The next Unreal engine...

"Dark Avenger" wrote in message
om...
OnePunchMickey wrote in message
...
And when there's 2 guys sitting beside each other in a boat you can
snipe
one's cranium off and the other just looks around whistling and
scratching
his sack ...


Maybe they weren't friends and he just doesn't care.

"cowboyz" writes:

Maybe they weren't friends and he just doesn't care.

If I'm sittin' in a boat with a dude I hate, and his head pops like a
balloon, I would sit up and take notice. I don't care if he's been
boffin' my wife, I'd be concerned for my own noggin.

Nick

--
# sigmask || 0.2 || 20030107 || public domain || feed this to a python
print reduce(lambda x,y:x+chr(ord(y)-1),' Ojdl!Wbshjti!=obwAcboefstobudi/psh?')

"Kevin C." looked up from reading the entrails of the
porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:


wrote in message
...
The exact quote is "The only thing more we could wish for is for the
badly underpowered integrated graphics chips from Intel and others to go
away or improve enough that they aren't such unfortunate handicaps for
game developers." I see no contradiction there.

If these "unfortunate handicaps" are what the average system is running,
there's your contradiction. Mr. Sweeney wants to deliver his graphics
engine; how many computers can actually run it is only relevant insofar as
the bottom line. If Mr. Sweeney was interested in targeting average systems,
his quote would have been "The only thing we could wish for is to be able to
come up with clever algorithms and optimizations that would allow our engine
to run smoothly on second-tier hardware".

I'm perfectly aware of that, but what kind of performance do you expect
from today's high-end games running on that level of hardware? There are
plenty of games out today that won't even run on anything lower than a
GF3.

FYI, I play Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries and Age of Mythology on a Voodoo3. I
have no complaints about the quality of graphics. It _could_ be nicer,
certainly, but it doesn't _need_ to be. That is, I've seen UT2k3 on a GF4
and I didn't think the small improvement over UT was worthy of a $200
upgrade. The games I can't play on a Voodoo3 are surprisingly narrow.
Namely, they're all FPSes that require hardware T&L or some equally useless
feature that adds little or nothing to picture quality, much less gameplay.

I beg to differ.
I upgraded from my Voodoo3 when I bought Morrowind, since the voodoo
didn't do 32bit color.

Now it resides in the old system.

While the whole 16 vs 32 bit color thing never seemed to make much
difference to me, there are games that really look like **** in 16bit
(or maybe the GeForce3's 16 bit color sucks.

X2 in 16 bit looks horrible.

Quite possible, but they shouldn't expect all progress to halt just to
accomodate them. Also, how many new computers will be sold with
GeForce4s then? Keep in mind that this engine is what Epic hope other
developers will be using for years after its release, meaning that
limiting it to old hardware makes even less sense. And hey, if a
developer wants to support old machines in 2008 they can still license
the UT2003, Quake3 or any other engine!

And nobody said otherwise! But at the same time, that doesn't mean that Epic
and Mr. Sweeney are gunning for the average system, if you care to get back
to that point.

There's "average" and then there's "average gamer's".
Gamers will tend to have a much better video subsystem than non-gamers,
because it's a feature that _matters_ to them.
Non gamers generally don't care about video features, if they even think
about it all, because it's not something they need for e-mail, word and
web browsing.

Designing for systems that weren't really _designed_ for gaming isn't
particularly useful since you aren't going to be selling many copies of
a game to non-gamers.

It's really no different than a "you must be this high to ride on this
ride" signs you see at midways, fairs and carnivals.

They shouldn't have to design the rides to accommodate the size and
tolerances of 6 year olds, when it won't be 6 year olds riding it.


The whole argument seems to boil down to: Game devs should write their
games so that they are playable on systems owned by people who don't
care about gaming, and/or who bought systems without considering how
they would perform with games.

Frankly I think that's bull****.
They bought a system without thinking, they got something that doesn't
play games well - it's their own fault.

Some idiot buys a Geforce 4 MX420 thinking it's a gaming card, why
should the devs care?

