I have zero nostalgia for Quake (i was 5 when it came out lol), but i wonder how this will do! Quake Champions didn’t seem to light the world on fire, but i wonder if the multiplayer scene here will blow up.
I was basically in the same boat. I didn’t have a PC powerful enough to run Quake 2 well at the time. I could do Quake 1, and played the hell out of it, but Q2 was a complete slideshow. By the time I was able to upgrade it was Half-Life days, so Q2 multiplayer will always be a missing chunk of PC FPS history for me.
Quake itself was ok. The multiplayer version was fun. But the real fun started when people began modding the game. The original Team Fortress was actually a free mod for Quake which I'm pretty sure quickly became the most popular instance of the game for online play.
Funny random tidbit, I actually remember playing the game with one dude who specifically had to brag about having a high powered 1ghz processor as his username in the game (something like 1gigahertz or something cheesy like that). Pretty sure back then I was still rocking a 700mhz AMD Athlon Thunderbird processor.
The mods were fantastic. One that always sticks in my mind was Quake Rally. I think you controlled a car and drove it through the standard levels or some new maps, I can’t remember, it’s been so long.
Screencheat is a fps game that supports 8 player split screen, but I think that is just about it. Is a hassel to set up 8 controllers as xinput only supports 4 and rest will have to be in directinput mode so anyting with more than 4 players is rare.
I can’t wait to play this! Quake II and Quake III Arena are my all time favourite games. God they were just so cool when they came out. Quake II especially was light years beyond anything else out at the time. And they were FAST too!
That’s the game I first used this name in online multiplayer. Was weirded out when I started seeing Orbitz travel popups (I was thinking of that drink, hadn’t heard of the travel site). Don’t recall much of the game other than for the time it looked quite clean, shiny and well lit compared to the original Quake. Though I don’t think I even finished the single player so I may have missed out on later atmosphere.
I haven’t played games in a loooong time, and this might get me figuring out how I can play it on my spare (and old!) linux laptopS I have a switch but I want to play it on a proper PC, just as I did when I was a kid.
The remaster has much higher hardware requirements than the original game. At least based on the official specs, it needs a basic gaming PC. You may have to use something like Yamagi to get it to run on your laptop.
It’s using Nightdive’s proprietary Kex engine that they made for remastering old games, so sadly no. The original Quake 2 engine (and all of idTech’s engines up to 4) remain open source though.
I feel like they have to put “AI” (the word, not the meaning of it) everywhere. It’s just the new buzzword, we still have to see some positive effects of AI. It just seems they have to throw it out because it’s the new thing.
Uh I mean, statistical machine learning models are used in tons of places and have been for a while now. There’s plenty of positive effects to be had. It’s just called “AI” without further clarification.
I’m sure what they are doing here is developing one such machine learning model to improve their detection.
And to me it seems like wildfire detection is a good contender to be improved by machine learning.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summaryBaldur’s Gate III is a highly anticipated role-playing game set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe, offering familiar classes and abilities in an expansive high-fantasy world. Though Microsoft’s parity requirements have been in place since the Xbox Series consoles came to market in November 2020, Baldur’s Gate III is the ecosystem’s highest-profile loss directly attributable to these restrictions. There weren’t a ton of concrete examples to prove this theory, and the Digital Foundry team argued against the idea, citing the existing variance in the PC market and saying that lower targets could actually help games run even better on higher-powered consoles. “MANY developers have been sitting in meetings for the past year desperately trying to get Series S launch requirements dropped,” Bossa Studios VFX artist Ian Maclure tweeted at the time. Rocksteady senior character technical artist Lee Devonald similarly tweeted about his experience building Gotham Knights — a game that shipped on consoles with a framerate locked at 30 fps and no performance mode. Regardless of whether the Series S is restraining the entire video game industry, Xbox parity requirements are literally holding back Baldur’s Gate III, and this system has accidentally created another console exclusive for the PS5, for now.
I’ve played this game a bit and I really don’t understand why it can’t be scaled down visually to work. It’s not some game that needs to target high fps or something.
if you have X amount of work to do, you can’t just “add optimization” and somehow you’ll have less work to do.
if a game needs all the resources, then a well optimized game would still require all resources. but the unoptimized one would just not run properly.
optimized means “it uses the hardware efficiently”. bg3 is a very well optimized game. it uses the hardware efficiently, and it uses all of the hardware. at a particular point, the only optimization left to do, is to do less work, i.e. to cut content.
optimization isn’t some magic sauce you add to computer code to make it run faster. optimization is about writing good, performant code. at some point it’s going to get as good as it can get.
the reason it needs higher specs than previous games is that it is doing a lot more than previous games. there is more work to do. what you’re saying is akin to “this tiny car can do 100mph. why doesn’t mine also do 100 mph when i stuff it full of bricks and give it a smaller engine?” well, it’s because it has a lot more weight to carry, and less engine to do it with
The GPU of the series S is simply a lot worse, socutting quality by a bit won’t cut it. I also suspect that since they always quote the split screen as problem, it might be about the number of textures to be loaded in when the game is kind of running twice, not the quality.
Why would you load a texture twice in memory? Especially if it’s for the exact same object? It only needs to be rendered twice the texture stays the same and therefore only need to be stored once in ram…
He didn’t say load a texture twice, he said twice the textures - which is a worst case scenario, but you could get if the players aren’t near to each other.
