Gaming Microsoft "dumbing down" games?

[truckspond]

Except for Microsoft Flight Simulator X and Orbiter I have nothing else that runs fine on Windows 7. I do not like consoles. They seem way too old fashioned. Microsoft is turning PCs into "trucks" (very popular when our society) and "dinosaurs".

Sorry, but I just have to say this: Microsoft is NOT the ONLY game vendor out there! Take a look at Valve for instance: They have some of the greats in their name: Half Life series, Counter Strike: Source, Portal series, Day of Defeat: Source, among many others. And all of them seem to run fine on Windows 7. EDIT: Oops! I forgot the Team Fortress series (Most notably, Team Fortress 2) :embarrassed:

 

[Hielor]

Well either way, with the quality of freeware like orbiter and classic gaming emulation. There really isn't a need for the mass-marketed franchises. Those titles come and go on whim, at least to me.

Because Orbiter can totally compete on the same level as mass-marketed franchises. I mean, its graphics are so modern and...oh, wait.

People want shiny and new and cool.

True enough! I got a job while in high-school running backups and installing floppy drives in 286's. I also got to carry the computers back and forth between the front and rear of the store. So it is very true! I knew alot about computers and it got me a job!

My idiot gramma and daddy thought I was the next Einstein! Frakking idiots..

Somehow I doubt that just playing video games taught you how to install floppy drives, unless you were playing some kind of install-a-floppy-drive game.

Not only are games dumbed down. The ever upward spiraling cost of hardware needed to keep up with programming inefficiencies is also a big detriment.

Programming inefficiencies? Yes, that's the only reason that you need new hardware. It's not like AI, or graphics, or physics simulation, or anything else that just requires more computation has come a long way. Programming efficiency has little to do with it.

I don't buy pc games these days because I would need new hardware to play them as there were meant to be played. Every year it's a frakking videocard, or processor, or something or other. That results in a cascade of upgrades because that something isn't compatible with what needs replacing.

Odd, I built a desktop back in like 2005 that was able to take any game I threw at it for the next four years or so...

If you're planning ahead, you shouldn't have to replace a major part every year.

If, on the other hand, you're trying to be "thrifty" and buy older parts that just meet the requirements for whatever game you want to play, then yeah, you can expect to need to upgrade for the next generation of games.

On that note, that's another reason why consoles are preferable to both end users and developers. An XBox 360 from 2005 is just as capable of playing today's games as an XBox 360 from yesterday.

 

[Keatah]

Because Orbiter can totally compete on the same level as mass-marketed franchises. I mean, its graphics are so modern and...oh, wait.

People want shiny and new and cool.


Somehow I doubt that just playing video games taught you how to install floppy drives, unless you were playing some kind of install-a-floppy-drive game.


Programming inefficiencies? Yes, that's the only reason that you need new hardware. It's not like AI, or graphics, or physics simulation, or anything else that just requires more computation has come a long way. Programming efficiency has little to do with it.


Odd, I built a desktop back in like 2005 that was able to take any game I threw at it for the next four years or so...

If you're planning ahead, you shouldn't have to replace a major part every year.

If, on the other hand, you're trying to be "thrifty" and buy older parts that just meet the requirements for whatever game you want to play, then yeah, you can expect to need to upgrade for the next generation of games.

On that note, that's another reason why consoles are preferable to both end users and developers. An XBox 360 from 2005 is just as capable of playing today's games as an XBox 360 from yesterday.

Orbiter's graphics are pretty off-kilter compared to today's over-hollywood-ized, over-saturated, over-bloomed, mis-colored, mass-produced games.. Problem is Orbiter is too realistic. And real spaceflight is too boring. There is no twitch factor. Things happen too slow in real-life space exploration to RELIABLY capture the attention of a younger kid's DS-ized and damaged attention span. Shiny and cool definitely. Orbiter is not star-wars.

I had to install a floppy drive in my Apple II in order to load some games. It was part of the owner's manual!! So therefore being a gameplayer taught me that.

It would same that one of my systems ran(runs) orbiter just fine, from it's first incarnation in 2000 all the way now to 2010. I cannot say the same thing for fifa soccer or gta or madden! No sir..

