🚀 go-pugleaf

I've played the demos for Tekwar, Witchaven, Cybermage, and Magic Carpet 
2 and I thought I'd post my thoughts and results. First, I am running 
these on a Dell XPS P133c (triton) with a #9 FX Motion 771 2mb VRAM card, 
16 megs EDO ram, and 256k PLB cache. My performance results varied:

Tekwar: Ran well in 640x480 mode, with a slight decrease in frame rate in 
areas with lots of detail or enemies. The readme said that it hadn't been 
optimised for speed yet, so I am assuming the real game will be faster.
I thought it was a pretty nice game, plagued by horrible control and some 
minor glitches. But it's main problem is the control, it was just hard to 
get used to. Switching weapons and firing with the CTRL key is a pain, I 
never was able to get my joystick to work (I have an SB AWE-32, anyone 
able to get the joystick to work? I use a CH Flightstick). And the mouse 
did not respond correctly either. The left button, instead of moving 
forward, moved backwards. And the right button would night fire my weapon 
like it was supposed to. Too bad it was so messed up, maybe the real  
version will fix these problems. Capstone are you listening? I liked the 
game for the most part. With work, it could be cool.

Witchaven: Like Tekwar, it could have been neat but ends up pretty 
mediocre. Same control problems as Tekwar, but worse. Anyone ever have an 
enemy hit you through a wall or door? I have! Also, there was some 
problem or incompatiblity with either the #9 771 card or my monitor or 
both. Or maybe the game is just frigged, but when I try to gamma correct 
the screen with F10, it will only stay corrected until I enter an area 
where there is a change in the lighting effect, eg. if I enter a 
particularly dark area or room and them leave, the gamma correction 
resets and I have to F10 again to fix it. Really annoying! It ran faster 
than Tekwar with no choppyness at all. I like the medieval weapons and the 
sound effects are great, too bad the game sucks. Also, for SVGA, the 
graphics don't seem very clean and there is still lots of pixelization. 
The hand/weapon graphics, like Tekwar, look really bad. Even worse than 
DOOM which is not even SVGA.

Cybermage: Again, could have been cool. This is actually the best of the 
lot IMO. Unfortunately, it is very slow. I blame this on shoddy 
programming/optimization. The graphics are nice, too bad the full-screen 
SVGA frame rate is so bad. On a Pentium 133 it is somewhat choppy at full 
screen. If I lower the screen size 1 notch it is much better. The music, 
sound, and graphics are great. If only it ran faster, it could be a lot 
of fun. Get your act together, Origin!

Magic Carpet 2: In SVGA it runs well, could be a tad faster. I would like 
for it to be smoother. In regular VGA it runs beautifully and the graphics 
detail is not that much worse in VGA than in SVGA. I absolutely love the 
music, it's very atmospheric. And the sound effects are top-notch as well.


So overall, these new "next generation" 3D games are, IMO, pretty lame. 
They all have problems and all need to be optimized because they are just 
not as smooth as they should be. Maybe it's not possible to get 15 fps at 
640x480, but it would be great. One last thing. I have read in the new PC 
Gamer that QUAKE will only be 360x480 and not 640x480. If this is true, I 
think it's a good move. The graphics look excellent, much better than any 
of these new games. If they can achieve graphics of that detail AND smooth 
frame rates, it would be, needless to say, revolutionary. But do the guys 
at id really need any more ego boosting? :)

Email/comments welcome. Let me know what you think about this stuff.


-Aaron