Your standard gamer is a total feckwit thread.

Which reminds me

Somewhere out there, there is an insufferable dolt posting on a random forum on the internet about video games. This idiot doesn’t really know the difference between HDR and bloom, but of course, he’s complaining about “too much HDR” somewhere. This twit is out there espousing that his own ideals of what a game should be is gospel that should apply to all games. The same idiot is reading technical articles put to text by the massively knowledgeable minds of press writers who actually believe that 3 cores at 3 GHz equals “9 GHz of power” and still actually think “general purpose processing” is a real technological metric. Sheep follow suit blindly on the basis of just how vehemently stupidity is espoused, and thus do we all get to see spelling erorrs and germatticl misteaks abound in an even otherwise vast expanse of stupidity so dense as to confound any quantum theory loyalist (if you don’t get that joke, don’t bother).

Now is this mountain of hebetude we like to refer to as a gamer all that unique? No, not really. He’s actually quite typical. He’s a whiny twat with an inflated sense of self-importance who gets involved in things he doesn’t have a single clue about and can’t really perceive anything that clashes with his own view. There are times when it’s not a big deal, and then there are times when things escalate into tirades based on a ground state of expressly lacking knowledge. And there are ever so many of these blockheaded banalities that form the basis of all understanding of that which we call “games”. I figure I might as well point out a few ways that you are a complete idiot. I know it’s probably falling on deaf ears, but you might as well hear it. Scratch that. You need to hear it. You deserve to hear it.

Graphics are the Universal Yardstick:

Yep. This is pretty much the most common one there is. It reaches farther than even fanboyism. This failing covers more of the gamer population than just about anything. Now, some of the more pretentious people out there might be espousing that they care more about gameplay first, or think that they don’t fit in this group because they might genuinely care about gameplay... to which I heartily shout, “BULL!”

The notion of graphics as the yardstick is a broader term that covers not just individual games but perceptions of hardware and software development at the back end. I’m talking about the people who see things like the fact that in the course of the PS2's lifetime, we saw polygon throughput grow by a factor of pretty near 4:1 even with several passes and nifty HDR fakery, and somehow that becomes the defining factor that shows that PS2 games had grown by leaps and bounds from early to late in the PS2's life. I’m talking about the people who assume that because PS2 saw such growth, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 will see the same. I’m talking about the people who read totally arbitrary press releases where some guy from EA says “we’re using about 1/3 of the Xbox 360's power” and assume that means the graphics will look 3x better towards the end of the 360's life. Or those who think that when a studio says a game is 10% complete, the final thing will look 10x better. Or those who immediately assume that a game that has framerate problems just needed to “tone down the graphics a bit” in order to avoid it. The people who think you can take a game made for 360/PS3 and port it to the Wii by simply pulling back on graphics. Yeah, you know who you are. And now you know something else. You’re an idiot.

The idea of a GPU being able to process more than you can give to it is nothing new. It’s basically something that happens on all platforms. People like to throw around the 6 billion vertices per second figure for Xenos, and yeah, it’s a valid theoretical limit under the assumption of an absolutely impossible contrivance (no Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, and you cannot dedicate all the pipes to vertex processing only), but that number leaves a little detail out of the picture. Oh, yeah, it leaves out the fact that vertices actually consist of DATA! Moving data requires bandwidth, and moving 6 billion vertices requires more bandwidth than the whole Xbox 360 has. Even if you include the wholly internal busses which DO NOT connect any two separate devices (e.g. the famed 256 GB/sec eDRAM which directly affects nothing other than the eDRAM die itself), you don’t even get halfway there for a pretty ordinary-sized vertex. Even for the smallest possible vertex, you don’t get there. Never mind that the only meaningful bus here is the main memory bus, because it’s quite likely you’re too stupid to get that part.
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Let’s also remember that these GPUs (RSX and Xenos) are both very familiar little pieces of hardware. Yes, the Xenos doesn’t have an obvious counterpart in PC-land, but at the face of it, it’s a pretty ordinary DX9 GPU plus a few features that can’t always be used in any given circumstance. A lot of its “special” features are also not the types of features that are prone to see massive usage even on exclusive titles, since they’re not really catch-all sorts of things (i.e. what might be useful for one project is total crap to another). Let’s also remember that there is a reason RSX has a separate memory pool from main RAM, or that Xenos has its framebuffer in eDRAM. It’s because otherwise, the CPU would get the short end of the stick every time it needed to access memory, and that equals a platform that can’t outpace a pocket calculator no matter how many GFLOPS you throw out there.

