And problems with heat dissipation.
You can basically make something as fast as you want, but you have to be able to transfer the heat away from it or it will destroy itself.
PC Gaming and Piracy: Examined
- Thread starter Jacks:Revenge
- Start date
-
Two Factor Authentication is now available on BeyondUnreal Forums. To configure it, visit your Profile and look for the "Two Step Verification" option on the left side. We can send codes via email (may be slower) or you can set up any TOTP Authenticator app on your phone (Authy, Google Authenticator, etc) to deliver codes. It is highly recommended that you configure this to keep your account safe.
You can basically make something as fast as you want, but you have to be able to transfer the heat away from it or it will destroy itself.
probably limitations with making a cost-effective and efficient cooling-system 
Plus there's the eco-trend nowadays ...
// ---
Interesting article ... until he began to cite all the reasons people use when claiming a game is 'consolized' (less options to tweak, lack of editing tools, etc.). Considering that this is basically what pretty much any good usability engineer is doing to everything we use. Never mind that back in the early days we did not have editors and we had to hack the software ourselves.
Of course there's people making a profit in pirating games. The industrial-scale pirates wouldn't exist if there wasn't money to be made.
See a need, fill it ... and money will be yours. Marketing 101 as it were.
The one thing that is better is if you could create and control that need, which is exactly what DRM-industry is doing (if piracy wasn't perceived as a 'big issue' the entire DRM-industry would be dead).
Same can be said about DRM. Consider that Starforce was once implicated in pirating a game in order to show how 'bad' things tend to happen to those who didn't pay for protection ...
ie : both camps have their demons that destroy whatever good they could do.
IMHO the real problem facing the gaming-industry (and any industry producing a product that can be distributed digitally) is that they are attempting to create and sell a product that is not (a) scarce and (b) does not degrade through use (= endless support = expensive support).
Add to this the tools to monitor the use and distribution of said product and it is bloody obvious that any competent manager worth his salary will see a loss that ought to be fixed.
They (software/games-industry) can count the number of potential units they could sell by looking at data (x game-capable pc's = x units to be sold) and when that doesn't happen they have easy targets because it is human nature not to blame bad luck on someone else (if the target can't fight back it is even better). Anything else and you'd have to admit that you were selling ice to Eskimos.
Other industries are jealous of the kind of information that game-developers can gather. Imagine what General Motors would do if they knew how often someone used and resold their cars ?
Not every market is filled with AAA quality products.
Normal markets have 80% average and 5% high-end pure goodness.
For every 5* restaurant there's a million fastfood-chains selling something that shouldn't even be called food.
For every Ferrari and its ilk there's a million cheap, crappy things that don't even deserve to be called a car.
Games are no different.
You wouldn't have a perfect pc-game if the average customer could not be satisfied by something of less than stellar quality.
Plus there's the eco-trend nowadays ...
// ---
Interesting article ... until he began to cite all the reasons people use when claiming a game is 'consolized' (less options to tweak, lack of editing tools, etc.). Considering that this is basically what pretty much any good usability engineer is doing to everything we use. Never mind that back in the early days we did not have editors and we had to hack the software ourselves.
Of course there's people making a profit in pirating games. The industrial-scale pirates wouldn't exist if there wasn't money to be made.
See a need, fill it ... and money will be yours. Marketing 101 as it were.
The one thing that is better is if you could create and control that need, which is exactly what DRM-industry is doing (if piracy wasn't perceived as a 'big issue' the entire DRM-industry would be dead).
Same can be said about DRM. Consider that Starforce was once implicated in pirating a game in order to show how 'bad' things tend to happen to those who didn't pay for protection ...
ie : both camps have their demons that destroy whatever good they could do.
IMHO the real problem facing the gaming-industry (and any industry producing a product that can be distributed digitally) is that they are attempting to create and sell a product that is not (a) scarce and (b) does not degrade through use (= endless support = expensive support).
Add to this the tools to monitor the use and distribution of said product and it is bloody obvious that any competent manager worth his salary will see a loss that ought to be fixed.
