Originally Posted by Drtyrm

That was pretty much my point. There is no possible way that Xregg's screenies prove anything about the mass appeal/success VG will experience. Only beacuse his performance is so far above average as to be statistically insignificant.

P.S. And obviously I wish I had $4600 to spend on new computer!

Originally Posted by r.gun

FRAPS + DivX... I've been playing around with some VG vids. You can make a 5 minute clip that's decent size and quality if you have the encoder resize the width down to 480... then you can play it on dvd players too... hah

Originally posted by Dirtch;167884

So can we say that transitioning to UE3 is still a plausible, viable, option for Vanguard's future at some point or another?

I would like to see that, honestly. Even if the art itself doesn't change drastically, it would make things more efficient for everyone concerned. Plus it'd be easier to implement newer features, or updates to existing features, using the new tools at your disposal.

Originally posted by Fong;167853

Brad, Have you cross-tested VG on Vista. Like Pull the HD and put another in your rig and install Vista on it. Same as Dual-booting.

I'd be insterested in seeing your results with 4gig and 64bit.





-Fong

Originally posted by Fong;167820

Great post.

But there in lies the problem. Vanguard is not Multi-threaded because they had to support all those $54 CPU's out there, namely the Pentiums & Athlon64's.

If Sigil was allowed to multi-thread, all they would have to do is load off the HD the next chunk into main memory and then from there into your Video card instead of comming strait off the slower HD. Preemtive loading.

Almost everyone has dual-cores, but not all. Some are still living in the dark ages. But they will have a rude awakening in 2007 when they see "Dual-core required" on some games. Kinda wish Sigil would've gone this route, but we'll see. Hopefully their working on a 64bit build of the game with the unreal 3 engine.


-Fong

Originally posted by thatznice;167810

Cmon Brad. We both know how the system works. Its not impossible.

First lets take a look at the evolution of user based online gaming and interactivity. Projects like Second Life show there is a market for this form of free play, however it does rely on user made content. It lets users create dynamic objects within the game world, however its rule base does not really offer any form of competitiveness. Basically what one person creates within the world cannot ruin the balance of the game due to the games rule set and how one plays.

Second. I believe the guys over at Mythic were also playing around with the philosophy that MMORPGs could potentially have user made content. Lets go further and talk about a world that at is base, is made by developers. However, set up where content can be created by the users themselves. The greatest hurdle is to how to keep the balance in such a project. This is the future of online mmorpging however. A UO meets Second Life with a core ruleset that keeps the game inline and an AI that is dynamic.

Of course this is a huge undertaking, and many developers would shy away from it. But I personally believe the first step, would be to create an engine for such a thing rather than the game itself. You chose to use Unreal's engine to be the basis of your game, thus allowing you to jump right in without making an engine from the ground up.

The engine needs to exist before the game, and I believe there are quite a few investors out there willing to invest in the creation of such an engine. But it would be two fold, the actual making of the game would come hopefully from a publisher with the cash to make this happen. The engine technology developed first as an independent project could spur a slew of both single player and multiplayer games. The second stage is having a development company use that engine like you use Unreals to create your desired project.

Its really a question of who will be the fist to do it, rather than when. because it will happen. Interactivity is evolving, its just a matter of how we can keep up with it.

cheers

Originally posted by Dulcina;167814

Sign me up for that! (yeah I read your post before you edited )


On topic: I wish I could get performance like that. My system is not too far from yours. I guess I have to get myself a new gfx card but I thought my X1900XTX would do for another few months

Originally posted by Syneval;167574

I bought the following system a few days ago, and no I didn't upgrade just to play Vanguard : )

Core2duo 2.4ghz, 2gb twinmoss 667 ram, asus p5b deluxe mobo with integrated soundmax audio card, geforce 8800gts 320mb, sata2 320gb 16mb cache hd, antec sonata2 with 450w psu. You can check the prices of these components online, and you'll agree this is a pretty cheap system.

I did a format, installed windows xp professional, and the latest drivers. I also applied M$'s v4 dualcore fix, activated it in the registry, forced windows to use the pmtimer in boot.ini, and lastly activated ahcpi (sp?) v2.0 in my mobo bios. I then set all possible quality settings to maximum in the Nvidia cp.

