Never put "Valve" and "suck" in the same sentance.CheeseSandwichCake said:
Unless, It's like, "Valve sucks awesome out of things that would otherwise suck."
RIP PC gaming?
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Unless, It's like, "Valve sucks awesome out of things that would otherwise suck."
Having experience in many low level languages - 'C', assembler etc, I'm constantly jealous of the high level function calls available to C#, XNA and similar. I have written games in 'C' and although mostly shite and hardware specific they took me an awful long time. The benefits of writing something in a Low Level Language like 'C' is that the execution times and memory overheads are very low. I can only imagine that XNA (arbitrary example) requires colossal overheads for the actual tasks it achieves?More Fun To Compute said:
If I'm wrong, please correct me (who knows, XNA may be highly optimised).
BLASPHEMY!RicoADF said:
Anyway, I'm just saying that because I love all things Valve.
Looks like there sort of "Love em or hate em"
PC gaming isn't dying. There are some things you can do on the PC that you simply can't replicate with equal quality on the console. Any RTS game will suck my nuts without a keyboard and mouse combo. A mouse is much more comfortable for aiming in FPS's than a controller will ever be (subjective, but a lot of people subscribe to that opinion, and that means there is a market), and for some reason, RPG's released for the PC will be more in-depth and worthwhile than console counterparts.
PC games get lots of free content: go on Google and type in 'mod.' Play any Valve game. Play any Blizzard game. Even Creative Assembly is releasing new content for E:TW.
I also keep hearing about having to update my system to play games. I've played most of the current Valve FPS's on a three year-old computer at the time of their release. I'm getting my brand new PC this summer after five years from last updating, and that's really for Empire: Total War. Every time I hear someone saying "you'll need a new graphics card and processor every six months," I know for fact they don't play on the PC or know what they're talking about. That's the kind of bullshit that's a dead give-away.
PC games get lots of free content: go on Google and type in 'mod.' Play any Valve game. Play any Blizzard game. Even Creative Assembly is releasing new content for E:TW.
I also keep hearing about having to update my system to play games. I've played most of the current Valve FPS's on a three year-old computer at the time of their release. I'm getting my brand new PC this summer after five years from last updating, and that's really for Empire: Total War. Every time I hear someone saying "you'll need a new graphics card and processor every six months," I know for fact they don't play on the PC or know what they're talking about. That's the kind of bullshit that's a dead give-away.
.Net is supposed to have a just it time compiler so it is fairly quick. If I remember correctly it does have some overheads around Garbage collection and API calls. It does have it's place, I'm not going to argue that it doesn't.Lord Azrael said:
Other languages are even easier to use though. Armageddon Empires was made in Adobe Director and sold commercially. The guy who was working on that might have given up if he was given books on C#, OOP, XNA and Design Patterns then told he had to learn all that before starting to code his game. Look at the crazy free indie games that Cactus makes with Game Maker and all of the Flash and Web games that are out there.
I personaly see PC gaming superrior to Console gameing for the major reason of, PC's can be upgraded, and you can have multiple games downloaded on one unit... where as a Console can not be upgraded, and you can not download as many games on a console.
Agreed in every point, I had a 7900GTX when it first came out and that would still play every game out today at a reasoanble framerate (if I hadn't dropped a paper clip on it when it was on - don't ask!).Kikosemmek said:
Now with the same system E6700 Core 2 Duo I have a GTX 260, blitzes every current game and hopefully will far into the future. I only have a 19" widescreen so Io don't really need it to go above 1280 x 768 resolution so the framerates I get are enormous. The lifespan of consoles worries me - they're not upgradeable, without a doctorate in computer engineering (or an unhealthy obsession - same thing really!
) and 2 of my brother's (who is in the opposite camp to me) xbox 360's have suddenly died from something called 'red blob syndrome' or something similar where the little green lights all turn red, resulting in an unrecoverable failure (epic fail?). Now what's best PC or console? I broke mine and made it much better - can you do the same to your console without a degree in engineering? (admittedly I have one of those but I don't need it to repair my PC!)
