On 6/9/2010 12:15 PM, Darren New wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>> Ok, this is a bit hard to confess, but I sold myself out, so to speak,
>> kind of. I went and bought an Xbox 360.
>
> Congrats!
>
> What part is the sell-out? That it's a console, or that it's a Microsoft
> console? Just curious.
>
> The games look great in HD, too, btw. Strongly recommended if you can
> manage it.
>
>> that with the Xbox 360 it's just a relief that you can simply put the
>> disc
>> in and play without having to worry at all about crashes, graphics
>> settings,
>> latest drivers and whether your PC will be able to run it at all.
>
> Things do indeed "just work" much better.
>
>> sound... (I don't really understand how they succeed in this, and why
>> they
>> don't use the same technique in the Windows ports of the games, when they
>> exist.)
>
> I think what's happening is there's a lot of background loading going
> on. The XBox doesn't have nearly enough CPU memory to load an entire
> large game at once, so the devs have to go out of their way to make that
> part work.
>
> I'm not sure why the same techniques wouldn't work on a PC, unless the
> device drivers for the DVD on a PC are in some way too blocking or
> something.
>
> Half Life 2 on the XBox has long loading screens. Batman loads while
> you're crawling thru the pipes from one place to another, or during
> cinematic cut scenes that load while you're fighting, or something like
> that. I think it depends on whether it was written for a PC and then
> ported to consoles or vice versa.
>
Games like Force Unleashed and Bioshock 2 don't play well on better 
hardware though, which I find irritating to the point of shear 
stupidity. Why the @#$@$ optimize FU (other than because you want those 
letters to mean something else entirely) so it requires 2 cores to even 
load *at all*? Why optimize Bioshock 2 so that everything in it works 
*except* multiplayer, which crashes, and all the damn vending machines, 
plasmid description videos, or anything else that apparently "uses the 
other core" when you have it, but lags the game into oblivion if you don't?

This is what we get with consoles. People making games work perfectly 
fine on *that* hardware, but then figuring they don't need to bother 
when they then port it to the PC, because, well.. everyone has the 
fastest 4 core processor, with the best video card, and 50TB of 
storage... O.o Bloody pisses me off.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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