🚀 go-pugleaf

On 7/16/2017 6:09 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> Another month, another monthly ramble. Time for me to start yammering
> about some vaguely game-related topic for... what was the reason
> again? Oh yeah, a vain hope of spurring conversation. Usenet is not
> dead yet, damn it!
> 
> -------------------
> 
> This is going to be a shorter ramble. It's about what I thought games
> of the future would look like, in the heady days of the mid 90s.
> 
> So, let us go back to 1996. A younger me was reading an article in a
> gaming magazine (remember those?) about the upcoming Flight Unlimited
> II. Now, I was interested not so much because of the game itself -
> when I do flight sims, I want my planes to have guns! - but because it
> was developed by Looking Glass, the guys behind the beloved Ultima
> Underworld, Terra Nova, and System Shock. It didn't hurt that the
> first Flight Unlimited game was visually astounding - head and
> shoulders above its rivals, like Microsoft's venerable Flight
> Simulator series.
> 
> But what caught my eye in the article was the claim - a boast, almost
> - that the developers intended to render every building on the map (a
> simulated San Francisco) of ten stories or more. This was, for the
> time, an astounding feat; with most flight simulators of the time,
> "cities" were rendered as only three or four of the tallest buildings,
> with muddy flat ground textures representing everything else. But
> Looking Glass was hoping to not only render the map based on
> "real-world elevation data" and "satellite photography" but populate
> it with potentially hundreds if not thousands of structures? It was
> mind-blowing.
> 
> Now to be fair, at the time I seriously over-estimated the number of
> buildings > 10 stories in San Francisco; the actual end product, while
> impressive enough in its graphical fidelity, still suffered greatly
> from the "pop-up city" appearance of most other flight sims with their
> equally limited number of structures on the map. But regardless of how
> inaccurate my take, Looking Glass's boast really triggered my
> imagination.
> 
> Now, you have to remember this was 1996. Video games were just
> starting to experiment with huge open worlds and even then, the
> attempts were fairly primitive; you just have to think of the
> pyramidal mountains studding the otherwise flat plains of Mechwarrior
> 2 to remember how primitive the technology was at the time. Some games
> - Strike Commander, Terra Nova - were attempting more natural curves
> and texturing, but even these simulations were simplistic. Most of
> Strike Commander's map was un-textured ("gouraud shading" was the big
> thing of the time), and - large as they seemed - Terra Nova's maps
> were tiny in comparison to the needs of a flight simulator. On the
> other hand, SimCopter (1996) was already showing us it was possible to
> create fully detailed cities - albeit with a significantly decreased
> visual fidelity from Flight Unlimited efforts. Utilizing maps
> generated from the venerable SimCity games, the small maps of
> SimCopter could contain hundreds of tightly-placed (mostly identical)
> structures.
> 
> So my thought process went something like this:
> 
>     In 1994, Strike Commander released with naturally elevated terrain,
> a few textures, and a handful of buildings.
> 
>     In 1995, Flight Unlimited presented us with fully-textured maps,
> and a handful of buildings.
> 
>     In 1997, Flight Unlimited would improve upon its predecessors
> already impressive graphics by upping the number of buildings.
> 
> Technology was moving so fast; what would 1999 bring us? A map with
> every buildings four stories or higher rendered in 3D? Would a map in
> 2001 include /every/ building in a city - down to the smallest shack?
> Would this level of detail - limited to just San Francisco in Flight
> Unlimited II - extend outwards and outwards, until the whole world got
> that sort of fidelity? And after you reached that level of detail,
> where would you go from there?
> 
> Might the developers not decide to start rendering the INSIDE of the
> houses then? Perhaps they would start populating these worlds with AI
> peoples. It didn't seem that far-fetched; SimCity 2000 already was
> attempting that; couple its technology with "modern" 3D-rendering and
> who knows what would come from it?
> 
> These days we have (almost) achieved this goal, so these fevered
> imaginings seem almost prescient to modern eyes. Flying across Los
> Santos in Grand Theft Auto V and it's difficult to believe we
> /haven't/ achieved this promised level of fidelity. Of course, most of
> the buildings are empty shells and the AI fades in and in an
> existential bubble around the protagonist, but it's a beautiful
> illusion. Of course, in 1996 I would believed we would have achieved
> all this by 2005...
> 
> Looking back, I made several mistakes in my thought experiment. First,
> I totally missed the "resolution wars". In 1996, most DOS games were
> still played at 320x240; while there was a slow movement towards
> higher resolutions, it was in no way certain that this trend was going
> to continue. And even if it did, many monitors couldn't go higher than
> 1024x768 anyway, so it seemed a limited advancement in any case. The
> idea that one day we might have multiple 4K monitors hooked up to one
> computer (with a possible resolution of more than 9000x4000 pixels)
> was just beyond imagination. Similarly, I completely missed out on the
> potential of 3D-rendering, a technology still in its infancy at the
> time (seriously, at the time 3D graphics cards were a lot like VR tech
> is today; nifty graphics but who knows if they were going to really
> catch on?). It was - I thought - the ever increasing CPU speeds that
> were going to create this gaming revolution, and while fast CPUs can
> structure detailed worlds, they aren't that great at pushing pixels.
> So as amazingly comprehensive as I believed those worlds might be, it
> escaped me that pixel count wouldn't remain limited to that of
> DOS-era games.
> 
> More importantly, I totally missed out on the fact that - even were
> technology able to present such vivid worlds - somebody would still
> have to go around and build those worlds. More than anything, this is
> the constraining factor in game-world development today; games like
> Minecraft show that the technology exists to create worlds millions of
> times larger than the Earth but you still need somebody to create the
> content - the buildings, the NPCs, the quests, the gameplay - that
> make those worlds worth exploring. Without that sort of hands-on
> touch, you get something like Daggerfall's world: generic and
> uninteresting terrain. Even in 1996, developers were looking at
> procedural generation to help out with the workload and with graphics
> limited to 320x240, art design was significantly less complicated than
> what is needed for the high-resolution computer-generated worlds of
> today. The hundreds or thousands of people needed to create just the
> few hundred-square miles for GTA5 or Skyrim were unthinkable levels of
> excess. Even I wondered if the sheer scale of such an imagined
> endeavor - detailing all of the Earth - might not result in a map
> shared out between multiple games and developers - and wouldn't /THAT/
> be neat, to play a Flight Simulator game in the air while somebody
> else used that same map for a racing game, a third used it for a
> football sim, and a fourth used it in a realistic "Doom clone"?
> 
> So, yeah; my predictions were a bit off target. Then again, so were
> pretty much everyone's in 1996.
> 
> But I still think back at times at these imaginings prompted by a
> single sentence in a long-forgotten article in a now defunct gaming
> magazine. Sometimes it's with disappointment that we've yet to achieve
> a fully-rendered game-world;  the closest realization on
> home-computers is the flight-sim mode in Google Earth, and even that
> has only a limited selection of 3D buildings and is unpopulated
> (although when it's taken to its full extreme - like they did for New
> York City - it is truly amazing and as jaw-dropping as my 1996 self
> imagined it would be). Other times it is with admiration and amazement
> at the level of fidelity - if not scale - that our games /do/ present
> us with. As the Mick Jager once sang, we don't always get what we want
> but sometimes we get what we need.
> 
> But I don't make predictions about where gaming technology is headed
> anymore.
> 
Something that occurs to me is it still might be possible to game map 
the entire real world.  You just have to find a way of importing all 
that satellite radar, lidar and visible light data into a game usable 
data set.  Just think, in another 20 years you might be able to do that 
in real time!  :D