So what we're saying is that it's a case of optimisation within the compiler? GCC (arbitrary example again) does that almost faultlessly well but optimisation for larger programmes could be daunting and require tweaks to a compiler to allow it to be tuned for specific programme architectures.More Fun To Compute said:
High level languages have their place, I don't disagree (I come from an embedded microcontroller robotics background so am pathologically averse to using them! Real time systems etc...) but, surely, all are ultimately based on layer upon layer of lower level, more efficient languages, the efficiency of which is lost the greater the level of abstraction? I realise this depends mostly on the quality of the compiler.
[Haha! Now this is a REAL geek thread! :-D)
Seriously... PC gaming will never end. There's about as much chance as PC gaming "ending" as there is NVIDIA and ATI declaring they're not going to make any more high end 3d video cards for the PC.Nimbus said:
We are talking about code being compiled at run time on virtual machines on top of operating systems but the whole thing seems to work somehow. I'm not all that up to speed with this but I think that C# does come with it's own set of gotchas like if you code in a certain way then you can get too much slowdown. Maybe if you were writing a physics engine then you may not use C# but it does a fair job of working with Direct3d api calls.Lord Azrael said:
You can actually get the XNA game studio for free and look at the sample code yourself.
Thanks! But that sounds a truly nightmarish proposition looking at source code at this time of night in my free time!More Fun To Compute said:
My specialty is embedded sytems so the main priority is to maintain system integrity by offloading unnecessary functions onto off-processor chips. This is what the new NVidia GTX...'s would appear to do too, loading them with hundreds of interlinked processor cores for manic overall performance! At high enough complexity, in order to maintain a reliable system, the CPU is generally relegated to being a rather sophisticated interrupt handler, controlling the interactions and memory usage of its various subsidiary chips, meaning local control of processes has devolved to the level of ancillary chips.Sorry, going a bit too deep here! Making the development of games easier is a complex task but worthless (controversial!) if the translation algorithms (compilers etc) aren't similarly upgraded. This means that consoles could see huge further improvement in capability purely through intelligent optimisation of code. This is also true for PCs, although slightly more coplex owing to the variety of different system architecture present worldwide!
Not entirely sure where my rambling has brought us but hopefully it's useful!
PC gaming is never going to die. Anything that is done on the XBOX 360 or any other gaming console can be done just as good, or better on the PC, so the gaming system will never go away. The Xbox has games that are also made on the PC, and usually are better or the same on the PC. Xbox is just a cheap way to make money and PC will always be dominate. The argument with the controller and the TV for consoles is also void, because you can now have better monitors and you can hook up any controller to the PC, also PC's can now be hooked up to the TV, also the graphics are better on the PC than the XBOX, and they always will be (oh and the PC is easier to upgrade). The Xbox is just cheap, and by my standards shouldn't even exist because there is something better with more capabilities. PC gaming isn't going to die, but XBOX and console gaming should have died a long time ago, but the HALO fan boys just keep giving them money.
Well, I don't see the PC going anywhere. It has great exclusives like... uhh... Diablo and... uh... Warcraft and Starcraft! And...
Did I mention Diablo?
And the fans are always nice. They don't act like snobs, claiming console players are jerks. They certainly aren't asses who like to spout how awesome they are and constantly put others down because they're so stupidly snobbish they'd rather hate people than just enjoy their games.
Nope. Not at all.
Did I mention Diablo?
And the fans are always nice. They don't act like snobs, claiming console players are jerks. They certainly aren't asses who like to spout how awesome they are and constantly put others down because they're so stupidly snobbish they'd rather hate people than just enjoy their games.
Nope. Not at all.
The number of games I am interested in for all 3 consoles within the next year or two is still lower than the number of PC games I am interested in for the same time period.
Everyone always points to this as if it is exclusive to PC gamers, when what you are referring to is clearly a fanboy, an audience that every platform has in abundance.Pendragon9 said:
And how many times do I get a 10 year old who shouldn't have a M game yelling in my ear when I'm on LIVE? Seriously, there are more console tards who rant about how epic their toy is while PC "elitists" actually have reasons to like PCs more rather than the console "IT looks shinier DERRR"Pendragon9 said: