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Where the hell did all you people come from?
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Asuka wrote...Im not going to get involved with the PC/Consoles argument again, ive discussed it several million times before...
Ahh! But this time, it's different. We're debating clearly definable technical power, not having a "which is better" argument. Personally, I can't stand consoles, but that's just me.
I never said it was like pure DM; I said it was nice, but fairly simple gameplay-wise. Standard deathmatch is usuallyfairly boring... I agree that it's very different, I just don't think that it's the second coming. The fact that the community tends to be very juvenile probably doesn't help my impression of the game, which is quite solid....how can you say counter-strike is anything like pure DM? Its team-based, its realistic, there are so many differences! No automatic respawn. Everything about how the game is played is different.
Not really, no, but I can deny that it was the best game released around that time. Marathon was superior to DooM, and System Shock (the original) was superior to both (though it was released slightly later).Doom clones can be good or bad. It depends on the quality. No one can deny Doom was a good game.
What are you talking about? See door, find key, go through door, go to next level, lather, rinse, repeat. You can't get much simpler than that.The thing about Doom was that it wasnt as linear as half-life or other such games. The levels were puzzling, far better thought out than any quake levels.
It gets very old, very fast. Games released today with such gameplay are not even remotely revolutionary; they feel like they're rehashing the same concept that's been done for years, and with good reason; they are.Searching for red key cards was fun, goddammit.
You're probably thinking about Serious Sam. Whenever a game is touted to, "bring back that Doom feeling", I always cringe. However interesting it was at the time, the 'Doom' feeling is ultimately tired and worn out. See lotsa monsters. Circle-strafe monsters until they all fall over. Rinse, lather, repeat as necessary. Add in the occasional key hunt. Welcome to Doom. And Snoozeville.Theres a new doom style game which i cant remember the name of coming out, but it is immediately reminding of doom... down to the power-ups. The most doom-esque thing about it though, is something a lot of later games lost in their search for superior AI... the AI is dead simple... enemy sees you, enemy attacks you, but the cool thing is you can have hundreds of enemies attacking you at once...
It reminds me sooo much of Doom 2.
Actually, the more I think about it, the less disappointed I get. Id has been trying to remake Doom since Quake I. At least now they're admitting it. The one major problem that I can see is that Id has yet to prove themselves capable of making a single-player game that is good for a reason other than technology shock. Id needs to learn about the subtle nuances of atmosphere, ambiance, and, most importantly, immersive storytelling. I saw the Q2 single player game. I saw the lack of a Q3 single-player game (even the bots can't play). I'm not holding my breath.iD is remaking Doom. Yay. No question mark. If they do a good job of it, itll be fu<king cool.
Oh, yeah. Man, I remember how great it felt to build Garret's skills up as you advanced. And in Deus Ex, wasn't it great to play with your social attributes and see how NPCs responded?Thief, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex dont defy categorisation - they are First Person RPGs.
* ahem *
Thief is not an RPG. Deus Ex *could* be considered one in the loosest sense of the word, but its skill system is ultimately a bit too simple for a pure RPG. Don't get me wrong, I actually prefer this balance of player / character skill, but it's not quite an RPG. What is it? LGS called Thief a FPS - First Person Sneaker. Deus Ex can kinda fit into that category, too, if you play it in that manner...
That's kind of a given, isn't it? When would you ever say, "that'll be fun no matter how poorly it's implemented".They are all incredible though, agreed. Theyre not as linear as average FPSs and they involve character development and storyline. Deus Ex multiplayer? Sounds like fun, but again, only if its done right.
I did.And FYI Ashvin, the 'killer' engine of Deus Ex is based on Unreals engine. But im sure you knew that.
* cough * * cough *Real physics in a dynamic world? All these games have real physics engines now.
Ok, do something for me:
1) Go into Deus Ex.
2) Pick up a body.
3) Walk over to a wall and stand so you're facing it
4) Drop the body.
5) Observe the "real physics"
If bodies do that where you live, I'd like to know about it; someone's about to get the Correspondence Paradox from hell.