-- 
Inquiring minds want to know while minds with a self-preservation 
instinct are running screaming.

On Sun, 16 Jul 2017 21:09:18 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:

>This is going to be a shorter ramble. It's about what I thought games
>of the future would look like, in the heady days of the mid 90s.

Around the mid 90s, I think many of us looked at the current rate of
advancement in gaming innovation and believed that the pace would
continue long enough to produce some incredible experiences.  So much
for that -- the more things change the more they stay the same :)  Who
knew that in the year 2017 we would be wishing games were more like
they used to be.  Games like Doom 2016 and Shadow Warrior 2 are
successful because they use old school shooters as a point of
reference for what makes games fun, adding updated graphics to an
existing (proven) formula.

There are a number of reasons for the discrepancy between our
predictions and reality.  Single-threaded processing speeds really
stagnated around 2005 or so, sadly right around the same time console
sales started luring game developers onto those platforms at the
expense of innovation on the PC.  GPU speed improvements have largely
defied that limitation, and in the limited ways that parallel GPU
operations are able to help, games have gotten somewhat better looking
over the last 10 years, but GPU performance is experiencing a similar
slowdown.  Multithreaded CPU performance has of course increased, but
that rarely matters a great deal when it comes to gaming performance.
After all this time, single-threaded performance is still important to
most types of software applications including gaming.

It's not all about technical limitations, though.  When consoles made
gaming more about the mainstream consumer, the industry began getting
crapped on by marketing teams the same way the movie industry had been
for many decades, pumping a lot of hype about upcoming titles into
mainstream media.  More and more gaming became a mainstream form of
entertainment rather than a niche market for the tech savvy, leading
to dumbed-down titles that aim the gun for the player or point exactly
where they should go to progress, and a bigger investment in story
writing, cutscene cinematics / quick time events and other filler
elements that didn't require as much innovation or talent, with a
focus on keeping production costs down.  And then of course all the
DLC / seasons pass nonsense.  It's not the first time the pursuit of
money has defiled an industry.

It's not that we don't still get the occasional gem (see my recent
posts about Player Unknown's Battlegrounds), but gaming is certainly
not where we thought it would be today, when we considered the future
20 years or so ago.

