(10-09-2009 01:19 AM)Gentleman Wrote:  Have you tried The Witcher Enhaced Edition ?? It's weird, I never had problems with this game using both 7600GS and 9600GT. The only difference, it's kinda obvious, but with 9600GT I was able to play at much higher graphical settings.

Anyway there is a new patch out after the enhaced edition, you can check here:
http://www.thewitcher.com/registration/e...patch.html

Hrm, perhaps I will give it another try, then. That game did look like a hell of a lot of fun.

Jake, you are probably right, that sort of thing is bound to go in cycles, as with any ongoing coding project.

DKTronics is also pretty much spot on, in my opinion. It's also less of a hassle for developers to make console games (even though coding for something like the PS3 can be rather difficult), because it is a lot easier to bug proof for 3 consoles than ten billion different PC configurations.

(10-09-2009 03:56 AM)KrazyTrumpeter05 Wrote:  Jake, you are probably right, that sort of thing is bound to go in cycles, as with any ongoing coding project.

Yeah the rule of thumb is that it's easier to get hardware right than it is to get software right. Hardware is typically what I call a "controlled room" environment. You only have a limited number of valid inputs and states you have to account for, and then it's up to the software to figure out how to turn those into whatever it is the software wants the end-user representation to be. If the hardware is sent bad state info then it's only job is to freeze up or do something entirely unexpected or undefined. It doesn't have to do any error handling or worry about what anything else in the computer is doing, or worry about what behavior previous hardware might have done in the same place. That's all left up to software these days.

So that's why various video card makers and motherboard makers have a long history of decent hardware and crap software. And even when they do get something right, it usually only stays right for a little while..

Quote:Hrm, perhaps I will give it another try, then. That game did look like a hell of a lot of fun.

You should. It's the best role play experience I had in my 27 years lol.

Just a teaser, The Witcher 2 is on it's way too, still on alpha stage but a video leaked:

(10-09-2009 03:48 AM)DKTronics Wrote:  Copy protection is also ruining the PC, screwing-over genuine buyers who now have to go through hoops just to play their legally owned games while the pirates get an easy ride not having to activate their games, have limited installs, and deal with Securom, or the evil Starforce.

Well nothing new there. Copy protection has long been a thorn in the sides of PC games, and it's never helped either consumer or seller. PC game publishers like Electronic Arts spend millions of dollars a year on upgrading and developing protection software, and providing tech support for the compatibility messes the copy protection causes, just to have it cracked in under a week. All studies done on the subject indicated that publishers would be better off financially to release games without any form of protection, because most buyers buy anyway (and really you don't need a study to tell you that 1 week of uncracked sales isn't going to come anywhere near making up for the cost of roughly $1.5 million per release).

So yeah I don't doubt that copy protection is a big motivator to steer clear of PC releases. Copy protection can be broken easily, but emulating an entire platform is much more difficult to do.

Sometimes I wonder where the distant future will lead us. I honestly don't see the digital rights management side of the war winning in the long run. It's extremely unlikely that DRM violations are going to become a jailable offense, and chances are that's the only thing that would stop piracy in the long run. Instead I see a future where hardware manufacturers sponsor the development of software which runs on their hardware (and is released mostly free) -- and in turn that will fuel hardware sales; People can't pirate hardware. And additionally most games of the future will feature advertisements that are updated via internet dynamically so that the ad placements remain current; and may also get tertiary income from selling box copies with printed manuals to users.

This model would be a bit like the Cablevision and/or Broadcast TV models through most of the last 50 years or so. The cable company billed users for the cable line service, and then in turn sponsored additional programming as part of their service. Cell phones are another similar trend; where the phone companies have all scrambled to provide games for their cellphones (some free, some not, depending). But by large, they paid for the development of the games out-of-pocket to encourage the sale of their new cell phones -- not because the games themselves were profitable.

... oh and the other solution which we already have: subscription-based games. Free to download, pay to play. These are good too because it's neigh impossible to pirate your way into having an account on an MMOG. At best you can hack someone else's account, but the gamedev company still gets their dime regardless.