No game out there has an even remotely correct physics engine. Halo looks like it has a powerful physics engine, but even there, there are occasional clipping errors. Still, if it's done right, Halo could be a massive improvement over the existing engines. Most of the "physics" you see in current games is all done with scripted events. All environment interactivity (or very nearly all of it) is done with scripted events. Also, no game currently in existence has dynamic world architecture. The reason for all of this is that, frankly, it's hard to implement a dynamic visibility tree (necessary for truly dynamic world architecture, and it's hard (or, more accurately, computationally expensive) to build a physics engine that does even little things like assuming that forces are applied anywhere but the center of mass. Eventually, we will overcome these issues. Trust me when I say that day is not yet here.
It's obviously a matter of taste. I thought Q2 multiplayer was somewhat better than Q1's, but the Q2 single-player game was just plain boring, and nauseatingly so, thanks to the color sceme.iD have not lost their touch. They have good days and bad days. I hated Quake 1. I finished Q2 single player when it was first released, and i have to say i enjoyed it. And i played multi-player for years. It was really good fun.
I've played it since a week after its release. So far, this novelty thing you speak of has not worn off. I must just be too simple-minded to realize it's simply an inferior game to anything Id software has ever released...Q3 is also damn good. Its not realistic or anything, but its fast and its fun. Keep playing UT, Ashvin, and you'll find that the novelty does wear off.
Alternately, you could make the quantum leap of logic and consider the possibility that some people really, genuinely, find Unreal Tournament to be a fun game with a solid gameplay design (and some killer mods).
I got that from the lighting and the textures. I find Unreal's lighting engine to be superior to Quake 3's. Quake engines in general have a common look to them, which has gotten much more pronounced with Quake3. Specifically, the textures look painted onto geometric surfaces, which is acceptable only if the textures are supposed to be painted on. Unreal smooths the surface lighting more, resulting in a cleaner geometric surface. I love some of the stuff that Epic is adding to the Unreal engine. The level architecture in a demo movie they released (available here) is magnificently detailed (it looks better than nVidia's Area 15 Quake 3 level), which is the real solution to the flat texture problem. The facial animation stuff is very cool as well....And its nicer graphically, so i dont know where you got that from...
The other part of the Unreal engine I like is the water and fire effects; though Quake 3 does have a more advanced system for similar effects (Shaders), I still haven't seen anything as good looking as Unreal's water (scratch that, Halo's water is better, but Halo hasn't been released yet)...
Feel free to, though it's hardly an argument. imp is saying things that are factually wrong. I'm correcting him based on Sony and Microsoft's whitepapers.Im so tempted to start on the consoles argument, but i wont.
We agree on something. Intriguing...FF7 rocks. Defnitely better than FF8. The X-Box looks decent. The PSX2 is also decent. However, there is one thing which is guaranteed to make or break any console marketed - the third-party support. Thats where PlayStation beat Saturn. That is where the main competition lies, not in the hardware, which ultimately will be quite similar for consoles produced in the same time period.
~~
Ignie Ferroque,
Ash. - "Non Facete Nobis Calcitrare Vestrvm Perinævm"
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lordsippa wrote...
Blood's physics were about standard for an FPS engine; worse, in some cases, because of some weird "features" (you slide down ramps... why again?).If I remember correctly, the physics engine in Blood was pretty good (if limited to very linear uses).
You might be thinking of Alone in the Dark 4 which, though not officially based on the Cthulu mythos, has some incredible similarities. The game looks to be good, but it doesn't have much of a physics engine at all.Also, isn't that upcoming game based around the Cthulu Mythos supposed to have a near perfect physics engine, that's FULLY manipulative. Or so I've been told.
Halo is the only game I've seen that looks like it might have very strong physics. It is rather hard to tell, though, from scripted sequences, since you can script in actions that apparantly obey the laws of physics.
I love quantum mechanicsOh, is anyone here interested in the law of quantum uncertainty? It's kinda fun.
On a final subject change, has anyone else here heard about the findings that prove that electrons act differently, depending on whether they're watched or not? It's very strange and scary and interesting and stuff. It's a major reason for my desire to major in physics (actually, String theory and the like are the true reasons, but they are essentially based on quantum mechanics). The experiment you're talking about is about seventy years old (I forget the exact date -you'll notice how I'm not going into history ), and forms the basis of quantum mechanics. Now quantum entanglement, on the other hand, is fairly recent, and very interesting...
On the subject of early games; the best are the Jill of the Jungle and Commander Keen series. Text-based MUDs are also fairly entertaining, though I don't play them too much; they aren't *too* attractive to me at present, and I don't want to risk getting dragged into their enticing web like so many of my friends.