On 2017-07-17, Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> -------------------
>
> This is going to be a shorter ramble. It's about what I thought games
> of the future would look like, in the heady days of the mid 90s.
>
> So, let us go back to 1996. A younger me was reading an article in a
> gaming magazine (remember those?) about the upcoming Flight Unlimited
> II. Now, I was interested not so much because of the game itself -
> when I do flight sims, I want my planes to have guns! - but because it
> was developed by Looking Glass, the guys behind the beloved Ultima
> Underworld, Terra Nova, and System Shock. It didn't hurt that the
> first Flight Unlimited game was visually astounding - head and
> shoulders above its rivals, like Microsoft's venerable Flight
> Simulator series. 
>
> But what caught my eye in the article was the claim - a boast, almost
> - that the developers intended to render every building on the map (a
> simulated San Francisco) of ten stories or more. This was, for the
> time, an astounding feat; with most flight simulators of the time,
> "cities" were rendered as only three or four of the tallest buildings,
> with muddy flat ground textures representing everything else. But
> Looking Glass was hoping to not only render the map based on
> "real-world elevation data" and "satellite photography" but populate
> it with potentially hundreds if not thousands of structures? It was
> mind-blowing.
>
I used to have a demo of Flight Unlimited. You could only fly the
glider. I used to play it quite a lot, it was relaxing flying around
from vortex to vortex. I remember being pretty wowed by the terrain,
which had a big photographic texture.

I'm playing Dishonored 1 DLC at the moment, having recently finished
Dishonored 2. After about 10 minutes in the game the graphics feel no
different to Dishonored 2, because I adapt to the shortcomings. Which
is to say that we really don't need rendering of whole cities to have
fun. What we need is good tight mechanics.

-- 
-Toby
Add the word afiduluminag to the subject to circumvent my email filters.

On Mon, 17 Jul 2017 13:38:34 +0100, Toby Newman <goo...@asktoby.com>
wrote:


>I used to have a demo of Flight Unlimited. You could only fly the
>glider. I used to play it quite a lot, it was relaxing flying around
>from vortex to vortex. I remember being pretty wowed by the terrain,
>which had a big photographic texture.

The real innovations of Flight Unlimited were not actually its terrain
and graphics, although those are the features that attracted me most.
Rather, it was that the flight-engine used (or they said it used)
fluid dynamics to map the flow of air over the wings, thus supposedly
creating more realistic flight dynamics.  While the graphics were
quite advanced for their time, they were merely an evolutionary step
from what had come before; the switch to the new physics engine was
far more revolutionary. But - having learned to fly from "flight sims"
like F-15 Eagle or LHX Attack Chopper, the subtle nuances between the
different flight engines quite escaped me and I paid it all no
nevermind.


>I'm playing Dishonored 1 DLC at the moment, having recently finished
>Dishonored 2. After about 10 minutes in the game the graphics feel no
>different to Dishonored 2, because I adapt to the shortcomings. Which
>is to say that we really don't need rendering of whole cities to have
>fun. What we need is good tight mechanics.


Graphics are important, but it's often less the technical aspects of
the graphics - number of polygons, pixel resolution/density, framerate
- and more the artistic usage of what's available. A game like, say,
Full Throttle (1995) still looks gorgeous today, despite being
flatly-lit sprite-based 256-color VGA that is probably running at 10
fps.  Too often developers just assume that creating a game with the
latest engine is enough, but without decent artistic style the game
feels shoddy. 

In many ways, the limitations of the older technologies inspired
developers to new heights. Unfortunately, a lot of indie developers
just assume that if they utilize retro-graphics, they will recapture
that same magic without understanding it was more than just using
320x240 art that made those games great. 

In some ways I regret the amazing advances in graphics over the past
twenty years; the focus on pixel-density, huge numbers of polygons,
high-res textures, real-time lighting, etc. seemed like such a
distraction from proper artistry, world-building and focus on
gameplay. It's only in the last four or five years - as GPU tech
finally seems to be plateauing - that developers are starting to focus
on these basics again rather than chasing framerates and the latest
technical buzzwords. 

On Mon, 17 Jul 2017 13:38:34 +0100, Toby Newman <goo...@asktoby.com>
wrote:

>Which is to say that we really don't need rendering of whole cities to have
>fun. What we need is good tight mechanics.

I couldn't agree more -- sloppy mechanics ruin a game.  

When I see game producers touting some new whiz-bang technical
achievement, its usually an indication to me that they are spending
too much time and resources on making sure their "on paper" promises
are fulfilled, and not enough making sure the game is fun.

It seems funny to imagine anything other than object-oriented software
development today, but a few decades ago object-orientation was the
new kid on the block, and not everyone understood it, much less
embraced it yet.  I worked on a project where my colleague was
dead-set on one goal -- producing the first object-oriented
application ever produced by that particular company.  He didn't seem
to care if it met the needs of the users, was easy to use, performed
well, or even if it worked at all.  He cared about the bragging rights
of putting a flag on the ground and saying our team was there first.

This same sort of thinking is a big problem in gaming today, these
people spend so much time trying to create hype about the next
greatest technology feature that they often forget to make sure the
game is fun to play before shipping.

Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

<snip>
>In many ways, the limitations of the older technologies inspired
>developers to new heights. Unfortunately, a lot of indie developers
>just assume that if they utilize retro-graphics, they will recapture
>that same magic without understanding it was more than just using
>320x240 art that made those games great. 

What they forget was that those games in their day weren't minimalist
retro games, they were the State of the Art, often pushing the limits of
what was possible.  It just wasn't possible to do better graphics back
then so they had to push in other areas.

>In some ways I regret the amazing advances in graphics over the past
>twenty years; the focus on pixel-density, huge numbers of polygons,
>high-res textures, real-time lighting, etc. seemed like such a
>distraction from proper artistry, world-building and focus on
>gameplay. It's only in the last four or five years - as GPU tech
>finally seems to be plateauing - that developers are starting to focus
>on these basics again rather than chasing framerates and the latest
>technical buzzwords. 

While it had it's issues from the generated terrain, Daggerfall had so
many other things that games like Skyrim are sorely lacking.

Skyrim *looked* much better, but in pretty much every other regard is so
much less.
Gimped item creator
No spell creator
Default spells a *tiny* amount on the previous games - seriously,
freezing northern waters and they don't have a water walking spell
available?
No stats/skill like in the earlier games
No letters of credit but back to the old "gold weighs nothing" nonsense
Ownership of a house or two IF and only if you'd done favors for the
locals vs there's houses for sale that you can buy from the bank if you
have the cash.
No ship ownership despite being on the coast.
And of course Skyrim also had a tiny map and the bane of all such small
map games, invisible walls to stop you going out.
Multiple ways of doing things (thieves pick locks, mages use a spell and
warrior types smash open locks and doors) vs Skyrim's "everybody knows
how to pick locks" and chests and doors are utterly immune to damage.


Now if someone could come up with some better procedural generation
algorithms to generate a _country_ sized county that wasn't flat nor
boring, then maybe we could get back to having all those other features
back and good graphics too.

Instead they're probably going to keep focusing on graphics and trying
to make decent VR/3D stuff while the games get as shallow as a puddle.

And they'll sell since the current generation of gamers never
experienced the oceans of depth older games had and are used to puddles.

They can't miss what they've never had and they've been trained to
expect games they can rush through and never play again (those that even
play at all instead of watching someone else play via a video. I really
don't understand the attraction in that.)

They don't expect depth or replay value or a radically different
experience with a different class, they expect everything to be balanced
and equal because they also expect it to be online and have pvp and thus
all classes have to be equal.

With them being the majority of gamers (if not now, they will be as
older gamers stop playing and/or die off) there's not much incentive for
the beancounters to focus on anything but shallow generic utterly
forgettable RPGs and online arenas, since their audience expects that
and will buy it as long as the graphics are amazing and they're told
it's trendy via some social media campaign.

Xocyll
-- 
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of 
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably, 
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So 
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr 

On 2017-07-17, Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Resident Evil 6

Somehow this wasn't claimed yet so thank you!

-- 
-Toby
Add the word afiduluminag to the subject to circumvent my email filters.

On Tue, 18 Jul 2017 17:58:14 +0100, Toby Newman <goo...@asktoby.com>
wrote:

>On 2017-07-17, Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Resident Evil 6
>
>Somehow this wasn't claimed yet so thank you!

Enjoy!

It isn't the best of the series but it does give you value for your
money (even moreso if you get it for free ;-). It has three (Four?
Five? Six? I forget) intertwining campaigns, each with their own
flavor. Graphics are okay and gameplay is... well, it's Resident Evil
so don't expect too much and you'll be fine. It's a bit heavy on
quick-time events but the running-n-gunning is solid enough. Story is
absolute nonsense and for a "horror game" it's about as terrifying as
an animated Batman TV show but it wasn't a game I hated. Apparently
Resident Evil purists hated it, but I thought it was better than 1, 4
and 5 (the only resident evil games I've played. 4 gets a lot of love
from fans, but I /hated/ its controls - and QTEs - and its story was
even stupider than 6).

Have fun ;-)

Nice look back.  I played Sierra's Helo(?) and loved flying around and 
in-between buildings, very cool.  A demo for one of the Terminator Future 
Shock games was amazing in that I could walk around a building, and then 
*open the door and go inside* almost seamlessly:  Wow!

Nice bonus at the end :)  I actually like RE6 as a decent 3rdp cover 
shooter, and intertwining campaigns always get a big thumbs-up from me:  Not 
only does it give both the devs & players extra value for the money -- from 
reusing game assets -- but it indicates extra attention has gone into the 
writing.  The first one that comes to mind is I guess the 3d AVP game, and 
besides RE6 I'm drawing a blank on others.

rms 

Spalls Hurgenson  <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>These days we have (almost) achieved this goal, so these fevered
>imaginings seem almost prescient to modern eyes. Flying across Los
>Santos in Grand Theft Auto V and it's difficult to believe we
>/haven't/ achieved this promised level of fidelity. Of course, most of
>the buildings are empty shells and the AI fades in and in an
>existential bubble around the protagonist, but it's a beautiful
>illusion. Of course, in 1996 I would believed we would have achieved
>all this by 2005...

