RE: Ironic comment RE: cooperative multitasking

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis@...>]

On Sat, 2002-06-08 at 01:25, Joshua Jensen wrote:
> > > Yeah, it is scary. You also have to fit in all your 
> > content: terrain, 
> > > models, textures, sound, animations, screen buffers, etc.
> > 
> > The advantage of a console is that you can do all that easily 
> > within 64MB.  Especially given that consoles tend to have 
> > lower quality texture/sound files, simply because today's 
> > TV's can't really support much better.  Maybe once HDTV hits off...
> 
> It's not as easy as you think... today's console games have a huge
> amount of content, like mountains that don't have fixed runs and you can
> roam all over.

Ya, but that kind of thing uses relatively low memory, especially if
coded cleverly.  To be honest, 64MB would be just fine for most PC games
today, if you had a leaner OS (i.e., a Linux kernel stripped of all
background daemons, X server, etc - just the core stuff needed for the
game).

Not to mention that all the game content won't be loaded at once.  A
clever resource management system with either a broken up world or
cleverly partitioned world would be able to keep a relatively small
amount of data in memory.

In addition, the consoles models and whatnot tend to be a lot lower
quality than what we see in the newer PC games, which are just now
starting to actually *need* 128MB+ of RAM.  The newest console is
out-dated by the PC within a week, generally - the graphics hardware
stuffed in those things is usually fairly weak.  Especially given that
consoles are sold at a loss of profit as is, makers can't afford to put
the hardware of a $2,000 PC and sell it for $300.

I think the only thing a console does pull off better than the PC
(besides being cheaper for the children/students who want to buy them)
is multiplayer - 4 people on the same console generally don't lag.  ~,^

> 
> > This is why I'll always prefer PC gaming.  Not to mention 
> > consoles' best RPG is the FF series (New in version XI - 
> > *less* gameplay than FMV!!) while computers are constantly 
> > churning out top-quality games, like Baldur's Gate series.
> > 
> > Which use Lua.  ~,^
> 
> So do some console games I know of...

Ya, so do some hand-helds.  I wasn't making the argument that PC games
were better because they had Lua.  Just trying to pretend I was still on
topic.  ^,^

> 
> Josh
>