S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - The Way it's Meant to be Played!

demalion said:
Why do people make excuses for such things?

It is true that such things happen often.

It is true that such things offend some people, and some people don't care.

It is true that not everyone does things like this, and that doing things like this is not the only option for successful game releases.

If it doesn't offend you, why are you making an issue of someone else being offended? Why say someone else should not be offended with your reasoning being that you personally are not?
If you'd intend to make a case that having one vendor will enhance progress and lower costs, or that such statements made in game forums have no impact, I'd wonder what you've observed that seems to indicate that will be the result from this.
If you'd imply everyone does things like this, I'd respond that such is both untrue and irrelevant to anyone who isn't gaining benefit from this, short or long term.

It seems to me that product evolution is fastest and pricing lowest when those determining evolution and pricing have to compete with others. This gives more pricing control to the consumer.

It seems to be true that this doesn't serve consumers when it is in actuality "exclusive" support, since it has a negative impact on those excluded (the benefit of cross-vendor APIs, I'd think), and shifts pricing and evolution control to one party (the one who benefits from higher prices).

It seems to be true that this doesn't serve consumers when it is portrayed as "exclusive" support when in actuality it is not, since it can mislead those "excluded", and also shifts pricing and evolution control to the same one party.

Why would it be invalid for consumers to find such practices undesirable and vote with their money accordingly? That is the type of choice they would prefer to retain, since their influence on evolution is even more limited.

It seems that it does serve people in the short term to say things that get them more money, whether those things have to be true to get that money or not.
In my opinion, publishers as a whole don't care, but not caring doesn't have anything to do with whether other people should care or not.

In terms of correlating things said elsewhere:

I don't buy that ATI devrel gave them the cold shoulder for support...I don't see any correlation whatsoever for that in what others say about dealing with ATI devrel, or in my limited personal experience as some "no name" who emailed them with my own questions.

Considering these things, I conclude that the contents of that text is bought and paid for propaganda...possibly decided upon by the person making the statements, or possibly decided by marketing/higher management and dictated to them, but in any case made for the purposes of IHV promotion in exchange for funding. It seems worded like it, and apparent contradiction to prior statements make it seem even moreso. Note, this doesn't make all of it untrue, or even my conclusion definitely right.

In terms of those making money, the question is whether they encourage people to switch to the IHV sponsoring them after buying their game, or instead encourage people to avoid their game, and how that affects their bottom line. The choice for the developers (as much as that is separated from the above) is a matter of their unique choices, values, and preferences, with as much latitude is allowed by deadlines and funding limitations (which is controlled by the "making money" part above).

No one is saying it is new, AFAICS, just that it is becoming more apparent. BTW, I think ATI marketing is learning. I'd prefer they'd spend more time and energy on other things, but the reasoning seems to be that because I have no choice in the matter of whether they have to adapt to this approach or not, that I shouldn't have a preference...?
Click to expand...


Well that saved me a lot of type work pretty much what I was thinking to 8)
 
IMHO

I believe them that they had more/better support from Nvidia than from ATi. I remember more than 6 months ago reading a preview for STALKER, where claims were it was ran on NV30 sample(yes it was october/november.2002), and it looked like from the beginning NV30 was their target as "best card". Actually NV30 failed to impress and R300 is on same level as functionality. But I doubt they have the time& resources to add same level of performance/effect tuning on R300.

A short notice: first ATi developer meeting EVER held in Russia took place less than 2 months ago. Until then AFAIK, Russia was terra incognita for ATi - both from developer&buying region. In same time Nvidia has VERY good relations with leading Russian game developers from years. AFAIK at least twice russian developers won prizes in NVidia contests. And that can be confirmed easily - many games that have no "harsh" problems with NV cards, have such with ATi's. And more games were made in Russia in 2002 than many think, much more than in 2000 to say.
 
Chavvdarrr:

Dude, have you ever heard of such a thing as Direct3D?

Point of this being, you don't HAVE to (or are even SUPPOSED TO) program directly for specific pieces of hardware!

Why you (or these crazy russian devs) think they have to pander for one specific manufacturer's card is beyond me. I have a GF3 so I am already in the favored camp, but unless they wizen up and treat all consumers fairly I'm not going to promote their dubious practices by splurging on their biased goods.


*G*
 
I really have little faith that this game will be anything special in the department of gameplay. Most of the talk has been about the advanced engine which is great, but there are some heavy weight games are due out around the same time as this one. Doom 3 being the most anticipated and of course the much delayed Duke Forever (maybe it will eventually come out). A new Max Payne is in the works and Valve of course has been supposedly working on a new engine for a while now.

I really hope STALKER turns out to be a great game, but at this point I don't see any justification for being upset at some "unique effects"?

Does anyone know if STALKER has overbright lighting?
 
"
Dude, have you ever heard of such a thing as Direct3D?

Point of this being, you don't HAVE to (or are even SUPPOSED TO) program directly for specific pieces of hardware!

Why you (or these crazy russian devs) think they have to pander for one specific manufacturer's card is beyond me. I have a GF3 so I am already in the favored camp, but unless they wizen up and treat all consumers fairly I'm not going to promote their dubious practices by splurging on their biased goods.
"

Simple answer.
To get more out of your hardware.
That is nothing but great.
It does not mean that the game does not run on other hardware.
ATI hardware will behave like any other Direct3D compatibile hardware.
Nvidia hardware will maybe behave like a littlebit more.
So what?

