Yahtzee and the next generation of consoles

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Count Arioch the 28th
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

If 512 ram is so restrictive then why does my xbox play games that my $1200 laptop can't when it has 8gb? You harp on the ram when from my experience it isn't an issue.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:If 512 ram is so restrictive then why does my xbox play games that my $1200 laptop can't when it has 8gb? You harp on the ram when from my experience it isn't an issue.
Well, most obviously: because CPU's and GPU's are also things that exist, and having lots of RAM won't make up for weaknesses there.

But also, that 512 MB of RAM on the x-box is shared between the CPU and the GPU. Your GPU doesn't have direct access to your 8 GB of RAM, and has its own RAM for graphics processing instead.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

And yet the Xbox can play Borderlands 2 without graphical lag to the point of being unplayable while my computer cannot. I'm thinking the "512 megs of ram" issues is being overstated.

Note, I am aware that having a godlike computer means you can play godlike games. I am perfectly okay with rich people having nice things; I don't complain that a lamborghini diablo is a better car than my pontiac bonneville.

Note that as long as gaming rigs are so expensive, I'm going to see a computer as a tool first and a device to play games second. It lets me do work-related stuff without an issue, it lets me view netflix and pornography without an issue, and it lets me communicate with my bros all around the world.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Count wrote:And yet the Xbox can play Borderlands 2 without graphical lag to the point of being unplayable while my computer cannot. I'm thinking the "512 megs of ram" issues is being overstated.
That 8 GB of RAM you're talking about has almost nothing to do with the overall process of running Borderlands 2 and is not the same thing as the RAM on the X-Box 360. It's an apples and oranges comparison. The reason your computer can't run Borderlands 2 is because either your GPU or CPU are slow.

As for the expense of gaming rigs, the cost of a desktop which will run basically everything out now and for the foreseeable future is ~1200-1400 bucks from scratch, usually less if you're willing to self-assemble. Given that you are going to own a computer either way because this is 2013, and the computer itself will cost 400-600 dollars, buying an up-to-date gaming rig is comparable to buying a newly released console plus a personal computer.

Yeah, PC gaming is more expensive (especially if you're the type of person who'd wait for consoles to drop in price before buying a game, because you can't really do that with PC rigs and expect it to work out as well), but not nearly as expensive as you make it sound. Your mistake is probably that you bought a laptop for gaming. Laptops are nice, but you'll pay several hundred dollars more for an overall weaker product, and costs explode even more steeply above that. My 3 or 4-year-old desktop cost around 1300 bucks, I think, and it runs Borderlands 2 fine.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

I bought a laptop so I could do all the things I mentioned that my computer does well. Maybe this is a thought process that makes sense to me and no one else (no bile there, that just applies to a lot of things I think), but the whole point was I didn't consider computers to be primarly a gaming platform. I also don't consider my phone a primary gaming platform, it's a phone first that also plays some games. My computer is something that is a tool first and something to play games with second.

If I want to buy something that plays games, I'll probably break down and finally buy a PS3 and some games before a gaming computer. (A gaming computer is on the list, but I have other priorities now that I have money coming in).
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Post by Hadanelith »

Never forget that even while gaming, your laptop's RAM and CPU (and for that matter, GPU) are all also servicing your OS. This is a fairly serious drain on your resources for a non-gaming rig. When a console is running a game, the OS is more or less shut off. Completely. The only thing still active is the little widget listening for you to press the Xbox of PS button, so it can bring up a menu. Notice that it takes a moment of loading to actually do anything from that menu - it has to suspend the game and go load OS stuff. Windows...doesn't work that way. At all. Windows and all of your background processes just sit there, eating computrons. And the more stuff you have installed, the more resources you are probably using in the background, which just makes your games run slower. Solution? Crack open task manager (ctrl + shift + escape) and start killing background programs. Just do so very carefully. Google any process you don't know about. There are plenty of ways to make your OS blow itself up, necessitating a reboot, so be cautious.
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Post by MisterDee »

Another small detail to consider:

The console version of a game can be optimized to hell and back, because you know the entire hardware setup. Plus, there's a licensing authority that will enforce a low bug-count, don't-lag-too-much requirement.

