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Warp wrote:
> IMO Half-Life is greatly overhyped. The only thing which was more or less
> innovative at the time was the long, playable intro. However, other than
> that the game is a rather typical straightforward first-person shooter
> with minimal storytelling.
Yeah.
My take was that it had a lot of different environments (indoor, outdoor,
alien, swimming, ladders, etc), the long intro at the beginning to get you
into it, a fair amount of humor and friendlies who helped you out in various
ways. And of course the Freeman/Barney/Shephard trilogy was cool - I haven't
seen that elsewhere. There were lots of different aliens, lots of different
weapons that weren't all just Same Old Same Old.
The story was kind of flat and the individual levels were rather intestinal,
but it didn't get old because of the variety.
That's not to say that made it great, but those are the things I appreciated
about it.
Undying had the same plethora of environments but the weapons and enemies
were kind of lacking, made up for with an even better story. Alice I have a
hard time judging just because I like the book so much. :-)
> Half-Life 2, however, is a completely different story. Great writing
> and storytelling, great technology, great playability...
I haven't done HL2 yet. Now that I have a machine that can handle it, maybe.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
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> OK, so I've wondered about this before... If I were to install Crysis on
> my PC, would I actually be able to play it? Or would my PC melt into a
> pile of liquid metal?
Download the demo? FYI I have a 5900 too and it played fine if I fiddled
about with the GFX settings (ie things were all set around middle values).
It got a bit choppy in places when there was a lot of action, so I suspect
if you put it on minimum it would be fine. With a new GTX 260 you'd be
laughing.
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"scott" <sco### [at] scott com> wrote in message news:497d6a03@news.povray.org...
With a new GTX 260 you'd be
> laughing.
Oh, I missed that it was a GTX. Yep, should play fine.
~Steve~
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> Download the demo? FYI I have a 5900 too
Ooops meant 7900, my old GPU was a 5900!
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Warp wrote:
> IMO Half-Life is greatly overhyped. The only thing which was more or less
> innovative at the time was the long, playable intro. However, other than
> that the game is a rather typical straightforward first-person shooter
> with minimal storytelling. IMO it wasn't even technically/graphically
> the most advanced game of the time. Rather average, really. The weapons
> were rather inventive, I grant you that (and something I miss from the
> sequels), but otherwise there isn't really anything special.
Well, I played Quake II from beginning to end. Not easy when you don't
have a 3D card! (I wonder - are modern games even *playable* without
one?) And then I played it all again on a machine that had 3D acceleration.
The next game I played was Halflife. Now, I don't know what other games
existed at the time, but compared to Quake II, Halflife was a hell of a
lot different.
- The locations were varied and interesting. Ordinary-looking office
blocks, secret underground laboratories, giant industrial machinery,
military bases, strange experimental test labs... and then if you
somehow manage to battle through all that lot, Xen. Wow. I mean, just wow.
- I lose count of how many alien creatures you have to do battle with.
Small blind headcrabs, huge gargantuas, the vortigaunts and technitions,
bullsquids, zombies, troops of soldiers, the massive tenticle creatures,
the little sound-horn wotsits... It would take an age just to catelogue
them all!
- Unlike Quake, the environment was more reactive. Walking a few miles
to get to the test chamber, and then walking all the way back out again
seeing it smashed up was really vivid, for me. And the way stuff blows
up or falls apart when you touch it... Man, some of that stuff really
made me jump out of my skin! In Q2, the map is just a passive maze for
you to run around, flicking the occasional switch, and the enemies are
the thing that hounds you.
- The weapons. I mean, you've got everything from a crowbar to a rocket
launcher. You've got pistols and machine guns, and then you've got the
tau cannon (my favourit game weapon *ever*!), the gluon gun, the snarks,
the tranquiliser gun, a sniper rifle, grenades, trip mines, a magnum...
All in all, I spent *months* playing through the game. I mean that! It
took about 6 months for me to complete it. And I was loving every
minute. There was a real spirit of adventure - like it was worth
replying the same room 8 times just to see what on earth would be round
the next corner. And it was always something new!
(And then I immatiately set about tacking Opposing Force, and then Blue
Shift, and then Gunman...)
> Half-Life 2, however, is a completely different story. Great writing
> and storytelling, great technology, great playability...