~~
Ignie Ferroque,
Ash. - "Non Facete Nobis Calcitrare Vestrvm Perinævm"0 -
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Im really going to regret getting involved in this again, but...
Before i start id request that people keep posts shorter than they have been. That is if you strangely feel the urge to keep replying. Or at least start a continued thread.
Mainly im replying to ashvins reply.
[Staying away from consoles discussion!!]
Counter-Strike isnt that simple compared with other FPS mods. But i accept that yes, basically, it is still a case of running around shooting everything which moves (except your team). Which, funnily enough, leads me onto the argument over the 'juvenile community'. This depends incredibly on the servers you use and who you play with. When i play i play with a clan. We take the game seriously (well, as seriously as its meant to be taken i.e. a bit of a laugh, but no TKing or anything) and i have anyone who doesnt take it seriously kicked. 'Juvenile communities' is a gross generality.
Never played Marathon or the original System Shock. But then again, back in those days i still only had an Amstrad CPC. I only played Doom 1 after playing Doom 2, which was defnitely the best game released of its time.
Simple Levels? Tell me Ashvin, did you ever actually play Doom 2 all the way through. It had some of the best level designs ive ever seen in any game. Play Doom 2 again. Levels such as 'Tricks and Traps' and 'Downtown' are classics. And 'Barrels of Fun' was the most fun level ever.
Red Key Cards. Yes. The simplest ideazs are often the best.
As for single player iD games, they have the atmosphere but not the storytelling. iD dont really make their games for single player. Since Doom 2 the emphasis has always been on multiplayer.
Dont get sarcastic about RPGs with me. System Shock 2 was an RPG. Not even you can deny that. Deus Ex was also an RPG. When you have an engine like that in a game you have to sacrifice something, and im not saying that it was particularly complex with the whole statistics thing or anything. However, it displays the basic characteristics of an RPG. Immersive storyline, character building. It is an RPG. Thief is more complex. First Person Sneaker is in fact an excellent way to describe it. When i said it was an RPG, i meant it has a good storyline and certain character building elements.
What i meant by 'Sounds like fun, but again, only if its done right' was that Deus Ex wouldnt lend itself to multiplayer that easily. It would be remarkably easily to screw up. It will take particular care to be implemented properly.
Fine then. Misunderstand me when i say 'real' physics. I didnt mean that the physics work as they would in the real world. I meant that various equations and so on are used so that basically, how you run or jump or glide or whatever isnt made up and just activated every time you press the key. Tribes had an advanced physics engine. Thats not to say you wouldnt know the difference if you were dropped into the tribes world, the whole 'for the time' element is taken for granted. Another game with an excellent physics engine is Carmageddon 2. Dont start me on the technicalities, because basically you'll lose me. I acknowledge your superior technological skill, but i know my games.
I thought that about Q1. I guess it boils down to opinion.but the Q2 single-player game was just plain boring, and nauseatingly so, thanks to the color sceme.I've played it since a week after its release. So far, this novelty thing you speak of has not worn off. I must just be too simple-minded to realize it's simply an inferior game to anything Id software has ever released...
Alternately, you could make the quantum leap of logic and consider the possibility that some people really, genuinely, find Unreal Tournament to be a fun game with a solid gameplay design (and some killer mods).
oooh sarcasm again. Seriously, i think youll find that im very open minded. Go to the quake forum and youll find closed minded people. They still play a 6 year old game and claim that its still better than any other. Theyre afraid that moving onto a different game will take their edge away. Ask Marty. At DCU this year i was a big UT fan. I didnt like Q3 at all. Since then though, UT has grown old for me. The only mod i play now is InstaGib. If you still like it then good luck to you I wish you well in the future
Woooo Quake 3 graphics argument again You know what i said about technicalities. Do you actually play the games or just sit around admiring the scenery?
Im glad we agree on something.
Blood didnt have a good physics engine. Blood was based on the Duke Nukem 3d engine, aka 'a big load of hacks sitting on a very simple engine'. It was a fun game though. Blood 2 was based on the LithTech engine (Shogo) and it was a lot of fun.
Half Life was a very linear game. A lot of fun though.
