"Bart-W. van Lith" <ba...@casema.net> wrote:
>Let's be realistic about GPL.
With pleasure.
>Ofcourse we all adore it, but for 99% of the average gaming public it's
>too hard to keep your car on the track, and even harder to go for really
>fast times.
Right.
>And that's not the worst (since it can be edited:).
>The thing I do NOT like about papy's way of approaching games like these
>is the very steep sys. req.
I know this argument is getting old, but the reason for the steep
hardware requirements of GPL is *not* poor coding, but the incredibly
detailed, realistic physics engine. And before someone says again "How
do you know that it's realistic? Have you ever driven a real
racecar... yaddaydadda" please consider this: a year after the sim was
released, people are still finding new and better approaches to
setting up the cars. Unlike with previous sims, where you could find
successful attempts like "no damping and hard springs at the rear end
work best" (which is totally unrealistic), those novel attempts all
come from people who use this approach: "This setup change would do
this-and-that to a real car. I try it in GPL, and it does the same!"
To me, this sounds like an incredibly realistic simulation by the
physics engine. And such an engine will use CPU horsepower.
>And not only that, but 36fps mac is pathetic! It's easy to know your max
>will often drop in certain situation (lots of cars, smoke, dirt, etc).
>That means (and that's the whole point) that going down from 36fps is
>always clearly to notice, and THUS distracting for such a serious and
>intersesting sim.
I think you got this backwards, Bart. Limiting the max framerate to 36
fps means more stable performance on faster machines. Compare a
Celeron 333 to a PIII 550 in GPL as you would compare a 2.5l 4cyl
Diesel engine to a 4l 6cyl Otto engine: Both give about the same
performance in everyday use as long as you stay below 4500 rpm
(assuming identical torque in this power band.) But in emergency
situations, you can rev the 4l to 6000 rpm (and maintain the 36 fps)
whereas the 2.5l Diesel will hit the limiter (and framerates will
drop). The 4l has reserves that can be mobilized when needed.
OTOH, you could remove the 36 fps limit. To stay within the metaphor,
this would mean racing both engines to the red line all the time. The
4l could show off its better performance, but now even this engine
would see the rev limiter quite often. What is better, smoother:
stable 36 fps or max 50 fps with occasional drops to the high 30s? I
would go for stable 36 fps.
Actually, I would have preferred an adjustable fps limiter (say, 25
fps for low end computers like the one I used to have.) As it seems,
there is a connection between the sampling rate of the physics engine
and the - only seemingly arbitrary - max frame rate of 36 fps which
prevents this.
>I REFUSE to upgrade anymore for games. LOTS of developers provve that
>there's much speed to be found with the average equipment people have.
I said this myself before, but have since seen the error in my ways.
:) The reason so many current games work nicely on 'old' PII 300s is
that hardware development was extremely fast during the last 12
months.
Coding a new game takes between one (best case) and four (worst case)
years. At the beginning of the development cycle, the designers have
more or less to determine the kind of hardware their game has to run
on when released. The designers tend to aim low in this guess for two
reasons: firstly, they want to cater to a base of installed machines
which is as wide as possible. The lower the common denominator, the
better the potential sales from that angle. Second, the game will
always be a bit slower than intended and require better hardware than
anticipated.
A year ago, I had a correspondence with some people who were coding a
3D railroad sim. I advised them to aim for the equivalent of a P200
with 64MB of RAM and a 3D card (meaning the likes of the Voodoo1 or
Riva 128). My argument was that every serious gamer would have such a
machine by the summer of 1999, which was the earliest possible release
date I could anticipate (they're still at it :) Their reply was that
they would rather design the game with a 166, 32MB and no 3D card in
mind and that I was too generous in my assumptions. :) Well, I erred
indeed, but in the other direction.
GPL is an exception insofar as the physics engine will not run
acceptably on slower machines. It was not first and foremost designed
to meet certain hardware requirements, but to set a new standard in
realism.
New games right now were designed to run barely on a P200MMX and
therefore run very nicely on the actual low-end entry-level computers
of today (400 MHz Celeron and AMD K6-2, last time I looked. Might have
changed since this morning, though. :) But this will change again with
the next generation of games, which will make full use of the hardware
support current today. By then, we will have to upgrade again to play
them - and we will do it, I'm sure. :)
>I also think changes at gfx is mostly a marketing startegy, so one can
>clearly show the difference in shots (and so in adds). Hardley any game
>dev. maxes out his old engine, and so never tries to solve bugs or add
>'forgotten' things.