So, it's easier to make a console game run well, and a lot of incentive to do so.

The PC version has to be optimized for some sort of middle-ground, mythical "average setup" that nobody actually has. Between the squorvillions of various GPUs (and dual-GPUs), CPUs, OS (patched or not, etc.)... It's expensive as fuck, and that's all to sell the games to a fraction of the number of people who'll buy it on a console.

So game companies make a token effort, try the game on a dozen different-but-common rigs or so, and call it a day if there's nothing too egregious.
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Post by Parthenon »

I absolutely love the fact that I can put a disc in a console and be playing almost immediately. No worries about whether it will work, or whether I need to mess about with settings or if some changes I made so that a previous game will work need to be changed back.

As well as that, if I have a computer I need to use it for work. I already have the internet to drain productivity, if I install some good games on it I'll get nothing done.

Theres also the fact that it is a lot easier to share a console for multiple people playing on it. If you use a PC then you either use the Guest account which is a huge fucking hassle for permissions, or if someone else wants to play you have to log out, quitting everything else you're doing, and log back on as another user. And leaving it on your account is a major idiotic move because depending on who else is around every single account you have will be defaced starting with your facebook. Whereas a console you just pass the control pad over and depending on the console swap user which is a lot easier.

I mean, for fighting games like Soul Calibur me and my brothers all started using the same account because then we could store our creations and fight each other, and we could help each other unlock all the characters and have more fun. Trying to do that with a PC would be a lot harder to almost impossible.

So for all these reasons I think the console will have a place for a long time.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:And yet the Xbox can play Borderlands 2 without graphical lag to the point of being unplayable while my computer cannot. I'm thinking the "512 megs of ram" issues is being overstated.

Note, I am aware that having a godlike computer means you can play godlike games. I am perfectly okay with rich people having nice things; I don't complain that a lamborghini diablo is a better car than my pontiac bonneville.

Note that as long as gaming rigs are so expensive, I'm going to see a computer as a tool first and a device to play games second. It lets me do work-related stuff without an issue, it lets me view netflix and pornography without an issue, and it lets me communicate with my bros all around the world.
Yes, it can, at 30 fps (most of the time) with major texture fade-in and absolutely no overhead other than xbox OS and with 100% homogenous hardware across the platform.

It also has most of the particle effects turned off, most of the lighting effects turned off, in fact most of the eye candy *period* turned off.

So why doesn't your 8 gigs of memory make much difference?

Well, partially because nobody's programming to make use of more than 4 gigs of memory (including your video memory). You need 64 bit executable and programming to make use of it. Some 32 bit games uses hacks to enable expanded memory (Skyrim IIRC does). So your 1.5 gig video card and Windows 7 which requires a gig or two of memory to simply *breathe* now has around 512 megs of system memory to do what you need to do unless something loads up into the 64-bit memory space opened up.

Same thing with multi-core processors. For the longest time nobody was writing multi-threaded games to make use of all the cores. It's hard shit. That's starting to change now.

We'll see memory make a bigger difference, a much bigger difference, in this next generation of consoles. Why? Because PS4 at the very least is hosting 8 gigs of memory, which will *require* a 64-bit architecture in order to use it. Xbox I'm sure will follow suit. Once that happens, you'll see more games open up to using all the memory on your computer.

And really, at launch the PS3 was 700 bucks and people bought it. For 800 bucks I can build a *really* good gaming computer that will last a few years. I bought my gaming laptop 2 years ago for 1200 dollars and it still eats anything I throw at it. I can't max out the details for cutting edge stuff but it still smokes pretty much everything.

That, combined with the huge library of generally cheaper games (I bought the new Tomb Raider for 20 bucks new today, you can't even find it used for that cheap for consoles), and the maturity of drivers and the relative homogeneity these days of PC builds, and you have a powerful gaming solution.

Hell even my virtual network server (quad core i-7, 32 gigs of memory, TB or three of hard drive space) I built from chrome up for 600 dollars. If I put a good, high end video card for say 300 bucks in there I'd be screaming. Instead I'm running half a dozen server boxes and a couple of workstations virtually.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

So we are in agreement: RAM doesn't mean shit and the "512 megs of RAM LOL!" argument is shit.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:So we are in agreement: RAM doesn't mean shit and the "512 megs of RAM LOL!" argument is shit.
I'm pretty sure you're just sticking your ears in your fingers and going "LALALA FUCK YOU I'M BEING WRONG AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME," but one more shot I guess?

