Well, that's just not what I mean.

In the late 90ies (I did say late, did I?) you would get a top-of-the-line card for little over 100 bucks and it could handle games for years to come, at 60+ FPS and high quality. $180 would have been the ultimate luxury model.

Today, unless you pay a ridiculous amount of money, a reasonably priced card is outdated pretty much the moment you buy it. A year from now, a card you could buy for $150 now will be obscenely outdated.

Cycles for new graphics cards get shorter but also more expensive and less powerful compared to predecessors.

The reason why Valve doesn't seem to have any problems playing on the PC market while almost all other developers more or less left for consoles and treat PC gamers as second-rate customers is because Valve doesn't follow hardware trends blindly. They add to their games what makes sense from the player's point of view but never clutter them with shader effects just to have "DX10 support" or "Real-time Shadows!" sticker on their boxes. They even decided to do some sorts of obscure particle-effects with multi-core support, not because it would look fancy in a review, but because multi-core is getting standard, relatively cheap and it makes sense to support it. While we all heard the "< 2% of gamers can run DX10" statement...

More developers should look at the current limitations and build their hardware around them. Instead of focusing so much on marketable graphics-technology superlatives. See what it's good for in UT3. Super-duper high-res: [i]grey walls![i] How ridiculous is that? They're ass-kissing GPU developers ("the way it's MEANT to be played!!1") without realizing that their PC player-base is moving away. Moving towards consoles, that is (so maybe they don't care).

It's just not fun to buy an expensive game and an equally expensive card only to realize you can just barely run the peachy settings. There might be a lot of possibilities for software but from the gamer's POV you just have this constant feel of running behind. And then there's this superabundance of crappy and/or near-identical cards which you don't even know why they got released in the first place.

Bah.

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Why snark works.

Which is why I love my 360 :smile:

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

I'm contemplating whether or not to buy a Ati 3070. I know 6 months later that i won't be able to play the new game coming out at the highest settings. I know how you fell Reaper.

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Reality has become a commodity.

For anyone who knows what a solid state drive is...
http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/
dear god... it loaded the first level of F.E.A.R. in 3.2 seconds...

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Reality has become a commodity.

haha the first bombing run map I played was slaughterhouse and had a hell of a time figuring out that crappy map. After a no-fun, scoreless stalemate I was ready to give up on it. How different is BR online? More 'cherry picking' and firing the ball at opponents so they cant fight back?

Hardly. It's ALL translocator and telefragging. People move like the wind, and two or three strong players on a side can move that ball up like nothing else. It's quite typical to punt the ball over the opponents heads and shoot them all as they see were it lands... while a teammate translocates there within two seconds. Also, the ball itself is subject to physics in flight... why hello Mr. Shock Combo.

Yeah, you said, late, sorry.

Your entire rant is baseless and completely contradictory to what has actually happened in the last ten years.

1st: Every year since 1999, there has been a new graphics card generation debut (go look it up), in fact, only recently has it slowed down.

2nd: The cards coming out now, save the generation leap from GF6 to GF7 and GF4 to GF5 have shown VAST improvements.

3rd: Wanting the absolute highest graphical settings in any modern game is from the basis of pure luxury. Look at games that are multi-platform between consoles and PC (where the PC version isn't a console port) and you'll see that there is a far higher graphical fidelity on the PC.

4th: Developers are not using the absolute newest bandwagon technology that is around. Crysis, is seriously, the only game in town that actually utilizes shader model 4 (other games are just pushing Vista). But, the game still has an incredibly quality in lower models.

5th: Unreal Engine 3 requires Shader Model 3. NOT 4, but 3, something that debuted nearly three years ago and is now dirt cheap to get on a card. The aesthetic choices Epic made has nothing to do with the fidelity of their engine ... which has already been distributed in many games that people are going nuts over. Their strong suit has never been game development, but engine development. Their knowledge of engine technology is incredibly vast and what they have achieved in UE3 is incredible ... from a technology point of view. Again, it hardly uses the "newest" stuff.

