And Doom is 30?

SparkyProtocol

Yep.

[QUOTE="horrowhip"]

[QUOTE="xxThyLordxx"] yeah but, Quality + Design + Quantity >>> Quality + Design.

Raining__Blood

No.... More != better. It is just different. Depending on the design, more players may be good. Or, equally as likely is that fewer players may be better.

You also forget that the more players you have, the more likely you are to run into people who don't know how to act as part of a team. More players = more opportunity for you to run into people who completely ruin the experience. I learned that playing Battlefield 2....

Oh, I know. I was just giving one example.

[QUOTE="foxhound_fox"]

Quality + Design >>> Quantity

Most games that tout their player counts usually aren't designed for that many players. Most multiplayer situations call for a specific number of players that makes playing the game "fun." More people on a map designed for less is not fun.

xxThyLordxx

No.... More != better. It is just different. Depending on the design, more players may be good. Or, equally as likely is that fewer players may be better.

You also forget that the more players you have, the more likely you are to run into people who don't know how to act as part of a team. More players = more opportunity for you to run into people who completely ruin the experience. I learned that playing Battlefield 2....

[QUOTE="VoodooHak"]

[QUOTE="xxThyLordxx"] typical lemming response. the topic is not about gameplay/experience/whatever, its about paying for an online service, yet cant provide such service.xxThyLordxx

The unerlying premise of the orginal claim about paying is that if you pay, the service should provice more players per session....which is an idiotic premise.

XBL isn't limiting anything.

Developers can have Dedicated Servers so long as they pay for and maintain those servers....

Servers aren't cheap though. Sony is taking what could quite honestly be called one of the biggest risks in the history of online gaming by making this game for the PS3. It means they have to support EVERY server for EVERY player... The community can't pick up the slack like on PC games, Sony has to do it all.

Without a subscription fee, they are relying entirely on the profits that the game makes. To cover the costs of development, a large number of copies need to be sold(1 million). But 1 million means a ton of servers. That increase the costs, and makes even more necessary copies, and this keep piling up until you reach a point where it becomes financially viable and profitable.

The risks involved are insane... Sony may end up losing a ton of money on the game.

As for DC Universe Online, expect that to have a subscription fee.

[QUOTE="aero250"]So more players equals a better online experience lol.xxThyLordxx

It can. All it takes is a developer that wants to make such a game. However, nobody does. Why? Because massive multiplayer games are prone to devolving into chaos.

If Bungie wanted to make a game with 512 players, made the tech to support such a massive game, and designed it to play well with that many players, MS would sit down and decide if they wanted to front the money for the necessary dedicated servers... Whether they actually would, that is an entirely different question... Servers aren't cheap. You need a ton of sales to break even on your servers, and to be quite honest, you need a steady stream of income to maintain those servers. Sure, you can ride off the profits you made on the game, but then the longer you run the game, the less money you make.

So, would MS choose to do it? Who knows...

Holy **** I've been follwoing this game for a long time, I heard that the X360 version will use 2 DVDs

Kurdish-Gamer

Yeah.

But there is a reason(and a reason that no other game really has problems with...)

With other games, texturing is typically based on the repetition of a particular tile. You use the same piece of data repeatedly throughout the level. this is for a number of reasons... The main reason has nothing to do with space on the disk, but rather the RAM available to store the data for rendering purposes.

The end result is a lot of very similar looking environments.

To solve this problem, Carmack designed MegaTextures. Massive textures that don't use up much RAM due to their structure and ability to be streamed straight from the disk.

Now, a MegaTexture has a maximum size of 128,000x128,000 pixels, or 16,348,000,000 pixels... Now, to store a texture, you need a minimum of 3 bytes per pixel(RGB data). This provides the computer with the color of the pixel. More data is needed to add different sorts of mapping(Diffuse Mapping, Shadow Mapping, Parallax Mapping, Bump Mapping, etc)

Anyway, a full MegaTexture is a minimum of 49GB uncompressed... That is just to store a single MegaTexture. Sure, they don't and won't necessarily use the maximum number of pixels, but it still gives you an idea of how massiveMegaTextures can be...

Anyway, the way Carmack has spoken about it, he is basically saying that the environmental textures are going to pretty much be the maximum size MegaTexture. That means that they will only need a handful of MegaTextures to effectively texture the entire game world. This means that they can really tweak the textures down to the tiny details, making everything look unique.

