iD software: Lost the plot?

[antime]

Originally posted by Curtis@Sep 11, 2003 @ 02:18 PM

Well ok Myname, "myth" is a bit over the top. I had a look around for doom3 stuff after I posted that, and it does look impressive, although I'm not convinced that it'll be playable except of the highest of high end cards.

Carmack has always been very serious about making him games playable over a wide range of hardware. He was actually rather disappointed that he had to raise the minimum requirements to GeForce1-class cards. Sure, you'll lose most of the eyecandy but the game should still be playable. The same has been true since at least Wolfenstein 3D.

 

[Carnivol]

Every major "serious" Mac application has a port or equivelant release on a PC. There is nothing a Mac can do that a PC can't do as well.

Yes, ofcourse, but what I was sorta "putting in" is that it usualy takes a PC that has 3x the specs of the mac we're comparing it too...

Something that is a bit irritating...

Also...

Why the ¤&#/ does Microsoft STILL puke out their crappy office packages?

I've been working with Quark the last years...

And I'm surprised that this program has practicly stayed unchanged for several years...

While Office brags about it's "new/unique/amazing" features for every release...

And still... Why is it so crappy?

Another thing to add is:

On the imac (G4, 7inch widescreen model) I got at school, I run Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark + additional stuff like IE5.2, Fetch, Suitcase (font tool), several downloads + evt. burning a CD... at the same time... (multitasking baby)

Only a little bit of speed loss, + there's a "tiny" delay when I switch between the tools, but nothing to realy care about (as we've all experienced small delays and stuff)...

Anyway, I was brining my work to a friend's computer, a hyper bastard P4 XP 3,2GHZ, 1gb ram, + a 128mb Ati card (don't remember what model he has)

Anyway...

Still, when only running my Illustrator work + some of my photoshop projects, his computer started having the same speed loss when switching between programs as the Mac had when I was running all that shit mentioned earlier.

And when I started messing around with sending stuff over to my computer from his + I decided to copy a CD...

His computer freaking made me a toaster and then decided to fuck up 😛

+On a mac, the chances of NOT getting the alt+apple+esc menu up when there's a series problem = 1/20 + the chances of it solving the problem = 19/20

While in 98 and XP, the chances of getting the Task Manager = 50% + the chances of it actualy helping you when there's a serious problem = 25%

I prefer Mac as a working tool, as it does the job!

But when it comes to other stuff like just messing around, translation/hacking projects, burning/compiling CD/DVDs and stuff like that... The PC is my right hand.

 

[antime]

Originally posted by Carnivol@Sep 12, 2003 @ 01:18 AM

Yes, ofcourse, but what I was sorta "putting in" is that it usualy takes a PC that has 3x the specs of the mac we're comparing it too...

But you still haven't explained what you're comparing.

 

[Myname]

Getting back to id in general, there was an interview where John Carmack was saying how he'd like to get games back to being a little more simple, which I thought was quite encouraging to hear. Most developers seem to be striving to make games more and more complex, which is fine, but it'd be nice to have some stuff around that you can pick up and play without having to read a novel of a manual *cough*Neverwinter Nights*cough*.

To be honest, I'm really looking forward to getting Half-Life 2 and Deus Ex: Invisible War and going the interaction route, but also being able to pick up Doom III and have some mindless blasting 🙂.

I'm also looking forward to buying some more RAM so I can play the bastards..

 

[gamefoo21]

You show me a mac that can beat down a nice pc in movie editing? ah so you can't since a p4 3.2 can slap an xp around like a lil bitch i can only imagine what it would do to a mac in that instance. and if you want to bring out the G5's then lets see how it does against an opeteron of the same speed. Mac's have one inherent weakness they are proprietary to the max. Pc's continue to punch Apple into the ground due to the fact that A Pc thats equal to a Mac is a 1/3 its price. Sure they look pretty but I mean comon why release a incomplete OS then offer the finished product as an upgrade with a nice price tag. Also the auto updates you have to pay for its laughable. Mac's are money pits. I'd rather have my pc and use my photoshop/3ds max 5, watch Tv, and relax by playing some good games.