Look, I get it, you're mad that your computer can't play every game ever at the highest settings for the next three or four years ... but stop complaining.

Things are MUCH better than they were. Games are drastically more scalable and there's exponentially more available every year. And, just to note, when HL2 was debuted to the public, their big selling point was the graphics and the use of the BRAND NEW Shader Model 2.0 to bring, "Shader effects only previously available in large budget animated films, such as from pixar" ... and the whole big selling point of the EP2 source changes, besides the cinematic physics, is real time soft shadows.

People don't even realize how good they've got it right now. The average price of a mid-line PC has only gone up about $50 in the last five years, and that is something that would last for more than a year.

Just to let you know, the reason why a lot of developers make their games have added features with future technology is so that WHEN that technology is adapted (because it will be, no matter how pissed off you get), their game will get a new coat of gloss and be able to continue to contend with newer games.

I'm done with this, it's ridiculous.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

haha the first bombing run map I played was slaughterhouse and had a hell of a time figuring out that crappy map. After a no-fun, scoreless stalemate I was ready to give up on it. How different is BR online? More 'cherry picking' and firing the ball at opponents so they cant fight back?

Hardly. It's ALL translocator and telefragging. People move like the wind, and two or three strong players on a side can move that ball up like nothing else. It's quite typical to punt the ball over the opponents heads and shoot them all as they see were it lands... while a teammate translocates there within two seconds. Also, the ball itself is subject to physics in flight... why hello Mr. Shock Combo.

Hmm.. I never really played UT04 in it's heyday, played the demo briefly when it came out and finally bought it in 2006, mostly for the editor and bonus DVD of video tutorials. I guess I didn't account for how crafty online gaming communities can be. The way you describe it I can see how a small community would have formed around BR, gotten really damn good at it in ways the designers never even imagined possible, and then moved on, taking BR servers and much of any chance of the game regaining popularity with them.

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o

That seems to be a trend with most online games sadly, but at least the UTs have decent bot support :/

Look, I get it, you're mad that your computer can't play every game ever at the highest settings for the next three or four years ... but stop complaining.

I won't. I know you're probably on the other side of this, because you're professionally interested in the technology (which of course has improved) while I am, in this case, looking at it more from the consumer side. But I'm not a ridiculous dips**t just because I think that getting a new graphics card has become quite an annoying affair lately, full of compromises and a mine field of bad cards which are only distinguishable by a "GS" or "XYZ" in their names.

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Why snark works.

You know there's an entire Indie game movement happening right now that's producing some high quality games that aren't insanely taxing on your graphics card?

So, I'm not a consumer now? Is that how that works? I look forward to coming technology, but I will never like the price tag. I'm also NOT an early adopter (These are the graphics cards I've had: Banshee, GF2, GF4, GF7. CPUs I've had have about the same type of leaps) That means, about every two or three years, I upgraded, and the reason I went from the GF2 to GF4 was because my GF2 died (the fan stopped working, I didn't know, and now lots of the memory is permanently damaged)

Does anyone remember when there was a difference between a VGA card and a Graphics Card? You think there's a minefield of bad cards out now!? Try buying a card, that costs the same amount, that has no 3D acceleration and, remember, warranties weren't very common and stores didn't really take computer parts back unless they were defective.

Give me a break. The way technology is today, it is spoon fed to the consumer to try to make things as simple as possible, so that a number or letter code will tell them how suitable the card is for their use. Guess where you can find out what each of those, three or four, codes mean? The chipset manufacturer's site. If you want to complain about naming, complain about motherboard names, those things are ridiculously cryptic, and I would agree with you if you complained about that. But this is just baseless. It seems like you had a bad experience or something and you've generalized the entire market by it (Maybe because you live in Austria and prices are exuberant there? Keep in mind, that isn't the manufacturer's fault)

Things are so easy now. SO easy. The generations have always grown in the same pattern and they've always been in the same price range. People, for some reason, expect their hardware to stay at the absolute top for far too long. This was never excepted before, people were content in running games at the maximum ability their machine could run them and upgrading happened when they wanted to play something their computer couldn't run. A lot of people still do that now, and it's even more annoying to hear them complain that their 5 year old video card can't run BioShock, because they have Pixel shader 2.0 and it requires 3.0 and they think that's an "outrage".

