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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.
> I'm assuming supporting USB mice is there or at least would be equally easy).
From everything I've read, there's no mouse support on the xbox. Keyboard
(discouraged), gamepad, chatpad (a keyboard that attaches to the gamepad),
and camera.
On the other hand, there's clearly support for voice as well, but that's
never listed in the "these are the input devices we support", so maybe I'm
missing something.
Plus there's the IR remote for the media player, which I have to assume
appears as a keyboard or something, but I'll be able to find out soon enough
when I start running my own code on the xbox. :-)
> That means no FPS games for me. (Yes, I tried a few demos, and they were
> next to impossible to play.)
I've found it takes getting used to, and some games manage it better than
others. I can't drive in GTA (which is kind of ironic), but shooting in most
of the games seems OK to me once I play the game a bit, even tho I agree
it's a lot harder than on the PC with a mouse.
> Well, it's both their and my loss, because I won't be buying
> FPS games (which is a shame really, because many of them *look* really great).
There's usually a lot of auto-aiming support for this reason. Did you
explore the game options and see if auto-aim is turned on? It's a setting on
the console.
Also note that if you buy a fast USB memory stick, you can copy the games
from the DVD to the stick (which uncompresses some of the data as it goes,
as they usually seem to wind up between 6 and 8 gig on the stick) and play
from the stick, which can be faster.
I have an XBox HD, and saving a bioshock game went from about 20 seconds to
about 3 when I switched to saving games on the HD.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
that the code does what you think it does, even if
it doesn't do what you wanted.
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Darren New <dne### [at] san rrcom> 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.
Well, here I am complaining how I have anticipated this one game for
five years, and then Microsoft decides that it will be published only
for the Xbox 360, seemingly as some kind of marketing campaing to boost
the sales of the console... And then I go and buy the console in question.
Hook, line and sinker.
> The games look great in HD, too, btw. Strongly recommended if you can
> manage it.
My CRT is capable of displaying up tp 1600x1200 and a bit more, but for
whatever reason I don't understand, if you set up any resolution larger
than 1280x1024 the console will not let you specify a screen aspect ratio
of 4:3. It forces it to widescreen (and thus everything is squeezed
horizontally).
> > That means no FPS games for me. (Yes, I tried a few demos, and they were
> > next to impossible to play.)
> I've found it takes getting used to, and some games manage it better than
> others. I can't drive in GTA (which is kind of ironic), but shooting in most
> of the games seems OK to me once I play the game a bit, even tho I agree
> it's a lot harder than on the PC with a mouse.
I tried the demo of Battlefield: Bad Company, and while the game looked
great, it was almost impossible to play. You need pixel-level accuracy to
hit anything, which is basically impossible with the controller. With a
mouse it wouldn't be a problem.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Hook, line and sinker.
I see. I guess that's why they do it.
>> The games look great in HD, too, btw. Strongly recommended if you can
>> manage it.
>
> My CRT is capable of displaying up tp 1600x1200 and a bit more, but for
> whatever reason I don't understand, if you set up any resolution larger
> than 1280x1024 the console will not let you specify a screen aspect ratio
> of 4:3. It forces it to widescreen (and thus everything is squeezed
> horizontally).
Ah, I see. I was thinking you were talking 640x480 or something.
> I tried the demo of Battlefield: Bad Company,
Try a demo that was designed for a console to start with, like Batman or
Bioshock or some such. You might find it's somewhat easier. I suspect part
of the problem with driving in GTA is that the steering is way oversensitive
for anything you could do with a controller. It might be right with a mouse,
but the wheel basically goes side to side with the slightest joystick
movement. (Or I have something configured stupidly, but there isn't a whole
lot of configuration you can get to on an XBox.)
Which gives me an idea... I'll have to see if anyone has written a
target-practice or shooting gallery app.
> and while the game looked
> great, it was almost impossible to play. You need pixel-level accuracy to
> hit anything, which is basically impossible with the controller. With a
> mouse it wouldn't be a problem.
Yeah, that's not going to cut it. The game has to be adjusted to account
for being played with a joystick - it shouldn't be hard to hit what you're
aiming at. Otherwise, you're right, it's pretty much unplayable.
But really, it took me a couple of hours to get to the point where I wasn't
thinking about aiming, I was just aiming. At this point, when I'm doing my
own thing and I'm writing the code to move, I have to run downstairs and
boot up a game to remember which stick is "look" and which is "move", so I
think I've internalized it pretty well. And some of it is still difficult. :-)
Maybe see if you can borrow a FPS game that's designed for a console from a
friend? Or, isn't Alan Wake basically a shooter, or at least have a fair
amount of shooting in it? I bet if you go back after Alan Wake and try some
of the other games, you'll find them easier.
There *is* a global-per-player auto-aim configuration setting on the
console. (I.e., a per-player default as to whether you want it turned on.)
Maybe you need to switch that too.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
that the code does what you think it does, even if
it doesn't do what you wanted.
