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Arumakani

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Well, "decent" is a subjective term, and I suppose what I ment by "decent" is a card that can run the latest games on highest detail with a constant FPS above or equal to ~50 (In other words, your expected console performance). I bought a Geforce 7600GT a few weeks ago, and it cost me $200, yet I definitely wouldn't consider it "decent" given my FPS crawls below 50 more than not. Despite the fact that I always run 800x600 for the extra frames per second, the card has trouble with new and several year old games (HL2). I don't really expect next year's to be playable on it.

Edited by woah
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Well, "decent" is a subjective term, and I suppose what I ment by "decent" is a card that can run the latest games on highest detail with a constant FPS above or equal to ~50 (In other words, your expected console performance)

Ah, so by "decent" you mean "graphics whore".

 

Do I even need to point out to you that PC games are often shipped with rendering options that are intentionally well beyond what even high-end rigs can run at a playable rate, so they can take advantage of future improvements in graphics and processing technology? Or that PC games usually run at a much higher resolution than console games? Or that a lot of PC games are just badly coded, or too graphically ambitious, so they require a high-end card to run well (see: Invisible War, Morrowind).

 

Heck, I still have an old ti4200 installed, and up until a year or so ago it ran even new games just fine. But then, I'm lucky enough to not be one of those types that throws a hissy fit if I have to disable FSAA and drop down to "only" 1024x768 to get a smooth frame rate.

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I bought a Geforce 7600GT a few weeks ago, and it cost me $200, yet I definitely wouldn't consider it "decent" given my FPS crawls below 50 more than not. Despite the fact that I always run 800x600 for the extra frames per second, the card has trouble with new and several year old games (HL2). I don't really expect next year's to be playable on it.

 

If your 7600GT is having difficulty playing HL2 at 800x600 you have some serious configuration/driver issues.

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In general, the averege range card ($200) will run the current latest games, and keep running newer ones further on down the track for a few years too. IMO this is a much better way to go than paying disproportionately high prices for a card that can't even be used to its full potential. May as well upgrade as you go, rather than trying to future-proof. It'll cost the same and at least you will KNOW you can run the latest games, and spend the money over the period of time, rather than put all your money in one go to gamble with future-proofing.

 

the difference is, that d3's engine was released 2004 and runs on a geforce3 and unreal3 games will be released in 2007 and its minimum specs is a geforce6800. and epic advertises soft dynamic shadows:

I know its nitpicking and they'll probably fix this for ut2k7, but it just caught my eye on the screens.

You didn't address my first point. Can you show screenshots of better shadows? It's not possible yet, so you can't point it out as some kind of "flaw" that should have been fixed, it's a technical limitation.

 

The pic ZB posted shows the shadow tapering off, the same way they do in T3. What you are expecting is for non-uniform fuzzyness on the edges, that gets more fuzzy the further away from the light that the shadow gets.

 

Show me one game that can do this yet.

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Ah, so by "decent" you mean "graphics whore".

 

Do I even need to point out to you that PC games are often shipped with rendering options that are intentionally well beyond what even high-end rigs can run at a playable rate, so they can take advantage of future improvements in graphics and processing technology? Or that PC games usually run at a much higher resolution than console games? Or that a lot of PC games are just badly coded, or too graphically ambitious, so they require a high-end card to run well (see: Invisible War, Morrowind).

 

Heck, I still have an old ti4200 installed, and up until a year or so ago it ran even new games just fine. But then, I'm lucky enough to not be one of those types that throws a hissy fit if I have to disable FSAA and drop down to "only" 1024x768 to get a smooth frame rate.

 

True, my definition of "decent" is quite unconventional. I'm not sure why.

 

I mainly just up the graphics detail settings myself. I always run at 800x600 and never enable AF, AA or v-sync, as the marginal difference in performance is too large given the slight improvements in graphics quality.

 

If your 7600GT is having difficulty playing HL2 at 800x600 you have some serious configuration/driver issues.

 

I'm not really sure what my problem is with HL2. It may just be my A64 3000+ processor. I know HL2 is very cpu-intensive.

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Modified Unreal Engine 3.

 

 

It was originally using the Vengeance Engeine, which is a heavily modified Unreal Engine 2.5. It has been modified to support normal maps and dynamic lighting, amongst other things, but it is nowhere near as sophisticated as UE3. The screenshot with the suspect lighting may have been from the game running on the older version.

