> > >Right, Rendition brings enough money to the table to make it worthwhile,
> > >any sane game company will port their game to the card.
> > So Papyrus will only support the K6 if AMD pay them to?
> Um no... Processors are another ball of wax. The K6 is presumably
> compatible with the market leading processor: Intel. Thus, Papyrus games
> (and every other game) will "support" the K6 by the fact that the K6 is
> just another CPU. And if it's not compatible with the Intel chips, AMD
> has some business issues to contend with. (Just like Cyrix did with
> their decidely less than 100% compatible chips...)
> > I doubt that
> > very much. Of course if a company offers money to make something that
> > will help in making a decision, but Papyrus also need to look at their
> > market and see where they could make money. 3dFX was one such
> > opportunity.
> It remains my belief that the cost to port to 3dFX would not have been
> recovered in the ratios needed to justify the business decision to
> allocate a talented graphics engineer to that project, when that same
> engineer could be more profitably working on the next generation of the
> Papyrus 3D engine.
> > >> and the reason that N2 wasn't developed on N2
> > >> had to be related to Sierra's involvement in that market.
> > >OK, as a sentence, that makes no sense.
> > Substitute "3dFX" for the second "N2". Sorry that the typo made this
> > "impossible" to understand....
> In the future, shall I take the liberty to random substitute words into
> someone else's sentences so as to make them mean what I want them to
> mean? I'm here to talk about auto sims and related topics, not play
> madlibs... Thus, rather than try to divine what you meant and reply, I
> pointed out a sentence that wasn't parsable.
> > >How exactly were they blinkered? Because they got paid to port a game to
> > >a 3D card? Come to think of it, I guess that really is getting
> > >hoodwinked...
> > "Because they got paid to port a game to a 3D card.....which precluded
> > them (either contractually or in the belief that it was unnecessary)
> > from porting it to the other, more succesful, 3D card.
> I believe the only thing that precluded a port to 3dFX was available
> time and manpower. I believe it to be a resource allocation issue rather
> than a contractual prohibition. At the time, it was not at all clear
> which card(s) were destined to be the "successes".
> > Once Rendition
> > was done and dusted there seemed either a belief that 3dFX wasn't
> > necessary, or else Sierra wouldn't have been too happy that 3dFX
> > support was being developed alongside Rendition.
> At the same time as N2 development was going on, Sierra was developing
> games with native 3dFX support. The happiness argument doesn't really
> hold too much water there.
> So, that leaves the decision that it wasn't profitable (or wasn't
> possible) to do so. It certainly wasn't possible to do so in time for
> Christmas release, given that the product almost didn't ship as it
> was...
> > Such dual support
> > would, in however small a manner, have reduced Renditions chances at a
> > time when they were still seen as a contendor.
> Yes, I agree with you on that point. Nevertheless, I don't believe
> Sierra directly makes any meaningful amount of money selling
> Rendition-based video cards. I believe they chose to sell 3D cards to
> seed the market and help the game-buying public installed base reach a
> critical mass of 3D cards earlier, so at some point in the future,
> Sierra development teams would be freed from having to write (or
> continue to improve existing) software rasterizers.
> ---Jim
I fully understand you viewpoint on this issue Jim, but I have a couple
of questions. Does everyone at Sierra/Papy live in either the past or
the future? Doesn't anyone there live in the present? Isn't Nascar2
currently the biggest selling Papyrus product? This is so but you sound
as if it is dead to future development. With the Track pack and the NRO
coming isn't it possible that N2 will be the biggest selling Papy
product well into 1998? I will concede that SODA should knock it down a
notch at release, but it doesn't have the market clout to stay ahead in
sales for long(unless it is a much better game than N2). Just how many
copies would Sierra have to sell to justify this patch anyway? A 1000?
10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? Whatever happened to doing what the
customer wants just to keep him/her happy? Nascar2 will be king at Papy
until N3 comes out and that won't be until late next year probably, I
think that is enough time to do a port without throwing everything off
schedule too far. I know that you can't just pull people off the street
to do a port, but I remember someone at Papyrus one time saying that
resources weren't a problem there.
Now, with all that said, I don't think Papy should make a 3dfx
port....they should make a D3D port. That way all of the new high
performance cards will work as well. I know many of the 3dfx faithful
won't like this but this is really in the best interest of everyone. I
don't think the Voodoo's design makes it the ultimate choice for N2 but
some of the newer cards look like they would be awesome.
Dana Bailes
