I don't care about this game. But if people insist on writing articles about it, "I COULD care less" than I already do (implied threat)... #8^)
I'm not justifying this way of using the phrase, just playing Devil's Advocate for an alternate definition that could make sense (though I doubt most intend it that way).
I too have bought, played, and mostly-loved every Civ game and expansion that has come out (I haven't loved Revolution or the latest Settlers as much, though...) Having said that, the combat system was starting to wear on me (especially the "surprise, I have a stack of 50 units next to your capital" mechanic), so I am quite interested in seeing how the changes play out. It could work great to work in some of the elements of classic hex-based war games - but it could also bring the g...
I really wish that kid could have ported his mod to Civ IV, rather than get a real job...
In my opinion, the best "expansion" was actually Teturkhan's mod for Civ III, which I liked even more than Civ IV. I don't normally enjoy massive maps, as I don't get into the grind of the late game, but his changes to the map, gameplay, and AI made it enjoyable to the end (which took over 100 hours). It was unrealistic to expect to conquer the entire world in this mod (at least at the difficulty levels I enjoy), but it was a blast to conquer your own little piece of the planet, eve...
You may be right about the lighting (I wasn't entirely happy with it in Fallout 3, and this will probably look the same), but it's probably too early to judge the overall rendering quality, pre-release. This is especially true when judging low-rez full-page scans of the artifacts of the magazine printing process, of pages that were designed with some sort of annoying "burlap" effect.
Having said that, compromises in lighting are not entirely unexpected in a game that f...
I never found Dogmeat.
I thought I'd also point out that the "real game demo" in the video is called an "outdoor environment with foliage" in the paper, lending credence to my assertion that it is likely only a "real game-like demo".
I should also point to the title of the article, "Cryengine 3 for Xbox 360 and PS3: New video shows impressive lighting in real time", in support to my concern that gamers are being misled into thinking they are going to see high-qu...
I should probably add that IF you see this technique on consoles, it will be severely limited.
The paper to which Shaman provided the link is called "Light Propagation Volumes" and says that the technique MIGHT be used on a 30 fps game on the consoles.
The video, on the other hand, is titled "CASCADED Light Propagation Volumes". The relevant definition of "Cascade" is "A succession of stages, processes, operations, or units". ...
Shaman, did you even read the hardware these small demos required to run at interactive framerates? If you think this tech will run on current consoles in real games, you are sadly deluded. I'll copy those requirements here, in case your pause button was broken:
Hardware and software used:
All video fragments are captured live with CryENGINE 3 SandBox
on nVidia GeForce GTX285 @ 1280x720, no MSAA
According to recent TomsHardware charts, the GTX285 looks t...
I'd probably place the Total War series above Civilization as far as immersion and strategy is concerned (and hours per game), but Civ is easier to get into and you can also play when you have to do other stuff. While I liked Vanilla Civ IV the best, I loved the Teturkhan mod for Civ III the best of all the Civs.
That was the distance from DICE (Sweden) to San Francisco. For DICE (Las Vegas), use the following:
Round trip distance to server ~= 1332 km
Speed of light = 300,000 km/sec
Theoretical minimum latency = 4.4 ms
Reported latency = 0.0 ms
Round trip distance to server ~= 17200 km
Speed of light = 300,000 km/sec
Theoretical minimum latency = 57 ms
Reported latency = 0.0 ms
I was going to make the same comments regarding the differences between used games and used movies or cars. Add to this the fact that new video games discount much more quickly and drastically than movies and cars, due in part to how rapidly technology advances. Developers need to recoup their costs and make any profits within a couple months of release or they never will.
Playing Devil's Advocate, one problem I have with this plan (as a gamer, not as a developer) is that this m...
For many users, I suspect they installed Steam such that it starts up whenever they are on the computer (for background downloads and such). This does not mean they are actually USING Steam. So, while I may be logged into Steam almost constantly, I'm only playing a game through Steam maybe once or twice per month. Of course, I'm not claiming to be a typical Steam user.
On the other hand, when a user is logged into PSN or Live, it means they are almost certainly playing a game or ...
The "1080p Promise" is a sore point for me, as a gamer, as well. Sure, there ARE 1080p games...2D ones that don't require much GPU processing or additional memory buffers for AA or various rendering techniques.
The worst is when the game isn't even 720p, instead rendered at an even lower resolution that results in a blurry mess that hurts my eyes after gaming for a relatively short time (especially late at night, when eyes are already tired).
It's for this ...
I heard they were changing the name to "Starcraft Forever".
Your argument about the GPU bottleneck only makes sense for game engines heavily dependent on GPU processing (most of them). For techniques that rely more heavily on CPU processing (ray-tracing) or streaming (megatexture), the power and dedicated memory of the GPU is much less important.
Remember the days of the first 3D accelerators? Most were set up to do all the rendering, dumping the results into an existing video card, whose sole responsibility was to hold the frame buffer a...
There are a couple of issues I have with split-screen gaming:
1. Reduced and distorted screen-space: The visuals were designed with the full screen in mind (5:4 or 16:9). Horizontal or vertical splits for two-players do not preserve this aspect ratio. Four-way splits do, but at a serious loss of resolution.
2. Reduced performance and/or loss of graphic quality: Splitting the screen doubles, triples or quadruples the number of times the world needs to be rendered per ...
Can't wait!
I COULD care less.