Because they’re pretty familiar on the graphics side, we have a pretty good idea by now how to get a lot out of them visually, even right now. It may require some support on the CPU side, but all in all, they’re both pretty known quantities and all their respective strengths and weaknesses are pretty well known. That said, it does mean that there isn’t likely to be a lot of room for improvement in the graphics arena. Does that mean graphics won’t improve at all? Of course not. It’s just that we’re starting farther along that curve than you might think. We can always have better artwork and better tools over the years, but you’re not going to see a 5:1 throughput increase in polygons or see things like “3x better graphics” because somebody makes some nebulous statement that they’ve “tapped only 1/3 of the console’s power”. For that matter, these GPUs aren’t that great to begin with in terms of vertex throughput, or especially fillrate, but they are all we have. Most all their power is pretty much dedicated to the shading of pixels because every hardware manufacturer thinks that is everything. Well, it obviously got a moron like you drooling, so it’s worth something.

Ultimately, the really unknown quantities are the CPUs, and the big unsolvable problem is pretty much the matter keeping them busy and keeping them working efficiently in spite of the fact that you’ve got to move data around. This is not an age where the GPUs’ inability to do something will mean the most, but rather cases where the CPU is not running at even halfway decent efficiency. Sure, there are exceptions and every game will probably hit them once in a while, but they stand for either a minority or totally trivial exceptions to the rule, especially since we all have a pretty good idea where this new generation’s GPU power stands, but failing to make something out of the CPUs is the reaper’s scythe for any game. Sometimes, people complain about a performance issue because it really is a totally curable problem, but the overwhelming majority of the time it’s because gamers simply expect the whole world with whipped cream and a cherry on top. Granted, I partly blame Sony and Microsoft for this with their one-upmanship battle where they kept touting power, power, power. When stupid gamers take that at face value, it gives the impression of... well, unlimited power, power, power.

It’s all well and good to talk about graphics when all you have to go on is screenshots. It’s NOT acceptable to start talking about developers and game engines and market dynamics and things you don’t have a flipping clue about - nor even understand in the least - when all you have to go on is screenshots. People are fallible and no game will ever be perfect, but you have no idea what or why or where failures happen, or what the stipulating factors were. But of course, you, like an idiot, prefer to presume that the only explanation is that no one is doing his/her job... that too, rather than lack of ability or lack of freedom or poor decision-making or bad management, the fault lies with the fact that developers are lazy -- after all, developers and the development process is the only thing in between a game’s concept and a game’s appearance on the shelf. And of course, when something does look favorable in screenshots, it’s somehow so often the case that it isn’t because those developers know what they’re doing and (more importantly) have the latitude to actually do it, but because the platform (whether you’re talking hardware or software) is inherently superior to the competition. It’s such an utter joke when people talk of how a super-powerful machine or a superior game engine makes everything easy and we just have to plug stuff in and make it work. That is idiocy of a level that could justify homicide.

This is not to say that the Cell and XeCPU aren’t powerful at all. It’s just that power isn’t the secret of the universe. And for all the posturing Microsoft may have done about “general purpose” power, the fact is that the CPU alone isn’t going to give or take that away from you. CPUs have been getting more powerful with each console generation, and yet, for most all of this time, it’s been mostly just graphics that have been improving, with everything else lagging behind. Now that’s partly your fault as the consumer who goes ga-ga over graphics above all else, but it’s also simply because it’s not so simple as just having more raw power. As much as having multiple cores and having all those GFLOPS pays off to some extent, these aren’t just “plug and chug” problems. They’re not easy problems to solve and there simply haven’t been good general solutions even in offline applications. If there’s anything you learn early on in engineering, it’s that the ancient adage that “every problem has a solution” is patently false, especially when reality sinks into the picture. To believe otherwise is no more realistic than believing in the tooth fairy. Oh crud, I forgot I was talking to a bunch of morons who might actually believe in that kind of sophistry.

We all like to justify our decisions after they’ve been made, but to whom do you need to justify them? To others, or to yourselves? Trolling swine pretending they understand the relative advantages the Xenos and RSX have against each other while wearing big signs saying “hey, Killzone is yet to come out, but it absolutely proves that PS3 is teh win!” is not the way to get an intelligent point across. Most certainly will it be of staggeringly superficial impact in enabling your preferred platform to win the console wars. If you buy some game and the graphics are impressive, great! If you happen to find it fun as well, that’s terrific! You’re all too welcome to talk about that, and feel free to go into detail. That’s the upside of having forums, whether it’s here at or anywhere else. For most of you dolts, that’s about all you’ll ever be able to comprehend anyway, so learn to leave it at that. If you can’t remember that rule, then just try the following one: Stop, drop, roll over and DIE... and the world will be a better place.

