And lo On Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:50:05 +0100, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> did  
spake thusly:

>   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.

Scab! Heh. OOC why the Xbox and not the PS3? I'm not fan-boying or  
anything I'm genuinely curious.

<snip>

> 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.

Which is why I made the leap some time ago.

> Microsoft
> has also made a quite good work at demanding game developers to minimize
> loading times even when loading from DVD, because it really makes a big
> difference: Sometimes Xbox 360 games seem to load from the DVD *faster*
> than they seem to load from the HD in the PC, as incredible as that might
> 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.)

Yeah as has been mentioned it's the fixed hardware. I was reading  
something from a developer about how all the processes in the game has a  
timing constraint  - this, this and this have to be done in this time in  
order for the screen to be redrawn. If you don't know the throughputs for  
the hardware it's more difficult to tweak.

>   Of course there are drawbacks too. For one, games deliberately have no
> support for mouse and keyboard, even though the console would support  
> them
> (eg. you can plug in an USB keyboard and use it to write in the  
> dashboard;
> I'm assuming supporting USB mice is there or at least would be equally  
> easy).

And that's the stupid thing about the PS3 you *can* use a keyboard and  
mouse (bluetooth and usb), but the games themselves have to accept their  
input to work. Not counting some of the old PS1/PS2 games I think only  
Unreal Tournament had this support, maddening.

> That means no FPS games for me. (Yes, I tried a few demos, and they were
> next to impossible to play.) AFAIK this is a deliberate guideline by  
> Microsoft
> (or at least it was for the Xbox).

Keep at it. It still won't be as good as with a mouse, but it won't be  
impossible.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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