This is true and deplorable, but few things will harm sales more than
a review which says "it's a nice game, but the max resolution of
800x600 is outdated and the graphics look old." Moreover, if you
release a game which is reviewed as "basically the same as its
predecessor, with a few improvements and bug fixes", few people will
buy it and most customers will (legitimately) yell "This is only a
patch! Why should I pay for it?" (Unless they're trained Microsoft
customers, in which case they will gladly pay full price for a few
minor tweaks... )
>Not having rain in a racing sim is a bit silly too. Just like Micrp.
>ruined GP2, Sierra will probably have asked Papy to hurry and forget
>about some things.
I disagree strongly. Rain is one aspect of a sim that is very
difficult to do right and very easy to leave out. What good are
current implementations of rain? When was the last time you saw a real
race that started in heavy rain, was driven during heavy rain and
ended in heavy rain? Was it an exciting race?
Does a sim exist which models things like this?:
- The race is started in the dry but with overcast skies. The
metereological service predicts a 60% chance for rain within
the next two hours.
- It starts drizzling during lap 10 but you can't be sure if you
should change to rain tires. The track gets a bit slippery in some
places, but is still fine in others.
- You decide to stay out and, in lap 18, the real downpour begins. You
barely manage to bring your car back to the pits. Those of your (AI)
competitors who changed to wet tires before (and who you laughed at
for being such chickens) now have an advantage.
- In lap 40, just two laps prior to your next scheduled pit stop, the
rain ends. Slowly, the conditions get better. Should you switch to
slicks again? Already, some parts of the track dry off, but there
are puddles in other sections and everything off the groove is still
slippery as hell. And there's no guarantee the rain will not begin
again...
All sims with rains effects that I've seen so far had either "rain" or
"no rain", but nothing in between. What is the benefit of a mode in
which the sky is grey, you see less, and the cars are a bit harder to
drive? As long as nothing like the scenario described above is
possible, I can do without rain.
>That's why you get 40.000
I think you get bad sales figures if you make a sim
- with a steep learning curve and no (or very little)
concessions to the beginner or 'arcade' racer,
- about an era which only a few people can relate to,
- and advertise it with the wrong arguments.
If you don't want to make SCGT instead of GPL, there's little you can
do about the second point. But I believe GPL would have done much
better if it had had the following features:
- An arcade mode with double tire grip and a 'bumper' cam for
increased 'sense of speed'.
- A more flashy damage model: flying body (fuselage, I mean) parts,
ripped off engines, more fire, more havoc.
- An adjustable AI difficulty level which allows the bloody beginner
to win against Jim Clark after two hours of practising.
- A top ten (or better yet, top 50) list of hotlaps for every track.
- An advertizing scheme which focused on the difficulty of the sim
("If they are too fast, you are too *SLOW*!" "Separates the men from
the boys...") instead of highlighting gory aspects which simply
*are* *not* there in GPL's current incarnation ("In 1968, safety
regulations were introduced - welcome to 1967...")
*WE* could always turn off the driving aids and maintain that hotlaps
in arcade mode do not count. All of the above would hardly have taken
away anything of the enjoyment we get from *our* GPL, but would have
increased the sales tremendously.
In Egypt, there are several pyramids that change their angle halfway
to the top. They look pretty ugly. The reason for their ungainly
appearance is this: the architects of the pyramids strove for always
steeper and steeper angles - until one especially daring construct
collapsed. All other pyramids in construction were quickly changed to
a safer angle to avoid a similar fate. I'm afraid that GPL was "the
pyramid that wanted too much" of sims. All other manufacturers of
sims, and even Papyrus themselves, seem to have toned down their
physics models for future releases.
The theory that "the market is big enough for arcade games *and*
serious sims" has been defeated. To the next company seriously
attempting to create "the most realistic sim ever": please include a
good arcade mode *too*, or you will have to make your next product all
'arcade'.
--
Wolfgang Preiss \ E-mail copies of replies to this posting are welcome.
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