Be Excellent To Each Other

Can I POTW Gaywood please? I don't read BETEO WEKEO so have no idea how that sort of things work.

I dunno - I'm holding out for Bink Video support as well.

Again on Bloomberg there was an 'in depth' look at the next gen console battle. Mentions of games in piece (and that games in general, not a specific game or series)? er...none.

You should, you are in it lots.

What is Havoc?

The future of console gaming apparently

Havok? Most typically a physics engine, but can also help with things such as animation and other functions.

It's been on consoles for a very long time. What with being based on standard c/c++ code.

A film in which Anne Hathaway scores on the Craster Scale.

Just to respond to this, I was a heavy gamer between 1995 and 2005 and I didn't have a console at all. I had an expensive pc. A lot of people I knew were the same.

Malc

Indeed. It's only in recent years (the "HD consoles"/the advent of Havok in the living room) that I've moved away from PC myself. I've always had most of the consoles, but I barely used them.

And yet, we're still lectured daily on the merits of PC gaming! It's as if I wasn't sat at one 10 hours a day for the best part of 10 years.

I had one of these!
Edit, I still do somewhere.

I've had pretty much all of the consoles over the years, it was always PC first for me until the Dreamcast, then it was mainly consoles until a couple of years ago (apart from WoW), now i'm back to PC.

I just play games. Whether they come via consoles, PC, handheld, phones, boards or in the pictures that slither across my peripheral vision.

I'm definitely moving back to PC myself now. My chums have all got decent systems so that tends to be where we play. Not gonna discount consoles, though.

I like playing games and I don't mind what I play them on. I also understand that other people like playing games and I don't mind what they play them on.

I just wish everyone else thought the same.

I bought one from a car boot sale for 50p and sold it to a crazy Italian on eBay for about £40

Various reports saying Microscrofula will have a similar revealy thing in april.

I did see lots of speculation last week saying they have to have it before GDC (Games Developers Conference) so that the devs can actually talk about the games they are working on for the new Xbox and not just the stuff for the PS4 - GDC is down as the end of March so it may not be that long to wait

Oh God, this.

I play games on PC much more than I do on console, for pretty much the exact reasons AE evangelises about, but his constant fucking harping on about it leaves me slightly embarrassed to admit to being a fellow PC gamer.

They're shit and they don't have Havok.

Also its a C64 without a keyboard and 99.9% fewer games avaliable for it. Not even like the GX4000 which at least has enhanced hardware and exclusive titles.

He lied to us! Havok has been around for years.



Stinking PC owners trying to claim credit!

Not the C64's finest hour it would seem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSv1nZIarBg

Not this forums either it seems.

That looks great. I love stuff like that. Bet it plays like shit though.

That's because we don't have Havok. Or a PC.

Some real shite about Windows 8 in this thread but as I have already corrected the same crap repeatedly I will just satisfy myself with a

<< sigh >>

I've readily acknowledged the advantages of a fixed architecture and 'bare-to-the-metal' coding many, many times (in this thread in fact, IIRC).

That only buys you so much though.

The Jaguar octo-core CPU in the PS4 is a low-power AMD part that was originally targeted at the laptop and mobile markets. It's a capable CPU but it's got a low clock speed (1.6GHz) and it's no powerhouse. A good advance on the current-gen of consoles of course, but nothing to get overly excited about. AMD's (far more powerful) octo-core desktop CPUs have been out for the best part of 18 months now. You can currently buy a full-fat Bulldozer octo-core AMD desktop CPU running at over 3GHz for about £100. The Jaguar is a cut-down, clocked-down iteration of this CPU.

The GPU in the PS4 is reckoned to punch about as hard as a current desktop PC Radeon 7850, a capable card for sure and should allow the PS4 to deliever 1080p@60FPS, which again is a great advance on the current-gen, but very much in line with what I've been saying all along - the PS4 is comprised of current mid-range PC parts in a small box.

(Technically speaking of course the PS4 utilises an APU as the CPU and GPU are both on one die, but the net result is the same.)