The Ubiquitous Fanboy Conspiracy:

We sure do see a lot of fanboys out there, don’t we? After all, everybody who doesn’t think PS3 is Kalki, the second coming, the divine inspiration for all humanity ever to exist and yet to come must be a fanboy, right? I wonder what that makes you. Hmm... How about a “thickheaded moron?” Words like “fanboi” and “FUD” get thrown around with total disregard for any sense of applicability in most cases. Now fanboys exist everywhere and every console has more fanboys claiming their platforms’ undeniable superiority on random forums than there are rational people on the whole Internet. FUD is effectively bread and butter for any rumor mill because one, that’s what always becomes of rumors since they are by definition unconfirmed, and two, rumors are the types of things that spread by interaction with more people, which in turn means several points for information to be reinterpreted and filtered of important details. That’s just the nature of the wonderful web. It doesn’t help, of course, that projects tend to be shrouded in secrecy until publishers are ready to make formal announcements about them, so what we tend to hear for quite some time about any given game is terribly incomplete information. Instead of treating it as such, people, including those who might call themselves “game industry journalists,” prefer to extrapolate and make assumptions.
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What happens to make you a complete idiot is the assumption that everything you know and everything you assume and everything you read on a site somewhere and everything you choose to take as a statement of a particular meaning is nothing short of the gospel truth. What makes you an even bigger idiot is the assumption that what flies in the face of what you previously believed is constructed out of fanboyism and some inexplicable crusade by various people to proliferate spreading of FUD. How did an acronym that is supposed to be about stirring the pot and blowing things unnecessarily out of proportion become this universal magic word that describes everything disagreeable? How is it that when people DON’T speak one way or another about one platform but DO speak well of its competitor, it’s therefore FUD? I’ll tell you how... It’s because the world is flooded by dimwitted swine.

I’m sure some atrociously obtuse cretin on an Xbox fansite stopped reading quite some time ago on the assumption that I, as the person writing this and also being one who writes for a Playstation-centric website (never mind that it’s part of a network that has Nintendo and Xbox faces as well), am an incurable PS3 fanboy and this is all some quest I’m on to bias all of humanity. Just for you, I’ll throw in a little ammunition to support that argument: I don’t like Halo at all. Yep. You heard right. Well, that proves it, doesn’t it? I mean, Halo is the ultimate creation; it’s the supreme force that is propelled to the top of gaming history by divine right; it’s “42” on a DVD! Anyone who doesn’t concede the entertainment transcendency of Halo is a total PS3 fanboi on a tireless quest to spread FUD. Q.E.D. Sorry, but that proof relies on the faulty supposition that your brain actually functions, which has been shown experimentally to be untrue. Now, those who are aware of my general tastes in gaming know that I grew sick of first-person shooters back when the original Quake was the new kid on the block, and that applies to all of them no matter how highly you might think of them. I do occasionally choose to look at games that I probably wouldn’t ever play from a technology standpoint, but my gamer tastes and my geek interests are very different things. But of course, those of you who have no knowledge of this wouldn’t have been able to guess that from such a small bit of information as “I don’t like Halo,” would you? There’s a lesson in there somewhere... something about jumping to the wrong conclusions... make that... hurtling headlong to the wrong conclusions, but it’s probably lost on you, you being a dim-witted simpleton and all.

It gets really funny when an individual speaks, because individuals are easier to accept or dismiss because they’re often speaking as individuals (even though people sometimes forget that). A guy like John Carmack comes along and speaks ill of multi-core programming, and the pangs of multithreading and synchronization and the scalability of peer threading vs. worker threads and how the 360 has better tools and how it simply eases the transition along a lot better than the PS3 does.... Well, of course, people tend to dismiss everything he says because they’d rather not hear that the PS3 may not see massive returns quickly or that multi-core in general isn’t going to pay massive dividends. Among the common rationalizations is that he’s not a console developer historically, though some of the really lovely ones include that Microsoft “has him in their pockets” and that he’s a total fanboy. The fact of the matter is that most all of what he says isn’t really very unique. It just seems that way because Carmack, unlike the vast majority of programmers, is actually in the public eye. He really echoes the sentiments of several thousand others. Bear in mind that even if he doesn’t really have a track record of console development, he does have something you don’t -- functioning brain cells. Most of what he says could easily have been surmised out of textbook knowledge and a fair bit of information about the architectures in question. Now I can’t say that I wholly agree with everything John Carmack says per se, but I can say that he’s really not coming out of nowhere with his assertions. One point that he makes that a lot of people seem to miss is that games are inherently not parallel programs. They can have sub-tasks which are suitable for parallelization, but the game itself is not, and that translates to the result that speeding up those sub-tasks, even tremendously, doesn’t add up to a tremendous gain in the end. The tricky stuff is making that not-so-tremendous gain look significant.

