its so easy, and you don`t even have to check for any graphics or memory availability, nor do anything other than set sync rate to 40 to get the correct game speed, no movement scaleing or anything.
<tongue in cheek> heres how to go about it
get yourself a 64bit 4ghz development machine with lots of ram and a realtime rendercard attached, when making the game put all the effects you want in, add in huge amounts of detail to hide the lack of actual gameplay
in the system specs specify 3.0 ghzcpu or higher, dx10 and nv40 or higher video cards, 512mb video ram, 2gb system ram and 100gig free hardrive minimum
call the Game Doom4
et`voila, no need to check for anything, if it won`t run then tell the user they don`t meet system requirements.
yes this is a sarcastic post, Doom3 was OK-ish, but only the effects impressed me, and most of the flame/smoke effects where nothing that hadn`t been done before, the heat shimmer shader is old hat, as is bumpmapping, and for what it was worth the extra detail on the models wasn`t that awesome, most of the time I didn`t realy notice it (apart from the annoying teeth in the models mouths when they spoke, whats with these guys? no toothpaste on mars?).
And can anyone say "obvious scripted sequences"? ,I was not impressed at all, I am now convinced that the waiting for Doom3 was purely down to Carmac waiting for Lee to finish the bugweek so he could finish the code off, bet if you used reshack on the doom exe you`d find a yellow pyramid icon in there
.
To be honest I have NO idea why it took them so long to make, I was realy looking forwards to it, but Carmack has convinced me that like all people who get famous, they start beleiving the publicty of their own followers and stop trying, or lose their way in trivia that makes no difference to the actual qualiy of the game.
Oh well, I just hope that Halflife II is better (most sequels have been poor so far, and Farcry started off ok, but rapidly sank into silly/tedious, as did Unreal II)
thats not to say it`s not a decent game, but it`s way below what I expected from ID after the jump from doom/quake to quake II, I expected much more than we got, knowing how to code a little I see lots of missed opportunities, maybe next time.
Mentor.
PC1: P4 3ghz, 1gig mem, 2x160gig hd`s, Radeon 9800pro w cooler (3rd gfx card), 6 way speakers.
PC2: AMD 2ghz, 512mb ram, FX5200 ultra, 16 bit SB.
Mini ATX cases suck.