HL2 is technically superior in every imaginable way. (Well, you'd be
kind of upset if it *wasn't*, right?? I mean, how many years later is it?)
I still remember running it for the first time, and being *stunned* that
you could make characters like that just out of flat polygons painted to
textured and hacked to look smooth. On the other hand, the last computer
game I'd seen running was HL1...
The physics feature was also pretty neat - and, AFAIK, brand new in
gaming at that time. (Of course, today seemingly *all* games in this
class feature it.)
I could go on about how much superior the game technology is, but the
fact remains... it was *boring*. They took out all the stuff that made
HL1 fun. There's no interesting locations, no impressive weapons, no
varied enemies... there's nothing interesting. (And we won't go into the
ending. Everybody knows all about that!)
- The location is the same throughout: It looks like Luton town center
on a bad day. There is a small amount of variation, but not much.
- Enemies? Well let's see now: Various human soldiers, headcrabs (which
I hated in the first place), zombies (so... basically more semi-humans)
and those annoying manhacks. And that's it.
- Weapons? Again, a pistol, an SMG, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, and
that's about it. (Oh, and the very cool but mostly useless gravity gun.)
- You can drive things now. Unfortunately all the drivable craft handle
*horribly* badly. But then, I guess controlling things like that with
only a digital keyboard is never going to work that well...
HL2:EP1 was even more graphically amazing (particularly inside the
citadel), but most of it just involved battling through a room in pitch
blackness with no ammo while seemingly endless numbers of zombies run at
you. Seriously, killing things in the dark using only a crowbar is *not*
my idea of a good time.
HL2:EP2 at last is a step back in the right direction. The inside of the
antlions' nest is... astonishing! (What can I say? I love caves!) The
regular antlions are pretty boring, but they added now, more interesting
ones too. The sequence with the guard is a little too intense for me,
but overall it's really great stuff.
(I replayed this recently. I notice that they've turned the difficulty
way down on many areas of the game since I played it the day it was
released. Like, the guards now die *before* you've exhausted your entire
ammo supply. Stuff like that.)
I'm interested to see what HL2:EP3 does...
Also, I wonder: Will games ever reach the stage where textures are
sufficiently high resolution that you can actually read the writing on
stuff?? Will we ever get believable character animation?
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>> With a new GTX 260 you'd be laughing.
>
> Oh, I missed that it was a GTX. Yep, should play fine.
*All* of the GPUs in the 200-series are designated "GTX". (I don't know
why... Perhaps something to do with nVidia's new naming scheme?)
So anyway, I asked Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units
Comparing your high-end 6-series to my low-end 200-series, we have:
| GeForce 6600GT | GeForce GTX 260
Gigapixels / second | 2.000 | 16.128
Gigatexels / second | 4.000 | 36.864
Gigabytes / second | 16.000 | 111.900
The GeForce GTX 260 also generates approximately 715 gigaFLOPS peak
processing power (single-precision only).
Given that you claim your 6600GT "handles" Crysis, and all of the
performance data I can actually obtain for both cards gives the GTX260
has roughly ten times "better", in theory the GTX260 should eat it up...
We shall see!
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Warp wrote:
> IMO Half-Life is greatly overhyped.
One thing I do remember what that the game AI was supposed to be
"amazing". I didn't really find it to be so... Seemed pretty average to me.
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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:497d8f76$1@news.povray.org...
> >> With a new GTX 260 you'd be laughing.
>>
>> Oh, I missed that it was a GTX. Yep, should play fine.
>
> *All* of the GPUs in the 200-series are designated "GTX". (I don't know
> why... Perhaps something to do with nVidia's new naming scheme?)
Hmm, you're right, my bad.
>
> So anyway, I asked Wikipedia:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units
>
> Comparing your high-end 6-series to my low-end 200-series, we have:
>
> | GeForce 6600GT | GeForce GTX 260
> Gigapixels / second | 2.000 | 16.128
> Gigatexels / second | 4.000 | 36.864
> Gigabytes / second | 16.000 | 111.900
>
> The GeForce GTX 260 also generates approximately 715 gigaFLOPS peak
> processing power (single-precision only).
<sniff> Don't do that to me. I'm sad now... <sniff> :/
>
> Given that you claim your 6600GT "handles" Crysis, and all of the
> performance data I can actually obtain for both cards gives the GTX260 has
> roughly ten times "better", in theory the GTX260 should eat it up...