Beyond the simple example of just me being some guy on some website or John Carmack addressing a crowd at QuakeCon, there’s the further stretch that everybody out there is a fanboy or a zealot of some kind. Sony for instance, was, and still is, getting a lot of bad press over the PS3. Now of course, the reasonable assumption is that because Sony has been on top for two generations, they are expected to continue the trend and when they don’t deliver, it comes off as a major disappointment. It’s no different than bashing Microsoft over Windows, as they’ve long been on top of the OS market. But of course, that’s not what people actually believe. No, the belief instead is that the press is universally occupied by Xbox fanbois. No... wait... it’s worse than that. They’re all owned by Microsoft, and have money shoved down their pockets in return for speaking ill of Sony. We all know that’s how the real world operates. We all also know that you’re a complete and utter moron.
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For crying out loud, media is a business like any other, and their job is to keep you interested. Rational discourse doesn’t draw hits, so nobody has anything to gain by trying to behaving up to the canonical image of “adults.” This isn’t really singling out the gaming media, since the media in general has the concern of trying to make sure they catch your interest within the first 5 words. Of course, in a field like gaming, where the public themselves have wisdom far beyond their years (in the regressive direction, that is), that’s only too fitting. Thus do we find headlines where so-called words like “pwned” are commonplace. When the public at large really only has the brain capacity and reading comprehension level to take only a handful of words by themselves completely at face value and proclaim it either as complete truth or complete lies... well... should we be surprised that the gaming media does everything just the same? Especially considering that many of the people writing for major gaming press sites are either every bit as stupid as you are, or they have various reasons to put up the appearance that they’re every bit as stupid as you are.

The never-ending desire for instant gratification has yielded the result that people can only view the universe as a single time-slice. There is no then; there is no when; there is only now. No one can look at things that could happen or have happened in the past. The only thing that people can look at is the state of things here and now. PS3 is expensive and has a small library. Now logic tells us this is not a permanent condition, but that’s not going to stop people from saying that. Every single doom and gloom image for the PS3 applies that exact rule: whatever you can say of PS3 here and now are things you will forever be able to say... It will always be a $600 console, and it will always have no decent games, and therefore it’s already dead... sure... Yes, the PS3 is expensive and lacks killer apps here and now, but because that is the case here and now, that is somehow all that matters for all time yet to pass? Similar things happen with the image projected by the Wii and the idea that the Wii’s current success is an indication that casual gaming will hereafter take over the market. Since when has casual gaming had inroads in the hardcore gamer market? I know, we all love Tetris, and Katamari was very enjoyable for millions, and of course Guitar Hero (which I’d characterize as both casual and hardcore) is godly. It’s not that casual games will take over, it’s that the area has a route to being filled and developers of casual games have a route to marketability. Is that sustainable? Theoretically, sure. Does that mean games for “hardcore gamers” are now no longer a sustainable market? Absolutely not. But no, people feel it makes more sense to assume that it’s the end of “hardcore” gaming, instead, because the Wii is clearly doing well... maybe TOO well *cue ominous crescendo*. This kind of stupidity is not just restricted to consoles. Over and over, we hear about the supposed death of PC gaming on all these silly assumptions that consoles have all this power, and all sorts of features previously thought reserved to the PC space are moving over there, and sure enough, the new console CPUs save Wii’s have raw computational power that could run circles around even the highest-end PC gaming rig for quite some time. Have we forgotten that raw computational power alone doesn’t achieve everything? Have we forgotten that the PC is an evolving platform that expands on many fronts? People so often tend to think there’s only room for technical innovation on the consoles because you have the time to really get intimate with the platforms and their hardware. This is valid, but the evolution of the PC can be a strength just the same. Especially since new developments on the hardware side can expose new power on the software side that wouldn’t have been possible (or at least feasible) otherwise.

