Quote: Original post by Moe
After doing a little thinking, I now see the need for the 'low' system requirements. I have a roommate who recently bought a laptop which has integrated graphics (by Intel, of course). We have had a slightly difficult time finding lan games that run decently on his machine. Considering the market portion that Intel has in the graphics game, I suppose it is fair.

I can definitely see the need for low requirements on commercial games. It's smart to make your game available to as many people as possible, unless you decide you want to be the next Oblivion and go after the high end next gen niche.

I'm just worried about the minimum requirements in a contest like this. As far as I understand, the primary focus of these contests is and always has been the quality of gameplay. Creating a game with 1000 hours of quests is wasted time, since the judges won't get to finish it all. Going for art and graphics capabilities that rival big name commercial games is wasted time, because you'll spend all of your limited time on only minimal visual improvements. And I think compatibility with all the systems out there is wasted time, because this contest isn't about being able to write every possible fallback effect.

I can totally understand it if the minimum requirements are in place because one of the judge's computers is that minimum requirement, and I'll probably just accept whatever is decided without any complaint, but it's always been my opinion that we should focus on polishing the "fun factor" and general stability during contest time and focus on compatibility after the contest, if we should choose to do so.

Anyway, I trust superpig in whatever he decides. I'm just crossing my fingers that his expert opinion is as close as possible to my feeble contest developer opinion. [grin]

Heh, knowing how long it takes me to get around to doing things, if I aim for next-gen Oblivion style graphics, by the time I actually finish the thing (if I ever do) it will look like rubbish compared to the new next-gen games [rolleyes].

Well, I'm just now getting in on this thread and it's getting pretty close to June. Is there still no narrowed down starting timeframe or is it still just sometime in June?

-AJ

Quote: Original post by pi_equals_3
I can totally understand it if the minimum requirements are in place because one of the judge's computers is that minimum requirement, and I'll probably just accept whatever is decided without any complaint, but it's always been my opinion that we should focus on polishing the "fun factor" and general stability during contest time and focus on compatibility after the contest, if we should choose to do so.

So don't focus on making it work on several different shader versions. Just have a single path for one version which is supported by the minimum specs, and focus on fun rather than implemnting HDR.

Quote: Original post by d000hg

Quote: Original post by pi_equals_3
I can totally understand it if the minimum requirements are in place because one of the judge's computers is that minimum requirement, and I'll probably just accept whatever is decided without any complaint, but it's always been my opinion that we should focus on polishing the "fun factor" and general stability during contest time and focus on compatibility after the contest, if we should choose to do so.

So don't focus on making it work on several different shader versions. Just have a single path for one version which is supported by the minimum specs, and focus on fun rather than implemnting HDR.

I'm not entirely sure what both your points here are, but I'd like to give one final prod for SM2 compatible hardware and hardware Vertex Shader support. Yes, we should focus on the fun factor, but with these requirements we just have more time to spend on fun gameplay since we won't need to worry about other rendering paths. If you want to allow folks to make good use of shaders, SM2 really is the minimum spec IMHO.

Not that it will matter much for my ranking though, purely altruistic motives here [wink]

Quote: When it starts :P

Hurry up already :)

Quote: Original post by remigius
If you want to allow folks to make good use of shaders, SM2 really is the minimum spec IMHO.

I thought we wanted folks to make good use of fun original gameplay. Don't need shaders at all for that.

Quote: Original post by d000hg

Quote: Original post by pi_equals_3
I can totally understand it if the minimum requirements are in place because one of the judge's computers is that minimum requirement, and I'll probably just accept whatever is decided without any complaint, but it's always been my opinion that we should focus on polishing the "fun factor" and general stability during contest time and focus on compatibility after the contest, if we should choose to do so.

So don't focus on making it work on several different shader versions. Just have a single path for one version which is supported by the minimum specs, and focus on fun rather than implemnting HDR.

That's exactly what I would do in any situation. I plan on building my effects from the minimum requirements up as far as I have time for after the gameplay is there. But whether graphics are the primary focus or not, graphics programming is my favorite area and I just like making things look pretty. Even though I could just as easily write more basic effects, it wouldn't be as much fun for me and I wouldn't learn as much. And aren't these contests supposed to help us learn?*

But like I said before, I realize that it might be necessary to keep low requirements, so I won't be angry.



*And win awesome prizes, of course.

Quote: Original post by Kazgoroth

Quote: Original post by remigius
If you want to allow folks to make good use of shaders, SM2 really is the minimum spec IMHO.

I thought we wanted folks to make good use of fun original gameplay. Don't need shaders at all for that.

Then again, it might be unlikely that one of us will come up with the next Tetris.

Quote: Original post by Avatar God

Quote: Original post by Kazgoroth

Quote: Original post by remigius
If you want to allow folks to make good use of shaders, SM2 really is the minimum spec IMHO.

I thought we wanted folks to make good use of fun original gameplay. Don't need shaders at all for that.

Then again, it might be unlikely that one of us will come up with the next Tetris.

I call it... Googletris!

Quote: Original post by remigius
If you want to allow folks to make good use of shaders, SM2 really is the minimum spec IMHO.

How quickly people forget how great older tech actually was. QuakeIII ran well on a pre-GeforceI card. Shaders were first introduced in the GeforceIII - 3 generations later on. Even the first shaders could do really nice lighting and some fancy vertex tricks - later versions than that let you do cool effects but that is just polish really.

IIRC, every entry in 4E4 that had fancy shader graphics did badly. Toy Robo may have used shaders but in a 'normal' way, not for showy effects.