Enough with the discussion already Im not going to say any more about it, anyway. Actually, if you intend to have a big technical gaming discussion, let the rest of the boards in on it, theyll add their impressions im sure. I suggest the games forum.
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Just found this board thanks to a tip-off; unlike Lucutus and Canaboid I'm not quite an interloper, I did CTYI a long, long time ago
Interesting tech discussions here, me likey!DX7 is much improved over DX3, but it still isn't up to OpenGL's ease of use yet. To some extent, it's also a personal thing. DirectX allows you to fudge a bit, and pull some deep-hardware stuff that perhaps isn't the best idea. OpenGL forces a level of abstraction that some programmers find uncomfortable. Still, virtually everyone I've talked with (or read interviews of) prefers OpenGL to DirectX in terms of pure programmical ease. However, when you factor in issues like 3dfx's absolutely terrible OpenGL support (which should start improving, hopefully, now that they're an ARB member), choosing an API becomes a bit trickier.
DirectX doesn't actually allow any more deep-hardware stuff than OpenGL does - not inherently, anyway. It's down to the GL extensions, which are down to individual card manufacturers. DX does fudge it all though; they tend to tack on DX calls for every tiny crappy thing that a card can do, causing much weeping and gnashing of teeth when you actually try to use those features in any games. OGL extentions, at least, are properly implemented, even if there are some of them that don't exist which really should, and some of them which are kludged - like the sorry state of affairs around bumpmapping GL extensions.
As for 3DFX... urgh, don't even start. Thank god their market share is sliding so fast. To be honest, the temptation is huge to completely disregard 3DFX flaws during implementation stages, and then tack on support in later stages; the grief involved in getting graphics-intensive stuff to work on 3DFX boards isn't worth the 6 or 7 percent of the market they control.The Microsoft rep. at the X-Box talk I attended (9 / 28 / 00, Colorado University ECOT 189) echoed Seamus in this; the specs aren't nailed down, and nobody affiliated with the project has called anything the "final specs".
Crapola. The final specs were nailed down before the GDC this year. I dunno what crack your MS rep was smoking, but we've had final specs set in stone for ages - not to mention dev kits! Given the number of dev studios here that are doing XBox work, I'd imagine MS would have mentioned to one of them if the XBox spec was about to change...CDs and CD-ROMs are fundamentally different in terms of their data storage system.
Dammit, you were doing so well too! I'm nitpicking here, I know, but the track system is the same for the two types; there is a basic difference between a data track and an audio track, but realistically it's the same storage medium and formatting.Even if you could somehow overclock a GeForce 2 Ultra to 350Mhz, you still wouldn't anywhere near the Playstation2's peak throughput of 80M polys/sec.
Heehee, lets see you get a PS2 to throughput that either mind. No seriously. Show me a PS2 demo that manages that poly throughput. You can't, because IT can't. Figures like that are intrinsically bullsh1t.the PSX2's architecture is superior to the PC's when it comes to the processing of high-bandwidth data.
Only from an engineering point of view. The PS2 is an engineers wet dream; it's just a shame they didn't bother asking any developers what they thought of all these wonderful ideas, because had they done so, we'd have a slightly less powerful PS2 with a hell of a lot better games.
Oh, and Asuka...System Shock 2 was an RPG. Not even you can deny that. Deus Ex was also an RPG.
Depends who you ask. Lets face it, you can't categorise these things any more! We've changed entire editorial systems because of the realisation that it's nigh-on impossible to pigeonhole any decent modern games into genres. Arguing about this is pointless; no matter which genre you try and fit a game like Deus Ex into, you're still wrong
Ja,
Rob
[EED]Shinji - shinji@electricdeath.com
Creative Director, Neko Technologies
UK Editor, GameLoft.Com
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Interesting tech discussions here, me likey!
I was referring to the DX calls for every little feature.DirectX doesn't actually allow any more deep-hardware stuff than OpenGL does - not inherently, anyway. It's down to the GL extensions, which are down to individual card manufacturers. DX does fudge it all though; they tend to tack on DX calls for every tiny crappy thing that a card can do, causing much weeping and gnashing of teeth when you actually try to use those features in any games. OGL extentions, at least, are properly implemented, even if there are some of them that don't exist which really should, and some of them which are kludged - like the sorry state of affairs around bumpmapping GL extensions.