That also seems to show with the way people look at company activities completely at the face value. Capcom, for instance, somehow instantly got labeled as this embodiment of pure evil the moment they announced that DMC4 would be multiplatform. People who loved the previous titles and also loved the PS2 felt that the two must inherently go hand in hand, and Capcom must obviously have loved the PS2 and been in bed with Sony in order to make their previous games exclusive. When this unfounded belief was shattered, the roof caved in for so many people, and then emotions ruled the web. This really happened because people like you are complete idiots. PS3 fanboys assumed that their hatred for the 360 should be mirrored by companies who previously developed exclusive titles. What a load of crap. There’s fanboyism in the development world every bit as much as there is in the outside world, I don’t deny that. The difference is that these are (hopefully) people who don’t let it cloud their judgment, as opposed to you who don’t really have judgment in the first place. Even within a single studio, you’re going to have people with their preferences, but it doesn’t change the fact that those preferences aren’t going to form the basis of what’s best for the company. People have this image in their head that companies constantly lie, and money is moving under the table, and there is all sorts of schmoozing going on here and there. That’s partly because they’re idiots, and partly because they’ve watched The Sopranos one too many times.

These aren’t black market arms dealers, this is a real legitimate industry, you stupid schmuck! What we may refer to internally as “schmoozing” is pretty insignificant, and really quite ordinary, unless you consider buying someone a beer tantamount to bribery. The reason it looks like companies lie and cheat and steal is because there is generically paranoia within the industry about protecting their interests, and so they err on the side of caution. As a result, the whole process is very secretive by nature. People don’t go around lying to you for the sake of lying to you, it’s that they won’t (and for safety’s sake, can’t) tell you the whole truth, and if you had the brain power to pay attention to more than one sentence at a time, you’d realize that. The closest thing I’ve seen to a company lying in a press release is to simply leave it at an oversimplified declaration that is mainly intended to get people to shut up. The problem is that nobody knows how to do that. Bear in mind, of course, that lying is different from “spinning”, which is bread and butter for Page Ranking regardless of what industry you’re talking about. Again, business is business, and Page Ranking folks need to protect the interests of their employers at all costs, so the point isn’t so much to lie, but to lead all discussion away from whatever they don’t want to take in the face.

Too often, though, people will take one tiny part of a press statement (often times, not even a whole sentence) and blow it out of proportion not paying attention to anything else, and for the common idiot reading this, you’ve probably already done so a few quadrillion times. Take for instance, one guy from Square in an interview says that the Final Fantasy franchise is apparently a “blank page” on the 360, so somehow this proves that Square Enix thinks poorly of the X360 and will never produce an FF title on it. Actually, it proves that you’re a complete and utter imbecile in every way. Of course, another rep from Squenix chimed in rather quickly to clarify that that is simply the current state of things, and does not speak anything about future plans. What does it say when a company actually needs to do that? Honestly, if people actually had reading comprehension levels beyond that of a 5-year-old, there really wouldn’t have been any need for that. But of course, you’re all half-wits, and Square apparently knows that. Not just them, of course. The gaming media loves to play up this angle because screaming bloody murder interests brainless sheep more than saying “Company A made an announcement that doesn’t rock the boat.” This is one of those cases where the press tends to balance on that line between being rife with stupidity and being stupid like a fox. It’s often hard to tell which at times, but in the end, it draws hits either way.

Is it really too much to ask that people develop the ability to actually read and process the written word, for the sake of the goddamned human race?! I mean, this is the Internet -- the Information Superhighway. If information is wasted on you, then what are you doing here? You want to learn? Great, that’s what the Internet is very well-suited to help you do. You want to scream that the sky is falling every time you read a single phrase out of a press release? Go home and ask your mother if she’ll let you climb back into the womb. You’ll be safer there, and you won’t be a complete waste of network traffic.
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What You Don’t Know:

It’s one thing when people talk on forums with the intention of trying to learn or just chatter harmlessly. Most of the time, the chattering on forums out there is just chattering pointlessly. Often times, it’s the screaming of all-too-vocal idiots posturing of the purported “correctness” of their thinking. Other times, it is fair-weather fandom and ill-weather hatred misdirected due to people’s complete inability not to take things at face value.

A good 99% of gamers who aren’t also game developers have absolutely no idea what a game engine really is. Oh, they have some very broad generalization which is partly accurate, but this broad generalization describes a package that pretty much doesn’t really separate a game engine from, well, a game. As a result, to most people, everything they see on the screen is somehow attributable to a game engine because that’s what an engine is, right? I can’t help but marvel at the stupidity of some comments about how somebody’s game engine limits how far a character can jump. What?? Of course, there are the more widespread and, strangely enough, widely accepted, piles of nonsense like the notion that UE3’s success in prolific licensing means that thousands upon thousands of games will all look like Gears of War. *sigh~~~*.

