@\NightandtheShape/@

Vol, I never said you said they were untalented. I stated that for the most part, I'm sure that they were atleast a few extremely gifted/genius dev's at Trokia. I'd say that about most development studios, Bethesda included. If you knew half as much as you make out you know about games, you'd never say half of what you do say, and the other half you'd spend a long time thinking on. As for what it has to do with anything? Well Vol your a mouth you say alot, yet you don't know the half of what you speak about, at the end of the day you're going off your own opinion of a said game, for example to you a particle effect for a spell is just a spell effect. That's my point, you know what a particle effect for a spell is? you've seen pleanty of them. You'd be damned to make one yourself, you don't understand you just play the games, for you a cool effect is just something of a bigger picture, but ya know it most likely took a day or so to put it togeather, it was thought about and constructed, changed, revised, reworked, polished etc... You wouldn't know the difference between something thrown togeather in five minutes or something thrown togeather over a few days. Your quick to insult, but you never see anything good about anything, I never looked at a game and saw black or white. A game can suffer from extremely poor gameplay mechanics and have some absolutely awesome technical achievements, or it could be perhaps a buggy piece of crap, but the mechanics are so accessable it brings a new gamer into the fold, dungeon lords is a prime example of this, it suffers from poor collision detection, poor combat, poor PC models and poor PC animations, and or code personally i think it sloppy coding but that's something else, anyroad my g/f wouldn't even entertain gaming, she saw a friend playing Dungeon Lords and never looked back, she finished it and now she's hooked. Dungeon Lords is not the best game in the world, but it has some redeaming factors in that it's interesting enough, and easy enough to grasp and play that an absolute n00b can pick it up and play it. <_< I'm sick of your know nothing mouth disrespecting devs. I have always had and always will have a very simple attitude, think you can do better, think you know better, proove it go do it, otherwise shut the hell up.

I don't get excited about tools, I guess it's because I've just spent the last week using a said "toolkit" which is perhaps the worst thing to grace the planet. It crashes every half an hour and needs to be reloaded every time one wishes to check an alteration made; NWN's toolkit was far superior For me, in this case NWN2's toolkit, it'd be excited about seeing the cool artwork, but the first thing I'd do is try and crash it aswell, see how stable it was, after that I'd have very little use for it currently, I can't really do much with NWN2 till I see a DM client, other than play the main story. *shruggs* Your a design student, it applies to you more .

Vol, most devs are certainly very gifted, some are indeed geniuses, your a gamer and a very dedicated one at that. Have you ever made a game Vol? Ever been involved in a project even remotely on the same scale? I assume, no. Your a mouth Vol.

There exists many scenarios where a developer may be more or less forced to sit on a game. The one most likely to apply here (not saying it does, but it could) is that the publisher no longer wanted to fund further development of the game, but couldn't release it before Half-Life 2 due to using the source engine. Sure, Troika would probably have been allowed to work on the game if they wanted to, but would have done so without pay and in that case it makes more sense (for a struggling company) to try and land a new contract. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I don't agree in the case of finding a new contract. If you're known for producing a bad product or an unreliable product then eventually you find yourself stuck without a publisher. In the case of trokia, from what I am aware of they couldn't afford as a company to work on the product anymore, finding a new contract would be pretty unlikely at that point. The only time a company would sit on a game is if there was no publisher, or the publisher can't or won't publisher.... Baldurs Gate for the playstation springs to mind. The only reason I replied in the first case was down to the implied post that trokia opted to sit in the game.

You're excited about a toolkit................................. :|

If so, that would be most likely due to having nothing to do, not because they had any option and chose not to. I don't count that so much as sitting on anything.

I will get vista, but it won't be for atleast a year after initial release, and I'll buy a new system for it. The machine I have now? That will be XP gaming machine, I've decided to not trust compatibility, I have too many games, to be risking them to vista, I was contemplating dual boot but now... I'm certain I will have two seperate machines.