Sure, physics and improved ai and all that stuff takes time. But for chrissakes!! We have 6 core chips today. And framerates STILL lag, and worse, they are not consistent!! X-plane is the worst offender, going from 20 fps to several hundred fps! I'd rather be stuck at 30-40 fps consistently.

Imagine if a portion of the code of modern games (the graphics core especially) was coded directly in binary, just imagine the performance then! Today, lazy programmers need to work with a language (and scripts on top of that), that are 5x removed from the hardware. If that isn't inefficient, I don't know what is!?!!? The worst being anything browser and flash-based.

Expanding upon the xbox being just as good today as it was 5 years.. Let's rip that apart a bit shall we? First off I don't know of any computer hardware that actually slows down over time. That is a marketing-created concept. My Orbiter computer runs at the same Mhz/Ghz rate now as it did 10 years ago.

The kicker for the consoles is that they don't have to manage a complete O/S, I/O, and all sorts of peripherals with half-assed unstable drivers. The console environment is fixed, specified, and not changing. The PC is basically a box of parts, where everything can be different, from bus-speeds, to i/o timings, to sound capabilities, and worse off, processor speed and graphics chips. Not to mention the last two parts often have different instruction sets. So a programmer needs to cover the lowest common denominator, or risk alienating part of the user base.

And not all game programmers have access to a consistent set of tools. It's just one big mess.

There's so much more I wanna ramble on about, but I gotta run..

 

[jedidia]

Not only are games dumbed down. The ever upward spiraling cost of hardware needed to keep up

Acually, this spiral has straightened out a lot lately. Processors aren't getting that much more faster, and with games relying 90 percent on strong video cards you don't have to change your whole machine every three years as you once used to. For example, I stuffed some new hardware into my Comp 3 years ago. It wasn't quite state of the art then, but it was very good. Today, 3 years later, it's STILL very good. It ran Mass Effect 2 without any problem whatsoever. I could even convert videos in the background while playing the game, because it obviously doesn't use much of my dual core processor. So I really don't see the problem with hardware anymore.

 

[Hielor]

Orbiter's graphics are pretty off-kilter compared to today's over-hollywood-ized, over-saturated, over-bloomed, mis-colored, mass-produced games.. Problem is Orbiter is too realistic. And real spaceflight is too boring. There is no twitch factor. Things happen too slow in real-life space exploration to RELIABLY capture the attention of a younger kid's DS-ized and damaged attention span. Shiny and cool definitely. Orbiter is not star-wars.

I had to install a floppy drive in my Apple II in order to load some games. It was part of the owner's manual!! So therefore being a gameplayer taught me that.

It would same that one of my systems ran(runs) orbiter just fine, from it's first incarnation in 2000 all the way now to 2010. I cannot say the same thing for fifa soccer or gta or madden! No sir..

Sure, physics and improved ai and all that stuff takes time. But for chrissakes!! We have 6 core chips today. And framerates STILL lag, and worse, they are not consistent!! X-plane is the worst offender, going from 20 fps to several hundred fps! I'd rather be stuck at 30-40 fps consistently.

Imagine if a portion of the code of modern games (the graphics core especially) was coded directly in binary, just imagine the performance then! Today, lazy programmers need to work with a language (and scripts on top of that), that are 5x removed from the hardware. If that isn't inefficient, I don't know what is!?!!? The worst being anything browser and flash-based.

Expanding upon the xbox being just as good today as it was 5 years.. Let's rip that apart a bit shall we? First off I don't know of any computer hardware that actually slows down over time. That is a marketing-created concept. My Orbiter computer runs at the same Mhz/Ghz rate now as it did 10 years ago.

The kicker for the consoles is that they don't have to manage a complete O/S, I/O, and all sorts of peripherals with half-assed unstable drivers. The console environment is fixed, specified, and not changing. The PC is basically a box of parts, where everything can be different, from bus-speeds, to i/o timings, to sound capabilities, and worse off, processor speed and graphics chips. Not to mention the last two parts often have different instruction sets. So a programmer needs to cover the lowest common denominator, or risk alienating part of the user base.