Well, it was achieved by then.  Grand Theft Auto III did all that in 2001,
except with lower detail textures and models.  In 1996 the graphics
in GTA 3 would've looked amazing, and probably would have been called
"photorealistic" by most people.  You don't hear that term being used
much used more, as it's become obvious what looks like we've almost
achieved in the latest AAA game is in fact a moving target.  In 1996 in
that moving target was extreamly low by today's standards.  If you were
shown GTA 3 in 1996 you'd be saying similar things to how you described
GTA V above.

>[...] Similarly, I completely missed out on the
>potential of 3D-rendering, a technology still in its infancy at the
>time (seriously, at the time 3D graphics cards were a lot like VR tech
>is today; nifty graphics but who knows if they were going to really
>catch on?). It was - I thought - the ever increasing CPU speeds that
>were going to create this gaming revolution, and while fast CPUs can
>structure detailed worlds, they aren't that great at pushing pixels.

Well, the difference between 3D graphics cards in 1996 and VR tech today,
is that in the former case the demand was clearly there.  3D graphics
itself clearly wasn't a fad, it was everywhere.  Games that weren't 3D
were already starting to look primitive. (Consider 1995's Stonekeep,
a dungeon crawler in the style Wizardry an Bard's Tale, but with much
better graphics.  Graphically it was the pinnacle MS-DOS era "2D" dungeon
crawlers, but in 1995 it looked dated compared to Ultima Underworld.)

The question was whether or not 3D hardware accelerators would be able
to meet that demand, if they could out perform CPUs enough to make them
worthwhile.  If you were familiar enough with the technology of the time,
like the 1995 graphics chip in the original PlayStation and 3dfx's Voodoo
chip used in arcade games in 1996 (but not in PCs until the end of 1996),
then you'd know that they had a huge advantage over CPU rendering.
Most PC gamers though would have to make something of leap of faith to
say that 3D acceleration was the future, although not anywhere near as
much as someone saying VR is future today.

>So, yeah; my predictions were a bit off target. Then again, so were
>pretty much everyone's in 1996. 

I was pretty good at making predictions.  I remember saying that PC games
were a couple of years away from being regularly released on CD-ROM
and then later saying the same thing about PC games and DVD-ROMs.
It was all about the price of the optical drives.  They had to get
into the $100-$200 range before they'd be standard in all new PCs and
it wouldn't until then that market penatration would be high enough for
PC game publishers to make the switch.

>But I don't make predictions about where gaming technology is headed
>anymore.

There's much less need to these days.  Computer technology is becoming
more like airplane technology, its getting close to its limits.
Modern commercial airplanes all cruise at the around same speed, about
Mach 0.85, because they can't be made to go faster without becoming a
lot less efficient.  CPU speeds have already hit a wall around 4GHz,
and even Intel has had to admit Moore's Law has slowed down.  We're not
too far away from the point were it won't be possible to add more gates
in order to squeak out 5% IPC (instructions per cycle) gains or put more
cores on the same die that most software can't effectively use anyways.
3D accelerators.

About the only computer technology that's still scaling like it used
to is 3D graphic accelerators.  That's partly because they're behind
CPU techology (eg. NVIDIA only started making 14 nm chips in October
2016, while Intel first 14 nm CPU was released in August 2015), but
also because they do actually benefit by craming ever more cores into
the the same die.  However even that benefit isn't as big as it appears
on paper because games already have trouble making full use of the GPU
resources.  (Games that cause video cards to overheat during their menus
but not during the actual game demonstrate this problem.  The menus are
simple enough that the GPU can reach almost 100% utilization and stay
there. During game play average utilization is significantly lower,
so the card doesn't get as hot.)

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
 db  //	  

On 2017-07-19, Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Enjoy!
>
> It isn't the best of the series but it does give you value for your
> money (even moreso if you get it for free ;-). It has three (Four?
> Five? Six? I forget) intertwining campaigns, each with their own
> flavor. Graphics are okay and gameplay is... well, it's Resident Evil
> so don't expect too much and you'll be fine. It's a bit heavy on
> quick-time events but the running-n-gunning is solid enough. Story is
> absolute nonsense and for a "horror game" it's about as terrifying as
> an animated Batman TV show but it wasn't a game I hated. Apparently
> Resident Evil purists hated it, but I thought it was better than 1, 4
> and 5 (the only resident evil games I've played. 4 gets a lot of love
> from fans, but I /hated/ its controls - and QTEs - and its story was
> even stupider than 6).

I played Resi 4 on Wii and the controls on that system were great. It
was a bit scary for me but I struggled on through and am glad I did.

Resi 5 I played on 360 in co-op. Co-op defuses the scares and the game
was pretty good, although I'm never really a big fan of 3rd person
games.