[I briefly considered buying one since they were cheap. Less than a
hour of reading online reviews convinced me the MX series were useless,
substandard crap for gaming.]

It's not like the information about the GF4MX cards wasn't _widely_
available on the net before he bought it and easily findable through
google.

He bought crap because he couldn't be bothered researching.

This is exactly the same kind of person who will install a game and NOT
actually check to see if the system can support it, has the proper
drivers, directx, etc and won't read the documentation and/or manual.
Then they'll whine and bitch to tech support and on web boards when it's
really _their_ stupidity to blame for their bad experience.

Gee I wonder why game devs don't want to cater to people like that.

Makes as much sense as limiting the max speed on freeways to what a
moped can achieve.

Xocyll
--
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably,
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr

Nick Vargish looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

"cowboyz" writes:

Maybe they weren't friends and he just doesn't care.

If I'm sittin' in a boat with a dude I hate, and his head pops like a
balloon, I would sit up and take notice. I don't care if he's been
boffin' my wife, I'd be concerned for my own noggin.

Maybe he'd just said "Hey Nick, watch this."

Xocyll
--
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably,
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr

Xocyll writes:

Maybe he'd just said "Hey Nick, watch this."

I've learned to look away whenever someone says that.

But then, I've got kids, so it's just common sense.

Nick

--
# sigmask || 0.2 || 20030107 || public domain || feed this to a python
print reduce(lambda x,y:x+chr(ord(y)-1),' Ojdl!Wbshjti!=obwAcboefstobudi/psh?')

On Thu, 26 Feb 2004 12:07:00 -0600, "faster_framerates"
wrote:

I'm sorry, but what is the benefit of excluding a market of consumers with
average video cards?

The same reason we're still NOT playing with our ATARI 2600 or 8bit
Nintendo anymore. Or why not use your Pentium100 to get on the
internet? Why are you using Outlook Express 6 or IE6, when IE 3
would work just fine?

More graphics requires more hardware power.

How about an engine that runs great and looks beautiful on a large range of
systems? I'm all for progress and a more cinematic look, but Joe Consumer

The same reason that a Honda Civic cannot race with INDY or NACAR
races... its an AVG car for AVG functions.

shouldn't have to upgrade his computer every six months and stay on top of
hardware issues just because he wants to play the latest game release.

Uh... screw them... its called PROGRESS.

This is why people settle for consoles.

And consles they can have. but wait, new consoles come out every 4
years or so...

--
Remember when real men used Real computers!?
When 512K of video RAM was a lot!

Death to Palladium & WPA!!

On Thu, 26 Feb 2004 12:07:00 -0600, "faster_framerates"
wrote:

I'm sorry, but what is the benefit of excluding a market of consumers with
average video cards?

How about an engine that runs great and looks beautiful on a large range of
systems? I'm all for progress and a more cinematic look, but Joe Consumer
shouldn't have to upgrade his computer every six months and stay on top of
hardware issues just because he wants to play the latest game release.

PS: HALO, (A crap game) - looks fine on a modern DX9 card and most
DX8 cards...

It DOES play on a GF2 card.... It looks like ugly mono color crap
that makes Unreal (1) look good.

If a MODERN game could work magic and look just as good on a GF2mx as
an ATI 9800XT - ****, nobody would ever need to buy a new video card!
But it doesnt happen that way, does it?

When UNREAL first came out, IT MADE ME GO OUT AND BUY A 3DFX Voodoo(1)
card! just for that game... then other games followed which looked
great on that card as well.

My price on the Voodoo1 was $125 (4mb card) - its in a friend's
brothers computer I think. - and its was a good price (The Voodoo2 was
$250+) In horse power, it was very state of the art back then...
but by todays standards, it makes the GF-FX5200 or ATI9600se LOOK like
BMWs....

Think UT2004 would work on a Voodoo1 card?


--
Remember when real men used Real computers!?
When 512K of video RAM was a lot!

Death to Palladium & WPA!!

In alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati Kevin C. wrote:

wrote in message
...

If these "unfortunate handicaps" are what the average system is
running, there's your contradiction.