There are a lot of really good indie games out there, now.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Please read this:

http://compreviews.about.com/od/video/a/GraphicsMayhem.htm

It's not what I base all my arguments on, but it was one of the first things to pop up when searching for "graphics card prices over the years" in google.

I also never said that I want to play Unreal 3 on my (excellent and carefully chosen) old graphics card, I just said that the PC game market is going down and with it PC gamers are treated as second-rate customers over console gamers. Which is a fact. Any other statements, especially the purely subjective view of graphics card naming being inscrutable for the average customer without hour-long comparison of website-spreadsheets, as well as the habit of leading game publishers to advertise their games with excessive hardware requirements were just examples for what else could be the cause of the PC becoming a less attractive platform for gamers.

I enjoy my indie games, I really do. But I'd also like to see a Deus Ex sequel that doesn't have all its core features removed just because the required buttons wouldn't fit on an XBOX controller.

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Why snark works.

I didn't say prices aren't more, I said they're relatively the same. As for debut prices, I don't think anyone here is honestly willing to pay that ... but those aren't the only options. There are cards that are fairly low priced that can play games well even if there's some new card out that's $600+.

You're argument, up to this point, has been disgruntled PC gamer complaints. So, please forgive me if I confused your analyzation with complaining ... it wasn't exactly clear. What you're saying now, is completely different then what you were saying before.

Before, you were complaining that games, like UT3, require more and more expensive graphics cards compared to ten years ago ... that isn't true and that's what I was trying to get across.

If, instead, you were talking about these general changes in the market that seemed unsettling because you felt the PC gamer was being treated unfairly compared to the console gamer (which, is only true if you look at it in a certain aspect) ... these are two completely different arguments.

If you had originally stated what you're stating now, I wouldn't have had a problem with it.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

WOW, this thread was on page 43 last time I posted in it and now its on page 65. :eek:

Recently annoyed. I have no real access to the net. I buy.. BUY UT III and behold that its made to use nVidia cards. I think "KOOL, I have a 7800..." The f**king game has issues and you need to have drivers NEWER than the ones I have...

Anywho.... I got them and now have hopes of playing it.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Seriously, at this day and age, you can pretty much access the internet from all over the world. Of all countries, America, how come you can get internet at your house?

Welcome back btw :cool:

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Aaron's Stuff

Internet connections within the USA are indeed available everywhere... As with the entire world I would imagine. However one must take into account "Feasibility and/or Gain"

Where I live I have a few options.

• Dialup
• Satellite
• WiFi

Dialup is out of the question. I refuse to go back to it. Snarkpit, and the world as a whole are not going to fully understand the limitations imposed as a 56k user. I have no interest in battling either for this comprehension anylonger.

Satellite requires a 600 dollar upfront monetary donation for the hardware.. I haven't 600 bucks.

Wifi is available but it has a 2 year commitment contract and is 55 dollars a month. I am debating this option now since I have a 15 day free use of this connection. It is faster than dialup but MUCH slower than DSL.

DSL by-the-by should be here sometime in 2008. I am hopeful.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Hay, I have dial-up. You cant play online games, but you can certainly browse the internet and download over night. Even if you use it till you get proper internet.

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Aaron's Stuff

Orph!. Been away from these forums a few days, and you pop back up out of nowhere!. Good to hear from you.

Juim said:
Orph!. Been away from these forums a few days, and you pop back up out of nowhere!. Good to hear from you.

Missed you too buddy ol pal. In fact, I missed everyone lots and lots. :smile:

Aaron, I simply cannot go back... I have been offline for months now. MANY MONTHS. I miss it, but not nearly enough to go back to dialup.

