Quote: "Raven you've just posted about 90% assumption."
I'm going on what I read on the Fileplanet website.
Quote: "1. People who complain about download size need get faster internet/new ISP/live somewhere else. (And pick a decent site to download it from rather than "fileplanet". I got the demo from Nvidia and the speed never dipped below 500kbps (Its supposed to be 8mpbs but this was Saturday afternoon and BT sucks.)"
The actual download time doesn't bother me so much really.
With my connection I got it in just under 30minutes, however I know some people who are still on 512K connections because that is as fast as they can get due to either being in a crappy internet area (in-fact if I didn't have a dedicated line, I'd be limited to 2Mb) or because of sharing the internet with other people in their building. Lots of the guys at work generally download stuff there because their connections at home are just crap for large xbox live stuff.
The gripe I have isn't so much with the download size, although imo it was fairly excessive; but the install size. As I mentioned before I had around 250GB free, but again lots of people I know have that as their total hard disk space. After installing the game took up approx. 6GB in total.. I had to manually delete the original installer file, and the temporary files the game refused to clean after use to get that down to 2GB. For a demo, that's ridiculous.
Size wise the demo isn't even that much bigger in terms of gameplay area to the original FarCry demo which weighed in at 500MB. So most of this size comes down to model and texture sizes.
Quote: "2. I'm running it fine on 7.7 ATI catalyst drivers. You certainly don't need the beta drivers for dx9."
Both my ATI and NVIDIA Drivers although they would play it with what I had (believe they were Cat 7.6 and Forceware 169.03), I got the same problems as Zeke and was forced to use DirectX9 ONLY.
Not to mention they had horribly performance, maybe this is different on Windows XP; but I'm on Vista and do not plan on reinstalling XP on any of my machines just to play games.
Quote: "3. No. This is MUCH better than Far Cry. The nanosuit changes the gameplay on its own, and the graphics, this time, are flawless."
Downloaded it in the end because I had a look at one of the trailer videos thinking "hey this does look pretty cool"; however actually playing it unfortunately the responsiveness I was hoping for just wasn't there. The movement felt nasty and jerky, probably because they had made it too close to realistic movement with you only being able to move a single step at a time... but then they overshadow that with completely inhuman abilities because of a special combat suit.
Yes, while there are some nice touches that make it cool. Overall it wasn't as impressive as the video made it out to be, nor was it as big a leap in gameplay mechanics as I'd hoped it would've.
By the time I got to the part where some invisible beast had just ripped apart a group of terrorists, I closed the demo and not played it since.
A demo is there to make people want to buy the full-game but honestly I feel the game is still a very long way from being ready. It certainly has not been able to shake in my mind that it is much more than a technology demo that hopefully someone else will put to better use. Although it is nice to see they've added a storyline .. no matter how retarded it is.
Quote: "4. The screen shot is dx9 and a STILL image. ALL the shadows are dynamic as is ALL the organic scenery (everything is moving in the wind). ALL other games ever released previously look worse."
Only if you have a system where you can turn everything up.
Played the demo on three different setups.
Athlon64 X2 - 1GB - 6100 (unplayable 5-10fps : everything low)
Athlon64 X2 - 1GB - HD 2400 XT (barely playable 25-30fps : medium)
Core 2 Duo - 4GB - HD 2900 XT (playable 120fps : high)
The difference in graphics is fairly vast between Low-Medium-High setups in terms of the atmosphere; but in terms of the actual visuals it's not exactly night-and-day you get from Half-Life 2.
Something else to note also, is while yes the world feels organic with everything swaying. The FarCry SM3.0 patch provided the same for the original game, which honestly doesn't look that different and runs at almost 4x the speed. This ment it was playable even on the on-board cards.
I mean you could argue "well no one who wants to game will use these", but what the hell is the point in making a game that only hardcore gamers can play? You can still do very nice graphics without demanding the earth from the graphics card.
While yes, this might look nice honestly compared to Unreal Tournament 3 .. I'd pick Unreal 3 graphics wise, as it just looks better imo and it actually runs on all of the rigs I use for testing.
Quote: "5. Its the most stable demo I've ever played. You can actually change the graphics settings WITHOUT reloading the entire level file or having to restart. (And without it crashing.) The level load times are minimal. There are NO other loading screens for the entire 1hr30mins. If, in the same area, you try to load a different save game, it loads INSTANTLY. There is a lot of pop up but considering my computer is about 5 years old and only the Graphics card is new, I can live with it."
Part fo what killed the performance for me was the constantly loading. It doesn't load "instantly" for new areas, as it's constantly streaming from the hard disk.. however it isn't doing it in little bits because it just loads so much data it's stupid.
As such while if I stayed in an area for about 5minutes with nothing happening my hard disk would stop accessing and my 6100 would finally get a reasonable speed. Take one step and that slumps back into unplayable country.
For a game that really is revolved around being developed for Vista and it's new technologies the fact that it constantly accesses the hard disk a known performance issue on the OS without some sort of fix or correction (which if you lock down the system and run an application in exclusive mode with indexing suspended it'll cause almost no performance overhead especially with pagefile directx access disabled) just seemed retarded to me.
As far as demos go, recently I've not played many (and I've played quite a few) that have actually crashed. In-fact the only one that has was Sega Rally Revo.. still no idea why.
Quote: "6. Therefore clearly the slickest PC game engine around. Unreal3 and HL2 must be blushing rightnow. "
UT3 still looks better, and Half-Life 2 even with the EP3 enhancements that have brought the engine closer to current generation graphics hardly looks out of place next to it.
The DirectX10 version no doubt would make them look aging, but I never saw that aspect. Either it was removed from the demo, or it just doesn't recognise my HD-Series cards as Dx10. A shame give I'd love to know if it's performance is any better than other Dx10 games. Still graphically all they appear to have done realistically is throw more and more polygons at a problem, so anyone who is using budget or mid-range cards ends up being left behind in lag-tastic country.
Quote: "7. Everyone else. it's more than just another pretty shooter. It's almost a sandbox game, you have so many different ways to tackle each section. You can go in all guns blazing or use the cloak to move through the entire level unseen. Or any combination of the two. There are no health packs, your nanosuit regenerates you automatically, so as long as you can get into cover, you won't die.
8. Its much more fun than Far Cry"
Sandbox is the key word that. I'd fully agree with you, it does feel like a Sandbox game.. for an FPS that is actually a BAD thing, not good.
The game has no real character to it. Sure some of the mechanics are impressive; but they're shown as set-peices on their own rather than something that feels fluid. The whole game just doesn't feel fluid at all, which if this was the next Rainbox Six forcing you to think about everything you're going to do then cool; but it's NOT. Once the poop hits the fan is what made the original enjoyable (for all of 10seconds).
Nothing you've said really made me want to play the game, and most of what you've gone on about was the graphics which frankly I'm really not impressed with, especially for the performance hit.
Having tried the demo, frankly I wish I hadn't. Atleast my imagination could've left me to think "yeah this'll be cool", but I'm going to go with whoever said it above.
This is just another damn shooter, and not even that cool.
It has some nice ideas.. just a shame they've overshadowed by the crappy engine.