They (software/games-industry) can count the number of potential units they could sell by looking at data (x game-capable pc's = x units to be sold) and when that doesn't happen they have easy targets because it is human nature not to blame bad luck on someone else (if the target can't fight back it is even better). Anything else and you'd have to admit that you were selling ice to Eskimos.
Other industries are jealous of the kind of information that game-developers can gather. Imagine what General Motors would do if they knew how often someone used and resold their cars ?
Not every market is filled with AAA quality products.
Normal markets have 80% average and 5% high-end pure goodness.
For every 5* restaurant there's a million fastfood-chains selling something that shouldn't even be called food.
For every Ferrari and its ilk there's a million cheap, crappy things that don't even deserve to be called a car.
Games are no different.
You wouldn't have a perfect pc-game if the average customer could not be satisfied by something of less than stellar quality.
Last edited:
What I want to know about piracy is why don't software companies (and by that I mean "anything besides games") put loads of DRM requiring absolute internet access and a client etc. etc. etc., but game companies do? You never hear about Adobe forcing you to install a program like Steam just to install Photoshop, do you?
The problem is, game companies are loading their games with so much DRM that people get fed up and probably end up pirating the damn thing anyway. Not to mention that when people find out a PC only game has some kind of strict DRM, they refuse to buy it. I used to want Spore for the PC, but when I learned that they stuck SecuROM in it, I scratched it off my imaginary wishlist.
If none of this makes that much sense, then forgive me, I have a ginormous headache right now.
The problem is, game companies are loading their games with so much DRM that people get fed up and probably end up pirating the damn thing anyway. Not to mention that when people find out a PC only game has some kind of strict DRM, they refuse to buy it. I used to want Spore for the PC, but when I learned that they stuck SecuROM in it, I scratched it off my imaginary wishlist.
If none of this makes that much sense, then forgive me, I have a ginormous headache right now.
So.
Next year I will get a 50MHz CPU with 10,000 cores.
That's going to be fun to code for.
Did you know that heat can be used to make ice.
I whant a gaming rig that makes strawberry ice cream.
Yummy
They do it a LOT. Heck, there's a lot of software out there that requires a dongle with a license key to be plugged into the USB ports of your machine in order to work.
I... what... wow. Shows how much I know.
Also I might be losing my mind. I typed the word "play" at the beginning of "shows how much I know" and didn't realize it until I read it. Wtf is wrong with me.
Last edited:
Ah yeah, we used Quark Express at a couple print shops and it needed the dongle thing.
I was always like "what the hell is this crap?"
I was always like "what the hell is this crap?"
I read it & this whole thread & you're not wrong.
The only real nuggets of info I took from it were the devs take on what they're trying to achieve with DRM, which is to try & prevent games being made available before or on the official release date & then hopefully for a couple of weeks after... & that they have unrealistic expectations of just how much money they think they should make over & above the service they deliver or for the good of gaming in general.
Wait, breaking even on more than 15% of games is unrealistic? Those jerks, wanting to at least break even!
~Jason
It's true.
Remember back in the old Pentium 4 days? Intel kept trying to crank up the Mhz on a single core and the thing sucked power and ran super hot and all the while AMD with their slower core, less power, and less heat, were still out-performing them.
Intel learned their lesson.
They keep the Mhz low and add more cores because it's not about raw speed anymore, it's about efficiency. Parallel processing is the future.
I think Intel is currently working on a processor with 6-8 cores.
If I were developing a game and I found out that half of the people I give tech support to are pirates, I would be so pissed off that if my boss walked by and said "hey, how about on our next game we require them to be online at all times to completely verify their legal copy of the game?" I would say "F*** YEA screw those assholes! I could be making double my pay in bonuses if they actually bought the game!"
HOLY CRAP. I would buy this computer!Did you know that heat can be used to make ice.
I whant a gaming rig that makes strawberry ice cream.
