On Fri, 26 Jan 2024 11:44:13 -0500, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
On Thu, 25 Jan 2024 13:21:21 -0600, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:
Spalls, I'm overcoming my addiction to Moore's Law. Performance just
feels like a pissing contest. I don't even overclock any more, unless the >>hardware is built that way.
It all just seems to be enough. What has happened to us?!
Because it /IS/ enough.
Aw yeah. IT'S ON.
Really? Is it? My instincts tend towards it is _never_ enough. Gotta
shave the minutes off of those MAME compiles.
;^)
Every now and then, it hits me just how FAST
and POWERFUL our personal computers have become. Even our cheapest
laptops are super-computers. Our handheld devices out-perform anything
I could have imagined thirty-years ago... heck, they're more powerful
than anything I'd imagine from a handheld 15 years ago.
It's true. You're beginning to sound like 3 Dead Trolls in a Baggie
singing "Every OS Sucks." If you haven't heard that, here you are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI
"If was enough to go to the moon, it was enough for you!"
It really was. I remember looking at my dad's Compaq 386 in '91 and
saying to him, "Nobody needs all that power." When I got my Dell 486 DX33
in '93 as a gift from him, complete with a CD drive that required a
shuttle and an SB16, I thought, "I'm set for life." The 486 was an
upgrade from a C=64 that got me most of the way through college.
Then I learned about wavetable synthesis, got a daughterboard for the
SB16, and the upgrading began. The leaps and bounds of an upgrade were a
major bang for your buck in those days.
Games - and applications in general - have not kept up. That's not to
say that our games have maxed out on their potential (too often I've
gotten stuck in the rut believing what we have now is 'the best there
ever will be'.) But our software plateaued in its needs about ten
years ago, for a variety of reasons.
If you're like my wife, well... she still plays a lot of Tropico 2. That requires me to set her up with the dgVoodoo2 DirectDraw wrapper just to
get the graphics to show up on the screen.
So for some, computers have bolted well ahead of the games they play. ;^)
That said, ray-tracing is "fun." Mostly as a tech demo. It doesn't really
add enough to the experience for the heat it generates and the power it guzzles.
Talos 2 looks beautiful, though. I'm glad I have a 4060Ti to enjoy it
with. There really is a noticeable difference between the high and ultra settings, especially with the ray-traced reflections. I got to the
Anthropic Islands today and I actually started taking pictures with the
photo mode.
Those "good enough" games, though? The 4060 sometimes runs on passive
cooling with those. No fan at all. The "Oh wow" factor is far less
important these days than the "fun" factor. And that is because you can't really "Oh wow" people with the graphics any longer. It's too hard.
Talos 2 notwithstanding. Oh WOW. Eye popping graphics. It's everything
Myst wanted to be and more.
Partly because we long passed the 'good enough' stage for making
convincing and fun games. Games with retro-graphics prove that we
really don't need more lifelike visuals or deeper simulations. Added >complexity in graphics or world design don't necessarily equate to
'more fun'.
Sure, just ask Ultima IX. The graphics were really "Oh wow" (so long as
you were running in Glide). The game? Ugh. As fun as painting a fence, or
so Tom Sawyer told me.
Games with retro graphics have convinced me that we are now in an age of fashion for games. Undertale was a massive hit with my youngest
daughter's generation (zoomers). It looks, for the most part, like it
could have been done on an Intellvision.
People are demanding gameplay. The response from the AAA game industry
seems to be, "That's nice. Enjoy CoD 6,008."
People, and small development teams, are starting to recognize that the
point of games is diversion and fun, not continued hardware sales.
AAA producers, not so much.
Partly because development costs have skyrocket. Thirty years ago, a
ten-man team could create a world-class game. Now you need a crew of >thousands. Making worlds bigger and with greater fidelity would
balloon costs without making the game significantly better.
BG3 notwithstanding, of course. That has a ton of content and it makes
the game better. But replay value doesn't come with a continued revenue
stream, so it's not in fashion rn.
Honestly, I think putting thousands of people on a game might just bump
into the mythical man-month fallacy. I wonder if AAA developers are
investing too much for too little, thus increasing their publication
risks beyond their ability to take gameplay risks.