For games, systems with integrated graphics are low-end - both in terms
of graphics performance and the system overall.

If Mr. Sweeney was interested in targeting average systems, his quote
would have been "The only thing we could wish for is to be able to
come up with clever algorithms and optimizations that would allow our
engine to run smoothly on second-tier hardware".

That would be trading graphics performance for CPU performance. Your
vintage hardware would still be struggling, the bottleneck would just be
different.

The games I can't play on a Voodoo3 are surprisingly narrow. Namely,
they're all FPSes that require hardware T&L or some equally useless
feature that adds little or nothing to picture quality, much less
gameplay.

The number of games that require shader support is growing, and it's not
just FPSes (eg. Prince of Persia). T&L let you offload calculations onto
the graphics hardware, which has slowed the rate of increase in CPU
minimum requirements. Shaders let you do all sorts of effects, but they
haven't really been taken advantage of so far - both because the
technology is relatively young and because developers want to support
old hardware that don't implement them.

And hey, if a developer wants to support old machines in 2008 they
can still license the UT2003, Quake3 or any other engine!
And nobody said otherwise! But at the same time, that doesn't mean
that Epic and Mr. Sweeney are gunning for the average system, if you
care to get back to that point.

But an average-spec system then will have far better shader support than
any graphics card available now. The old cards will be sitting in the
old computers they were originally bundled with, and they're not going
to be the driving force in the game market.

-a

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 08:12:28 GMT, drocket wrote:

On 26 Feb 2004 09:46:27 -0800, (John) wrote:

A good interview with Tim Sweeney on the development of the future
Unreal 3 engine:

http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/sweeney04/


He says "...we're going to make a game that brings today's GeForce
FX's and Radeon 9700+'s to their knees at 640x480! :-) We are
targetting next-generation consoles and the kinds of PC's that will be
typical on the market in 2006, and today's high end graphics cards are
going to be somewhat low end then, similar to a GeForce4MX or a Radeon
7500 for today's games".


I'm slightly confused about one point: one of the major new features
of UT2004 is a software renderer. All by itself its rather confusing.
I mean, at this point, who doesn't have SOME sort of 3d acceleration
card? There's probably what, 3, maybe 4, people who are going to
actually use the software mode?

Theres this kid, son of a client.... He thinks Counter Strike is hot
**** on his TNT-M64 P4 system.

I told him I couldn't play CS, its too old, looks like crap, plays
like crap... when compared to UT2004 or other modern games.

I'll be giving him a crap load of my screen shots.


--
Remember when real men used Real computers!?
When 512K of video RAM was a lot!

Death to Palladium & WPA!!

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 09:54:27 GMT, "Kevin C." wrote:

FYI, I play Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries and Age of Mythology on a Voodoo3. I
have no complaints about the quality of graphics. It _could_ be nicer,
certainly, but it doesn't _need_ to be. That is, I've seen UT2k3 on a GF4
and I didn't think the small improvement over UT was worthy of a $200

GF4 what? GF4mx cards are actually GF2 technlogy. UT-Classic is
about 1/10th the graphic detail of UT2003/2004.

If you played UT2k3 on the GF4mx, the settings are WAY low. Go to the
unreal.com site, check out the screen shots... that is WHAT I see or
better on my setup.... in 1280x1024.

upgrade. The games I can't play on a Voodoo3 are surprisingly narrow.
Namely, they're all FPSes that require hardware T&L or some equally useless
feature that adds little or nothing to picture quality, much less gameplay.

heheh... yeah, right. That's just you. I've owned a 3 Voodoo3
cards (more than one system), I still have one of them that I just
want to hang on to, a piece of history. but since then, I've
upgraded to the TNT2-Ultra GF2mx (both played UT better than the
Voodoo3) GF3 GF4 TI4200 ATI9800Pro.

I've only recently retired UT-Classic. which I played almost
everyday since it came out, I haven't played it in weeks since I DLed
the UT2004 demo... the UT-Classic was getting WAAY old.


--
Remember when real men used Real computers!?
When 512K of video RAM was a lot!

Death to Palladium & WPA!!