And not all game programmers have access to a consistent set of tools. It's just one big mess.

There's so much more I wanna ramble on about, but I gotta run..

 

[RisingFury]

Moreover, just *playing* games would never have gotten you a job by any stretch of the imagination. I highly doubt you could've walked into an interview any time in the 90s and said "oh yeah, I've spent a lot of time playing Zork and Hack" and had any chance of them doing anything but laughing at you.

Just playing won't get you anything... but playing on a PC is a learning experience.

I would never have learned programming on consoles and nor would I learn English from the types of games getting released on consoles now...

 

[Ghostrider]

oreover, just *playing* games would never have gotten you a job by any stretch of the imagination. I highly doubt you could've walked into an interview any time in the 90s and said "oh yeah, I've spent a lot of time playing Zork and Hack" and had any chance of them doing anything but laughing at you.

Well, I started learning English thanks to Scott Adams' and Infocom's adventure games. Bought a tourist's dictionary and some english-language magazines and in some months I had progressed well beyond CLIMB ROPE and KILL TROLL WITH SWORD (which I admit are neither good pick-up lines nor easy sentences to slip into a conversation). When I began studying English at school, I was already able to read, write and speak at good level, which helped me greatly with my grades.

Then, back in the early '80s, sometimes the only way to get hold of a game was to write it yourself. There weren't any fancy cover DVDs, you had listings to type into your machine line by line and if they were for the wrong home computer, you had to port them. That was useful to learn programming, which in turn helped me to develop the ability to break complex tasks down into many simpler ones. This is a very useful skill which saved my bacon countless times when the Swiss Army decided to drop shiny new corporal's chevrons on my twitchy shoulders.

And what about lateral thinking and multitasking. Computer and videogames force you to think out of the box (especially simulations, RTSs and RPGs), think fast and evaluate large amounts of information. You learn to prioritize tasks, adapt to a changing situation and allocate resources when needed. Don't discount action games because situational awareness is also important.

And yes, you can get a job by telling your interviewer you played games. I've been a reporter for a game publication, it happened to be a prerequisite. :lol:

 

[ar81]

What era are you referring to? The time when you could get a job just by knowing a lot about computers is long past. Any time in the last couple decades, any serious employer has wanted a college degree and/or several years of experience in the field.

Moreover, just *playing* games would never have gotten you a job by any stretch of the imagination. I highly doubt you could've walked into an interview any time in the 90s and said "oh yeah, I've spent a lot of time playing Zork and Hack" and had any chance of them doing anything but laughing at you.

See above. Playing games has never had any chance of getting you any place. It's somewhat more difficult to get into the crafting aspect of thigns that can lead places with a console than a PC, but if someone's motivated the opportunity is still very much there.

You're just now realizing this?

Computer games exposes you to a wide variety of support problems.
In the era of DOS you had to configure lower and upper memory usage, EMS or XMS memory, sound configuration, and you should know how to manage yourself in a directory tree and use text commands.

Nowadays having some old games makes you to find ways to emulate old games, and it requires you to deal with compatibility tools. That's somehow useful. If you learned about BASIC for DOS, you can code macros in MS Office without too much problem to automate stuff at the office.

Games do not make "just users" but users that deal with support problems. I also learned english to play games. I can't wait to see if some day chinese will make games. That would help me to learn chinese... :lol::lol:

---------- Post added at 02:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:29 PM ----------

Orbiter's graphics are pretty off-kilter compared to today's over-hollywood-ized, over-saturated, over-bloomed, mis-colored, mass-produced games.. Problem is Orbiter is too realistic. And real spaceflight is too boring. There is no twitch factor. Things happen too slow in real-life space exploration to RELIABLY capture the attention of a younger kid's DS-ized and damaged attention span. Shiny and cool definitely. Orbiter is not star-wars.

I had to install a floppy drive in my Apple II in order to load some games. It was part of the owner's manual!! So therefore being a gameplayer taught me that.