GPU's almost always have dedicated memory built into them. This has fuck all to do with your system memory (the 8 GB you're referring to). It's not unusual for a modern gaming PC to have 1 GB of dedicated memory on their GPU and 8 GB of system memory. Now, vista or later needs about 2 GB of ram in overhead if you're doing anything serious on it, and the information getting fed to the GPU dedicated memory does take up space on the system memory before it gets transferred over, so for simplicity's sake you can just pretend it uses up an equal amount of system RAM.

So if you're running windows 7 and have 4 GB of system ram and 1 GB of dedicated memory on your videocard, we can (simplification's sake) say you have 1 GB of system RAM free for whatever you need it to do and 1 GB of GPU memory. The X-Box 360 has a different architecture, such that it has 512 MB total shared between the system as a whole and the GPU. It also has 10 MB dedicatd on the GPU, but that's pretty negligible. At a naive half and half distribution (it isn't, but whatever), that's 1/4th the RAM of the PC available for performing any gaming-related tasks.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

No, you are trying to "win" and you perceive me as a less dangerous target than Kaelik, so you're picking apart what I'm saying even if you have to pull a completely unrelated argument out of thin ass to beat me. Since the argument is "RAM doesn't count as much as the anti-console people claim" and "PC games are a crap-shoot as far as whether it works in an actual computer system because that's such a huge target it's not likely to hit yours by sheer probability" rather than "DSMatticus knows more about computers than Count Arioch", I don't know why you're wasting your time continuing to prove that you know more about computers than I do. Good for you?
Last edited by Count Arioch the 28th on Sun Apr 28, 2013 11:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

The fact that PCs only dedicate like a quarter of their RAM to a running game is what allows me to type this without quitting out of FTL, Crusader kings 2, or Dominions 3. Chrome is an absolute beast of a memory hog and if you have a bunch of windows open (like I do now), it will gobble up all 512 megs of RAM by itself. FTL is eating up a little less than 300 megs by itself. Neither of those programs are graphics hogs, which would of course chew through a lot more memory. Dominions 3 is of course a memory-light title and uses only 130 megs of RAM, because it uses 32x32 pixel sprites. Now Crusader Kings 2 is much bulkier - it uses 1.25 gigs all by its lonesome. It's graphically prettier than Dominions 3, and the interpersonal relations mechanic it has going chews through RAM pretty extensively on top of that.

But the bottom line here is that RAM is essential for simultaneous processes of any kind. Consoles can't do games with a lot of moving parts like Crusader Kings or Dominions unless those games concede to use 8 bit sprites. And even then they can't really do AI diplomacy.

If you want to do strategy games on a modern console, it would have to be something like Dominions 3, which has bullshit graphics and no internal AI diplomacy worth mentioning. Otherwise there are simply too many moving parts for the poor little consoles to handle.

Now after that, I genuinely don't know what the point of moving forward in console power would be. At that point you've already got more than enough power that you can do photorealistic graphics and strategy games with a lot of moving parts that the computer AI is able to track and enact strategies around, so I seriously don't know what the PS5 would even do.

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Post by Koumei »

It will control your brain directly and make your decisions for you, a feat that the PS3 cannot curre- oh sweet, Disgaea D2 is out! Be right back!
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Post by Kaelik »

FrankTrollman wrote:If you want to do strategy games on a modern console,
Even if tomorrow there was a console as good as the best PC, still no one would ever play strategy games on it.

Consoles can do First person shooters, and platformers, and rpgs. But the moment they ask you to control an army to fight against an enemy army, the real bottleneck is shitty controls, not processing power.