Human efforts and art style have nothing to do with it, right? It’s entirely because UE3 looks like that... yeah, engines have a “look.” But of course, if someone releases a UE3-based title that doesn’t look that great, it’s because the development studio was full of bums. No... It’s worse than that. It’s because they don’t like gamers, and actively seek to disappoint you all. Actually it’s because you’re a complete moron to say nothing of also being a self-centered one. Again, these sorts of stupidities come about because people don’t really have any idea what a game engine is about and where the importance really lies. It’s not about PS3 or 360 or PC or exclusive or multi-platform or making the next Halo-killer or even getting Hitler onto a T-Rex; it’s about supporting their own pipeline so that they can streamline the development process for their own purposes. It’s not about achieving things on one game or one platform, but about making those achievements not only possible, but repeatable. It’s not the runtime component itself that’s the biggest difficulty, it’s the tools and the pipeline to get things into that runtime that is important. That’s true in this generation more so than any other, and I’ll surely be able to say that again when PS4 and Xbox 4Pi or whatever come around. People have this image of an artist coming up to a programmer and asking “can we get our guy to move like Nathan Drake?” to which the programmer responds, “Sure, lemme just work on that for a little while, and we’ll have it.” It just doesn’t work like that -- that is a recipe for chaos. The reality is more like an artist bringing up an issue like, “I can’t seem to export skeletons that use bidirectional constraints. Could we support this?” Bringing that up as a relatively high priority concern gives rise to a larger discussion, planning, and hopefully development roadmaps and schedules if not a workaround. Sounds corporate? Well, it is. Human resources don’t come for free.

Admittedly, you can’t expect people in the general public to know much about certain things. There are times when you see people say they think a game should do things which are actually pretty brazen violations of TRC requirements for just about any platform. Again, nobody outside would be expected to know that (and most don’t know that there are such things as TRCs). But then, all of this really comes down to a simple reality. It’s always easy to say something, especially something incalculably stupid, and especially on the Internet. Doing is something else entirely. Most people really seem to believe everything in the world is possible all at once because they don’t have the ability to think about what they’re babbling about before they speak (or any other time, for that matter). It’s certainly easy to say you want no texture to be used more than once, but at the same time, there should never be load times (and indeed, this was among the expectations of what it meant to “be next-gen”). Now of course, that’s inherently impossible, but it’s easy to say. The problem comes when something is easy to say and people assume that it is therefore easy to do, which is pretty much true of all the dimwits out there who like to pretend they know what makes games worth buying for everyone. It’s easy to say “I think this, that, and this”, and once in a while, people will suggest things that, by themselves, aren’t too bad, but are generically suggested with total abandon for the cost thereof. This isn't just referring to raw computational or monetary costs, but opportunity costs and man-hours. “What sort of cascading effects are incurred?”, “What does this decision preclude as opposed to others?”, “What is the impact at the user level?”, and other such questions that you, as a cretin of the highest order, will never be able to even consider. Ultimately, game design becomes a massive optimization problem with the end goal of making money off the title. No matter how much you hear developers talk of their passion for making games (which is often truthfully uttered), passion doesn’t pay the bills, and what matters in the end to their bankrollers is that those developers, however passionate they might otherwise be, can prove profitability of their concept.

Well, all things said, the consumer shouldn’t really care about this sort of thing. They simply need to worry about the games they’ve bought. If they want their preferred platform to win the console war, it will only happen if they buy the platform, and buy the games for it. And yet, people will incessantly whine about what so and so did which didn’t match their vision because they are too stupid to know any better. Much as you’d like to think there is such a thing, there is no inalienable right to the purity of thick-headedness. Your stupidity may be a god-given gift (or curse), but it is not your place to screw over the rest of the planet with your mindless prattlings of how your own measure of satisfaction should drive an industry. There’s a world of difference between “I don’t think the graphics are good enough” and “Burn whoever decided to make this game multi-platform.” The former makes you a disgruntled customer. The latter makes you self-centered filth who has no clue what he/she is talking about.

