PGD Annual 2009 - Progress

[jdarling]

FUR was never designed to run on a "128Mb Intel crappy video". It uses some pretty heavy effects like deferred shading (rendering to 3 textures at once) and +20 light on the screen (continuously). The minimum requirement is pixel and vertex shader 3.0. The engine is not bad, it's done by design. I'm not planning to downgrade anything. I want to create nice looking games with stat of the art effects and for that you need a video card. Welcome the world of games. So for this time you have to do it with the movies we create.

Chill, wasn't meant to p1$$ ya off, but when I think of an arcade machine I don't think of the state of the art graphics chipset being installed. Most MAME and likewise arcade systems (wasn't this an arcade contest) are designed for lower end hardware for a reason (the reach and "reuse").

Just to be somewhat fair, ran it on my ATI box as well (honestly can't pull specs from here but I know its a Radeon, DX10 support, and at least 256Mb) it still bottlenecks (all other specs are pretty much the exact same, guess I need that latest and greatest 512+ card).

Let me add to that that there aren't any Intel graphics chips that are even designed to run games.

True, but it is also one of the most common chipsets in notebooks (ok laptops whatever) on the market today. If your going to design for high end hardware then you should test up front during the load for that hardware and warn the user if they don't meet your expectations, or scale down the effects (as many production games do) so the user can at least see that you have something beautiful instead of wonder what died.

LOL Fair enough...but didn't you read the instructions pdf I provided? The controls were on the 3rd page

Paul, I did read the directions (after I ran the game LOL) but when I play test I try to do it from the perspective of what the average user is going to do. In the idea of an arcade game few (if anyone) will have access to your manual .

TIP: Play the "west circuit" track because "deep highway" is just too full of powerups. Turbo means instant death because you'll just crash into something muhaha.

I'll give it a shot next time I have time to play some games (that arn't board games or involve 7 year olds ).

All you need is inkscape and notepad.

Got a writeup on that anyplace? I'd set my 7yo to work creating something for his brother to play in . He does ok with InkScape and I'm serious when I say Chance loved it.

In general
I'm not a hardcore gamer, never claimed to be, never want to be. I have a wonderful family and enjoy spending time with my children outdoors. I've worked in the industry plenty, love designing/play testing, but it's not a life I'd lead on my own time or $$. If asked what type of "gammer" I was I'd have to answer "8bit and green all the way".

Most players (greater than 90%) NEVER read a manual! In fact this has been proven with more than one game and more than once by placing blatant cheat codes, tricks, and tips in manuals only to have them "discovered" some time later and passed via NG/MG/Web to the rest of the playerbase.

Few people look at your spec sheet and requirements, even fewer pay attention to it. But, plenty of people will be happy to tell you how bad it failed on their hardware if its allowed to run without warning them.

I just though with a few minutes I had I'd spend some time showing my kids some new games and put some thoughts out that may be useful to developers or anyone else. I'm off back into my world of marketing, the great outdoors, and tinkering with the kids. CYA on the flipflop.

- Jeremy

[paul_nicholls]

LOL Fair enough...but didn't you read the instructions pdf I provided? The controls were on the 3rd page

Paul, I did read the directions (after I ran the game LOL) but when I play test I try to do it from the perspective of what the average user is going to do. In the idea of an arcade game few (if anyone) will have access to your manual

No worries, I do see what you mean

As I said, I will put in the controls for credits/start game, and an in-game help file too

Thanks again for the feedback chief

cheers,
Paul

[NecroDOME]

Why would an arcade game not have nice graphics? MAME is a simulator for running old arcade games. When some classics back then like house of the dead where released, you also could better buy a new pc because the also needed some hardware.
It's not designed for low-end hardware, it's designed (as the compo rules say) to the hardware of the judges. It was also tested om similar systems and run fair enough imo.

Also for this compo you don't need to put the insert coin onto the screen which button to press. After all you should somewhere insert a coin that says "insert $1". Next you have limited controls: a sick or steering wheel and a few buttons that probably already have an icon on them for what they are supposed to do. Again keep the compo-rules in mind.

Also nVidia and ATI are making low budget cards that will not run the game because they are not targeting hardcore gamers.
We tested it even on a old DX 9 card on a pc which didn't had a big CPU and the game run acceptable. I'm not expecting that everybody can run the game +60 FPS continuously.

Also did you disable the motion blur, lowered the track iterations and bring the car count back to 2? In most cases this will also help to speed up the game.

[Wizard]

NecroDOME: The game you submitted is very good, I like it !! It runs fine on my Laptop with NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 GPU, Intel Core Duo 2 GHZ.

[NecroDOME]

@Wizard thank you for the hint I didn't mean to put up a discussion like this.

[Zhooibaal]

Let me add to that that there aren't any Intel graphics chips that are even designed to run games.

True, but it is also one of the most common chipsets in notebooks (ok laptops whatever) on the market today. If your going to design for high end hardware then you should test up front during the load for that hardware and warn the user if they don't meet your expectations, or scale down the effects (as many production games do) so the user can at least see that you have something beautiful instead of wonder what died.

It's only fair to keep in mind that the laptops (or notebooks xD) that are equipped with such graphics chips aren't catagorised as gaming systems. The "gaming laptops" out there are all equipped with somewhat high-end graphics chips like the GeForce Go 7400 mentioned by Wizard. The Intel chipsets have no support for hardware shaders whatsoever. My laptop doesn't even display anything other than the hud when I try to run FUR on it. Later chips (yours probably) attempt to emulate the shader support, but that's the bottleneck right there. The emulation is way to slow to pull off a decent framerate on such a graphics chip. Even my old Athlon 64 3200+ (a single core that is) with 1GB RAM and a GeForce 7600GS runs the game fine even with the motion blur enabled but on a relatively low resolution. But it manages to keep above 30 fps all of the time with those settings.

As long as no shader technology (or only very old shader technology) is used it'll all be fine on graphics chips like yours. But current gen technology or even last gen won't work very good. And last gen is DirectX 9 or even DirectX 10 as DirectX11 is the current version and therefore that is the current gen. I can imagine that DirectX8 will work fine on your graphics chip. Just try a game like Battlefield 1942.

[chronozphere]

I'm anxiously waiting for the final outcome of this competition.

Is judging still progressing?

[Traveler]

I believe it is.

I have my results nearly ready and I'm currently in the process of writing a review for each game.

[paul_nicholls]

I believe it is.

I have my results nearly ready and I'm currently in the process of writing a review for each game.

Nice

cheers,
Paul

[WILL]

Is judging still progressing?

Yup, got my scores in already. Working on the magazine.

(I could use some photos from the 2 remaining teams which haven't sent me theirs yet.)