Green Monster Games (Curt Schilling)

[Northerner]

Oh, sitting aggro and low health aggro were staples and quite well known. Positional, distance, aggro-decay, sneak-arcs and so on also were documented to some degree and tested quite a bit. Actual straight-up pathing changes (as opposed to aggro) for roamers though I haven't really seen but hey, I was a Rogue and stealthed pretty much all the time I wasn't actively stabbing something.

I do wonder if anyone there even knew how it all worked or if it was just a result of spaghetti.

[Jorren]

Not to mention the geometry, and seams in the landscape (probably the same thing) pull Umbral plains mobs to zone in fun!? Run a line of mobs stacked on top of each other against a wall and FD flop em apart... good times!

Could sit nearish to a mob in some cases, others no way.

[Spawn]

From my experience on some of the EQemu / SoD back ends. Its ALOT of spaghetti. Some of it still has me puzzled on what it was supposed to do.

[Suineg]

Yeah we had our main tank mod rod down some health and sit down when pulling to him.

[dFiend]

Originally Posted by Spawn

From my experience on some of the EQemu / SoD back ends. Its ALOT of spaghetti. Some of it still has me puzzled on what it was supposed to do.

All I remember from EQ was this kind of in-game frustration: satanic pathing, random aggro, 4 am corpse runs after my pick-up raid wiped the 2nd time to Vox. Between the random bullshit and playing on dial-up, it's hard to believe I played for over 2 years.

EQ is the like the ex-girlfriend of mmos: endless frustration during the relationship, but still something you use as a standard, something nostalgic, something you know you'll always miss, and something that leaves a void that you're never quite able to fill.

[Ngruk]

Interesting discussion in the McQuaid topic, min specs and tech.

Something we have talked long and hard on from day 1, min specs.....

It's an interesting and not nearly as easy to define piece as I thought when we first started, but certainly has enormous ramifications on potential user base.

Every notch you move up, on any component from RAM/Vid card to hard drive space, you eliminate potential users.

Having to balance between that and making a game that doesn't look like pong....Fun!

[Zehn - Vhex]

Clearly this is the wave of the future:

GeForce 3D Vision Kit

[Locithon]

I think most gamers have a system like this: 3ghz dual core, 2gb ram, and some version of an 8800 card.

By the time Curt wants to release his game (winter '10?) I think the gtx 280 series will be a little closer to the norm as the next generation of cards (ati 5870 and gtx300) will have been out about a year.

I'm not sure how more cores will affect this, most games I play seem to actually do worse. My e8600 at 4ghz outdoes my 3.2ghz Corei7 in most games.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Gamers, sure. That's about 15~20% of your population, maybe, if you're lucky. Rest of your population are people who bought a sony vaio from best buy 3 years ago or got a Compaq tower from Wal-Mart 4 years ago. No seriously.

[OneofOne]

Originally Posted by Locithon

I think most gamers have a system like this: 3ghz dual core, 2gb ram, and some version of an 8800 card.

Between me and my 5 other gamer buddies, only 3 have systems that meet that spec. One of them *just* upgraded his machine from a "WoW only" box a few months ago.

We (this board) are NOT representative of the gaming community at large.

[NativityInBlack]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Gamers, sure. That's about 15~20% of your population, maybe, if you're lucky. Rest of your population are people who bought a sony vaio from best buy 3 years ago or got a Compaq tower from Wal-Mart 4 years ago. No seriously.

True story, Have a coworker that plays WoW casually on a geforce4 still, the guy pays the sub but won't upgrade his Dell and can barely move sometimes.

Many players ask from time to time on new games stuff like "oh will it run on my 5 years old notebook?".

You guys remember that initially they couldn't upgrade EQ over the initial min specs? They had to stick to it for quite awhile.

Aion looks fine and runs OK on older systems, they should sell well over that.

Sturdy scalable graphics is the key - and also a bitch to pull out I guess. I would stick to the Pong level and hope it's not too brown.

[Froofy-D]

Target specs: 40-60FPS in single group or solo situation on a 3-year old PC that was "average" at the time of purchase or a 4-year old machine that was "high-end" at the time of release. Anything more and you will have no hope of WoW level subs (if that is your intent).

The WoW min specs are here:

WoW -> Info -> F.A.Q. -> Technology

Requires only a Gforce 7000 series, which were first available in 2005. List of Geforce generations:

GeForce - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

4 generations old technology (5 if they release GT300 at the end of 2009). The average PC gamer buys a new PC about as often as new consoles come out.

[Blumpster]

Originally Posted by NativityInBlack

You guys remember that initially they couldn't upgrade EQ over the initial min specs? They had to stick to it for quite awhile.

I remember when they went to Full DX8 and if you logged in with DX7 it was all fucked up. I didn't even read the patch notes and just logged in to play and thought my computer had died.

[Camerous]

really? cause at Best Buy you can get a system like mine for a thousand bucks.

Premium - Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q8400 (4M Cache, 2.66 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB)
Graphics 1GB ATI Radeon 3870 X2 graphics card
6144MB 1066 MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [2x2048 + 2x1024]
1.5TB Dual Hard Drive Raid 0 "Stripe" (2x1.5TB) - (7200rpm)

I think most people have up graded to systems that make everything else from a few years ago look like complete crap.

[Froofy-D]

Originally Posted by Camerous

really? cause at Best Buy you can get a system like mine for a thousand bucks.

Premium - Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q8400 (4M Cache, 2.66 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB)
Graphics 1GB ATI Radeon 3870 X2 graphics card
6144MB 1066 MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [2x2048 + 2x1024]
1.5TB Dual Hard Drive Raid 0 "Stripe" (2x1.5TB) - (7200rpm)

I think most people have up graded to systems that make everything else from a few years ago look like complete crap.

The average gamer won't spend $1000 to play a game. The most common cards around now are still Gforce 7 and 8 series. 4 and 3 year old tech respectively.

Steam Hardware Survey

Feel free to cite a better source for gauging the "average gamer PC" though. I wouldn't mind seeing alternate data.

Also, PC games are suffering a problem similar to why BluRay won't overtake the standard DVD market anytime soon. With 3-4 year old tech you can make a game that looks "good enough" for the majority of people. Why should someone buy Crysis when there are 100 other fun FPS games that run at half the system specs? Case in point, nothing has dethroned Counter-Strike 1 yet in number of players online:

GameSpy.com - Gimme The Stats!

And that is running on a 9+ year old game engine.