 

They have now switched to a modified UE3 with a completely rewritten renderer.

Edited by obscurus
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All these engines, render the graphics, or do they do other things aswell? As you can tell I'm a gamer rather then a tech-head. ALso is the Unreal 3 one the most advanced one or is the Crysis engine by Crytek more advanced. Probably the latter, with regards to graphics and physics anyway...

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"What can I say, I'm a jerk. A three times all American Jerk, from Jerksville, Kentucky. Yee Haw"

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Cheers buddy.

 

But don't they render the graphics or is that Middleware? Is Unreal Middleware? So most game developers use Unreal engine as it's the easiest to modify?

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Cheers buddy.

 

But don't they render the graphics or is that Middleware? Is Unreal Middleware? So most game developers use Unreal engine as it's the easiest to modify?

 

 

The Unreal Engine 3 (and 2) (IMO) is the easiest engine to work with for mappers, as it has a very powerful and mature editor with far more features than any other game editor available on the market, and a very pleasant interface (I'm biased though, UnrealEd is the only editor I've used extensively). It is very easily moddable, and can be used to create a very diverse range of games. It is however, very expensive and they don't release the source code unless you pay for it (about $2 million for a sourcecode licence, IIRC).

 

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml

 

It uses some middleware itself, such as SpeedTree RT, and you can plug different physics middleware in if you want, though I belive it uses it's own physics engine by default.

 

Most game devs seem to buy the sourcecode licence and change things to suit their specific project....

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So there is enough in the Unreal 3 editor, like in Doom3 to create a Thief style game, without having to use source code etc?

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Code! The word is coding! :)

 

If a feature is not implemented in your engine of choice you have to write it yourself. You can import models and such, but with missing functionality you have to write it (or find somebody who can do it for you).

Gerhard

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Yes. There are people using it. But you should choose the langauge based on your needs. And obviously it's not me who is hardcore with coding, whatever it means, but it's a simple fact. Engines are made out of code. Anything that is not coded, but needed for your game, you have to code it as well. Plain and simple.

Gerhard

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It was meant as a compliment buddy. It means that you obviously know your stuff. So is DarkBasic used in any published games? Or is it all C++?

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As I said, the choice of language depends on what you need. There are games in Java, Basic, C, whatever. Most professional games for PCs or consoles are done with C++ I would say, but that can change.

I think I heard once upon a time that DarkBasic seems to be quite good for creating games, because I think it was developed for that purpose. I'm not 100% sure on this though, because I never really got interested in coding in Basic again and I might confuse it with some other Basic.

 

Question is what you want to do. If you know that, then you can decide wether it's worth looking at it. Best would be to ask in some forum dedicated to that language. But of course you have to be wary of fanboys. :) They might present that Basic better than it could be. :)

Gerhard

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Nope. Why do you think that. Unreal is not Thief. Therfeore it has about as much simialrities to Thief as Doom 3 has. Maybe less, maybe more. Depends on the technical features.

 

 

To be fair, Thievery did a pretty good job of using the vanilla Unreal 1 engine to produce a similar game to Thief (albeit multiplayer oriented). Similarly, Nightblade (if there is anyone still working on it, the website hasn't been updated in ages) is making a Thief inspired mod using Unreal Engine 2. They did/are doing this without the source code AFAIK. UnrealEd is a very powerful piece of software, and Unrealscript is very easy to work with.

 

Given the capabilites of Unreal Engine 3, I have no doubt that even the vanilla version would be a great start for a Thief style Mod. It certaily is more feature rich than Doom 3, though its hardware requirements are substantially greater, and wihtout the possibility of source code availability, and relatively limited exposure to the workings of the engine, it would be more challenging to make deep modifications to by amature modders.

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To be fair, Thievery did a pretty good job of using the vanilla Unreal 1 engine to produce a similar game to Thief (albeit multiplayer oriented).

 

That's not really the point though. The question is rather: How much effort was it to do it? And would there have been some other engine where more features were already available.

 

For example: We could also use the Source engine for our mod, but then we wouldn't have dynamic shadows. So we would have to implement it ourselve if we absolutely would want to. Ignoring the question wether we could do this in the scope of a mod, which would undeniably impossible with HL2.

Gerhard

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