>
> We shall see!
You won't be disappointed! :)
When will you get the 260? Today?
~Steve~
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>> Comparing your high-end 6-series to my low-end 200-series, we have:
>>
>> | GeForce 6600GT | GeForce GTX 260
>> Gigapixels / second | 2.000 | 16.128
>> Gigatexels / second | 4.000 | 36.864
>> Gigabytes / second | 16.000 | 111.900
>>
>> The GeForce GTX 260 also generates approximately 715 gigaFLOPS peak
>> processing power (single-precision only).
>
> <sniff> Don't do that to me. I'm sad now... <sniff> :/
Heh. Well, yours is a 6-series. Then they made the 7-series. After that
came the 8-series. Then there was the 9-series (which is really just
rebadged versions of the 8-series - hence unpopular). Now we have the
200-series. And... according to the numbers above, it's "only" 8x
faster. 2004 for the 6-series, 2008 for the 200-series. So in 4 years,
it's "only" got 8x faster. Ho hum!
Well, I guess if I feel rich enough I could always add a second GTX260
at some point... I *do* have an SLI motherboard. >:-D
(No, seriously. I'm kidding. I really can't afford to do stuff like
that. Besides, the CPU is old enough already...)
>> We shall see!
>
> You won't be disappointed! :)
I ****ing will if it doesn't work with my motherboard! o_O
(The card is PCI Express 2.0 - and I'm not sure that my motherboard is.)
If not then I guess I'll be replacing the entire PC rather than just the
graphics card... but let's hope not, eh?
> When will you get the 260? Today?
I bought it using the super-hyper-ultra-mega-saver delivery option.
So... next week? Maybe?
(It's daft really; if you want it tomorrow, gotta pay lots of money. But
if you go with the cheap delivery option, often it arrives the next day
*anyway*! :-P But we'll see...)
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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:497d9d5b$1@news.povray.org...
>>> Comparing your high-end 6-series to my low-end 200-series, we have:
>>>
>>> | GeForce 6600GT | GeForce GTX 260
>>> Gigapixels / second | 2.000 | 16.128
>>> Gigatexels / second | 4.000 | 36.864
>>> Gigabytes / second | 16.000 | 111.900
>>>
>>> The GeForce GTX 260 also generates approximately 715 gigaFLOPS peak
>>> processing power (single-precision only).
>>
>> <sniff> Don't do that to me. I'm sad now... <sniff> :/
>
> Heh. Well, yours is a 6-series. Then they made the 7-series. After that
> came the 8-series. Then there was the 9-series (which is really just
> rebadged versions of the 8-series - hence unpopular). Now we have the
> 200-series. And... according to the numbers above, it's "only" 8x faster.
> 2004 for the 6-series, 2008 for the 200-series. So in 4 years, it's "only"
> got 8x faster. Ho hum!
Well, that's ok.
>
> Well, I guess if I feel rich enough I could always add a second GTX260 at
> some point... I *do* have an SLI motherboard. >:-D
I was going to suggest that but people seem to have problems running
it.
>
> (No, seriously. I'm kidding. I really can't afford to do stuff like that.
> Besides, the CPU is old enough already...)
>
>>> We shall see!
>>
>> You won't be disappointed! :)
>
> I ****ing will if it doesn't work with my motherboard! o_O
>
> (The card is PCI Express 2.0 - and I'm not sure that my motherboard is.)
I found these quotes just now:
"It doesn't matter, PCI-E 2.0 cards will work on PCI-E 1.x systems as well.
The PCI-E 2.0 spec is a fairly new one (Jan 2007). Currently, only the X38
chipset from Intel and the nForce 7 from NVIDIA support PCI-E 2.0."
And:
"A Short 2-3 inch black slot is usually a PCI Express slot (usually PC
less than 2 years old will have these)"
So you should be ok if you have these slots.
>
> If not then I guess I'll be replacing the entire PC rather than just the
> graphics card... but let's hope not, eh?
>
>> When will you get the 260? Today?
>
> I bought it using the super-hyper-ultra-mega-saver delivery option. So...
> next week? Maybe?
>
> (It's daft really; if you want it tomorrow, gotta pay lots of money. But
> if you go with the cheap delivery option, often it arrives the next day
> *anyway*! :-P But we'll see...)
You'll get it tomorrow then.
~Steve~
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