Truth be told, I have been playing many of my old games again. From Civ 4 to Quake 4 and many others.

I have had lots of fun with them and my son even got me an expansion to Civ 4 under the ol' tree waiting for Christmas to be played. :razz: .

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Ahhhh sounds nice Orph. Seems like you got a good life to keep you entertained. But you know, once all your websites are cached, its not that slow.

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Aaron's Stuff

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting aaron_da_killa</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>Ahhhh sounds nice Orph. Seems like you got a good life to keep you entertained. But you know, once all your websites are cached, its not that slow.</DIV></DIV>

Until someone posts a gig sized image.

Nope... I refuse to go back. We got a call last week saying that the limit of the DSL line is only 2000 feet from my door. They should be able to expand sometime in 2008 to include my residence..

I'll wait.

Snarkpit got a long without me this long. It will survive indefinitely if need be. In fact, things look spiffy and quiet enough that my currently being here seems... Over-rated.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

seems?

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Aaron's Stuff

aaron_da_killa said:
seems?

Highlight it Aaron. :heee:

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Very clever Orph.

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Aaron's Stuff

Something else I noticed:

Civ 4 is the better game in the Civ saga, as far as graphics go, but they omitted some key elements that made the previous versions great.

For nostalgia reasons I loaded Civ II to play and couldn't get past the flatness of it, and soon uninstalled it again. Even the fact that I knew it was the better game couldn't entice me to continue.

I did notice that playing 4 took little less than a day to complete. Even if I protractedly took my time to win through "Goodness" and had all the other Civ's voting me winner. Most of us know that winning that way is about the hardest.

I played Civ II games upward of two weeks for a single game. Some would call that tedious, but thinking about it myself I'd have to disagree because most of the tedium was simply setting up the infrastructure of the worlds. Thats no more tedious than say as RPG and its "Hack/slash.. Pick up gold... Go to town... Return to hack/slash... Repeat..." :biggrin:

My biggest, and only real complaint was that there was no coastal defenses in Civ 4. The stupid computer players always took advantage of this by placing untold numbers of ships off my shores ant attempting to bash my walls into undefensiveness. Yeah, I was almost always advanced enough to bomb their wooden ships with my bombers, but dammit I missed my coastal defense advance. :sad:

I did however like the addition of the barbarians making themselves much more than a simple/major annoyance. They actually build cities now. Not just wander the globe causing mayhem. I found entire continents with little more than barbarian cities. That was a nice addition. AND they were almost always invariably the best computer players, as far as advancing in techs. They were almost always just behind me, where the other computer players were decades if not centuries behind.

Civ II will be missed, but Civ 4 is good enough.. For now.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Hell has frozen over

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Someone left a comment on that Duke story... made me chuckle!

BY TEHMARK AT 03:41 PM

Can't wait till it sucks more than Daikitana

Yeah, I think it'll have trouble holding its own in today's FPS market unless they do something drastic then get ridiculed by fans for changing things from the already flimsy premise of the series.

They should release all the other versions of the game with it and call it the Duke Nukem Forever Anthology, just to run with the embarrassing joke of development time they took. It would do nothing, but help them by marketing it as a staple in video game history.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Crono said:
They should release all the other versions of the game with it and call it the Duke Nukem Forever Anthology, just to run with the embarrassing joke of development time they took.

I agree, just for curiosity sake. I'd think that they could release them as betas if nothing else.

I am not real sure how many times they started over or even what engine they are presently using but I'd like to see the Quake and Unreal versions.

I looked at Unreal 1 the other day. It still looks good. Especially compared to the early versions of Quake and HL1 from the same era.

I don't think they truly got far enough in the Quake version to have anything playable however, so an anthology might be out of the question.. shrugs

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The best things in life, aren't things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IObO7aSMhYM

Duke Nukem Forever trailer

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Why snark works.

reaper47 said:
Duke Nukem Forever trailer

9 years in the making, for that pitiful trailer.

