody won't bring in 50 different 8-high blocks to a puzzle and easily complete it.
This comment was edited on Mar 5, 20:56.

One warrior fights in the medieval, one in the present and one in the future.

Day of the Tentacle, anyone?

The fact that you seem to think that the pricing problems with Steam have anything to do with rights simply demonstrates that you understand almost nothing about business and markets.

Charge as much as you believe the average consumer will pay, then knock $0.01 off the price to make it look less.

Hooray, I know more than you.

Seriously, about my earlier post:

I humbly apologize for saying anything positive about Steam (which has never injured me).

I have forgotten the only reason I ever signed up with these forums; to make smartass remarks in mockery of smug antifanboys.

This comment was edited on Oct 15, 13:40.

>..why is it called 'Battle Carry'?

Because the developer has A Few Screws Loose

Seriously, people, pull your heads out of your propagandist asses.

Steam is a content distribution platform. It's free to download. You don't need to own any Valve products to use it. It's distributed, like bittorrent, meaning fast downloads unless half of god's green earth are trying to download the thing at once.

It essentially pays for itself because of the products being sold through it. It doesn't install insidious copy protection like starforce and it can't be incompatible with your disk drives. It's got software built in DESIGNED for you to back up your Steam games, rather than software designed to prevent you from doing so.

So it requires you to be online to play. Copy protection's a bitch, ain't it? At least it doesn't take proprietary hardware, like all of the truly excellent games only available for consoles.

So it requires you to give some money to Valve (and probably not that much), which some of you seem to think is the antichrist because they have a problem with release dates and they screw internet cafes with their licensing schemes.

The bottom line here is that it's convenient, it's not hard to install/uninstall, it replaces protected, overpriced, expensively packaged, difficult to duplicate physical media, and it gives indie game developers (at least those with a bit of scratch) a place to sell their titles which takes the burden of distribution, advertising, packaging, and providing a lasting update infrastructure (ever tried getting updates for Origin software recently?) for game developers who can't afford the overhead entailed in all of the above.

In short, shut up and either use it or don't use it. The rest of us don't care why you hate it, and those of us who don't aren't convincing anybody by raving on about how revolutionary it is. It's not. It's bittorrent with a storefront and a virtual file system tacked on.

My $24.50,
-BatCountry

Yeah, if only these Canadians had the patience to wait for another 4 more years of a US run by oil barons.

We'll be the ones with Monopoly money then.

This comment was edited on Oct 6, 13:53.

> maybe i'd try it if it were 5-10 dollars canadian

Yeah, but nobody sells games for $0.05 these days.

It's like picking around the crust of a pie... They'll get to the brain eventually.

Besides, these zombies ride the short bus, you can't begrudge them the time it takes to figure out anatomy until they get to the part they're really after.

On the other hand, running XP meant jumping through hoops to play some classic games

For classic DOS games, try Dosbox, a really smooth DOS emulator for newer PCs. Runs on several OS', including WELL on WinXP and Win2k (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/)

For old Lucasarts adventure games, try ScummVM (http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/)

For newer protected mode DOS games, if Dosbox doesn't work for you, try running it native under VDMSound, a program which enables sound device emulation under the WinXP/2k VDM (commandline) (http://ntvdm.cjb.net/)

I run 2k pro and have found only 2 games that I can't run that I enjoyed in olden times. Ultima 7 part 1 and part 2.

And some clever fools are recreating the engine for newer systems. (http://exult.sourceforge.net/)