I really wish people would read articles before commenting. I went looking for an article like this specifically that talks about the issues involved and folks can’t even be bothered to read beyond the headline. 😞
Because you’re focused on the visuals from a single user perspective…
There’s the world state and game logic to consider as well, and this would be relevant even in a 2D sprite based game.
The article makes it clear that it’s the couch co-op split screen that is causing the most headaches, with whatever additional overhead there is in maintaining another active character and rendering of the world on screen.
because split screen requires rendering stuff twice. and also needing to keep more stuff in memory simultaneously, depending on what two players might have in their field of view, instead of just one.
also, reducing the (subjective) quality by half, does not necessarily mean that you are now using half the resources. And also your game would look like shit compared to its contemporaries
And how would you recommend they optimize a game so they can render it twice in split screen, when the S only has 10 Gb of RAM? Because that’s the issue here.
It’s obviously impossible for me to recommend specifics without seeing their code and data. But a lot can be done in 10 GiB with some effort and clever resource management. They might have to make fundamental changes to their engine if they didn’t plan for such constraints ahead of time, so maybe it won’t happen for this game. But what they learn through this experience could benefit their future work.
We get it, you’re a huge xbox fan and you’re disappointed it doesn’t have a release date. But let’s be clear here: this is 100% on Microsoft. Larian has made it clear they aren’t happy with the level of quality of the game on the S (believe specifically for split-screen) and they are holding out on a release date until solutions can be found. That is 100% their right, and you better believe if they released with a shitty performing S version there would be tons of articles, tweets, threads, etc moaning and calling them out on it (instead of the universal praise it is currently receiving). If Microsoft really wants the game on their console sooner they have options: They can help Larian get the S version running properly by providing developers/knowledge/tools/etc, or they could allow for games to have exceptions for certain game features on X vs S.
If anything, Larian have gone above and beyond what most other larger AAA companies put out: Cross-play, cross-save, DRM free, and a huge open-world full of enough options and branching paths to put basically every other RPG to shame. It’s clear they want to deliver a great game that has everything possible they can put in it to please their customers. And part of that is not putting out a crappy version of the game. If you don’t like it, maybe take it up with Microsoft; or wait patiently and see if they can’t optimize and get things figured out once they game releases on the other platforms and they can spend more time focusing on the xbox platform.
There’s two views I see here from a software engineering perspective: multi-targeting devices with different specs can get really hard, and that modern development consumes resources in excess.
View 1: If you design a device that won’t catch up to modern expectations (limited, shared memory being the factor here), don’t expect to run all of the games. Some (or most) games will demand a certain level of resources. Microsoft either expected their status to swing their will upon the developers or were willing to help but just flopped on predicting what would be needed over the device lifetime. It’s a hard job, balancing developer need and cost. The hardware developers did their best. This comes down to
View 2: It’s an old coot viewpoint, but goddamn are modern computer programs are bloated pieces of mess. This is NOT an insult to the game developers, but it is to the OS and the engine developers as a whole. The entire programming industry has assumed that bigger more betterer computer always gonna come in a year or so. So now we have gigabytes of unused HQ textures in game downloads for no reason. Windows OS with Chrome takes gigabytes of RAM to display a webpage. We went from ultra strict data streaming to CPU rates for Crash Bandicoot to an NVME SSD shoveling half a terabyte a second when you want it in the Xbox Series X. This has left those who cannot afford strong PCs (note: most of the third world) and now consoles from playing the latest and greatest games. Developers leave them behind by grasping at the end of Moore’s Law. If BattleBit can produce good gameplay with 256 players on a raw potato, AAA game engines should try and appeal to everyone now.
They can help Larian get the S version running properly by providing developers/knowledge/tools/etc
Iirc, Microsoft is actually trying to help them get it running on S. I wish I could remember where I heard that, but I’ve been reading and watching too much on the game recently to find it.
Mate, you’re not John Carmack. It would be a ridiculous assumption to think their developers didn’t take a serious look into optimisation before deciding to ignore the xbox ecosystem for initial launch.
To be fair fully maxed out settings on PC It’s only using ~4GB for me? I was surprised but that seems to be how it is. I have 32GB and was using roughly half overall on the machine so plenty available.
Okay so after seeing the bot TLDR and the other comments, I actually went and read the article. It’s a bit wishy washy as to why and mentions RAM could be the issue for S consoles.
When I read the headline I thought it meant it was also not viable for PCs either, which doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Most PCs have at least 16GB ram these days.
Why are people upset at all? I don’t get it. I actually think this is good, it will either force Microsoft to change their policy with consoles and/or release a line that can compete with PS. Or else. Meanwhile PC is still an option.
It’s been a while since I did Xbox memory mapping (One X) but IIRC there is approx 2GB of ram withheld by the system, and then an additional one or two can be recalled by the system for the purposes of running things like background downloads, party chat, video chat. That means that when your game goes to cert it’s checked to be performant under max OS load; so 6GB. This causes lots of issues (and is a pain as even MS’s analytics indicated this was a use case that appeared almost never. From what I have heard since, these TCRs/XRs/FTCs having changed much.
When I read the headline I thought it meant it was also not viable for PCs either, which doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Most PCs have at least 16GB ram these days.
Also keep in mind that PC doesn’t have unified memory. So there’s usually at least 8GB of VRAM in addition to whatever amount of main memory you have.
I don’t think anyone is upset? Xbox players are of course disappointed because they want the game but Larian have been totally fair and upfront about everything.
Microsoft should really re-evaluate their policies here though I agree. I feel like split screen could be an exception to the rule specifically.
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