The next Unreal engine...

"Xocyll" wrote in message
...

Not that your points weren't valid but:

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.

I think Maxis would disagree.

Again, it's a matter of perspective. "Gamers" probably go through dozens of
games in a year. Having the right hardware is of critical importance to be
able to play every new release and therefore it seems to us an "obvious"
thing that people must upgrade if they expect to play the newest games.
Despite that, "gamers" only constitute a small minority of people who buy
games. And granted, if a game developer is more interested in the niche
market than in the mass market, it's entirely their choice, but here we
simply disagree on what is meant by "average".

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

Yes, I'm aware of the two product lines. Though since you brought it up,
that makes an interesting point for me. GF2 technology is still being sold
TODAY. So what was being said about (real) GF4s not being around in 2006?

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.

And? Are you saying that you saw an increase in picture quality due to
hardware T&L? I'll make it even easier: are you saying you saw an increase
in picture quality? Because it's almost universally accepted that UT looks
better in Glide, for which it was optimized (you can ask in
alt.games.unreal.tournament if you want to take a poll). Throwing in better
GPUs might have given you a higher framerate and/or resolution, but I said
_picture quality_, which is neither of the two.

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

Well.. according to NeedForSpeedU, my civic can It might even win..

Far Cry on a 9700 Pro graphics card gave me a "wow". Even seeing the
rain on water in Morrowind in a GF4 was a "wow" moment for me. There
has been a lot of innovation in hardware and software since the GF3.

Beyond Good and Evil is doing that for me. The sense of speed in the
hovercraft looter missions and the look of the water is just amazing.

Playing Vietcong I'm continually astounded in the variety of AI
placement and behavior that this game offers. For instance I'm now trying
to complete one of the quickfights (Arroyo). It's quite difficult, and
I've
restarted the level literally dozens of times, and each time the initial
AI
placement and behavior is slightly different. Very impressive.

I played Swat 3's singleplayer aspect for probably 4 months until the
multiplayer patch was released in late 2000. That game had awesome AI too.

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.

Man, no kidding. I played CS religiously for 2 years, but when I started
playing multiplayer COD in December, it was over. It's painful to play CS
now.

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Asestar wrote:
|The same reason that a Honda Civic cannot race with INDY or NACAR
|races... its an AVG car for AVG functions.
|
|
| Well.. according to NeedForSpeedU, my civic can It might even win..
|
|
My Impreza can kick its ass Now if I can just get a WRX Rally edition....
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_.--""--._ On
." ". 27 Feb 2004 13:01:14 -0800
| . ` ` | in
\( )/ comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
\)__. _._(/ Dark Avenger
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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 if you snipe...

If you use an assualt weapon he hears you and will go by boat to you
and will try to find you on land.

He should always react if someone in his LOS gets shot. Does this game
have those goldfish guards that forget that they've been attacked if you
leave them alone for 30 seconds? I can't believe developers ever decided
to do that. I don't care if a guy I shoot goes and alerts the whole map.
That should be part of the challenge.
--
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`-.-' K I N G O F T H E M O N S T E R S

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 20:48:58 GMT, "John Hall"
wrote:

That's exactly what the developer of UT2004 said on the Screen Savers last
night. Its to support laptops.

It STILL doesn't make much sense to me. First off, most notebook PCs
come with a 3d card anymore. Not a good one, true, but I'm sure that
it would still be a whole lot faster than software mode.

Then, to run a game like UT2004 in software mode, you're going to have
to drop your resolution to something like 640x480. Considering that
most notebook PCs have a LCD screen with a resultion of 1024x768, the
picture is going to look like crap when you stretch it out (and if you
bought a notebook PC with a resultion of 1280x960 (which could just be
doubled), you probably got one with a decent 3d card.)

Finally, I can't image the god-awful pain that it would be to play a
3d shooter with a notebook interface. Once again, I suspect we're
down to 3-4 people using software mode...

And it still doesn't make sense that they're targetting their current
game at a tiny, tiny market (people who want to play 3d shooters on a
notebook), but with their next game, they're planning to cut out a
large chunk of the market (anyone who doesn't have a high-end
videocard from the next year or so. And that's going to include the
entire notebook market they're currently trying to cater to.)

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


"Xocyll" wrote in message
.. .

Not that your points weren't valid but:

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.

I think Maxis would disagree.

Again, it's a matter of perspective. "Gamers" probably go through dozens of
games in a year. Having the right hardware is of critical importance to be
able to play every new release and therefore it seems to us an "obvious"
thing that people must upgrade if they expect to play the newest games.
Despite that, "gamers" only constitute a small minority of people who buy
games. And granted, if a game developer is more interested in the niche
market than in the mass market, it's entirely their choice, but here we
simply disagree on what is meant by "average".

"Gamers" are far more than a minority of the people who are going to be
buying the games that would _require_ newer hardware.

You don't need much of a system to play the Sims, you certainly don't
need a new video card, probably not even within 3 or 4 generations of
new.

You do need a good video system to play the latest shooter with state of
the art graphics.

If Maxis were producing a game like Unreal or DOOM3, I bet they wouldn't
be supporting every possible graphic chipset no matter how underpowered.


Bottom line: If the game is going to run like crap on a low end system,
why support that system?

How many sales are you going to make to people with low end systems when
the game runs badly?
How much did it cost in extra development time?
How much is it costing for tech support?
How much "bad advertising" are you suffering from people who are having
a horrible game experience on their low end system and are telling their
friends and posting on your web forums?

Are you ever going to make enough sales to the low end to make back your
expenses?

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