The 8GB of system GDDR5 RAM is a surprise, I'll grant you that, (everyone was expecting 4GB), but again, let's put that into context. GDDR5 is the standard RAM even for low-medium end desktop PC graphics cards and has been for a couple of years - (it originally debuted in 2008 in the Radeon 4870, a high-end card at the time, so it's five year old RAM technology) - the current GeForceGTX650 for example, a fairly low-end part, costs £84 and has 1GB of GDDR5 on-board.

The entire system having access to 8GB of GDDR5 is an intriguing proposition, and will probably give the PS4 a solid technical advantage over the 720, but at the same time let's not get overly carried away, GDDR5 only really benefits graphics work (hence even low-end PC graphics cards having 1GB of the stuff strapped to them), so it remains to be seen what benefits it will equate to in the real world when used as system RAM as well.

Your reference back to the original XBox (which was effectively mainstream PC hardware of the day stuffed into a not-so-little box) is correct, but Sony at least emphatically pushed the esoteric hardware of the PS2 (remember the 'Emotion Engine'?) and the PS3 ('Cell Architecture') as being something unique and special, an approach that they've completely dropped for the PS4.

Finally, the real-time encoding and streaming of games to other devices or elsewhere is already underway by Nvidia as 'Project Shield', requirements will simply be any Kepler-based GPU, the cheapest of which is the aforementioned GTX650, which costs £84, so let's contain our excitement a bit on that one.

Still, nice of you to pop in again DocG! It's always a pleasure to see you post and chuck a few base insults my way, although I'm sure you've done better than 'fucking dribbling idiot' in the past. If you're still in touch with myp ask him for a few suggestions, he got pretty imaginative with his abuse

Ack! Come on chaps, you did see the bit where I specifically referenced 'arcadey console type games'?

Like a lot of folks here I suspect, I've owned both consoles and computers over the years, going right back to the 8-bit days.

My point about, for example, the PS1, was that it brought the arcade game Ridge Racer into your house, and it did with a little box of magic that just plugged into your telly. You didn't need to install anything, you didn't need to configure anything, and you didn't need to spend £1000 or more on a PC (£1000 basically being the absolute starting point for a PC you could play games on back then). I mean, fucking hell, even getting a basic game controller working on a PC twenty years ago was an exercise in hellish frustration, and god help you if you wanted two of them working at the same time.

And yet with the PS1, all you had to do was buy it along with a copy of Ridge Racer, plug the PS1 in, put the disc in, turn it on, and by christ it was a fucking 3D arcade game that still cost a pound a go in the arcades, in your own house, on your own telly. It was stunning, it was magical.

Of course we were playing stuff on our PCs at the time as well, Quake, Warcraft 2, Civilization 2, Command & Conquer etc etc but the PC couldn't do anything like the PS1 was doing. Even if it was technically capable of it - (which it wasn't since 3D acceleration basically didn't exist, hence my earlier point about the consoles bringing something new and magical to the gaming table, Quake was software 3D at launch with hardware 3D acceleration only coming later) - the huge financial and technical barriers to entry made it pie in the sky for most people. We do all remember config.sys and autoexec.bat and freeing up enough base memory to load a CD-ROM driver and even a fucking mouse driver, don't we?

Now if you didn't like arcadey/consoley type games then fair enough, the PS1/PS2 era may well have passed you by, but in my circle of friends and acquaintances we were all over that shit like a cheap suit - despite being mega-keen PC gamers as well.

That's really all I'm getting at here, this is probably the first generation of consoles that offer nothing unique, nothing new, nothing that can't be got elsewhere for around the same cost and at around the same level of convenience. At the PS4 reveal show one of the games was later confirmed to be running on the PC, the argument being 'well that's basically what it'll look like on the PS4', that's the level of homogenisation we're talking about.

I don't understand why it's such a contentious point. I'm not arguing about the relative merits of the platforms as such, just saying that they're all basically the same now.

The same hardware, running the same games, with the same controllers (remember you can plug a 360 pad straight into a PC and I wouldn't be surprised if the 720 wasn't the same), at the same sorts of resolutions and detail settings. (Initially at least, the PC will pull ahead as time goes by, as happened with the current-gen.)

