Quote: "I'm not sure I agree. DBP has access internally to the geometry data of matrices and BSPs. Shadows work on matrices at the moment"
thats because TGC has access to the low level data of these things. Currently we don't, not even through the TPF SDK.
As currently the only cost effcient way to create softshadows is through Shaders - and we can't use terrain, matrices or BSP as shader fvf mesh, then technically for the community atleast it is impossible to create SoftShadows on these things.
They're also created differently to DBP's shadows as theirs use the stencil buffer, which i wouldn't be surprised if this was a pure hardware based thing using DirectX's builtin stencil shadows.
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and although the advent of Broadband is a nice thing, 650mb for a video still takes a fair wack of time to download ... admitidly the difference is 24hrs to only 2h30min but that is still a long time. Add to this not everyone are within broadband areas.
Only a very very small fraction of the US and Canada are a)in a broadband capable area or b)able to afford it ... as $40/month ain't cheap. If you go for the cheaper deals, your likely to be cut off every so often onpurpose (even more because of poor lines), for the companies to save more money they put MORE people on the servers - so where on AOL you'll know you'll only have 50 other people who can possible go on the same connection line as you which means at peak it can go as low as 448kb for a 512kb line, other companies jam upto 250 people to a server - this generally means you get speeds not that much better than dialup.
Not to mention the many kinds of "broadband" ... DSL, Terminal, OC, Cable.
add to this the ONLY places to get these things are on servers which never have enough mirrors which slowdown transfers as they que up people and double/triple them up sometime unless you pay something like $100-200/year.
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and i know people are getting more and more used to consoles, only problem is unlike a console a PC is not a SET NEVER TO BE CHANGED peice of hardware.
particularly this new wave of games, people just don't understand the hardware requirements.
If there was never a Demo of Half-Life i would've gone out and bought it only to find that my computer of the time just wasn't upto playing it.
320x240x16bit on my Cyrix6x86 150+ w/Trio64v2 gx - it ran on my system at a sturdy 10fps, went down to around 4-5 at points.
now i know what HL2 will do on a good few setups, and no doubt sites will release what they recommend as the rig.
Problem is rig's speeds change from machine to machine, and people REALLY do need to start getting downloads now more than ever.
It's wonderful to see what HL2 is possible of, no doubt alot of people are thrilled witht he current graphics - however to get anywhere close to that people have to one ONE HELL of a rig...
and as you said more and more are from consoles, and they'll be thinking thier system can run this.
Niether nVidia nor ATi are advertising on TV or in Magazines about what thier cards are capable of - and have you ever tried to by a peice of hardware to do something from CompUSA or PCWorld and actually come away with what you wanted without alot of bull about what it CAN do?
I mean christ i've even come away from PCWorld thinking "what the hell was that geek on about!? 54million gigplops per second, it was a modem!!"
games need more technical hardware, and quite frankly no one but a gamer will know what the technical things are or where to get them.
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not to mention, i miss interactivity
without a demo quite frankly the game will stay on the shop shelf.
i've only bought like 8games in the past 12months, at one point i was getting atleast 1 game per format per month.
Simple reason being is, i don't want to spend $50 just to find out i have to spend another $100-200 on upgrading my system just for it to work. (which is another reason why i'm begining to get annoyed with the laziness of PC developers again - it was alright a few years ago before the last generation of consoles.
Since the XBox and PS2 and GC though - PC Games have gone from requirements of a P2-266mhz upto a P3-800mhz ... HL2 & AoD actually require atleast a 1.5Ghz system (thats IF you have a decent 3D Accelerator)