I watched a playthrough of Resi 7 on Youtube because it was obvious to
me that I would never have the guts to play it myself!

-- 
-Toby
Add the word afiduluminag to the subject to circumvent my email filters.

On 7/16/2017 6:09 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:


> But I don't make predictions about where gaming technology is headed
> anymore.
Aw, but that's fun.

Well back sometime in the 90's after the Battletech arcade games came 
out I had a vision of a VR like enclosed space where you would actually 
run and fight with VR swords and cast spells, and drive mechs, etc.  the 
reality isn't here, that's for sure.  After experiencing the fright of 
VR heights am disappointed it's not for me even if it were.

I am rather awed by The Crew's rendition of USA.  It's got enough of 
each of the major cities to feel like a bit of being there, obviously 
it's much smaller as you can drive across the country in a couple hours 
at 120mph, but it's very nice to just drive around those places.

I'm awed by GTA V too, mostly when flying, but it's a much smaller map 
and feels very cramped by comparison, on the other hand I can actually 
get out of the car.

Where will we be going in the future?  I don't know, there was that 
whole augmented reality thing (pokeman) that seemed like it was big last 
year, but I haven't heard a peep about anymore.  VR?  Oculous said it's 
not selling enough to keep on, I think it's still too far out with too 
many problems, it hasn't gone beyond toy to gaming yet.  Sadly some days 
I think we're going toward pull the bandit arm and hope for a pellet of 
the freemium phone app crap, but that seems to be being clamped down on. 
I personally do enjoy quite a few of the retro games, but the most 
enjoyment is still from the AAA games.  Maybe someday we'll get to a 
Holodeck where you can run around and apparently swing a sword at a 
dragon, fence with a dark knight etc. but it still seems like at least 
20 years or more off.  Probably we'll just be doing the same old Doom 
with yet more updated graphics and larger play areas.

- Justisaur

>VR?  Oculous said it's not selling enough to keep on, I think it's still 
>too far out with too many problems, it hasn't gone beyond toy to gaming 
>yet.

    It's very early days. 
https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-multiple-vr-titles-made-1m-oculus-store-alone/
Both Gabe, in a companion article, and the Oculus rep are at least saying 
they are pleased with how VR is developing.  In a couple years, high-res 
displays will start appearing and it will be breathtaking.

rms 

On 7/21/2017 2:54 PM, Justisaur wrote:
> On 7/16/2017 6:09 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> 
> 
>> But I don't make predictions about where gaming technology is headed
>> anymore.
> Aw, but that's fun.
> 
> Well back sometime in the 90's after the Battletech arcade games came 
> out I had a vision of a VR like enclosed space where you would actually 
> run and fight with VR swords and cast spells, and drive mechs, etc.  the 
> reality isn't here, that's for sure.  After experiencing the fright of 
> VR heights am disappointed it's not for me even if it were.
> 
> I am rather awed by The Crew's rendition of USA.  It's got enough of 
> each of the major cities to feel like a bit of being there, obviously 
> it's much smaller as you can drive across the country in a couple hours 
> at 120mph, but it's very nice to just drive around those places.
> 
> I'm awed by GTA V too, mostly when flying, but it's a much smaller map 
> and feels very cramped by comparison, on the other hand I can actually 
> get out of the car.
> 
> Where will we be going in the future?  I don't know, there was that 
> whole augmented reality thing (pokeman) that seemed like it was big last 
> year, but I haven't heard a peep about anymore.  VR?  Oculous said it's 
> not selling enough to keep on, I think it's still too far out with too 
> many problems, it hasn't gone beyond toy to gaming yet.  Sadly some days 
> I think we're going toward pull the bandit arm and hope for a pellet of 
> the freemium phone app crap, but that seems to be being clamped down on. 
> I personally do enjoy quite a few of the retro games, but the most 
> enjoyment is still from the AAA games.  Maybe someday we'll get to a 
> Holodeck where you can run around and apparently swing a sword at a 
> dragon, fence with a dark knight etc. but it still seems like at least 
> 20 years or more off.  Probably we'll just be doing the same old Doom 
> with yet more updated graphics and larger play areas.
> 
Speaking of Pokemon Go, here may be a few reasons why you haven't heard 
anything about it recently.  :D

Can I At Least Catch Catch Pikachu First?

Thanks to Bozo News Hawk James Gassaway for sending in today’s report. 
The Pokemon Go app has only been around for a couple of weeks and it’s 
now caught a bozo in addition to Pokemon. From Milford, Michigan, comes 
the story of bozo William Watkins who was playing the game when it led 
him to a flagpole outside the Milford Police Department building. No 
problem there, except for one small thing. Our bozo was wanted on an 
outstanding warrant and several of the cops recognized him as he was 
hanging around outside the building. He never got the catch that 
Pokemon. He was arrested on the spot.

~~~~~~
Hey, Look That Pokemon Is On Top of That Police Car!

The way things are going, we may have to develop a completely separate 
category for Pokemon Go bozos. Bozo News Hawk Glen Snow sent this one in 
from Baltimore, Maryland. It seems our bozo was intently playing his 
game and searching for the elusive Pokemon, all while driving his car. 
And the worst possible thing happened at the worst possible moment. He 
crashed his car…into a parked police cruiser. Fortunately, the cops 
weren’t in the vehicle at the time and no one was injured. The cops were 
nice about the whole thing. No report on whether the Pokemon was caught.