Let me put it another way: OpenGL forces developers to do things the Right Way, pushing pure graphics information to the driver, and letting the driver handle the details of the hardware. DirectX lets the developer fudge their implementation quite a bit by making DirectX calls that may or may not in fact behave in a fast (or even particularly well-defined) manner on all present and future hardware. As an example, OpenGL forces you to trust the driver's texture management, whereas with DirectX, you can shuffle textures around in memory.
There are pros and cons to each approach. I happen to like OpenGL's setup more, but it does require well-written drivers for good performance (see: nVidia). The flip-side of that is that OpenGL is insanely portable, since you don't have to write anything pertaining to the behavior of any specific piece of hardware; in a year or two, the way a new card manages geometry and textures might be entirely different than right now, but your OpenGL program will still be fairly efficient, since the driver is doing all the low-level work. With DirectX, on the other hand, you are given the ability to pull more hardware-specific tricks, with the downside (the five hundred kiloton downside...) being that your program can do weird things on different cards, the nuances of which you have not yet fully taken into account.
I agree with you on the state of some of the OGL extensions. Maybe the ARB will clean some of these issues up with 1.3.
Temptation? That's not temptation -that's a perfectly valid design plan. 3dfx can't write decent drivers. The Voodoo series will therefore get shafted until 3dfx can learn to write drivers.As for 3DFX... urgh, don't even start. Thank god their market share is sliding so fast. To be honest, the temptation is huge to completely disregard 3DFX flaws during implementation stages, and then tack on support in later stages; the grief involved in getting graphics-intensive stuff to work on 3DFX boards isn't worth the 6 or 7 percent of the market they control.Crapola. The final specs were nailed down before the GDC this year. I dunno what crack your MS rep was smoking, but we've had final specs set in stone for ages - not to mention dev kits! Given the number of dev studios here that are doing XBox work, I'd imagine MS would have mentioned to one of them if the XBox spec was about to change...
-- Seamus Blackley, GameCenter - The Monster X-Box Interview (23 / 9 / 00), 1:00 PM PT Tokyo Game Show, Tokyo, Japan.GC: Is there a rough schedule to get [development] units out sometime at the end of the year, the beginning of the year.
S.B.: You know, there are already 1,500 dev units right now.
GC: Those are the XDKs.
S.B.: So the XDK is an evolving platform, right? You get the XDK today, there's another upgrade coming this year, there's another update at the very beginning of the year, then there's the final hardware. And so you get software and hardware updates the entire way through. This is what we're doing so people can push the limit on their launch titles. The danger of the launch title is that because you don't have final hardware is that everyone is conservative and doesn't take full advantage of the hardware.
Now, I admit there is some chance that I'm very wrong, and that there is a vast conspiracy at Microsoft, the sole purpose of which is to screw me over (it wouldn't be the first time). However, when the X-Box's originator Seamus Blackley says something about the X-Box to an interviewer, and an MS rep. says the same thing to me a few days later, I tend to believe it to be something resembling the truth.
When MS changes the X-Box specs, then says it's still an evolving platform, I tend to believe that the specs aren't fixed, and that it's still an evolving platform...
Yes, you are nitpicking, but that's all right...Dammit, you were doing so well too! I'm nitpicking here, I know, but the track system is the same for the two types; there is a basic difference between a data track and an audio track, but realistically it's the same storage medium and formatting.
How about this: Audio CDs and CD-Roms use fundamentally different filesystems, even though the data on Audio CDs is ultimately just raw 16-bit (or 22-bit) PCM-encoded audio, which could be stored just as well on an iso9660 filesystem.
Better?
Not necessarily. Figures like that give you an idea of what the hardware is capable of doing. Acctual applications won't hit that for a variety of reasons, but these figures tell you the absolute limit of the pure hardware, while ignoring all other factors that could hamper performance.Heehee, lets see you get a PS2 to throughput that either mind. No seriously. Show me a PS2 demo that manages that poly throughput. You can't, because IT can't. Figures like that are intrinsically bullsh1t.
Assuming everything else is equal (equally bad, that is), then comparing the peak throughputs of the two systems is a perfectly good way of determining the superior hardware. If you do, in fact, take other considerations into account, then the PC will likely suffer an even greater defeat, due to the presence of numerous bottlenecks that just aren't there on the PSX2.