Choose the box you like the look of most, choose your 'operating system provider', maybe choose based on platform exclusives a couple of years down the line (if there are any) - but the point stands, next-gen is 'everything's about the same' gen.

Has AMD not already got something like that? (Or am I thinking of something different and wierd?)

I can't understand why people don't think that this isn't anything but a reasonably interesting post. I've no idea if he's right but it sounds interesting, and plausible, enough. If PS4 and the new Xbox are "about the same" in terms of grunt (although I'd suggest there wasn't much between the PS3 and 360 either) what do they offer hardcore gamers?

I think loads of people on here can take up that mantle.

See my most recent post in the "other" thread. I think most people probably do agree with him. Gaywood offered a great counter-argument, but both have merits. Sadly, AE has banged the drum inappropriately too many times before, so nobody will give his view due consideration. And sadly, I totally understand that.

I

don't

care.

Good night.

Hang on! What about Screamer? That was pc and almost as good as ridge racer.

That falls foul of the 'fucking nightmare to run' rule, being as it was a DOS game.

You ever try getting a gamepad set up for that fucker?

Oh yes, it also falls foul of the 'needed a £1000+ PC to run it properly' rule, being as you absolutely had to have a Pentium for it move at anything like the same smoothness as Ridge Racer, and £1000 just about bought the cheapest Pentium based PC at the time.

Finally, it was a decent game as a PC arcade racer, but by god it wasn't as good as Ridge Racer.

So no, you can't have Screamer interfering with the magic of Ridge Racer on the PS1!

I actually preferred Screamer to Ridge Racer. Mind you, it was my first ever PC game on my first ever PC, so my memory might be a little rose-tinted.

Screamer rally was quite good too.

I think screamer came with my Packard Bell p100.

Lovely pc that. Not at all like a ps4

Screamer Rally was fucking brilliant. I could only play at utterly crap resolutions but I didn't care because I had so much fun with it.

There's a lesson in there somewhere...

I've still got the disc for this downstairs. Wonder if it'll install on Windows 7?

I think this was one of the first 3D accelerated games I played with my original 3dfx card. (Quake 2 is the other one I remember, the jump from software to hardware rendering was just stunning.)

I reckon you should move to another thread, but please continue

It seems Sony are at least talking the talk of attracting indie developers. They'ye meeting with loads of indie devs at GDC, and their staff are saying that they don't want there to be any reasons indie devs don't target the PS4. Who knows how it will actually play out, but it seems positive to me.

It's that attitude that's warming me to Sony lately. Microscrofula are doing a good job of alienating small developers with their hellish certification process.

Yep, there's also the problem that (with a handful of exceptions) you need a publisher to get on XBLA, and for most indies that means getting Microsoft to publish their game, and Microsoft require exclusivity (either on the whole game, or on some significant content). This is not the case for PSN, Steam, iOS, google play, or many of the other places devs could sell their games.

There's also a bunch of Xbox games with known bugs that could be easily fixed, but the developer can't/won't pay Microsoft to certify them.

Everything you need to know about the PS4 event

Good stuff. Might as well replace the six pages of discussion with that one video.

Damn, that Havoc might look brub, but I want more isometric games!

I posted this on Twitter a few days ago because this thread was being derailed by a rampaging cunt who's been given carte blanche to continue.

Also, I think the point is that what we've seen so far suggests something extremely mediocre, but we probably need to wait and see what they have up their sleeves. Is it going to be as awesome as when I got my Gamecube? PS1? Xbox? Probably not, given Sony's track record.

Interesting piece, shame he doesn't expand on some of his themes. I'm sure there is a piece to be written about the second cousin of the 'tyranny of choice' which is the 'dictatorship of preferences'. You shall see only those things that look like those things that you have previously bought or looked at...and if your an idiot like me that'll be a cavalcade of shite.

Cavalcade, that doesn't get used enough...must use cavalcade more.

Guardian interview with Sony's head of worldwide studios

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/ga ... -interview

Details:
All PS4 games will be available as a download, sounds like they'll be doing more PS+ style stuff, and you can queue up a download for a game from "any device".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rJDn0jRnUQ

I wondered what happened at it.