Re: Oblivion Delayed

Mean_Chlorine <mike_noren2002@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> looked up from reading
the entrails of the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the
signs say:

>Thusly Quaestor <no-spam@xxxxxxxx> Spake Unto All:
>
>>>that it is MUCH easier for the programmers to optimize for a platform
>>>with a FIXED set of hardware than it is to make something that will work
>>>decently well on ALL the PC hardware it might be run on.
>>>
>>
>>As a game developer I faced this back in the 80's. It's a lot worse
>>today
>
>Compatibility issues are worse today than in the bad old days of DOS?!
>That is the sheerest rubbish.

Actually no.
1. The hardware changed at a much slower pace.
2. one OS really (IBMDos/DRDos/etc weren't really that different.)
3. Since Dos games had their own drivers for video and sound you dodged
the whole "what drivers does he have" bullet, and more importantly, the
drivers didn't change.
No situation as you get now where you test under driver release X, but
driver release Y comes out just before your game does and subtly breaks
something.


Now you have a variety of MS OSs depending on what they're supporting,
98se/ME/2k/2k3/XP(base, sp1, sp2), various hardware, with various
drivers and new drivers (for video anyway) coming out every other month.
Other applications running at the same time as the game, etc.

Almost all of which could be sidestepped in the dos days by making a
boot disk so you know exactly what is running and every bit of it is
either known ms code, or your company's code.

A video card was a video card - did it follow the vga/MCGA/SVGA spec?
NO varying acceleration schemes.

While the card situation has dropped to really only two, now they have
to support multiple generations of cards with widely differing feature
sets.

geforce3ti's, 4ti's and mx's, 5's 6's and now 7's in various flavors
from budget to flagship models.
Ditto for the ATi offerings.

Whereas in the Dos days, one 1/2 meg vga/mcga card was pretty much the
same as the others for the basic standard it supported.

Sure you can support only the current and last gen, but that cuts your
potential sales way down.

>>that the most extreme and demanding whizbang graphics are mandatory. If
>>willing to publish for platforms at least 2 years old, it is relatively
>>trivial to make programs work on a large array of machines, but most
>>believe that success is dependant on demanding the latest dirX or video
>>cards.
>
>The reason games made for new machines don't run acceptably on old
>machines is that they're made for new machines. Seems obvious enough.

Acceptably is in the eye of the beholder.

>You also seem to have missed that PC hardware evolution is slowing
>down. ATI 9800 pro, for instance, is almost three years old and it
>runs all present games just fine, thankyouverymuch, and will probably
>continue to do so for another year.

And yet, new cards are still coming out at a breakneck pace, and people
are going to want to justify them - and that requires games that
actually need those features/speed.

>>Then of course there's billgates, who pays developers to require his
>>latest OS when they would run fine on the previous OS.
>
>The previous OS... Would that be the unstable, unsupported pile of
>bugs known as Win95, or the horribly unstable abomination-before-god
>front-end for DOS known as Win3.11?

For just one example Mech Commander 2.
The demo claimed it ran under win95 - it wouldn't even install.

Why?
Because the _installer_, not the game, the installer required a hook
that was only present in win98 and up.

Frankly I found win95b to be very stable - not in it's default layout,
but after it had been tweaked.
But then MS defaults are never the best for a stable machine anyway.

>>Definitely. The fast-evolving PC is in fact its own worst enemy, with
>>most developer time spent just trying to get things to work, instead of
>>developing the game functions.
>
>More rubbish. The only selling point the PC has is technological
>superiority. The day PC games stop pushing the envelope completely, is
>the day PC gaming dies.

Be that as it may, but pushing the envelope means the game devs have to
keep up with all those changes, and that takes time both for coding and
for error checking.

If PC games stop "pushing the envelope", they'll only die if the
consoles exceed what PCs can do.

Too much of the envelope pushing is just graphical crap anyway, not
story, not replayability, just glorified tech demos to sell the latest
ATi/nVidia offerings.

How fast is fast enough?
How good is good enough?

Consoles seem to manage quite well with less state of the art, but
KNOWN, FIXED, hardware than PC games - there's a lesson there.

Xocyll
--
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably,
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr
.

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