I agree and disagree. The Playstation 2 is a weird machine to code for; it apparantly twists programmers minds in completely strange ways (I would argue that this is a good thing, but then again, I'm going into physics in order to break the laws thereof, so my opinion might be skewed). However, given time, I believe that developers will find ways of squeezing every last little bit of juice out of that machine, even if they have to be on acid to do it. Look at some of the last games released for the PSX by Square -damn fine work, considering the limitations. I firmly believe that they will eventually wrap their heads around the machine, and start churning out some incredible games. It will just take longer than it would have had Sony written a developer friendly PSXDK.Only from an engineering point of view. The PS2 is an engineers wet dream; it's just a shame they didn't bother asking any developers what they thought of all these wonderful ideas, because had they done so, we'd have a slightly less powerful PS2 with a hell of a lot better games.Depends who you ask. Lets face it, you can't categorise these things any more! We've changed entire editorial systems because of the realisation that it's nigh-on impossible to pigeonhole any decent modern games into genres. Arguing about this is pointless; no matter which genre you try and fit a game like Deus Ex into, you're still wrong.
:: Does that head-nodding thing ::
Deus Ex is not a real time strategy game. I think I can safely say that... (now, watch, someone will take RTS to mean something other than the Starcrafty games to which everybody knows I'm referring).
~~
Ignie Ferroque,
Ash. - "Non Facete Nobis Calcitrare Vestrvm Perinævm"
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Now, I admit there is some chance that I'm very wrong, and that there is a vast conspiracy at Microsoft, the sole purpose of which is to screw me over (it wouldn't be the first time). However, when the X-Box's originator Seamus Blackley says something about the X-Box to an interviewer, and an MS rep. says the same thing to me a few days later, I tend to believe it to be something resembling the truth.
When MS changes the X-Box specs, then says it's still an evolving platform, I tend to believe that the specs aren't fixed, and that it's still an evolving platform...
Ahhhhhhh! I see where you're coming from; I fear you're misinterpreting the good Mr Blackley. The specs of the XDK change regularly as they grow closer to the final X-Box spec, quite simply because NVIDIA et al haven't produced final silicon for their chipsets yet. The actual paper spec for the XBox remains static, it's just that the XDK units are still striving to meet that spec.Assuming everything else is equal (equally bad, that is), then comparing the peak throughputs of the two systems is a perfectly good way of determining the superior hardware. If you do, in fact, take other considerations into account, then the PC will likely suffer an even greater defeat, due to the presence of numerous bottlenecks that just aren't there on the PSX2.
Depends, really. I can do some things much faster on the PC than I can on the PSX2, and vice versa. Bullfrog hit this problem in porting Q3A to the Playstation2; Q3 precalcs its geometry and stores it in memory, which makes it nice and fast on the PC thanks to a superfast memory architecture. On the PS2, this was dog slow (we're talking 5 or 6 frames per second peak) because the memory architecture of the PS2 is such a load of crap. It's faster to recalculate the geometry tesselation each frame than it is to precalc it and pull it out of memory (assuming you can get the vector units doing the tesselation right in the first place) which requires something of a shift in mindset for coders!However, given time, I believe that developers will find ways of squeezing every last little bit of juice out of that machine, even if they have to be on acid to do it. Look at some of the last games released for the PSX by Square -damn fine work, considering the limitations. I firmly believe that they will eventually wrap their heads around the machine, and start churning out some incredible games. It will just take longer than it would have had Sony written a developer friendly PSXDK.
There's still the prospect that this could kill off the PS2 to a degree, as developers can produce better quality titles faster on the GameCube, XBox and DreamCast. It'd be a minor factor though; if anything is going to kill PS2, it'll be Sonys amazing arrogance and mistreatment of consumers and retail.Deus Ex is not a real time strategy game. I think I can safely say that... (now, watch, someone will take RTS to mean something other than the Starcrafty games to which everybody knows I'm referring).
Consider it done! I mean, after all, Deus Ex requires you to develop strategies for handling situations that arise in real time, does it not? :P
ja,
Rob aka [EED]Shinji
PS - Hi Fionnuala 0 -
Ahhhhhhh! I see where you're coming from; I fear you're misinterpreting the good Mr Blackley. The specs of the XDK change regularly as they grow closer to the final X-Box spec, quite simply because NVIDIA et al haven't produced final silicon for their chipsets yet. The actual paper spec for the XBox remains static, it's just that the XDK units are still striving to meet that spec.
Except that Microsoft has changed the X-Box specs, bumping the processor up from 600Mhz to 700Mhz. No, it isn't a major change, but it still indicates (as Seamus says in that very same interview) that the X-Box's final spec isn't nailed down. Yeah, it is quite certain that the X-Box will have an Intel chip and nVidia graphcs and MCU units, but the details are still being tweaked. The graphics specs have remained fairly constant, though, with claims of about 150M dual textured polys/sec. I haven't heard anything about their MCU, other than its existence.
But that's the Right Way of doing it, isn't it? In an ideal world, you don't have to cache anything, except the mathematically-defined surfaces that form your world geometry; everything is lit, vis'd, transformed, and tesselated in real-time. With PCs, we have fairly large caches attached to most processing units, but the PS2 forefeits these caches in favor of a much stronger system memory architecture, coupled with powerful processors (see my previous drooling all over the Emotion Engine). I would say that, in the long run, the PS2's method still leads to better performance than the PC, once developers learn to take advantage of its power. The fast data pipes avoid the major bottleneck in PCs: memory. If you can dynamically produce large vertex arrays, while retrieving textures over an ultra-fast system memory bus, you can avoid the video and system RAM bottlenecks that slam modern PCs.Depends, really. I can do some things much faster on the PC than I can on the PSX2, and vice versa. Bullfrog hit this problem in porting Q3A to the Playstation2; Q3 precalcs its geometry and stores it in memory, which makes it nice and fast on the PC thanks to a superfast memory architecture. On the PS2, this was dog slow (we're talking 5 or 6 frames per second peak) because the memory architecture of the PS2 is such a load of crap. It's faster to recalculate the geometry tesselation each frame than it is to precalc it and pull it out of memory (assuming you can get the vector units doing the tesselation right in the first place) which requires something of a shift in mindset for coders!
Having said that, if I were Sony, I would have added more fast-access SPRAM to act as cache if the developers absolutely, positively believed they couldn't live without it (I would also up the system memory to at least 32M, possibly 64M, though that would make my losses fairly high). Of course, if I were Sony, I would also build a system with four Emotion Engines coupled with 512M of RDRAM, and sell it as a graphics workstation. I'd buy one of those...
It's never been particularly easy to develop for consoles. Granted, Microsoft is trying to change that, but console programmers are used to having to become very personal with the systems for which they develop. I agree that Sony's hubris could potentially kill the PS2, but they would have to be damn arrogant, especially given their level of support from developers. Then again, MGS2 is going to be developed for the X-Box, so I suppose anything can happen...There's still the prospect that this could kill off the PS2 to a degree, as developers can produce better quality titles faster on the GameCube, XBox and DreamCast. It'd be a minor factor though; if anything is going to kill PS2, it'll be Sonys amazing arrogance and mistreatment of consumers and retail.
Oh, hush...Consider it done! I mean, after all, Deus Ex requires you to develop strategies for handling situations that arise in real time, does it not? :P
~~
Ignie Ferroque,
Ash. - "Non Facete Nobis Calcitrare Vestrvm Perinævm"0 -
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But X-Box is a games console. Its not meant to be a PC. Its cheaper and easier and... im not going to get into this argument again
Quake. Yes. First of all, N64 Quake was sh!te. This is entirely beside the point. As I recall Quake would run on certain 486s - i vaguely recall there being 2 sorts, a DX and an SX. It ran on the DX, it didnt on the SX. Also beside the point. (And while we're not on the point, i might mention that i have the copy of PC Format in which the original Quake was reviewed They said that you needed a 'Monster Machine' to run it - they were talking about a Pentium of almost any sort )
Anyway, back to the point. Shinji pointed out in his post, Consoles are not the same as PCs! Just because N64 is a higher-tech piece of equipment than a 486 doesnt mean that it will run everything better. Thats like saying that because a DVD player is higher-tech than an oven, it will cook your food just as well (for gods sake, mine does). Id like to see you run Occarina of Time on a 486 . Its all down to compatibility problems, the same as they had porting Q3 to console. Its all about cache and different types of memory and other stuff which im not quite sad enough to care about
Anyway, nuff said for the moment
A0
damn it i know.Advertisement