Yummy
And what would that accomplish? the DRM would get cracked within days and you'd still be giving the same techsupport to the same pirates, PLUS now you'd have to give even more techsupport to all the legit buyers who are having problems with the DRM itself, and not just the ones who have problems with the game, so it'd just be more work for you, and your company woulden't be making any more money for that reason either, probably less infact because of the boycotts and the people who feel that it's ok to pirate games if they use DRM, ohh, and the cost of buying/developing the DRM and running the servers needed to uphold it doesen't help the bottom line either.
That's what the industry needs to figure out, they have tried DRM, ohh how they have tried, and it has failed consitantly and thoroughly, we've seen various DRM for atleast the last 20 years now, and all of it has failed misserably! it does not stop thieves and it never has.
Wisen the hell up! if something has so consistantly proven itself to be a failure, what kind of sense does it make to keep going down that same path again and again? it will only lead to more failure!
All it actually succeeds at is costing companies money, and undermining consumer confidence, now please stop shooting yourselves in the foot allready, you utter pillocks!
Its high time to try something else, the digital version of brute force has failed, so perhabs the answer is diplomacy? perhabs instead of punishing the customers, in a failed attempt to punish the pirates, they should be rewarding them? and working to boost consumer confidence? perhabs more people would buy games if doing so was hassle free, the quality control on the products was actually worth a damn, people felt they got a good service and a product worthy of its pricetag, and even, ghasp, if buying a game wasen't such a risk, if they could get their investment back if it turned out they bought a lemon..
Regardless, it sure as hell coulden't hurt them to try, it's not like their current solution is helping them one single bit, on the contrary, so what do they have to lose?
If you had read the article, you would have noticed that it addressed those issues pretty well. I'm just saying...
~Jason
Intel have already released 6 and 8-core processors. My machine has an 8-core i7.
The issue however is that the CPU is intended for the purpose of processing streams of data that will usually occur in a serial fashion. Ultimately, you can add as many cores as you like in order to deal with data crunching in a more parallel fashion, but this will fall down because the tasks are often still serial. At the end of the day, raw number-crunching is still always going to count.
For the record, games on the other hand tend to represent massively parallel tasks in all manner of aspects, which makes them very suited to multicore environments. It's for this reason I'm writing a Dx10/11 game engine that runs not only visuals, but also crunches object movement in the form of all physics and AI on the GPU. As GPUs with huge quantities of processor cores become more and more mainstream, I think we're going to see a lot more of this sort of thing happening.
ATi fanboys can rage about PhysX all they like, but Nvidia are definitely heading in the right direction - and ATi need to get on that bandwagon if they're going to compete. The industry also needs someone to step up and create an API standard (like OpenGL) as to how these physics APIs should behave, otherwise we're going to increasingly see a split between Nvidia games and ATi games, because they otherwise won't be portable between one another's proprietary implementations.
The Facepalm to dwarf all Facepalms!
Not that it really matters, seeing Skidrow already cracked the thing.
Not that it really matters, seeing Skidrow already cracked the thing.
As well as selective research lets it, of course.
Last edited:
The bigger issue is that the average high-level language (like C) and the IDE used by most developers (ie : Visual Studio) is not designed for multi-threaded/parallel processing of data. Never mind the debug hell for such things.
Games do have massive parallel tasks, but they also have the need to keep those tasks perfectly synchronized.
It's not impossible though, but it sure does a lot of serious architecture & design before even a single line of code is written.
// ---
there's one problem ... DRM has not failed.
Thanks to piracy and genre-blindness people have come to accept a lot of needlessly restrictive solutions, because the publisher provided a nice juicy carrot.
DRM works and it is here to stay.(period)
Just look at Microsoft. When XP required on-line activation a lot of geeks protested.
We've got Vista and Windows 7, the restrictions have gotten worse, but practically anyone has accepted it.
The fight is over.
Pirates and DRM-industry have won. Those who value freedom to decide what their computers can and can not use have lost.
We do not own the software because we aren't allowed to buy it anymore.
We are renting software these days.
It may not be as bleedin' obvious as a subscription to a MMO-service, but it is the same for all intents and purposes.
Read the contracts and 'terms of service' for things like Steam.