In total, uncompressed, RAGE is basically over 1TB in size right now(id has already revealed this). This is something that no other game really faces... Compression can only go so far, so naturally, it isn't really possible to fit the game onto a 9GB DVD. Hell, I am sure it isn't easy to fit the game on the 50GB Blu-Ray....

[QUOTE="WilliamRLBaker"]

[QUOTE="thelastguy"]

Dedicated servers are lag free

I would rather play a game lag free than being able to play it for longer

thelastguy

P.S: 360 could easily do 256 players with a dedicated server farm.

Doesn't change the fact there isn't any

edit:

My argument was never that LIVE can't handle dedicated servers, it was that it is sad that a free service is able to provide them for first party games

Why would they need to? Developers decide how many players they want their games to have. They decide. If they want a ton of players, the publisher will need to decide if they are willing to pay for servers to host a ton of players. But the developers aren't choosing that... So, there is no point in having expensive dedicated servers...

Zipper decided they wanted a 256 player MP game... So, Sony is paying for the servers...And if MAG bombs in sales, don't expect them to maintain those servers for long. Hosting 256 player games means big servers. Big servers mean big costs. If MAG doesn't sell, expect them to either shut the servers down or arrange some sort of subscription service to continue playing. Because those servers won't maintain themselves.

*hand gesture*

You're pretty good.

The quadro line is more for CAD.

In truth with a properly optimized engine the 7800 would get substantially better performance.

Irick_cb

Of course I am pretty good....

And yeah, Quadro line isn't really for gaming. Technically speaking, it uses almost the exact same chip as the 7800 GTX. And optimized engine(optimized for both cards), would technically get extremely similar performance between the two.... The main difference is the drivers that the two cards run on... However, there are some changes made to the BIOS of the card as well, which makes it impossible to get the same performance from the consumer card.

But overall, you can technically achieve nearly the same gaming performance on the workstation cards as you can on the consumer cards... It just requires some serious tweaking(and some serious tweaking on the developers side...)

[QUOTE="horrowhip"]

Fine. But the 8600 GT is basically worse than the 7800 GT, so the point is completely useless anyway. Mac Pro was not and has never been cutting edge... EVER. So, will you please stop with this.

Irick_cb

The 8800 works fine in "newer" Mac Pros.

If you read the article you'd know the only macs that could not upgrade were those based on the older 32bit EFI (like BIOS, but newer)

Apple pushed back official upgrade kits from public release for that reason alone, if you plugged a 8800 into the PCIx16 slot on a 64 bit pro it would work, abet sometimes requiring a chipset bios flash.

Seeing as ID tech was presenting as Macworld, i'm fairly certain Apple would have allowed them to run their new engine on their top of the line system.

Which would still have been top of the line.

And yes i'm aware macs are not cutting edge, however they can run any game you throw at them respectably well.

Espetialy the Pro line.

*looks over at his twin eVGA branded GTX 285 slied pro*

Yep, just fine.

I understand. But, you are trying to argue that at the time of the demonstration they were in some way top-of-the-line.

Yes, anymore, Mac's are just fine for gaming. did I ever say that they weren't? No.... I never did. The only thing I did say was the Mac's are not Top-of-the-line, and that the hardware that id ran the tech demo on was rather average hardware for gaming... Which it was... The FX 4500 is basically barely equivilant to the 7800 GTX in terms of running games. It is much better at doing high end graphics calculations like running in a server farm that does calculations for ambient occlusion or shadow mapping. However, when playing a game in real-time, those cards aren't all that great. They can do fairly well, but not fantastic.

THAT was my point.

[QUOTE="Toms Hardware"]

In mid-2007 the Pro was updated and shipped with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT.

Irick_cb

I wasn't.

Still dealing with the LAPTOPS, not desktops... Macbook Pro and Mac Pro are not the same.

id used Mac Pro... You keep trying to speak about Macbook Pro as if that means anything in regards to Mac Pro....

And don't quote the poorly edited article as saying that Mac Pro and Macbook Pro are the same. they are not...

Not to mention, the 8600 GT is horrid next to the 8800 GT.... At the time of the event, id had the best offering Apple had on the market. The PC market was still significantly ahead of this, between the 8800 GTX and even SLI on 7800 GTX cards... Mac was not top-of-the-line for the time. They were good, but not cutting edge.