What’s even stranger is that those who feign acceptance that the number of platform-exclusive titles is going to be dwindling this generation due to rising costs and decreasing profitability for a single SKU have henceforth tended towards trying to comfort themselves by discussing which platform is the “lead” platform for a given game. Oh, boy. How about a show of hands; Does anybody out there actually know what a “lead” platform is? Who out there actually believes that there is a definite cut and dry answer to that question? Who out there believes that all multiplatform development has a single lead platform? If you answered yes to more than one of these questions, congratulations: you’re a delusional simpleton.
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First of all, we have to accept that for many multi-platform next-gen developers right now, the most likely candidate for the “lead” platform is the Xbox 360. Why? Because it was on the market a year earlier, and engines take a long time to write, and having at least one next-gen platform to work off of is kind of important. In many other cases, it may even be the PC, since comparable GPUs (at least in capabilities if not raw power) were available for PCs long before the 360 ever existed. Secondly, the notion of a platform being the “lead” doesn’t necessarily mean anything will look better or worse for that platform or people worked particularly hard on that platform. At its simplest, it means that some point of development (whether it be code or content) had to be built on a groundwork based on something specific to that platform, whether it be architectural or API. Thirdly, the reality is that the notion of a “lead” platform won’t generically exist on the scale of a game or an engine, but on the scale of individual subsystems. A render layer may be 360-centric, while a threading layer may be PS3-centric, while an input layer may be PC-centric. Fourthly, the idea of something being the “lead” platform isn’t guaranteed to reflect positively on that platform. For many previous-gen games, PS2 was the lead platform because it was quite simply the one that gave people the most headaches, and the most hell with data management. So you simply had to design around the PS2 because that extra work was inescapable if you wanted something that looked and performed halfway decently. Of course, that’s less likely this generation, unless someone were to create a multi-platform engine that includes the Wii as well as the PS3/360. That’s actually not that likely because it is far more streamlined to abstract a lot of the platform differences away from content creators, and you simply can’t do that if you have large differences in capacity. Fortunately, between the PS3 and 360, the differences in practice are not that enormous and are almost entirely of the nature that can be abstracted away from content creators (even if they may give programmers headaches), which makes this pair very ripe for cross-platform development so long as the business side of the equation agrees. As much as it might begrudge you blockheads to admit that, it’s reality.

I should clarify that the real point here is not about why things are multi-platform, or how difficult it is to make a good game, or why things don’t turn out the way everybody hopes. It’s that a studio’s concerns go beyond just “does this look good?” and “does this play well?” Even beyond things like “do we have a potential hit on our hands?” is the matter of workflow and keeping the team’s production moving smoothly. There’s more to the development process than one game, and indeed, many third party development studios do work on more than one game at a time. Even otherwise, there is the need to worry about the next game and the game after that. Preproduction, planning, and concepts, for the next project in the pipe are all taking place while you’re busy reading about the current title which is fast approaching release. That’s partly to hedge bets, and partly because it’s quite simply of paramount importance that time not be wasted. The greatness of the current project could be beyond belief, or it could be a total joke. In the end, that’s measured by you going out and buying it and possibly saying what you think to other fellow gamers. Yeah, there are gems that fade into the shadows, but whatever they were, hardly anyone will ever know if the sales don’t measure up.

So again, I have to ask, why should you as a stupid consumer care what goes into the decision-making process? And in turn, why should it ever be a point of discussion for the idiots to whom it doesn’t really matter? Sure, no one will tell you that the industry itself is perfect the way it is or that an Ubisoft or an EA or a Take2 does everything exactly right, but bringing things that are personal or individual interpretations into the matter is purely stupid. Talking about sub-par graphics of this game and blaming ports (as if all that many of the games you think are ‘ports’ really are) for the health of the industry and thinking that your own preferences define what the brave new world of gaming ought to be... That’s little more than failing to see the forest for a single tree. The worst part of it is that this tree is named “ME.” There are a great many things throughout the industry that could be done better; nobody’s disputing that. Being able to think about that in any meaningful way means letting go of your misappropriated ego and looking at the bigger picture. The reality is that most of you will lie on your death beds never having been able to do that at any point in your life. As such, you should stay out of it and just sit back and listen. At best, you can fight the good fight with your wallet. Ultimately, what the industry does follows what the consumer does. So in the end, there is really no way to mature the industry without maturing the gamer. If you can’t be a part of that, then you have no place complaining. Just go sit in front of your TV and accept that you are an idiot.
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He he he!

He's actually wrong on many counts, but no wonder they go off like this then gamers prattle the internet. Footballers much feel the same. It would be great to get a rant from Giggs.
 
of course I didn't read it all but I didn't have to read it all to know that "listen, cockface...." shits all over those rants.
 
I'll read it all at some point just for you Weastie. Maybe not right now, but soon ;)

Although I'm disappointed, because going by the thread title I was looking forward to ranting (once more, it must be said) and how PC games are being incredibly dumbed down for the console crowd.
 
feck that Weaste, I couldn't even be arsed reading Suresh's two paragraphs about popping tiles or some shit.

Sorry Suresh :D
 
I can't be bothered to read that. Can someone come back to me with a summary?
 