Id has lost its path. I mean they are backing a POS card that is produced by nvidia and every dx9 bench shows that the Fx's are shitty cards. Carmack is nothing but a buyable lil whipping boy who will say anything for the right price. I will be warez'ing my copy of doom 3 in silent protest but buying my copy of HL2 :bow

BTW Doom 3 is based on a dx 7/8 engine due to its use of OGL 1.4 So any Dx8 card will run it peachy, any dx9 card should run it fine, any Dx 8/9 cards (fx's) should run it great in 16 bit mode 😉.

 

[Carnivol]

Something clever was said by John there....

Making the game simple!

Simple doesn't mean easy and not fun!

(Look at tetris, that addictive simple piece of shit that realy beats you in the nuts when it comes to score-attack)

While people for some reason tries to put-in as many features as possible into the games these days, using entire keyboards and shift 1-2-3 buttons to switch between the possible actions on each button and stuff like that...

It sure gives you control, yeah! But is it "that" fun?

Some people also think that dooms lack of jumping is a handicap...

Why? (dunno if D3 doesn't have this)

Goldeneye, Perfect Dark and Time Splitters 1-2 doesn't have jumping, but they're all kick-ass games!

+I hate people that sell themselves to graphics (especialy those that sells themselves to crappy graphics like Max Payne's! Hi-res textures alone isn't great graphics and for GOD's sake, PLEASE, no more "I'm forcing a truck out of ass" faces in future game releases)

You show me a mac that can beat down a nice pc in movie editing? ah so you can't since a p4 3.2 can slap an xp around like a lil bitch i can only imagine what it would do to a mac in that instance. and if you want to bring out the G5's then lets see how it does against an opeteron of the same speed. Mac's have one inherent weakness they are proprietary to the max. Pc's continue to punch Apple into the ground due to the fact that A Pc thats equal to a Mac is a 1/3 its price. Sure they look pretty but I mean comon why release a incomplete OS then offer the finished product as an upgrade with a nice price tag. Also the auto updates you have to pay for its laughable. Mac's are money pits.

I haven't done much movie editing, but rendering a crappy guided tour movie through a shopping mall I made last year didn't take me much time.

But my comparing shows that when I was converting the same movie at school + on my friend's computer, both where done at almost the same time (the PC won that one with a few minutes, unless windows messed up the counter ofcourse, as it usualy does)

Anyway, for the price thingy, the price for a PC and a mac is almost the same where I live. A PC powered to the limit (almost) costs about the price of a G5.

(I still haven't seen a G5 in action though, but it looks great + I've heard great things about it)

I wouldn't say that a Mac is a money pit, as it's mostly used at schools and at larger companies (especialy Newspaper and magazine makers)

Simply because of a writing utility you just can't find an alternative for on a computer (Quark) + multitasking on a mac is more reliable than on a computer (when working with larger programs that is)

Anyway,

I'd rather have my pc and use my photoshop/3ds max 5, watch Tv, and relax by playing some good games

It's all a matter of taste ^_^

Just add a coca-cola to that and Illustrator and I'll join you :lol:

(Anyway, I almost never play PC games anymore... just simply because the gap between good titles just becomes bigger and bigger)

 

[CrazyGoon]

Originally posted by Carnivol@Sep 12, 2003 @ 12:06 AM

Some people also think that dooms lack of jumping is a handicap...

Why? (dunno if D3 doesn't have this)

Doom has never had jumping and should never have jumping. Why add jumping? I don't think Doom 3 will have jumping...

Sacrificing gameplay for graphics = :slap

 

[Carnivol]

The lack of jumping in games like Doom and Goldeneye is actualy VERY natural...

Only game that has a jumping that works "natural" is Dark Forces.

(mostly used for passing small gaps and climbing up small edges and into airducts)

In Doom you can walk up small edges and if you run you can pass small gaps.

Dark Forces is actualy THE best Doom clone if you ask me!

 

[Curtis]

Originally posted by gamefoo21@Sep 12, 2003 @ 10:18 PM

Mac's have one inherent weakness they are proprietary to the max.

I think I would argue that this is the Macs greatest strength...at least from a developers point of view. If you can narrow down to a particularly small window the exact hardware that your software will be running on, you can pull all sorts of tricks and perform some very nice optimisations. Especially from an OS point of view. What Microsoft does well with their OS's is get them to work on practically any PC hardware thrown at them - look at Windows 98. It works perfectly well on hardware and with devices that weren't even on the drawing board when it was released. Microsoft dreams of having a closed source proprietary platform to work with - they are half way there with the Xbox.