(Yeah, I know most of them are the artists, and most of the disk space
they take up is artwork assets.)
Partly because some platforms are holding us back in comparison. I
don't just mean how games designed for console (or even older laptops)
limit how much RAM or CPU processing a developer has at their
fingertips. But also... look, if you frequently play games on mobile,
its hard to justify paying $60 for a super-high-end PC gaming, no
matter how great it looks.
My wife spent more than $60 on Evony in the first three months, and she
is still playing and still paying. Hundreds of dollars worth.
The trick is, it's $5.49 a pop. She doesn't notice and she doesn't care.
It ruffles my feathers, but it really isn't a bad deal if you don't have
a mental illness that turns you into a whale.
(I think that's what you meant? $60 for a AAA game. Otherwise that's one
cheap high-end PC!)
The mobile games set a floor level of
what's acceptable gaming and you can't go too far above that and
expect to make a profitable game. Which isn't to dismiss mobile games
as low-end crap (as I said earlier, I am frequently wowed by how
powerful our handheld devices have become).
I'll say it then. Mobile games are low end crap. The battery dies fast.
The games barely work. I do better running a Gameboy emulator on my
phone.
I dropped "Yahtzee with Buddies" because they had updated it with so much
new content so quickly, to bump up the desire and need for MTXes, that it collapsed under its own buggy weight. Even the vanilla mode didn't work
right any more. They even had a period of time where you couldn't see the categories on the left side of the scorecards. When I told my Family
(team) I was leaving because I couldn't even play a basic game any more,
all they could say is "Yeah. I get it." Then some commented that they may
be coming with me soon.
It was freaking Yahtzee. You know. Roll five 6-sided dice. Score it in a category of various poker hands. How can you screw that up?
They're not low end crap because of the devices, though. The devices are capable of much better. They're low end battery crippling crap because
all mobile developers are into the fast buck. They load it up with
Skinner box addiction psychology instead. That's the focus. Then they
move on and develop the next crappy game when that dries up.
Games (and applications) will get better in the future. I have
confidence that they will start demanding more powerful computers
again. As developers become more comfortable with AI generation, as
new techniques - especially with ray-tracing and cloud-compute
simulations - are developed, and even as new hardware and ideas are >developed, we'll see some revolutionary changes.
Honestly, by the time any of that comes, I'll probably just stream the
games from some heavy iron on a server farm. That kind of epic leap would require an unjustifiably powerful home computer. It'd be a space heater
with no thermostat and would likely cause brownouts in my town.
What I've always liked about this hobby is that the basic computer you
need to do Microsoft Word for work or the family finances can be also
used to play fantastic games for less than the cost of a console in
graphics components. Plus it gives better, more flexible results than a
console and KBM for the head shots.
I love general purpose computing. I wonder how much longer it will last?
But right now computers are in the doldrums, waiting for that
inevitable storm. A ten-year old PC can still be a quite satisfactory
gaming computer. There's no immediate need to upgrade because you'll
see very little advantage to it.
I have one of those downstairs. If I put my spare 1080GTX in it, it could
play anything made more than two years ago at high settings. It could
also credibly play anything between two years ago and the present at
pretty decent settings. Part of that is that I think 4k monitors are
nonsense, though.
I have a 15 year old computer in the next room over, with a 1st gen Core processor, that I could put the 1080 in and it would play any game before
2015 at max settings. It's got a 750Ti in it rn.
But this state won't last forever. Whether it takes five years, or
another ten, I think we're coming up to a precipice of epic change.
(And if not, that's cool too. I've already a large enough backlog to
keep me busy for the rest of my life ;-)
I am set for life too. I will die before I get through a quarter of it. I
don't know why I still buy games. Pack rat mentality I guess. But
sometimes a game I actually really look forward to and intend to play
right away comes out, like Talos 2 or BG3. Then buying it makes sense.
What I don't do any more is buy a game just to see it run in all its eye-popping glory. Those days are behind us I think.
My current computer does everything I could possibly want it to. I have
to go out with my binoculars and spy on some birds in the wild to do
better. Those are some eye popping graphics, I can assure you.
--
Zag
No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had
spent more time alone with my computer.' ~Dan(i) Bunten
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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