It would same that one of my systems ran(runs) orbiter just fine, from it's first incarnation in 2000 all the way now to 2010. I cannot say the same thing for fifa soccer or gta or madden! No sir..

Sure, physics and improved ai and all that stuff takes time. But for chrissakes!! We have 6 core chips today. And framerates STILL lag, and worse, they are not consistent!! X-plane is the worst offender, going from 20 fps to several hundred fps! I'd rather be stuck at 30-40 fps consistently.

Imagine if a portion of the code of modern games (the graphics core especially) was coded directly in binary, just imagine the performance then! Today, lazy programmers need to work with a language (and scripts on top of that), that are 5x removed from the hardware. If that isn't inefficient, I don't know what is!?!!? The worst being anything browser and flash-based.

Expanding upon the xbox being just as good today as it was 5 years.. Let's rip that apart a bit shall we? First off I don't know of any computer hardware that actually slows down over time. That is a marketing-created concept. My Orbiter computer runs at the same Mhz/Ghz rate now as it did 10 years ago.

The kicker for the consoles is that they don't have to manage a complete O/S, I/O, and all sorts of peripherals with half-assed unstable drivers. The console environment is fixed, specified, and not changing. The PC is basically a box of parts, where everything can be different, from bus-speeds, to i/o timings, to sound capabilities, and worse off, processor speed and graphics chips. Not to mention the last two parts often have different instruction sets. So a programmer needs to cover the lowest common denominator, or risk alienating part of the user base.

And not all game programmers have access to a consistent set of tools. It's just one big mess.

There's so much more I wanna ramble on about, but I gotta run..

Too realistic? That's cool for kids.
Instead of flying a fragile Cessna or a too maneuverable F-16 that will be hard to control, Orbiter has a DG that is very appropriate for kids to play.
Since DG only bounces without ending your game when you crash, kids feel it is made so kids can't break it. My experience shows that except for orbit align and sync, and using IMFD (basically MFD guided flight), kids love Orbiter.

I recall a mission where they had 2 DGIII, one in front of the other. One was damaged and they had to rescue their classmates (crewmembers had their names). They had to do it before night. It was quite fun for them. And the prize for accomplishing mission was a pack of cookies.

Orbiter is not Star Wars, but kids loved it in my workshop in 2005-2006. Of course, for those who want to pull the trigger it is not cool.

Code for modern games is binary. You write the source code, then compile and it is binary. Less FPS usually occur due to some slow tasks like video rendering.

If orbiter runs at the same speed as it did in older computers that's because it has more features that add load to a faster computer. Also, faster computers does not mean too fast paced game because Orbiter adjusts itself to clock time. Only old DOS games did not synchronize themselves to the clock.

 

[T.Neo]

People want shiny and new and cool.

Yeah, and anything beyond SHOOT EM BLOW EM UP!!!!!!111 seems to be lost on the average person...

Though I must say a lot of what I know about computers in general was somehow related to messing around with Orbiter. Not that it would make me, or that I'd want to be, a person with a profession in computers...

 

[truckspond]

Yeah, and anything beyond SHOOT EM BLOW EM UP!!!!!!111 seems to be lost on the average person...

I'm not sure about that... Look at the success of Portal after being launched alongside 2 "SHOOT EM BLOW EM UP!" games in The Orange Box as a "filler" game

 

[ar81]

Perhaps games are dumbed down so people just run and shoot. A no brainer gameplay.
I like games that are very much like simulation where you feel there is something more to do than using a joystick and 2 buttons (one to pull the trigger and the other for something else).

 

[AirSimming]

I like games that are very much like simulation where you feel there is something more to do than using a joystick and 2 buttons (one to pull the trigger and the other for something else).

I have to say that in my point view simulations actually are not games, i.e. Orbiter/MS FS/X-Plane etc. A game offers a goal/several goals. A simulation has the goal to simulate, even if you can chose missions like in MS FSX, but it's still a simulation in which you can chose just to simulate a flight from x to y and do it in any way you like. A game mostly has pre-programmed patterns you're forced to follow like ego shooters or even strategie games etc. So we're basically talking about two different kinds of software.