If Apple can't exploit the fact that their target platform is a known quantity (and I'm not saying they don't), then they don't deserve to be in business. It is very hard to prove one way or another, though, that MacOS and Macs are an inherintally "better" computer. Arguably, MS does a much better job by being forced to cater for multiple platforms and doing it well.

As for jumping, I expect to be able to jump in an FPS these days, and developers expect to put the feature in their games. It can make the problems the devs present more interesting, and the level of skill required to play the game a little higher (HL's jump duck move for example). If you can't jump in D3 I'd be shocked.

 

[Curtis]

The Anandtech HL2 benchmarks show that Nvidia cards are severly disadvantaged when playing HL2. Don't expect reasonable DX9 performance with anything less than an FX5900 Ultra, and expect it to run fine but look like shit on an FX5600 and below (you'll have to use DX8.1 or 8.0 modes).

ATi cards are safe though - even the 9600Pro runs the game fine @ 1024x768 (albeit without AA/AF).

Heh - maybe Valve have lost the plot? 😛

 

[Tagrineth]

On the imac (G4, 7inch widescreen model) I got at school, I run Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark + additional stuff like IE5.2, Fetch, Suitcase (font tool), several downloads + evt. burning a CD... at the same time... (multitasking baby)

Only a little bit of speed loss, + there's a "tiny" delay when I switch between the tools, but nothing to realy care about (as we've all experienced small delays and stuff)...

Wow, you must have the most ungodly amazing Mac ever made, because every Mac I've ever used (including G4's - single, not dual) has had insanely frustrating "Multitasking". Granted I have yet to use MacOS X, so maybe that fixes things, but before MacOS X... blech.

Anyway, I was brining my work to a friend's computer, a hyper bastard P4 XP 3,2GHZ, 1gb ram, + a 128mb Ati card (don't remember what model he has)

Anyway...

Still, when only running my Illustrator work + some of my photoshop projects, his computer started having the same speed loss when switching between programs as the Mac had when I was running all that shit mentioned earlier.

And when I started messing around with sending stuff over to my computer from his + I decided to copy a CD...

His computer freaking made me a toaster and then decided to fuck up 😛

It's called shitty optimisation. Thing about Macs is, when they're "Multitasking" they more or less give full control to the active programme. Windows still gives reasonable processing time to inactive programmes. That can be changed, without too much work, though.

+On a mac, the chances of NOT getting the alt+apple+esc menu up when there's a series problem = 1/20 + the chances of it solving the problem = 19/20

While in 98 and XP, the chances of getting the Task Manager = 50% + the chances of it actualy helping you when there's a serious problem = 25%

The only time I've had problems with XP's Task Manager coming up... were when DirectDraw crashed thanks to a faulty Voodoo2 driver installation. Only reason I had problems? I had no idea where the mouse pointer was, so I had no idea what I was clicking. I think it may have vanished altogether. Other times it's been like... playing Diablo II on Voodoo2 SLI, over time the cards desync and the video crashes, which means the TM has no ability to show itself because the V2's are overriding the VGA output. Other than that? No problems.

 

[mal]

OK that's enough of the mac/PC 'debate'. :blah

Start a new thread if you wish to continue. Last time I checked this one was about iD software...

 

[Carnivol]

And we're back on track...

I just read a funny thing almost EVERYWHERE online...

Seems like history is about to repeat...

Half-Life 2 SUCKS!

(Accourding to the beta testers)

The gameplay is supposed to be slow and dull.

(just like I predicted, judging from the E3 12min trailer)

So...

The game got another delay, they're gonna rebrush the entire gameplay part of the game :lol:

Just like with the original...

First they spent 2 years on making it...

Delay after delay...

Then, they figured out the game sucked ass. So they formed a new group (with only the best) to make the game in 6 months... 😵

And guess what, it was actualy not so bad...

But you can easily see that GoldenEye (N64) was one of the reasons why the original Half-Life (first production) sucked...

Also, another game that supposedly isn't good is Full Throttle 2 (LucasArts has canned it because it didn't turn out as good as the original)

Well, that's it for today ^_^