~~~~~~~
Hey, While You’re Up Here, Can You Grab the Cat, Too

Our list of Bozo Pokemon Go players on parade continues today with this 
story from East Greenwich Township, New Jersey. The local Fire and 
Rescue crew received a call asking for help getting someone down from a 
tree. Yes, that is “someone”, not “something” as in the usual trapped 
cat. When they arrived, they found a woman, smartphone in hand, stuck in 
the tree. Her bozo excuse…she was chasing a rogue Pokemon and climbed up 
the tree in an effort to catch it, only to find herself unable to get 
down. The rescue team retrieved her. No word on the fate of the Pokemon.

~~~~~~~~
All of these were from one week in July 2016 on the Bozo Criminal of the 
Day.  http://www.electricferret.com/bozo/archive/date/2016/07/


-- 
Inquiring minds want to know while minds with a self-preservation 
instinct are running screaming.

Justisaur <just...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the entrails of
the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>Where will we be going in the future?  I don't know, there was that 
>whole augmented reality thing (pokeman) that seemed like it was big last 
>year, but I haven't heard a peep about anymore.  

Well after the fiascos of people being robbed via the game and the
deaths and murders they probably don't want any publicity.

Hey augmented reality, it's new, it's trendy, it can get you robbed,
raped, killed or murdered, sign up NOW!

Wow, google turned up this site  http://pokemongodeathtracker.com/
14 deaths 55 injuries

Yeah, pretty sure the makers just wish no one ever mentions it again.

Xocyll
-- 
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of 
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably, 
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So 
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr 

On 7/22/2017 4:48 AM, Xocyll wrote:
> Justisaur <just...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the entrails of
> the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:
> 
>> Where will we be going in the future?  I don't know, there was that
>> whole augmented reality thing (pokeman) that seemed like it was big last
>> year, but I haven't heard a peep about anymore.
> 
> Well after the fiascos of people being robbed via the game and the
> deaths and murders they probably don't want any publicity.
> 
> Hey augmented reality, it's new, it's trendy, it can get you robbed,
> raped, killed or murdered, sign up NOW!
> 
> Wow, google turned up this site  http://pokemongodeathtracker.com/
> 14 deaths 55 injuries
> 
> Yeah, pretty sure the makers just wish no one ever mentions it again.
> 
I just saw a new online ad for it yesterday.


-- 
Inquiring minds want to know while minds with a self-preservation 
instinct are running screaming.

Justisaur  <just...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I am rather awed by The Crew's rendition of USA.  It's got enough of 
>each of the major cities to feel like a bit of being there, obviously 
>it's much smaller as you can drive across the country in a couple hours 
>at 120mph, but it's very nice to just drive around those places.

Yah, it does a pretty good job of representing the USA, better than I
would have expected.

>Where will we be going in the future?  I don't know, there was that 
>whole augmented reality thing (pokeman) that seemed like it was big last 
>year, but I haven't heard a peep about anymore.

I don't know about augmented reality in general, but Pokemon Go is
still pretty big.  It's long past its over hyped stage, so it's no
longer making headlines any more, but I still hear things about it.
The latest news story was fairly widely reported.  They had server
problems at some Pokemon Go convention and had to issue refunds.

>VR?  Oculous said it's 
>not selling enough to keep on, I think it's still too far out with too 
>many problems, it hasn't gone beyond toy to gaming yet.

The only thing that makes me think that virtual reality has a future is
the fact that the constant stream of new VR-only games being released
on Steam hasn't stopped.  I mean if all these people are betting their
own money like this on VR, then there must be something to it, right?
More likely though is this is just going to be further evidence supporting
something I've long suspected to be true: the games industry as a whole
destroys more wealth than it creates.

>Maybe someday we'll get to a 
>Holodeck where you can run around and apparently swing a sword at a 
>dragon, fence with a dark knight etc. but it still seems like at least 
>20 years or more off.

Eh.. sounds exhausting.  Like all those motion controlled Wii games that
having you waving your arms all around but worse.

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
 db  //	  

On Sun, 23 Jul 2017 23:23:20 +0000 (UTC), in
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, Ross Ridge wrote: 

>More likely though is this is just going to be further evidence supporting
>something I've long suspected to be true: the games industry as a whole
>destroys more wealth than it creates.

Well, they're always reinvesting profits into the next new shiny, and
eventually the next new shiny will fail, it is speculation after all, so
the money gets thrown into the fire at some point.

We frequently criticize the games industry for being too conservative and
not embracing innovation in gameplay and game concepts. The antidote to
what you're describing is more conservatism in that arena.

I'll take reinvestment in new shiny any day, but there's a balance to be
struck. Hopefully they'll find it and we'll still get a variety of games
to play.

I have little interest in VR, though. Anecdotally, which is definitely
not evidence, VR is a non-starter with most everyone I know. Too much
uncanny valley I think.

-- 
Zag

No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had
spent more time alone with my computer.' ~Dan(i) Bunten

