Oblivion

I totally know what you mean...

Actually, I bought an Xbox 360, and rented Oblivion, and have never experienced it crash, once!

Plus, the Xbox 360's controller makes it worthwhile.

I would suggest to you, to go out and buy an Xbox 360. Its been one of the *BEST* purchases I made other than the iPod & my 15" Mac PowerBook.

Peace to you!

untz

Odd, your descriptions of the brutal punishment and avoidance of pain your character was involved in .... it makes me want to play the game.

Then again, I can lose hours play Mah-Jongg. Hence, no way in hell should I buy this game.

I have the Xbox 360 version but I basically never play that. Actually, I take that back. I played it enough to get out of the initial dungeon, put it down, and haven't picked it back up since. Why? Because I'm never inspired to go turn on the Xbox 360, and when I am, someone else is using the TV.

So my question is, would it be worth getting the PC version? I don't actually have a PC, but I have an intel iMac that runs Windows (in which I play WoW and HL2). I've heard people saying the PC version has marginally better graphics, and I know with a PC game I'd actually play it more, since I don't have to go anywhere to do so (as I'm already in front of my computer). So would it be worth re-buying in PC format?

There are actually some fairly neat things being done with Java towards gaming now- there have been openGL interfaces to it for a while but people are starting to build useable 3D engines from them. The main thing tying people in the mainstream industry to C++ is that everyone in the mainstream industry uses C++. Ultimately you are going to have to solve the problems of Garbage Collection and the like at some point, no matter what environment you are using and it can save a bunch of time and effort if your system does that for you. There is a worthwhile (and currently quite high signal-to-noise) community over at www.javagaming.org for anyone interested in that field.

I believe Microsoft is doing something similar with C# and managed DirectX but I have less experience with that.

I've been a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series for years and I've found that Oblivion runs passably on an AMD 3000+ processor with a gig of ram and a 128mb 6600gt video card. I had to double my ram from 512 meg because that just wasn't enough and I would think if your pc is any slower than that you would be hard pressed to have much fun with it. I bought my wife a whole lot of new hardware for her birthday, mostly so she could play it. It was an entirely worthwhile investment.

Haha! How nice that you're hooked as I am. And normally i'm not the gamer type, but since i play it together with a friend, i do have more patience.

I'll play the 360 version and despite the missing mouse and keyboard (man, those analog sticks are just not made for first-person stuff) it's playable (and it only crashed once).

BUT: I do have the german version (yuck) and it must be a bug introduced while translating, but the save game system is the worst the world has ever seen! For one, it's not sorted (you always have to search for your files) and gets resorted sometimes! So you know yout save game position, and after the next save it's at a completely different location!! argh?

btw, we started with a gal as well and it was horrible at first, since we experienced the same problems. Always dying because of a bad look. ;) But since we jumped and sneaked our whole Oblivion-life, we're now nearly invisible, are faster than anybody else and can jump really high (to kill the enemies from above)... :D

Love your stuff, keep on ranting!

/* [Peter Schombert]
The way I see it the big problem with writing a game in a nice garbage collected language is that the garbage collector tends to run in an inconsistant manner. ... Are there languages / implementations that have fixed this problem?
*/

There are several garbage collection schemes out there that are supposed to handle this. Java's hotspot compiler (which is now the free compiler) uses a "train algorithm"

Steve would recommend OCaml, which uses two garbage collection schemes (one for short-lived objects, the other for longer-lived objects).

The saddest part of the story is that C++ does allow garbage collection, and that GCC ships with a good collector turned on by default.

peter schombert said...
Obviously programming these games in something more modern would have helped, but could they really have maintained their framerates. (I honestly am curious)

Keep in mind that the effective frame rate has to include, in the FPS ratio, the number of S my computer spends down each hour from having to cold-reboot it. I'd estimate it's about 10 minutes per hour, so the effective frame rate is only 5/6 the advertised one.

As for garbage-collection pauses: the game has huge pauses all the time, and it's not garbage-collected. It frequently has to swap in areas and do all sorts of other management cruft. As long as the pauses aren't letting monsters romp on me, then I don't mind them. I suspect that using a garbage-collected language wouldn't change the play quality at all.

I do all my games programming in Java because I know I'm never going to be pushing the metal with my limited endeavours ( as programmers we like to think we're important to games but the models, animations and artwork are what takes the time, there are hundreds of very capable APIs to do almost anything you want but a well-textured and original model is hard to come by ) and because even if I do manage to crash my JVM I know my entire system won't go with it. That can be very convenient when you're exploring new coding avenues and don't want every mistake to throw your PC to the floor and jump on it.

If you're a bit careful with when you create objects and when you pool them you're very unlikely to have gc related pauses on a modern machine and if you do find they are emerging you can probably design them out if you look at your structure carefully. Its quite possible to program badly or well in any language. You can also get irritating language zealotry for any language* - every now and then Javagaming gets a thread along the lines of this:

newbtroll: U cant program game in java cos it's slow lolz!!!!!1one

regular: It's not, we've had this conversation before and no-one cares.

newbtroll: but its slow lolz! There was a benchmark of doing 1++; a million times! You should use C++

regular: But the site is called called JAVA gaming. It would be stupid if we were all using C++. And anyway there has yet to be a meaningful benchmark for any language.

newbtroll: Java is slow! lolz!!!!1one



*possibly not befunge

Anonymous said...