I did notice that he wants to take a crap again though. Some things never change. :biggrin:

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Orpheus said:
Civ II will be missed, but Civ 4 is good enough.. For now.

Civ 4 was very disappointing. It's better than Civ 3, but that's nothing to be proud of. It has fewer features than AC, the 'streamlining' removed important aspects of the game, combat is incredibly annoying and unfun, and it runs like a dog. All I want is a Civ game with the cool features of AC, and twice I've been denied :/
Orph if you want a longer game you should set it to marathon, as that adds something crazy like 8x as many turns to the game. It actually gives you time to build an army with current tech and use them before they are completely outdated. And if you like the barbarians you should set them to raging or whatever its called... they become a nightmare (a fun one!)

Thanx Joe. I read someplace yesterday (for the first time too) about the marathon thing.

I may try it next time.

My son bought me the expansion, or more precisely, one of them and I plan on playing it some soon. Well, soon as in after Xmas.

I also slightly missed the options that came with the espionage portion that were missing. You couldn't do all that much with a spy anymore. :sad:

IMO, they removed the tedium, and TBH, thats what made Civ II so grand. Now, if they would just spruce up Civ II to look like Civ 4, I'd play that again in a minute.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

God, Alpha Centauri was good. Still my favorite Civ-style game. Even though it doesn't have the fun ties to real-world events.

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Why snark works.

I bought AC when it came out new for 50 bucks. I never opened the box. Its still packed away someplace, unopened as far as I know.

It was one of those "I must have" games. I simply had no time to play it.

My hope is that they will have some expansion that will put the tedious things back in, assuming enough people complained and they thought it prudent.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Don't really know where to post this, as it doesn't warrant a full topic, so im going to temporarily hijack this thread to pimp an animation I made demonstrating some things about mazes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIBwiGrUgzc

Do you have any future plans you could share with us Nick? I mean, is this for a project or just passing time?

Perhaps an explanation of the process would suffice.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Nice!

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Why snark works.

A maze transformed into a circle and then back again. Visually shows why the "follow the wall on your right" rule often works.

Good to know if you ever happen to get locked into one. :smile:

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What the Snarkpitters listen to!

Do you have any future plans you could share with us Nick? I mean, is this for a project or just passing time?

Perhaps an explanation of the process would suffice.

No exact future plans, I kinda want to do a transformation for a maze where you can't solve it by following the right wall, and maybe a couple videos showing non-standard maze solving strategies working their magic.

Now that I think about it, are there any mazes that can't be solved by following the right wall? Wouldn't following the left wall work just as well?

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What the Snarkpitters listen to!

Mayhap its not so much the right wall but the right=correct wall. :biggrin:

A literal play on wording. Since following the correct wall, even though it may be on the left or center, would indeed be the path to the finish.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

I made another one,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqZDYcpCGAI

And another,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1tSK5V1pds

Now that I think about it, are there any mazes that can't be solved by following the right wall? Wouldn't following the left wall work just as well?

Obviously a three-dimensional maze, but also some mazes where the start/end is in the interior that have a loop around the designated end point. And isn't dead-end filling obvious to anyone with enough intelligence to find their way to the video?

And isn't dead-end filling obvious to anyone with enough intelligence to find their way to the video?

Perhaps, but it is important because it can find all solutions of a maze, it is provably as fast as possible (asymptotically), and it takes only one piece of memory (the location of the current dead end) beyond storying the maze itself, regardless of how big the maze is.

Some cs majors were lamenting over a graph theory problem that is exactly the same as solving a maze with these constraints. They couldn't find the solution after trying for hours when I talked to them, so I don't think it is obvious.

Recently found (yesterday) 12 Shannara audio books by Terry Brooks AND 72 versions of my favorite Christmas carol "Carol of the Bells"

I am happy now.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Truly the Maze Master. It all makes sense now.

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Why snark works.

Kool avy there Reaper.. I'd have laughed twice as hard if it had been the big man Santa himself though.

Seeing those little buggers eating that snowman had me in stitches.

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The best things in life, aren't things.