AwesomeOcelot

That's not relevant, the size of the recordings doesn't matter, it only matters if you're writing on average more than 30GB a day. If you record 200GB of video in one day in a week, that's still less than 30GB a day, if that's irregular so you miss out 2 weeks every month, that's less than 15GB a day. Boot up is probably the biggest difference, but I use sleep/hibernate most of the time, so everything is still in RAM. I have 16GB of RAM, Windows 7 caches over 10GB of stuff I'm not even using, which is faster than a SSD. Most programs loaded in under 3 seconds with my Spinpoint F3 HDD. Firefox, LibreOffice, and GIMP don't take long to load when you've got nothing in them, it's the difference between 3 seconds and no seconds, but loading Firefox with 30+ tabs on a HDD and you'll know it. MSE quick virus scan takes over a minute on a HDD, and under 10 seconds with the cheapest SSD. A big difference is when things are competing, so you have Windows services and your video editor both trying to read and write to a HDD at different parts of the drive, trying to load a program then can be really slow. I used a separate HDD for media storage to the OS, which gives a major performance boost, but when the HDD died I didn't need a 500GB HDD for the OS, the SSD was silent, much faster, and uses less power, it's a $64 upgrade that drastically reduces load times. After getting a sufficient amount of RAM, getting a SSD is probably the biggest value for money upgrade for performance you can get. Having a SSD for the games you're currently playing would be well worth it. A lot of games take ages to load, they have a lot of data and most of it is only written once. Video editing would be way faster with a SSD, but the storage required would also be prohibitively expensive, capturing and encoding wouldn't be effected.

I wonder whether this will make it. Other similarly sized games have made the amount flashback needs in their last 2 days, and KickStarter is biased in funding projects, if it's close people will pledge to push it over. I still think that putting the digital game, no thrills, at $15 will get you more money than at $20 or in this case $25.

Microsoft won't release its Microsoft Studios exclusives on the PC (unless they want to sell Win 8 or 9 with an exclusive) because they'd prefer if people game on a Xbox rather than PC. They may even pay 3rd parties not to release on PC but the 3rd party would probably want to negotiate for timed exclusives to Xbox One, so the PC port gets released 6-12 months later. Because the hardware is going to be so similar for PC, Xbox One, and PS4 the only reason why most games wouldn't be on PC or the other console is that someone is being paid for them not to be, the PC could run every game on consoles, it supports gamepad, it could support Kinect or any console peripheral if the manufacturer wrote drivers. I just hope PC ports are going to be much better, with less time spent on the graphics engine, and more time spent on gameplay elements like getting mouse support right or the FOV acceptable.

I don't understand the stupid rumour about always online, the answer to that is and always has been "obviously not". Registered to one account and prohibiting used games however, that's highly likely, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's what will happen with the PS4 as well. Despite EA saying "we're not going to be doing online passes any more".

Console FPS, whether Killzone, Halo, or Call of Duty, shining **** and calling it gold.

Unlike Sony where they were constructing nonsensical sentences with as many buzzwords as possible, Microsoft has decided to just list them as they fade in on a power point behind.

Human-like intelligence. "Our games are now like living worlds", the claim of every generation.

It made sense when Sony did it, this makes no sense.

Xbox early adoption of internet gaming. Xbox360 launched HD era of gaming. Following this pattern... look at PC gaming 8 years ago. Also I think I saw and heard CliffyB of Unreal Tournament and Gears of War fame saying "real emotion", but I don't quite believe it.

Isn't it also coming out on the PS3? Blizzard never said they wouldn't release Diablo 3 on other consoles, they denied that it was a exclusive but said there was no other announcements, which highly suggests the next Xbox is being negotiated or they're waiting to announce it, they might even today.

That's like the Apple Macbook Pro 13", no one will be playing games at 1440p on it, the GPU is the Intel HD 4000. It's completely pointless, no one is going to be designing games for high PPI 13" screens apart from for tablets. It's a very different prospect designing games for a 13" screen and a 27" screen, you want things roughly the same size. You can use scalable graphics for the GUI, or just make differently scaled variants for the same resolution but different PPI. In 3D games you can just zoom in, the only thing that would let you down is texture quality, and perhaps there's a set of ultra resolution textures, but these games wouldn't hope to run on such low performance hardware. I can't see 1440p becoming the new standard for laptops, at least not for the majority of budget and mid-tier ones, it's probably going to 1600 x 900 but it really should be 1920 x 1080. 2560 x 1440 is going to be growing on the desktop, but it's going to take time to gain market share.

Makes sense to have a map or combat log on additional monitors, I can't think of any other uses but I'm sure there are. It would be cool for the interface to be script-able enough that any window in-game you can have on the primary you can also have on an additional monitor. This is work for Obsidian and probably not a priority, I don't think Unity3D has native support, although if they allow PE to render in a border less window then the OS will deal with it.

I bought my mother one a few weeks ago, there's no issues as far as I can tell compared to the Kindle Keyboard 3G, the screen is higher resolution, higher contrast, and is backlit, making it much better. The speakers are gone though.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown, I love a lot of things about it, I hate a lot of things as well. Management, graphics, voice acting, destructible terrain are really well done. Interface (gamepad orientated), vision, and engagements are terrible. It's unforgiving, maybe a little too unforgiving in terms of enemy range, aim, and damage, but it's mostly for the better. I'd like a little more information before choosing options because if you choose the wrong ones the game will punish you heavily. Panic and car explosion mechanics don't make a lot of sense and are annoying as hell, that's not panic friendly fire, clearly that guy had a grudge. Animation is really buggy, but the only problematic bug I had was a loop after a mission that made me quit and load a save. Line of sight is not obvious, and in a 2 move system, it can suck. Worst thing about the game is engagements, made worse with the cutscenes that play every time. Lots of fun turn based tactics and emergent gameplay.