Well done Weaste, with this thread you've managed to out nerd every other nerd in history in one fell swoop
 
Somewhere out there, there is an insufferable dolt posting on a random forum on the internet about video games. This idiot doesn’t really know the difference between HDR and bloom, but of course, he’s complaining about “too much HDR” somewhere. This twit is out there espousing that his own ideals of what a game should be is gospel that should apply to all games. The same idiot is reading technical articles put to text by the massively knowledgeable minds of press writers who actually believe that 3 cores at 3 GHz equals “9 GHz of power” and still actually think “general purpose processing” is a real technological metric. Sheep follow suit blindly on the basis of just how vehemently stupidity is espoused, and thus do we all get to see spelling erorrs and germatticl misteaks abound in an even otherwise vast expanse of stupidity so dense as to confound any quantum theory loyalist (if you don’t get that joke, don’t bother).
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That's the most nerdy paragraph ever constructed

HDR? Bloom? technological metric?

It's beyond even being a parody of itself
 
You cannot Spam your own thread. And if you had any clue as to what I'm talking about, then the word "Spam" would not come across your mind.

It's a thread about the standard game being a total feckwit on a similar level to the majority of people that post in the United forum are. The only thing we lack there is a professional footballer having a rant.
 
Post 181...

After seeing what Insomniac was able to achive on the ps3 at 60fps with streaming tecnology with Ratchet and Clank (which is one of the most impressive games this generation IMHO with an extremely highy poly count, excellent animations and some textures had Uncharted/Gears level of quality), I am let down at the texture and modeling detail in these Resistance 2 pictures.

Resistance 2 is supposed to use the same streaming routine and runs at ''only'' 30fps...I expected more of this one.
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:wenger:

Post 152

I don't like the shiny gear. It's shouting "please shoot me". The Black Ops skin from R:FoM was better, its black was flat and perfect to disappear/appear into/from darker areas.
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Ok, to summarise:

Weaste may well have wrote that ;)

Not all of it is correct, in fact some of it is opinion being forced down as fact.

It does give a decent glimpse of how game development works.

It does the above in a very patronising way, especially considering he is making general assumptions quite a lot.

He is obviously a software engineer who may have an interest in video games, but somehow just doesn't really get why people discuss them and enjoy them so much in the first place.

It's all very anal. However a lot of the 'fanboy' references are true.

No doubt there are much better examples on the net of how to explain why people are generally wrong about video game development and the machines, without calling everybody stupid and explaining things in a much more cohesive way.
 
Red442 said:
I can't be bothered to read that. Can someone come back to me with a summary?
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Gamers are annoying stupid twats, who don't understand how games work but act like they are experts. Ie. thinking graphics are the most important thing about a game.
 
WeasteDevil said:
You cannot Spam your own thread. And if you had any clue as to what I'm talking about, then the word "Spam" would not come across your mind.

It's a thread about the standard game being a total feckwit on a similar level to the majority of people that post in the United forum are. The only thing we lack there is a professional footballer having a rant.
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i knew that bit, its the only part i read on this thread.

You can if your thread was designed purely for the basis of spamming. Anyone who starts a thread, and is the only person to post for the first 9 posts, is a spammer.
 
It's like picking through a thread on RAWK.

I understand what you're saying. You know me, and you know I'm a fan of the game. But look at it from a forum fanboy posting my penis is bigger than yours perspective.

Resistance 2 doesn't have the level of detail or texture potency of say, GoW2 (which recently had it's own debut). The main argument for Resistance 2 is the scale, and amount going on, on screen at once. The first screens showed this off nicely. massive Goliath, tanks etc. The new screens do not. They don't show that impressive scale, nor do they show the texture or geometric complexity of what we've come to expect of R2 and have seen in KZ2.

I understand we're seeing a human city, so it's not as complex as Chimera architecture. But for the purpose of public showing, I'd stick to more wide open open scale screens that people can use to show off what Resistance 2 can muster on a technical level.

See Insomniacs (same team as yours or different?) effort with R&C5. Most of the screens showed off massive city scapes, tonnes on screen etc. It had that wow factor. The new R2 screens don't have quite the same effect, especially with the knowledge that the game runs at half the frame rate of R&C5.
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WeasteDevil said:
I dunno, I can waffle. :D
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His quote about the artist asking questions was funniest though. Do you think he has actually worked in a development team?

I've worked with (and currently am) some very excellent artists, and none would even think to ask about the various methods of animation blending, before they've asked "can we replicate so-and-so" game!

fecking hell, I was in a pub a couple of weeks ago trying to explain quaternion rotations and how they overcome the gimble lock to him, and I barely even know what the feck I'm banging on about!

And no, that night was nowhere near as boring as it sounds, because after I blew a few braincells, I proceeded to destroy about 10billion more with whiskey.
 
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