Of course they denied it, would look pretty bad otherwise in the public. The last third was rushed, that's a matter of fact, for a game that was postponed several times due to the late release date of HL2. And again, Source was pretty much completed in Summer 2002. Valve had to work on their own game as well, after all. Remember the E3 2003 gameplay? Don't tell me that one appeared buggy or slow to you. Valve just managed their own tech better than Troika did. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> There is no way any company can actually sit around on a game, it's just not possible, activision wouldn't allow it, and nobody in the industry would be happy to do such a thing. Milestones in the industry may seem reasonable when originally agreed, but later down the line it can almost seem an impossible task. Working with a game engine that's still being developed is kinda like painting a picture and mixing the paints on the canvas and hoping you get the shade right everytime you start over on a new day. One day, the code works, the next it's broken and needs rewriting/editing this is a potential nightmare in itself as your rewrite may break the original, or better still, become broken again at a later date.

Now that's sly! We will give it a try. I don't know if it will work in DOSBOX, because this is an adapted version specially for winxp. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Ahhhh I see, I couldn't get it to work under XP due to the old black screen of doom bug, fallout 2 works fine.

I'm pretty certain that's down to laptop monitor design, I actually play fallout in DOSBOX, perhaps that may, it's unlikely, but that would certainly fix it, just running it fast enough is unlikely.

Search, Sort, and Assume

People often make it out to be harder than it is. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Its writing thousands upon thousands of If X=1, then Y Else... lines that I dont consider to be all that amusing to do. Granted, Im not a programmer <{POST_SNAPBACK}> huh... *Shakes head* Never did any AI like that, that's the wrong way to do AI.

:'( That's just beautiful!

Ahhhhh... Vologic R00fles.

People often make it out to be harder than it is.

Okay then, WHY do you believe it is?

Vol why do you always insist NWN's is the best game ever?

I hear ya in that respect.

It seems like a fairly interesting internship.

or The struggle is the portability aspect. I am really enjoying the flexibility of the mobility of a notebook - question is how much of a hit in performance do you think I am looking at? Any thoughts or insights would be helpful as I wrestle with this decision. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> They're both powerful machines, and I'd be happy with either personally. What i will say is that you may have some issue with GFX drivers with the laptop, but you'll probably find yourself turning off one of the GPU's quite often on the geforce 7950 GX2. If you want mobility the laptop is a beast, I have the same spec desktop and I am very very pleased with it but beware older software.

I considered getting one with Bioware, though their placement started in May and I was offered a sure deal in January. It was an opportunity I couldn't refuse, though my eye was always on Bioware at the time. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I tried a few places, I've had my knockbacks, as we all do when looking for jobs. I'm not certain what I'm going to be working on... But any work placement that gives experience is better than leaving university simply with a degree.

My boss wholeheartedly agrees. In fact, in a discussion with him, he feels that AI won't truly get a fair break unless a dedicated card and API is created. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'm still not convinced on the benefits of AI middleware, but I've only ever coded AI first hand, have you used any middleware?

Naturally the learning curve is steep, I am certain it's going to be quite some time before we feel the whole benefit in the games industry, but it will happen eventually. I just think it's better to start climbing, and bitch less.

writing code for a parallel environment is a nightmare. developers that complain about it are right to do so. just being able to fix the affinity to a specific core is not the problem. the developers are probably required to implement threaded versions that will work across multiple cores. this means maintaining two different programs/code bases depending upon configuration. my guess is that most game developers are not experts in programming in parallel environments and, likewise, do not have the time to learn the subtleties involved given their other tasks. parallel computing has been around for quite some time in the scientific/defense realms, and that's where the knowledgebase lies. probably not something a game dev has time for unless he doesn't sleep much. oh, i'm programming on a quad-core, the BCM1480 (broadcom). taks <{POST_SNAPBACK}> *Sigh* I think you misunderstood me, it's a very difficult thing to do, parallel program, but the benefits in regards to what the potentail rewards are for games make it worthwhile, in my opinion. That is why they deserve a slap, perhaps it's because I see it as being more of the ability to deal with tasks seperately in some sense, I can see some benefits for AI in future releases. Graphics have been offloaded for quite some time, physics is currently being offloaded, two cpu's leave alot of power to improve game AI. That's my opinion, complaining because of that is worthy of a slap!

Just saying what I have read. It won't be the same as a physics card, but it's a start.