I doubt there's anything preventing them having breaking trees in DX9, it's just a matter of ensuring there are enough bells and whistles in the DX10 version to make people stare and say "ooh shiny".

Hmm, I'm sensing a lot of our-dull-team-game-played-with-an-inflated-bladder is better than yours.

I'm unbiased, I hate them all.

OK, so get back to me in 10 years and tell me how you feel then. I may well be in the wrong industry, I expect I could make more outside of the games business, but business software development doesn't sound too thrilling either.

I would disagree. Getting proof-of-concept stuff up and running, and extending technologies are great fun. It's the slogging through code, trying to figure out why the fuck something isn't working right on one specific machine that's a nightmare. As Valve have said, Steam is a godsend because they have a lovely detailed hardware profile for practically every machine on there - they know what technologies to target, which GPUs to optimise for, the whole works.

Well that all sounds dandy, but the reality is you will be slogging through the code. After 17 odd years of it, I guess I can't be expected to be excited by the prospect. 2 years or 6 years, it's still a slog.

Personally I don't mind if they go episodic, as long as what they produce is still good value, I just don't understand why they feel the need to come up with various other justifications for it. We know they want to make money, it's OK.

10 am Valve's local time, which is west coast USA, which means 6 pm for those of us here in Blighty.

As for development, it's always a chore, no matter what anyone says.

This comment was edited on May 31, 17:16.

What? A video game version of Lost and it's not going to be using the current big thing, episodic content? I can't think of a better match, no need to provide an ending, and a way of milking the public for as long as the ratings hold up.

It's the old, old story. Corporation has idea. Corporation becomes successful. Corporation disappears up its own arse.

Ah, another old Saturn coder? I mostly used a standard retail saturn for development. You just connected up to the pc via the cartridge slot.

You only needed to use the special version when you wanted to test a bootable build.

This PS3 kit certainly wouldn't win any design awards. Certainly a contrast to the DTL-10000, which was actually quite stylish.

Currently there are no improvements. At the moment, enabling it in something like GR:AW just gives a frame rate drop because it's causing many more particles to be displayed.

Not exactly a great way to sell more boards. I suspect this will play out exactly the same way as the first generation 3D accelerators, which were in many cases slower than the software solution (albeit with better visuals).

This comment was edited on May 5, 11:58.

This question is asked over and over again. They put the protection in the demo version because crackers were using unprotected demo executables to assist in cracking the full version.

Must have missed that one: what was wrong with the original GBA? I never owned one, but i heard some people where kinda upset about it having two buttons less than a SNES controller. They didn't put in the missing buttons on the SP, did they?

Having no lighting for the screen was the worst problem. Made it pretty much unusable most of the time.

As for the 360 CPU, it's going to be process shrunk to make it cheaper to produce, not to increase performance.

But again, you're left with a game that still basically works OK for those without the PPU, so where's the incentive to get it?

Without something special, something that only the PPU can achieve, it's just an expensive doodad in your pc giving you a few extra FPS by taking some of the workload off the CPU.

The problem I see with this board is that it promises to do so much more than is currently possible using the CPU alone, and that's fine. You see the tech demos and you're impressed. But then it comes to adding support into games, and devs are left with what to do about the overwhelming majority who won't have the board.

That means all the really clever stuff can't be a fundamental part of the game (destroyable environment, fluid modelling etc), because all that would be impossible in software alone. So it just get used to "accelerate" the barrels in a FPS, or add some pretty but pointless extra smoke, etc.

The only way you could really show it off is to have a title written that only works with the board, and what publisher would go for that option?

Well he's certainly balanced it out now. 9 years since his last actual film, and that was the shitfest Titanic.

Oh for a modern Magic Carpet.

I'm still stunned that anyone enjoyed the Doom movie. I broke my rule of not watching any film with The Rock in it, and I guess I got what I deserved.

There are a few problems with multiplayer as I see it. Fine, you can have a PPU enabled server, and then everyone gets the benefit of the heavy lifting done server side, but that does mean all the client side effects are inconsequential, because they have to be, or the game is not in sync.

Given that people tend to turn off high end detail in online games to improve their frame rate, there is really only justification in the servers being PPU enabled.

Now for single player, you come back to the problem of having to support both those that have a PPU and those that don't, and physics isn't really like rendering, you can't really have the equivalent of LOD, you have to run it all or you end up with weird stuff like boxes that float in mid air until the player comes in range, and then they suddenly fall to the floor, etc.

So given the need to run physics constantly and support those without a PPU, how can you have a compelling PPU demonstration game. It's either just fluff (loads of crap to knock over, that you leave out if no PPU is there), or it runs like a dog if you have a load of really useful physics stuff, but no PPU.

Seems like in the end you'd really have to produce a game that was PPU only, if you really wanted it to show its stuff.


I think I've worn out my P and U keys.
This comment was edited on Dec 19, 22:16.

Regardless of whether it gets much support at first, I'd be very unlikely to pick up a first generation card. It's likely to be rather underwhelming.

As for those people thinking they are going to be getting totally destructible environments, dream on. Can't see that happening any time soon.

I'm rather inclined to think you'll just be seeing a lot of extra unnecessary piles of boxes to be knocked over, or a lot of extra wavy grass for those that have the PPU.

Well the item below seems to point to a fairly categorical denial of such a thing. I can't imagine they want to leave people guessing about this, it simply isn't in their interests to have potential customers sitting on the fence.

A small error, but one with such horrendous consequences.