Dynasty Warriors can be made on a console because you control one person, but Dominions never can (in a way anyone would ever play) because console controllers are basically not function at empire management.
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Post by Red_Rob »

FrankTrollman wrote:Now after that, I genuinely don't know what the point of moving forward in console power would be. At that point you've already got more than enough power that you can do photorealistic graphics and strategy games with a lot of moving parts that the computer AI is able to track and enact strategies around, so I seriously don't know what the PS5 would even do
And Bill Gates said that he couldn't imagine anyone needing more than 640k of memory. Well, he didn't, actually but the point is that if you exopand boundaries, people will find new things to do with it.
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Post by Kaelik »

Red_Rob wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:Now after that, I genuinely don't know what the point of moving forward in console power would be. At that point you've already got more than enough power that you can do photorealistic graphics and strategy games with a lot of moving parts that the computer AI is able to track and enact strategies around, so I seriously don't know what the PS5 would even do
And Bill Gates said that he couldn't imagine anyone needing more than 640k of memory. Well, he didn't, actually but the point is that if you exopand boundaries, people will find new things to do with it.
More RAM is always strictly better than less RAM, but it comes at a cost, and while I'm perfectly fine with always building bigger computers with more RAM, we can see that when you do that, the games you get are Crisis, not some kind of nebulous amazing game with better gameplay.

So we can continue to innovate on the PC, and we can upgrade consoles when you can point to eight games that couldn't be made for the Xbox that you would want to play on one.

And the longer we delay in making new consoles, the better the future ones will be.

Right now I have DayZ as the only such game in my head, in that it is a PC game that I would play on a console, even if I would prefer playing it on a PC, so people with shitty PCs should be able to get that.
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Post by Username17 »

Kaelik wrote: Dynasty Warriors can be made on a console because you control one person, but Dominions never can (in a way anyone would ever play) because console controllers are basically not function at empire management.

Except Dynasty Warriors can't be made on the console. There isn't enough RAM to track the battle, so the battle doesn't exist. Only areas in your immediate vicinity exist, and enemy troops around you just have spawn rates based on where you are and what milestones have been flagged. Dynasty Warriors can only be simulated on the console, and the simulation... varies in quality. If you run back and forth between two areas, the fact that the battle doesn't really progress and nothing is actually happening becomes kind of obvious.

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Post by Kaelik »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Kaelik wrote: Dynasty Warriors can be made on a console because you control one person, but Dominions never can (in a way anyone would ever play) because console controllers are basically not function at empire management.

Except Dynasty Warriors can't be made on the console. There isn't enough RAM to track the battle, so the battle doesn't exist. Only areas in your immediate vicinity exist, and enemy troops around you just have spawn rates based on where you are and what milestones have been flagged. Dynasty Warriors can only be simulated on the console, and the simulation... varies in quality. If you run back and forth between two areas, the fact that the battle doesn't really progress and nothing is actually happening becomes kind of obvious.

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That's fine, my point is that a more powerful console can let you play dynasty warriors, but no console, no matter how powerful, will ever let you play starcraft.

Because fundamentally console controls are not capable of dealing with that level of control. (Unless you are playing with a mouse and keyboard anyway, in which case you aren't really playing a console.)
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Post by shadzar »

Red_Rob wrote:And Bill Gates said that he couldn't imagine anyone needing more than 640k of memory. Well, he didn't, actually but the point is that if you exopand boundaries, people will find new things to do with it.
64k
65536 bytes

either way a gaming console is dedicated and devoted to one task, the games that are proprietary to it, a REAL computer is an all around machine, not made for ANY specific program ran on it, but just so it CAN run programs.

computers sometimes have GPUs with their own ram, but today on-board GPUs share system ram, OS requires X RAM, TSRs require Y RAM. only daughterboard/slot GPUs have their own RAM that can compare to a gaming console.

gaming consoles also have several banks of RAM, not just system ram. a gaming device is dedicated mostly to processing polygons, while a desktop is not.

also desktops may have stupid multi-thread and such low level processors, but a gaming console has seperate processors for sound, graphics controller, HID, etc and doesnt bother with threading or memory allocation as it is all dedicated to its single task.

also desktops and laptop have single GPUs, while gaming consoles have multiple.
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Post by Red_Rob »

shadzar wrote:either way a gaming console is dedicated and devoted to one task, the games that are proprietary to it
ORLY?

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So I guess the headers "bing", "social", "tv", "video", "music" and "apps" are just part of the wallpaper?