Wow...that video was pretty damn awesome. I'll definitely have to dust off my copy of Witcher and play through it again to get ready!

cool game , just like KrazyTrumpeter05 sed pretty damn awesome.

and this is a pretty old game but its back baby:
serious sam III

What scares me is the thought of something like Cloud Computing, or OnLive's up-and-coming service, where the only thing you own is a sort of thin-client-based gaming PC with just a joypad, and a fat internet connection.
Everything is done on the hardware server farm, pre-rendered then squished down to a closed-source codec, Quicktime I believe, and sent down your Internet connection. Bandwidth will be critical, and low latency will be key to a lag-free gaming experience, as well as a internet connection capable of sustaining 1.5Mbps for SD, and 5Mbps for HD, sucking up most UK's monthly quotas in a week or two. Totally piracy-free, and no hardware upgrades needed, I can see many casual gamers trying this. But I like to have my hardware on-site, as well as the ability to mod games, change cfg and ini files to my tastes, and when the net goes down I can still game offline.

Another form of protection could be whereby you buy your game, DVD or digital download, and you only get part of the game, the rest is stored and encrypted on the firm's own servers. When you play, the game requests and downloads only what it requires and stores it in RAM only, still encrypted, and it decrypts files on-the-fly with the decryption key being part of your account you sign up with. And if its ever leaked to the net in any way they'll know who exactly leaked it and close the account, the decryption key could also contain your credit card details, that should put off some users leaking any files on the net.

(10-08-2009 08:00 PM)KrazyTrumpeter05 Wrote:  

(10-08-2009 07:32 PM)Gentleman Wrote:  Probably. Anyway the rumours are very hot around the web:

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/10/06/n...nd-market/

Wow...that story seems almost unreal. If it's true, that's some seriously bad news. No GPU competition will be awful for PC gaming.

I suppose when/if nVidia goes under, ATI can hire their driver people and finally put out drivers that aren't *****...

ATI driver's aren't poor at all.

That's an overused pathetic excuse tbh..

(10-09-2009 01:59 PM)DKTronics Wrote:  Everything is done on the hardware server farm, pre-rendered then squished down to a closed-source codec, Quicktime I believe, and sent down your Internet connection. Bandwidth will be critical, and low latency will be key to a lag-free gaming experience, as well as a internet connection capable of sustaining 1.5Mbps for SD, and 5Mbps for HD, sucking up most UK's monthly quotas in a week or two. Totally piracy-free, and no hardware upgrades needed, I can see many casual gamers trying this. But I like to have my hardware on-site, as well as the ability to mod games, change cfg and ini files to my tastes, and when the net goes down I can still game offline.

Yeah Yahoo tried a more realistic version of that with Yahoo Games some years ago, where they relied almost entirely on Java games that were only playable via a working online connection. It only lasted a few months before they had to release stand-alone builds people could play without internet connections, or with shoddy internet connections.

The thorn in the side of the Cloud computing model is, in fact, mobile devices. There are a lot of people, especially casual gamers, who like to play from laptops. And there's no way a laptop on a wireless hub connection can maintain speeds and latency needed to make Cloud work. And since that sort of user is such a large portion of the paying customers when it comes to casual gaming, the anti-piracy benefits end up being outweighed.

(casual gamers are also traditionally not very active pirates -- they usually find it easy enough to drop $15-25 on their credit card that they don't bother worrying about looking for 'alternative' sources).

The partial-content design is the same thing Yahoo was trying to do with its original Java-based games. That might be more feasible now with better wireless connectivity available today, but it failed five years ago because of the reasons mentioned above.

(10-09-2009 02:55 PM)Sythedragon Wrote:  

(10-08-2009 08:00 PM)KrazyTrumpeter05 Wrote:  

(10-08-2009 07:32 PM)Gentleman Wrote:  Probably. Anyway the rumours are very hot around the web:

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/10/06/n...nd-market/

Wow...that story seems almost unreal. If it's true, that's some seriously bad news. No GPU competition will be awful for PC gaming.

I suppose when/if nVidia goes under, ATI can hire their driver people and finally put out drivers that aren't *****...

ATI driver's aren't poor at all.

That's an overused pathetic excuse tbh..

Every encounter I've had with ATI driver for the past 4-5 years has been riddled with frustration. So yeah, in my experience they are poor.