If i get more out of my current hardware that's fine with me.
I don't care why they decided to go for Nvidia hardware or give that kind of hardware special optimizations.
Thats part of every business.
It happens every day.
If a competitor did a good and clever job - thats fine. Congratulations.
To develop good hardware is not all. Other things are part of that business too and will ever bee.
 
Richthofen said:
Simple answer.
To get more out of your hardware.
That is nothing but great.
It does not mean that the game does not run on other hardware.
ATI hardware will behave like any other Direct3D compatibile hardware.
Nvidia hardware will maybe behave like a littlebit more.
So what?
Click to expand...

Just a side question here. What if making optimisations targetted specifically at one piece of hardware actively harms the performance on others? Different pieces of hardware may have very different restrictions to follow to make things run quickly.

Does the developer use multiple code paths to work around these issues?
That destroys much of the point of having a unified API, and increases the workload.

Hopefully using DX9/OpenGL high level shaders may mitigate these sorts of problem, but I wouldn't absolutely count on it.
 
Andy, part of TWIMTBP campaign may mean that NVIDIA's dev rel will drop in code paths specifically for their hardware. If this is done such that they branch the code then neither the developers themselves have done any extra work nor is there any detriment to other hardware - only NVIDIA's boards a gaining performance from the 'default' path.

Of course, if I were ATI's dev rel I'd be proffering hardware and support and making sure that the code actually is branched... ;)
 
Considering that the guys still needs a publisher (or did until recently?) I'm not really that surprised that they target another company (here nVidia) to help them show off and hype their game before a given publisher.

And this doesn't mean that the final game wil be tailored to one piece of hardware. A game developer with focus on advanced rendering that can't at least support the two main IHV companies probably wont reach much success in the market anyway (it would be a bad sign after all).
 
they already have a publisher but can't comment on that right now.

"
Just a side question here. What if making optimisations targetted specifically at one piece of hardware actively harms the performance on others? Different pieces of hardware may have very different restrictions to follow to make things run quickly.

Does the developer use multiple code paths to work around these issues?
That destroys much of the point of having a unified API, and increases the workload.

Hopefully using DX9/OpenGL high level shaders may mitigate these sorts of problem, but I wouldn't absolutely count on it.
"

Again part of every business.
I don't think that is the case in this special matter here.
I think Nvidia card owners get littlebit more out of their hardware and that's it.
But again if it would harms others than it is their problem.
Its up to the competitors to get devlopers in their direction.
If they can't well i don't care. Then consumers will start to buy other products so in the end they have to challenge that or they will die.
It's all about business and making money and it will ever be that way no matter how.
 
Thought I'd point out that they gave another response, this time from the PR Manager:

http://www.3dgpu.com/comments.php?id=2323&category=9

I'd like to bring in certain explanations. In the previous message from Oles Shishkovtsov it was mentioned "we contacted NVIDIA and ATI for several months, but ATI did not respond". I'd like to add some details here: it probably wasn't put in a proper way, for it's not that ATI refused us in technical help, it's more that not everything went as we expected. We got our 9700 board with delay early October. That was already the release variant of the board, we couldn't get hold of earlier versions. ATI guys provided us with access onto developer forums and were ready to answer our questions.

We wouldn't like you to get a wrong impression out of that previous message that ATI developer relations department works badly. We did receive two 9700 boards, and we'd like to thank ATI for that. It's just that everything went not as fast as we expected, boards came after quite some time and we did not get a possibility to demonstrate the game at ATI's booth at ECTS. So, everything's fine with ATI's developer relations, probably something just went wrong on our side.

Oleg Yavorsky
PR Manager
GSC Game World
www.gsc-game.com
www.stalker-game.com
Click to expand...
 
Support is a non issue, they might not be overjoyed with ATI's ... but it all came down to cold hard cash in the end, and we all know it.

No dev would be silly enough to antogonize the huge amount of non NVIDIA users by giving the impression their game was unoptimized for their hardware if they werent getting payed to do so.
 
FUDie said:
Lezmaka said:
You mean the game devs are in this business to make money? OMG!
Click to expand...
You seem to approve.

Let me give you another scenario. What if CPU vendor A were able to influence major OS vendor B to optimize the software to work better on A's products? What if A were the dominant CPU manufacturer? What if B were the dominant OS manufacturer? Sounds like collusion to me.

-FUDie
Click to expand...

You mean like microsoft and the opteron, omg how terrible, lets all go commit hari kari
 
"
No dev would be silly enough to antogonize the huge amount of non NVIDIA users by giving the impression their game was unoptimized for their hardware if they werent getting payed to do so.
"

Well a little comment on that.
Do you really think the average "Joe" knows that the game he bought was optimized for a other hardware vendor?
I'll tell you what happens if a Direct3D advertised game runs gread on a NV card of "Joes" best friend.
Next time he will buy a Nvidia card and that's it.

I don't think the average Joe will ever blame the software company.
He has not enough knowledge to get a clue of that background.
What he will do is to blame the manufacturer of his 3d card.

But well.. that is again business :)
 
Well the logo on the box and splash screen in the game are a dead giveaway (optimized for one is unoptimized for the other, most people will be perfectly able to make that leap).
 
MfA said:
Well the logo on the box and splash screen in the game are a dead giveaway (optimized for one is unoptimized for the other, most people will be perfectly able to make that leap).
Click to expand...

Yup.
And the next logical step in that chain of thought is:
"This isn't optimized for my card. Maybe it will give me trouble."
And simply grab another box.

Entropy
 
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