Vanguard was installed and updated, I set 'highest quality' in the gfx options, and then proceeded to turn all remaining sliders and options to maximum as well, except hardware occlusion which seems a bit buggy. In other words, I have set everything, everywhere to maximum, with a res of 1280x1024. I then added the precache line in vgclient.ini and gave it 128 as value.

Now, I have to admit I didn't expect the game to run very well. On my previous system it was a bit of a dog, and looked and ran a LOT worse than any other game I had installed. Vanguard looked unimpressive, was plagued by constant load times, the textures looked like uninspired crap and so on ...

On my new kit however, holy crap ! Not only does the game run at a near constant 40-75+fps in the wilds, even in busy towns with many players loading hitches are kept to a minimum and fps never drops below 25. And it looks absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous. Just think about the best screenshots you saw of the game, and that's exactly how Vanguard shows up on the monitor here. Having taken the time to tweak my driver color settings, the world looks incredibly vibrant, with none of that washed-out look that plagues some people. I'm a bit of a graphics whore, and I'll freely admit there is not a single comparable game that can hold a candle to Vanguard's full gfx option looks.

I tried to play EQ2 after it but was instantly and inexplicably repelled by how ... fake ? that gameworld looks now. Not to mention the sub-par combat etc.

I have seen the same thing with many other games : Oblivion, NWN2, Supreme Commander ; a very huge jump in performance, far beyond what should mathematically happen if I compare with my previous system. The culprit ? The GeForce 8800GTS 320mb ! Even at less than 300 euro's, this card truly achieves the next level : its 96 streaming processors and unified shader architecture basically mean that any shader-heavy game will run ridiculously better on this card.

I'll admit nothing is perfect tho. Two things annoy me : the fact that there are sometimes small gfx bugs like a bush flickering in and out of existence. And most irritating, sometimes the game will bog down to 8-9fps after a few hours of play. If I log out/in and stare at the exact scene again it's up to the usual smoothness tho.

Originally posted by Ghengis;167729

First forgive the long post - I don't post often and have quite a bit to say apparently.

It's easy to see how immersive games would appeal to obsessive compulsive personalities but that's not really the point. Some people work hard and play hard in order to squeeze the most quality of life they can from each minute we have on this planet. MMO's are a great way to 'play hard'.

The grind in its simplest form comes back to content. We are immersed in a world and in order for it to remain attractive we need to be challenged and interested and so there must be tons of content - like so many shrimp being fed to a whale - and that poses a serious challenge to MMO developers - how to constantly come up with more grist for the mill and make it interesting and challenging.

Also, I won't argue the merit of spending so much time online gaming except to say it is everyone's own choice. I do it with my five sons and we enjoy being an online family and I wouldn't trade our time online together for a mountain of soccer games, a parking lot of minivans, and a coven of soccer moms (it is coven isn't it?).

Here's an idea for developers and a bit of my gaming history so you know where it comes from.

I come from an extensive IT background and I work hard at computers in an online service capacity (not games) and play hard at computers after work in the world of MMO. I have seen everything from the pong console (which I received for Christmas around 1970 on a black and white TV) all the way up through EQ beta, EQ2 beta etc. Before that BBSing and before that table top at a men's gaming club including AD&D in 1973, lead miniatures (table top) Avalon Hill, Starfleet etc. Based on that experience I'm going to offer this thought to you game developer mogul types - and yes I would be interested in being part of any development of this idea.

First, to address the real issue here - the never ending quest for grist from both a player and a development perspective - the best content is player driven content. Using a culmination of MMO and milieu based genius and accidental genius witnessed from all gaming experiences over the course of a lifetime of gaming I have pieced together a game setting and architecture that would truly constitute a second generation MMO, and a way forward.

Imagine a vast world with real logistics - the kind that can only be created on a super computer like the one mapping the human genome - which BTW runs risc (reduced instruction system code based architecture) based Linux now and not just AIX. Just imagine 64 processors and a Terabyte of ram per footprint - no computer resource starvation no matter what the load...the entire subscribership online in the same world together - 50,000+ people playing together.

