@snakebliskin In this case, Ubisoft just made a full price game cost on someone that did not play the game. Tell me, how do they lose? The only people that lose are the people that bought the game and sold it right away. Now, in addition to making full price on the game, they also get another person to repurchase DLC that originally came with the game in the first place. The end result is they, on a per player basis, they make more money. The used game market is a red herring. Developers can either realize this or stay in denial about game sales. For whatever reason they are trying to shame consumers, and also for whatever reason, they think most consumers care. Do not kid yourself about shovelware. Companies make shovel ware, not because their other games do not sell well, but because it is not risk decent profit. Even if they had AAA titles with massive profits, they would still make shovel ware, still make overpriced DLC, still make anything and everything for a quick dollar.
@RPG_Fan_I_Am My computer and my consoles are all hooked up to the internet peristently, so having to connect to the net for single player is a non-issue for me. Anyways, sometimes it is fun to have a story (even play co-op in a campaing). Imagine if they made these games, campaigns, and experiences have AI that ran on some server somewhere. Imagine a game like FEAR with military/scientific quality AI that you could access from your home. Imagine an MMO with NPCs that actually act like something other than an automated message machine. Imagine a game like Civilization with an AI that could run on a server. No more computer cheating, just actual intelligent gameplay. Civ is not always practical to play an marathon length game with a friend (as i do not play civ style games with strangers). Sometimes, it is also nice to get a way from the constant glitching (and more explicit cheating) that comes with competitive multiplayer, especially over something like XBOX live. Sometimes it is also fun to play humans versus wave after wave of computers. It would be actually nice for the computers to have something other than a zerg mentality. Games like CoD can be extremely fun, but it is extremely easy to get burnt out on cookie-cutter FPSs. It would be nice to be able to have a challenge of that calibur in games where there may not always be a human on the other end (like Fallout; although, that is partly a mechanics issue).
@RPG_Fan_I_Am One interesting facet of expanding internet and digital distribution systems is that you could potential have an AI server. They that can hold terabits of data, be able to react and change to player choices, but not be limited on the machines that a player might be on. Something like this is much more common to science and research than it is to video games though. I am hoping that with the popularity of online gaming, especially some of the cash cow MMOs, that server side AI might be a more realistic possibility. Some video game budgets easily rival military simulator budgets, so I do not see why this could not happen. Static rules could then be stored on a local machine and dynamic rules on a server. This would minimize lag and provide a larger element of realism to the game. I would be happy to pay a monthly fee for this service, just as I would a fee for a persistant worlds in current mmo's.
@RPG_Fan_I_Am Memory only becomes an issue if you want to add dynamic AI. For video games (especially a fast paced FPS) you see instances of an enemy for a few seconds at a time. A smart static AI would work well in this situation. They can react in a similar way to a human, give a player a challenge, all without needing to store memory about its rules. The only memory constraint would then be on the development side of generating rules, something the average player will never see. Although, there is that nice money investment for hiring people that know computer science, psychology, sociology, statistics, fuzzy-logic, KDD (and other potential expensive professions). Of course, if you want a more dynamic AI, the AI would then have to store data about its current rules and data about how the player reacts in a certain situation. This is more important when a player interacts with an AI over a long period of time, or the AI is used in critical situations (like strategy games or medical machine learning AI), To be continued...
@RPG_Fan_I_Am The human brain takes so many shortcuts that can easily be exploited by game developers. If it was not for shortcuts taken for pattern matching, your life would be very blurry and disorienting. While a human brain can take up a lot of space, so much of your brain is not used for how your directly interpret your surroundings. Granted, even if your remove everythng not directly related to stimuli processing, an AI brain would still take up a lot of space. However, developers can take shortcuts that the human brain needs for personality development. An AI does not need years of experiences to know what it likes or dislikes. Rules can be created from billions of bytes of data from a training set, but once that rule is created, it no longer needs the training set to remain valid (meaning a video game only needs to store a tiny fraction of the information used in the development of the AI).
I have yet to play a game with "solid" AI. In fact, I have yet to play a game with AI that was not dumber than heck. Going from scripted AI to non-scripted AI has not made AI any smarter, it has just found new ways for AI to dumb think. On top of that, to date, there still has yet to be a true artificial intelligence. At best, they are complex deterministic algorithms in which skilled players can easily dominate/exploit.
Since Firaxis decided to put malware in Civ5, I am interesting in nothing that has already been announced. Hopefully, there will be some cool new information presented.
It would be nice if they used the same gamma. The colors have different shades of black/white making it slightly more difficult to get an accurate view of which one is really better.
So theres no real benefit right now to gaming on Windows 7....... Game development is not moving towards DX10. DX10 has been out for how long? How many games are made for DX10? DX10 was a big of a waste as 64-bit Vista (and probably 64-bit Win 7). Nice addition, but no support.
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