|
Forum: The Classroom Topic: computer games? started by: a.out Posted by a.out on Feb. 15 2001,19:45
Okay, I need some help here. My mother is going to Lebanon tomorrow, and she wants me to copy some computer games for my cousin for whom we bought a computer this past summer. That's all fine, except I don't play computer games much anymore (mainly an occassional game of quake III), and when I do play games, they are always linux-based games. I need suggestions. I don't really feel like scouring warez sites for games, so I need input for good demo versions of windows games that run *reasonably* on a 450 MHz AMD w/ 4 or 8 megs of video ram, I can't remember which. Something like the quake 3 demo, which can keep most people pretty busy. Any suggestions? In the meantime, I'll get my cd burner configured. Posted by The_Stomper on Feb. 15 2001,20:35
One word - Tribes. Get the demo, or even the full version (it's about บ in the bargain bin now). It's the best damn thing you'll ever do for your cousin (and the worst thing ever for his school marks).Stomper Posted by DuSTman on Feb. 16 2001,01:37
You didn't say if that video card has 3d acceleration, and if so, how fast. That can make a great difference to what options are open to you.. No Q3 arena for you if you don't have a 3d accelerator.You might be able to get away with unreal tournaments software renderer in a low resolution. That game runs well off the software renderer, as its visible surface determination algorithms are better suited to a software rasteriser than polygon-at-a-time hardware renderers: UT has a system where by the polygons are held in a binary space partition tree, and appropriate traversal of this tree can be used to sort the polygons on a front-back manner, then a span-buffer is used to track what polygons are visible and what arn't. It's this span buffering technique which I believe is more suited to software rasterisation.. Posted by askheaves on Feb. 16 2001,01:58
quote: Q3 uses the same BSP idea. One group in my senior year of school had an Octal Space Partition system running, and it was pretty sexy. Too bad they did everything in OpenGL and had the input loop built out of the GLU library (or something like that... the thing with the callbacks) integrated right into the render loop. All messed up. My group built a Direct3D game and my implementation used a bunch of COM objects in their own threads that dealt with Sound, or Input, or Graphics, or whatever. It didn't work perfectly as I was unaware at the time of some limitations of NT (like, timer latencies... damn, they screwed things up). I'd do it a whole lot better now, but I accidentally deleted all the code. I'm among the dumbest people on the planet. Posted by DuSTman on Feb. 16 2001,02:21
Q3s system is somwhat similar, but again, somehat different as well, instead of using a span buffer and traversing the tree near-far q3 has the world divided into clusters of convex sub-spaces (because, doing this for every convex subspace in a geometrically complex map would take quite a lot of storage space), and then simply has a graph data structure showing how each cluster of subspaces visibility properties connect with each other. The binary space partition tree is used for swiftly determining which sub-space you're in, as well as collision detection. I think it is also used while rendering, but it isn't quite as extensively as (i believe) it is in UTs system.Interesting you did this sort of stuff at school. I'm in the second year at university now and the subject matter is boring as hell. Posted by askheaves on Feb. 16 2001,02:48
The content of classes will continue to be pretty boring. The Jr & Sr years will be more interesting as they will put a lot of the crap you learned to the test with all sorts of applications. The time that we really got to shine was senior project time. We got to choose any topic, and do what we thought we could accomplish.Actually, our project was a hell of a lot more ambitious (as well as ambiguous). We planned to make a game for the Dreamcast using Wince 2.11 and DirectX. Aside from the technology issues, it was way too much to do in less than 6 months. We ended up with a single threaded app that could walk around a 3D world with a ramp to a second level with barrels, walls, and 2D pics of our professors (not Sprites, but textured monoliths) that you could shoot and they would blow up. If you shot a barrel, it would go 'Clang!'. If you shot a wall, a bullet hole would stick around. That app ran really slow, so I sped it up by making it a multithreaded app with everything being accomplished independantly. Didn't get some of the collision stuff into place in time, and couldn't do the ramp thing. No biggie. Still got an A. And, incidentally, you're probably right on the UT vs. Q3 engines. Q3 was designed around the idea of curved surfaces. UT was designed around the concept of faggy colored light and CliffyB maps. YUO=FAGORT! Posted by L33T_h4x0r_d00d on Feb. 19 2001,02:36
so yea.... i like revolt...because of the pretty colors.Oh yes Breakneck racing(no sadistic pun intended) is a badass racing game. Possible the best out there. There just something about racing a city bus against a voltswagaon bug monster truck and a shelby cobra. The game has everthing including UNLIMITED NITROUS, which you can turn off i you like but its really fucking funny to burnout on a pyramid with a gokart. |