/* I do all my games programming in Java because I know I'm never going to be pushing the metal with my limited endeavours.
*/

I feel somewhat timid posting on this, because while every so often I dream about writing a game, I don't have the kind of team needed to put together a decent one (average number of developers on today's games: 30; average time in development: 2 years; yeah, I think I'll write one by myself on weekends). I used to have a subscription to Game Developer Magazine, but since I wasn't actually writing games I dropped that.

Steve's right to say, "the game has huge pauses all the time. ... It frequently has to swap in areas and do all sorts of other management cruft." Some of the smarter games do that piecemeal, but even then you don't necessarily know where the player's going to go (for that matter, your operating system may pre-emptively load up memory pages that it thinks you'll use, but there's no telling if you'll actually use them).

Stevie's Drunken Blog Rants covered some of how programming for Amazon was different from the programming you study in school. Game programming's apparently diferent from both of those. However, I have a strange feeling that OCaml would be a good tool for some of the math-intensive graphics stuff, if OpenGL and DirectX didn't already own that field.

And, please, realize I *like* C++, although I'm sad to see so many people use it without paying attention to modern development practices (eg., smart pointers or garbage collection instead of new/delete (or even worse, malloc/free), functors instead of function pointers, RAII (which you don't get in Java, and which is on my list for not liking Java; and no, finalizers and finally blocks aren't an improvement), using OOP when it makes sense, and only when it makes sense (my other big reason for not liking Java)).

Please note, I don't like C++ because it's perfect, but from what I can see, it's the best of a bad bunch. Then again, I haven't done much programming in functional languages. I'll admit I'd like OCaml more if it's syntax was more C-like, and I'll admit that's a silly position to take. Then again, I like Perl.

Is cabochon.com coming back? I wanted to add a link to your slightly too vicious Ancient Languages: Perl rant to Wikipedia's Perl article, in the Related Links subsection of the Con section, but the link is broken. I saved Google's cached version in case Cabochon isn't coming back and you give me permission to republish it somewhere, but it is coming back, isn't it?

The server crashed and should be back up by the time you read this. If not do just check back as it absolutely will be back so there's no cause for alarm.

I'm Oblivion free now after spending about 235 hours finishing most of the quests (main, faction, etc.). My employer only wishes I could be as productive in the time I spent at work over this period. But, to that I say, work is nowhere near as fun. On my 1 1/2 year old gaming rig from Falcon Northwest, I was surprised it held up as well as it did, only a few crashes to desktop over that massive amount of time. A testament to spending some extra buxx with my fine feathered friends at FNW. And for all the rest of you in Oblivion, it's fun to rail on it a bit, but I'm left in shock and awe, feeling melancholy, thinking back on the things I did in the game. Beth did themselves proud, tip of the hat.

I've put over 100 hours into Oblivion so far and I haven't seen it crash once. I haven't even noticed a single bug yet. My framerates are solid and constant, even after playing for hours at a time.

I wound up getting an Xbox 360 after writing this entry -- bought it for $250 from a friend who won it in a drawing. Had the disk drive, wireless controller, the whole works.

Then I bought Oblivion for it. Yep, wound up paying full price twice, but I suppose it's worth it.

It's WAY better on the XBox 360 than on any PC I've seen. That's corroborated by friends with recently-constructed gamer PCs. The XBox 360 is the first device I've owned that can actually drive my plasma TV in HD mode (up to 1080i), so the graphics are astonishing. And the game is very smooth; the pauses are tolerable.

The XBox 360 version of the game DOES still crash at incredibly annoying moments. For instance, it had about a 25% chance of crashing right after you closed an Oblivion Gate, as it was loading the outside world. Ouch. That's a ton of lost work.

However, it crashed at those points so reliably that I just started saving my game right after grabbing the Sigil Stone. And (to their credit), the save games never got corrupted, and always took me back exactly to where I'd saved. So it made it tolerable.

On the 360, the game crashed for me about once or twice a day (not counting the tower-closing crashes). That's loads better than on my PC, where it crashed about once an hour, requiring a painfully long reboot. (The XBox boots pretty fast by comparison.)

In any case, I finally finished the game. There's a ton of stuff I didn't get around to doing, but after having played Morrowind, I knew I would get bored as soon as my character became near-invincible, at high levels. Takes all the challenge (and adrenaline rush) out of the game.

So I got to 25th level (32nd at the very end), pushed through the main quest in about a week, and then quit cold turkey after logging, oh, somewhere around 130 hours. Haven't looked back since then! It was a great game, but rather humorless -- the game takes itself way too seriously. Ironic that they try so hard to be "realistic", but then have vampires and minotaurs and spellcraft. Ah well, that's the general trend for Tolkein-inspired fantasy these days. Fun for a while, and then I escape back to the always-fresh, always-quirky worlds of Anime.

I can't wait for the new Zelda to come out this Christmas.

i just started oblivion up again earlier this month. with all the mods you can make it a pretty fun game.

reading your quip about "the best of single player and the best of multiplayer" reminded me of something i kicked around while talking about getting oblivion up and running again.

i called it the DMORPG b/c i sometimes find myself wishing one of the NPCs in the city might actually have something new to say.

feel free to have a read.

Speaking of micropayments of MMORPGs, Iron Realms (Achaea being the largest) run a number of commercial MUDs that use a system like that.

You can purchase special items, custom items, pets and other specialties.

No up-front fee to pay. No monthly fee to pay. In fact, some people have played for years without paying a cent. Of course, it is just more difficult that way.