Jonas wrote:No, you're not hated for not liking Steam, but it sounds more like you hate us for liking it.
which is not true. i don't hate people for liking steam, i feel more sorry for them, that's all
I really like the fact that the game fetches updates automatically and tells me about new releases.
it never told me about new releases and downloaded more crap behind my back than usefull things. updating is ok but somebody else stated it once well: version conflicts. with steam you have no idea what version your game runs. now try matching people up in lans or other places where people don't have net access or do not allow automatic updates. i know a lot of people having bad times trying to run source games on lans through steam. furthermore i play mostly single player and only a few selected multiplayer gems. now to play single player beeing blocked anytime by the steam system is not something i like at all.
From the point of view of an independant developer, a system like Steam is the way to get your game out there when none of the shops will put it on their shelves.
that's true, but steam is not the only way to do this. i would never buy something off steam as i have not the slightest control of what gets on my machine. with downloads or cds i can examine that stuff before i run it through. i know i'm paranoic in such things but i do not trust steam one bit as i do not trust windows one bit.
being the owner of a mediocre computer, not old but not state of the art either - Half-Life 2 looked excellent, it looked more realistic than Doom 3 and the physics were better than any implementation of Havok I'd ever seen before.
i have also such a system, a laptop to be correct. the reason hl2 looks probably graphically better than doom3 is simply that hl2 uses pre-rendered radiosity, like quake does (who wonders, hl2 is modified quake code) and d3 uses full real time lighting. those are two different lighting schemes. radiosity always looks smoother but you have then restricted lighting, especially it's no more dynamic. real-time lighting gives more realistic (but harder) lighting and shadows. it's common knowledge in ray-tracing that radiosity gives soft images but ray-tracing gives correct shadows. what simply annoyed me the most on source is the crappy and inconsistent shadowing. it really destroys anything good on this engine. they should have better left it off at all instead of doing a half-baken version. but that conforms with the entire half-baked look of the engine. i do not say d3 is better or worse, as they both have different focus points and different aims (outdoor / indoor) and would perform bad in the opposite scenario. concerning physics i said what is to be said there: it feels artificial and out-of-place.
And that is a comparison to Invisible War, Thief 3, and Max Payne 2 among others. Max Payne 2 had good physics, but I don't see how they were any better than that of Half-Life 2.
IW has bad physics, hands down, and i never said it is better than hl2. people feel like rubber-dolls than people and in general physics have the feel of beeing half-done.
thief3 i can not compare, i never got the chance to play it
if mp2 has better physics than hl2 i guess in that case seems to be matter of taste. mp2 felt good to me and credible, hl2 felt somewhat artificial and 'squeezed-in' instead of beeing part of the gameplay (except ravenholm, which has though only been a testing playground for the grav-gun... boring). i still prefer the physics of trespasser, although beeing not that sophisticated like havok it had already nice rigid-body physics in times computers had not yet the processing power havok sucks up for the same today. i guess i'm an old-schooler in that sense but simply because it's new doesn't mean it's necessary feels better. maybe we leave it then to 'matter of taste' as except sugestive points there are no technical ones you can compare with.
Source was designed to show some really pretty light.
there is nothing new with that lighting. it's quake-style lighting mixed with projected shadow maps. i see really nothing special or pretty there. ok, yes, we have normal-maps and specular-maps but that's something you find today in all graphic-oriented games and had been already around.
If you want to convert DX to a new engine, you're probably better off choosing Unreal 2, but Source works perfectly for daylight. And as for dynamic lighting... have you played The Lost Coast yet?
source only works for daylight as indoors the shadows are totally off. concerning lost coast i can not judge as i did not play it.
. Warren Spector's new game is going to be based on the Source Engine and be distributed by Steam... any reactions?
. overall it looks unfinished, crappy. i don't like the graphics at all. and the physics system itself is also a mediocre implementation of havok. max payne 2 had a much better implementation of havok and is older. also trespasser (very old) had comparable physics which had been better integrated into the game than hl2 did.