Ross Ridge wrote: 
>More likely though is this is just going to be further evidence supporting
>something I've long suspected to be true: the games industry as a whole
>destroys more wealth than it creates.

Zaghadka  <zagh...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Well, they're always reinvesting profits into the next new shiny, and
>eventually the next new shiny will fail, it is speculation after all, so
>the money gets thrown into the fire at some point.

If it were all just companies like that in the game industry then
I might be inclined to believe that the industry is (somehow) a net
creator of wealth.  It's all the wannabe game development companies
making games that will never make a profit that has me thinking that
wealth is being destroyed overall.  In particular all the VR games on
Steam are pursuing an extreamly small slice of the pie.  According to
the Steam Hardware Survey only about 0.38% of users have a VR headset.
More people are using MacOS (2.95%), Linux (0.72%) and Windows XP (0.76%).
More people have 1024x768 monitors (1.27%) and 33.6 Kbps modems (1.64%).

These aren't games that can get away with cheap 2D pixel art either, so
they're not cheapest of games to make.  It's hard to see how any VR game
can be making any money, whether professionally produced or some cheap
shovelware that somehow manages to go viral.  Maybe the PlayStation VR
(with over 1 million sold) is allowing a few of the most successful VR
games to make a profit, but otherwise VR just seems to be a dark hole
people are throwing their money into.

>We frequently criticize the games industry for being too conservative and
>not embracing innovation in gameplay and game concepts. The antidote to
>what you're describing is more conservatism in that arena.

Well, the benefit to all these wannabe game developers is that you do
get a lot more variety.   If you want different than you can find all
sort of different from small indie developers.  Of course it's really
hard to tell the good from the bad.  Sometimes a good game will get
noticed and become popular, but there must be lots of good indie games
not getting any attention.  Even only 1% of all indie games spewing out
on Steam these days qualify as good, that's still one every week or two.

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
 db  //	  

On 7/24/2017 12:13 PM, Ross Ridge wrote:
> Ross Ridge wrote:
>> More likely though is this is just going to be further evidence supporting
>> something I've long suspected to be true: the games industry as a whole
>> destroys more wealth than it creates.
> 
> Zaghadka  <zagh...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Well, they're always reinvesting profits into the next new shiny, and
>> eventually the next new shiny will fail, it is speculation after all, so
>> the money gets thrown into the fire at some point.
> 
> If it were all just companies like that in the game industry then
> I might be inclined to believe that the industry is (somehow) a net
> creator of wealth.  It's all the wannabe game development companies
> making games that will never make a profit that has me thinking that
> wealth is being destroyed overall.  

I'm no economist, but I'm not sure how in the truest sense of the phrase 
games could create wealth.  They're consumer items.  No one *needs* 
games to live, there's no actual anything created.  At best it's moving 
wealth created by something else to the makers (or corporate overlords 
of the makers) of the games.

Sure there may be some fringe uses where something is actually useful in 
training or tangentially by processes developed, but it's not the main 
use.  There may also be some prevention of other forms of destruction, 
such as rudderless young men playing games instead of starting gangs, or 
causing destruction of property for fun.  I'd actually rate that pretty 
high on games value, but other than crime rates dropping I don't have 
any specific statistics, which may or may not be related (I've read some 
stories that way, and others that indicate the elimination of lead 
contaminants may be responsible.)

Of course the same goes for any other entertainment; music, movies, tv, 
written fiction, which I'd imagine dwarfs games.  Then there's the whole 
philosophical question of what value is.  But it doesn't directly put 
any food on anyone's table, give them shelter, or cure their ailments 
(again with possible rare exceptions on the ailments.)

- Justisaur

Justisaur  <just...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I'm no economist, but I'm not sure how in the truest sense of the phrase 
>games could create wealth.  They're consumer items.  No one *needs* 
>games to live, there's no actual anything created.  At best it's moving 
>wealth created by something else to the makers (or corporate overlords 
>of the makers) of the games.

Weath is created simply through things like one person trading something
they don't want for something they do want with someone else who is doing
the same thing.  Both parties end up being richer because they now have
something they value more than the thing they traded away.

When someone invests money in a developing game they're giving up
something of value and hoping to get something of greater value in return.
So for example when an investor spends $250,000 on wages, renting an
office and other expenses, they're hoping the result will be a game that
will generate more than $250,000 in sales.  If so then the game presumably
creates wealth.  The investor has more than the original $250,000 invested
while the people who bought the game presumably got something they valued
at least as much as what they spent. (Obviously they might end up hating
the game and regretting purchasing it, but usually that's not the case.)
If the game doesn't make $250,000 though wealth is destroyed.

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
 db  //