Consoles having been getting more varied for a while now. Basically the Xbox dashboard is what Microsoft has always wanted Windows to be - a closed proprietary computer that Microsoft have total control over.
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Kaelik wrote: That's fine, my point is that a more powerful console can let you play dynasty warriors, but no console, no matter how powerful, will ever let you play starcraft.

Because fundamentally console controls are not capable of dealing with that level of control. (Unless you are playing with a mouse and keyboard anyway, in which case you aren't really playing a console.)
It is empirically proven that you can play Starcraft on a console. I don't know that you should, but you can.

Apparently the new Sony console lacks backwards compatibility because they're moving away from the PS3 architecture, which used six specialized processors because fuck ported games. And since they broke the cardinal rule that all things shall come in powers of two, emulation is going to be a total bitch because 6/4 is not an integer.
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Post by Kaelik »

name_here wrote:It is empirically proven that you can play Starcraft on a console. I don't know that you should, but you can.
My entire point is that the controls are shit, not that it is impossible to make the game for consoles. Now ask anyone ever in the entire world who played starcraft on the 64 (well, no one did, but whatever) and on the PC, and they could tell you that a fucking nintendo controllers does not give you the same control.

Which is my actual point. Strategy games aren't on consoles because of controls, not hardware.
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Post by Vebyast »

I'll weigh in on artificial intelligence and memory consumption, since that's what I do. It's not the problem. Conceptually speaking, video game AIs are twenty to fifty years behind modern AI research. For some concrete examples, Halo used state machine technology from the 60's and Black & White used neural network tech from the 80's. Video games didn't start simulating worlds complicated enough to require high-level AI until well after the necessary AI was invented, and most of modern AI research is in fields that video games will take another twenty years to move into. As another example, my current work is in motion and manipulation planning, which are about how to move individual joints in a robot to accomplish basic tasks like walking or picking things without falling over. There's no reason to apply those to modern video games because you can just hard-code a walking animation or an open-the-door animation. It won't start being useful until games move into augmented reality, which is probably eight or ten years away.

Even given that, AI is generally far more processor-intensive than memory-intensive; there just aren't very many space-time tradeoffs to be had in the more-memory direction. There are a few, but even those aren't particularly effective; for example, Planetary Annihilation is finally using potential fields for unit pathfinding instead of A* and predicts they'll bump unit caps up from approximately 1e2 to only about 1e4. In fact, having limited memory isn't a particularly huge problem either, since the field of AI has tons of ways to use more time to save space.

TL;DR: Memory use by the AI isn't the issue. Processor use for the AI might be an issue if you have thousands of agents solving hard problems in continuous spaces, but not otherwise. If you have memory issues, it's because you're being inefficient, not because you don't have good enough algorithms. And even then your algorithms will use a fraction of the memory your that your art does - you can search out a million-vertex graph, a quarter-second or half-second operation if you're not careful, in the space of a single jpeg.
Last edited by Vebyast on Sun Apr 28, 2013 10:51 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Chamomile »

FrankTrollman wrote:Dynasty Warriors can only be simulated on the console, and the simulation... varies in quality. If you run back and forth between two areas, the fact that the battle doesn't really progress and nothing is actually happening becomes kind of obvious.
Worth noting that this isn't actually true in every version of the game. Even Dynasty Warriors 4 Empires had a massive improvement in making the battle progress where you weren't present, requiring you to do more than just cut straight through the enemy lines until you hit the main camp/enemy general, not because of any kind of significant hardware bump but just because they told the computer to run a simplified and abstracted version of the battles that were happening elsewhere (also worth noting that DW4:E had noticeable lag problems if a bunch of soldiers were on the screen at the same time, which sometimes happens on maps with a single vital chokepoint and which I assume is due to the increased complexity of offscreen battle simulation, since that never happened in DW4).

When Dynasty Warriors games have the entire battle stall except for the region which you're in, it's not because Koei can't create the illusion that the battle is ongoing in all places, but because they don't want to.

This isn't actually a rebuttal to the main point, since it's still true in Empires 4 (and more obviously so) that the hardware doesn't have a prayer of running the entire battlefield at once. Just pointing this out.
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