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welcome to console gaming fun! :)
I heard XBox 360's controller is one of the best ever designed for FPS. It
should, as many of the console's tops are FPS. You'll eventually just get the
hang of it. Not as easy as pointing and clicking, but does the job fine.
Eventually, I also guess something like Natal will mean point and shoot with
your bare hands...
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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> > The games look great in HD, too, btw. Strongly recommended if you can
> > manage it.
>
> My CRT is capable of displaying up tp 1600x1200 and a bit more, but for
> whatever reason I don't understand, if you set up any resolution larger
> than 1280x1024 the console will not let you specify a screen aspect ratio
> of 4:3. It forces it to widescreen (and thus everything is squeezed
> horizontally).
just so you know: most HD games on consoles aren't really that high. They
range mostly in the 720p zone or even less, very few of the graphical
heavyweights have managed to really do the 1080p hype any justice... perhaps
next gen... :P
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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();
}
<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models,
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>
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Patrick Elliott wrote:
This is what we get with consoles. People making games work perfectly
> fine on *that* hardware,
Which is exactly the reason companies like consoles. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
that the code does what you think it does, even if
it doesn't do what you wanted.
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
> This is what we get with consoles. People making games work perfectly
> > fine on *that* hardware,
>
> Which is exactly the reason companies like consoles. :-)
yes, and there's really no point in trying to optimize games for PC when
consumers can just throw more hardware at the issue. Typical PC gamers are not
really running Pentium 4 these days.
Plus, it's much easier to cope with a single static architecture like a console
than the sheer variety of hardware and drivers for PC. It's always amazing to
see the swann songs for consoles pushing it to the limits than seeing Crysis
running at 2x1080p, 64FSAA, 120FPS by running on a cluster. :)
and then, consoles are typically about shared familiar entertainment on the
living room rather than a lone experience on the basement PC... :P
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And lo On Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:51:57 +0100, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom>
did spake thusly:
> Phil Cook v2 wrote:
>> you couldn't lock doors behind you to stop the AI path-finding :-)
>
> What, in Thief? If you pickpocketed the key, you could unlock the door,
> go thru, lock it, and the AI couldn't follow because it didn't have the
> key. It totally worked.
Ah pick-pocketing the key, didn't do that very often.
> You couldn't relock something you picked unless you found the key, tho.
>
>> But it does highlight developer thinking.
>
> Exactly. I'm not sure I'd call it "developer thinking", but yes.
>
> The trick is to drive the gameplay without any invisible walls.
Illogical barriers to progress, invisible walls is snappier though.
>> I'm not sure about hidden bits. Oblivion had plenty of those and it
>> still got dull, InFamous had none and I loved it.
>
> OK. Well, *I* find it dull. :-) Maybe that's just because I play every
> game like an adventure game. ;-)
Well everyone's different. I can't stand racing games, my cousin loves
them.
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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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.
Hahahaha! :-D
> From all the
> Windows games I own, *at least* half of them present random crashing, hangups
> or other malfunction
I've heard a number of people say this. (E.g., there are certain people
where every time we have a CSS match, they have to restart their PC a
dozen times before CSS will launch without crashing.) I find this rather
baffling. I have *never* seen CSS crash, even once.
About the only remotely similar thing I've seen it do is when my
graphics card started dying... man, that was, uh, "special". Do you know
what happens if you take a level map make up of X thousand polygons,
take every 5th vertex and set either the X, Y or Z coordinate to zero?
After a while it quickly becomes impossible to see where the hell you're
going!
> my PC is becoming so old that it struggles running the
> more recent games at even decent framerates with decent quality settings.
I suppose that could be the problem.
When I first played AvP, it was rock solid. When I tried to play it on
my current PC, it refused to play. At all. Wouldn't go past the menu
screen. Just would not run. Claimed I had insufficient video RAM. (The
box claims you need a minimum of 2 MB, and I only have 896 MB...)
The Settlers IV used to run fine (but for the occasional crash), but
since I upgraded to a dual-core CPU, it utterly refuses to run at all.
Won't even start up.
I could continue. Basically old games seem to not like being run on new
hardware. (Now if I could just get hold of a Windows XP license code, I
could use Virtual Box to solve this problem!)
> 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.
That's the advantage of a static hardware platform, of course. It makes
testing 20,000x easier. The disadvantage is... a static hardware
platform. ;-) If you want more processing power, you must buy an entire
new console. (Assuming one is even available in the first place!)
> Microsoft
> has also made a quite good work at demanding game developers to minimize
> loading times
No, I think you'll find that that's "market forces". As in, console
gamers just won't pay money for a game that makes you sit and wait for
it to load, so developers invest significant time and energy into making
it fast. If they didn't, it wouldn't sell.
> (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.)
That makes two of us.
> Of course there are drawbacks too. For one, games deliberately have no
> support for mouse and keyboard.
And this is the main reason why I will never, ever buy a console.
I have only ever owned one console, and I only got that so I could play
Sonic the Hedgehog. And no, I didn't pay retail price for it either...
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