Imagine a central neutral starting city which is policed and where you are safe from PVP and can interact as we have been in all our MMO's but as you go further away from the city friendly patrols are fewer until only the entrance to the zone is guarded and further - open territory with total 100% PVP - the outer zones - and no means of magical travel, period and you end up where you end up. No friendly towns or villages out there either, just virgin territory with a few basic dungeons, a random encounter table and a wealth of virgin resources. Some of you might start to recognize this a 00 space from Eve-online, and that's exactly the model I'm using mixed with others.

I'm also going to use the same game for the economics model in combination with Vanguard's model. You have to build everything - houses, boats, equipment - all player built however, the resources to do this on a large scale require the setup of player owned resource based equipment - such as a mine, or a sawmill, a boat with vast cargo space or a large caravan etc, which is an expensive proposition. In addition you have the logistics of getting these items to and from market over land and sea trade routes and you know trying to do this unescorted is almost certain suicide given the number of players out there hunting for juicy economic targets like yours.

Economic moguls or super carebears who do this sort of marketeering require protection, much like the medieval merchants did from the local lords, and were willing to pay a tax on their goods to receive it.

The local lords need to build a castle - have patrols, go out hunting for bandits, respond to sightings of incursions etc to keep thier carebears safe, and continue to build thier own fortifcations (keep/castle/seige engines). In short, everyone needs these resources which make the world go round...

What about pirates who invest in ship building, but they use fast over manned and over gunned sloops to wage piracy against merchant trade routes...and setup well defended areas among a smattering of islands near your territory...they're hard to find in such a vast ocean never mind catching them...and if you do you know what they say about cornered animals...remember this isn't a respawning computer MOB these are real people who've invested a lot in their ships whom you've cornered...

The casual small guild which doesn't want to be part of any large war and decides to become a bandit guild - preying on your overland caravans - taking up residence in your vast forest...

All this content, economy driven, and provided by players themselves in a PVP world with a non-pvp core controlled by the developers, writing geopolitical events as coalitions of guilds become united and attempt to take and hold a rich region, and develop it etc up to and including the formation of towns around the player owned keeps - in the interest of economics, trade, safety and resource for further exploration, dominance in war against other factions and neighbors, and indeed, to own the coolest dungeons for miles for their own to explore and farm can only happen if you have 30-50 thousand people online at the same time.

This is going on somewhat today in Eve-online but its failing due to computer resource starvation. When 100 ships meet 100 ships in battle in a zone with space stations and death star defenses the hosting server dies of computer resource starvation and starts dropping connections etc, but other than that the game runs fine and they still set a world record with 30,000+ people online at the same time in the same MMO world.

Computer resource starvation caused by cisc (complex instruction system code architecture) systems because they don't have the resources required to do this sort of game - you would call these systems Intel or AMD based however a pSeries (Big Blue) now runs Linux. Producing a game like this on Linux would shake the foundations of the gaming community and the opensource/Linux community on a massive scale. I bet IBM and the opensource community would love to work on a game like this where the resource client code is available for both Windows and Linux, the game client is free and the subscription rate was say $20 a month. Eve-Online does run on an IBM based 64 bit optronic super blade Windows platform and is coded in Python which shows IBM's interest in a piece of this 6 billion dollar industry...

I would play that game - would you? And there's your answer to the grind, and the grist - both provided gratis (to a degree) via the players of the game themselves. There's nothing more realistic than humans hunting humans.

Originally posted by Akuma;167599

Backing that up:
www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html

Clearly indicates that the susbcriptions rose up exponentially up and until velious was released (basically: brad's era), and rose very slowly after. It was an era of eternal population of newbiue zone; EQ was "beginners friendly" for a good 2 yeahs and a half and only halted with Luclin (piece of crap expansion btw)

It's interesting to notice that there was a mass influx of players (100.000 subs) in spring/summer 2004, 6 months before wow was released. Iirc it was about the time i quit EQ and Gates of Discord had been released and was a piece of crap extension... i'm clueless.