In terms of lore is this like sacrifice and sympathetic magic, is it something explored in the main quest line?

If you render the dead 3D models out to sprites after you exit a map, those sprites would have to be saved in the save files, that has a cost in terms of loading times. The decay states would have to come from the 3D model, which means a lot more work for each model, if we're talking 3 decay states that's at least twice the work for each 3D character model. The thing about having corpses stay in 2D games is that they have 2 or 3 states of decay, perhaps even 8 degrees of rotation, and they're a limited selection of different corpses, something you can get away with in a low fidelity game. In a high fidelity 3D game, even if the corpses are the same model, there's a lot states in game that has physics, skeletal rigging, and rag doll death. I think it could work, render out 3D models to 2D, at this time do all decay states from the positioning of the 3D model, send to the save data, load a sprite dependent on the time it's been there on return. Since so much of the game will be 2D, I wonder if having many 3D models is going to be a problem, especially with the poly count on them, which is lower than a lot of games because you're viewing them from a longer distance in PE. It's probably not going to be Age of Empires, but it could be even more than Assassin's Creed. After 24 hours cannibals obviously claim the bodies.

It seems like a lot of work. Also there's the much bigger problem of, even with correct shadows from the position of the sun, the whole lighting would also have to change in the scene not just cast shadows, it would be strange to have the same lighting but the shadows moving. My suggestion was to do renders of the shadow map for each hour of daylight, compress those down, so that if you visit an area it will be forever in that hour until you travel or set the party to wait. That may work for simple shapes, but not for complex ones. It's not simply a case of stretching a 2 dimensional shape. Not shadows overlapping, shadows onto other objects. You don't need 360 degrees for shadows formed by the Sun, even on the equator. I don't think so, you might be able to do this for simple shapes, but not things like trees.

That's not the way shadows from the sun work, the sun rises and sets, goes from East to West. Also that would work quite well for a light source rotating around an object, the scenes in PE are prerendered complex 3D scenes that are painted over, preventing this from working: a) what happens with objects that are next to each other, b) with anything that casts a shadow on itself, or c) as Pipyui said things that aren't cylinders and boxes? It's not just shadows, every rock, shrub, brick, and tree would be lit differently depending on the time of day, and look at them, they're not repeated assets.

Next Xbox won't require an always on connection. People are extremely gullible. That's what Yoshida said about the PS4. Microsoft hasn't stated their position, but it's unlikely to be different.

On your 5Gb/s connection?

The original campaign didn't ask for funding for development apart from sound assets like music, which was $6000 out of the ~$37000, so while promises were broken, it wasn't rewards or what people were backing. They never gave a concrete release date on either KickStarter campaign. I don't see why there'd be outrage at what they've done. Also, features get cut in game development all the time, obviously some people can't get their heads around what kind of work goes into some features like what has happened with Shadowrun: Returns. They're right to be disappointed, but you can't blame the developer, it's an inevitable part of any software development, and the backers only have themselves to blame for backing, they have to own their decisions.

It's not going to be a golden age like the late 90's because most money is being thrown at "casual", "cinematic", and "photorealism", in the late 90's games were still being made for gamers by gamers backed by publishers, they were trying to make the best games they could. A lot of games are FPS designed for gamepad, 30 frames per second, and narrow FOV, all terrible for gameplay. The new console generation is just going to make it worse, with larger budgets, larger asset teams, and more linear, scripted, QTE infested games because gameplay gets in the way of narrative and drops frame rate, plus it's perhaps a little too hard and complicated, it's probably unnecessary. The only way for their to be a new golden age is for many mid to large developers to find a way to become independent like Valve or CD Projekt RED. KickStarter hasn't looked like supporting that yet, it may be proven to support inXile, not sure if it's big enough to call it mid-sized, and Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera are going to have to sell well for them to grow. Smaller developers like Frozenbyte, Supergiant Games, and Team Meat have managed it with the help of digital distribution and in that respect gaming has never looked so good.

I use Foobar2000, it's streets ahead of anything else, been using it for a bit over 8 years. Foobar2000 has mass tag, rename, move, and copy. Foobar2000 can search freedb.org for tags, there's also MusicBrainz Picard. MediaMonkey is pretty good, you can do a lot of the same things but it's not as customizable or as minimalistic. dupeGuru Music Edition finds duplicate files.

It's a bit ridiculous considering the actual cost of shipping from the US to some places is under $10 for this kind of weight. In this case the EU and the US is free, if the $25 is at least some what related to actual costs in other campaigns the EU is subsidizing the rest of the world by quite a bit.

That's not what people mean by "like a PC". The Xbox 360 wasn't basically a PC especially since Apple switched to Intel (Mac wasn't always included under "PC"), the 360 had a PowerPC CPU and 512MB of shared RAM, which you would not find in new PCs at that time especially gaming ones. Linux is famous for running on every piece of hardware. The Xbox was more like a PC, it had a 733Mhz Pentium 3, Nvidia GPU similar to the Geforce 3, a HDD in every console, Windows NT OS similar to XP, apart from the memory which was low compared to gaming PCs. The PS4 and next Xbox are even more like PC, they have AMD CPU and GPU that'll be in PCs, 8GB RAM that's common for PC (although PS4 will use GDDR5). When people say a console is like a PC they're talking about x86 architecture, a GPU in a family found in PCs with DirectX or OpenGL support (which was the case with the PS3), and an amount of memory found in contemporary gaming PCs. All 3 are the case with the PS4 and next Xbox, the only thing that's missing is HDD as default.