If piracy numbers gone down but sales don’t go up, then what?
I saw dramatic improvement with the same videocard going from Vista32/2gb to Vista64/6gb. I think its tracking all the population that drags the system down in that particular circumstance.
If you have a 4870, you’re almost certainly not graphics-limited in Dalaran. WoW gets CPU limited in a hurry, and it’s not always obvious (a look at task manager won’t always show CPU cores pegged at 100%).
With something like Dalaran, the limit is in things like the scene setup, which largely happens on the CPU. It’s all that culling away hidden geometry, and particle systems going off (that’s all computed on the CPU in WoW), and tons and tons of memory hits to a hugely disparate amount of objects (all those various armor sets and so on).
You can have a 5870, which is WAY faster than your 4870, and still not get more than 30fps in Dalaran on a good day.
If they really completely re-architected the engine to make better use of multiple cores and further limit state changes and so on they could probably make it run a lot better on our modern computers, but it’s almost certainly too much to do. It would probably require changing the way data is formatted, meaning all new local graphics and model and world data for clients and stuff.
The only way to really be graphics limited in Dalaran on a 4870 is to run at a REALLY high resolution (2560x1600) with AA turned on, or to have the shadows quality cranked to the max. Which doesn’t look much different than having it turned down a couple notches.
I’m running a GeForce 4 TI on my XP (er, only) box.
And, before you ask, no you can’t have it.
I think Charles is referring to server-side game saves. Some preliminary details can be found here…
Last year, Ubisoft head honcho Yves Guillemot mentioned that the company was “working on tools that will allow us to actually decrease tremendously the piracy on PC.” Ubisoft is now launching this proprietary new system to manage its PC gaming community, starting with making its PC games accessible through Ubi.com accounts.
In the past Ubisoft has been derided for its use of the controversial StarForce digital rights management application. Ubisoft’s new platform takes an approach that tackles many of the typical criticisms of DRM. You’ll be able to run your games without a disc in the drive for authentication, and you can take advantage of unlimited installations.
“If you own a hundred PCs, you can install your games on a hundred PCs,” said Brent Wilkinson, Director, Customer Service and Production Planning at Ubisoft.
One very interesting benefit of this new account management system is how it handles save games. Your saves will be stored remotely on Ubi servers, allowing access to your game saves on any machine. Steam offers a similar service for select games, but this will be available for the majority of Ubisoft’s PC titles.
So what’s the downside? Since authentication is now handled through your Ubi.com account, you’ll always need to connect to your Ubi.com account to authenticate before playing. While it’s hard to conceive of PC gamers being stranded without an Internet connection, those situations do come up, particularly when traveling.
We asked about the potential backlash to this authentication platform requiring an Internet connection. “We think most people are going to be fine with it. Most people are always connected to an Internet connection,” Wilkinson replied.
I wonder how that will work with game saves that create very large files. So every time I press quick-save I will have to wait for my PC to upload 30 megabytes at 10 kb a second?
Probably the same way that MMOs handle it. All the state is on the server, none of it (or only minimal amounts of it) is transferred to the client.
I don’t believe that will be the case. This would require a very specific type of architecture to work. I don’t really expect that every game published by Ubisoft will be written with an MMO style server side state system. This is pretty unrealistic for certain types of games. Of course I could be wrong.
What types of games are you thinking of?
I think I just heard all the people travelling while playing OFFLINE on their laptops suddenly cry and now there is only silence.
Sounds great. Companies need to try out new things. If an Ubi.com account is as intrusive as some (I’m looking at you GTA IV with your three different account logins) that’ll be less good. You’d think this would be part of the offering at major download platforms like Steam. We’ll sell your game, and host its saves…
Such as real-time strategy games. Ubisoft HQ can not host a private instance of every rts game being played around the world. Can they? No, I don’t think so.
Maybe not, but in that case, would you really have multi-megabyte saves?
Yes. I just checked my Company of Heroes save games. They are at least 25mb each.
Shows you how much I know about RTSes… still, I wonder how much of that would really need to be kept in a server environment. I suspect a lot of that 25Mb is art and video resources, which presumably wouldn’t need to be duplicated for everyone on the server.
I wonder if Charles will show up and enlighten us about how all of this will work.
You’re assuming no optimization would be done to make the saves as small as possible here. Ubisoft (or whoever) would have the incentive to do so since massive server farms aren’t really that cheap.
That said, if you’re Ubisoft why would you want that aggravation? Not to mention all the users who want to play offline, but the random data loss events that inevitably occur in the data center environment are going to kill you.
In a totally unrelated note, i finally finished The Void two weeks ago!
Yeah, i needed two months and a half to finish it. The game unrelenting bleakness and cruel system made me do long pauses in my game until i had steeled myself again enough to continue it.
Nah, savegames would be ten times (250 MB) more if they included art and video resources.
I don’t have any technical insight, but i think there are some kind of games that produces a few KB in savegames, and others generate a 50MB file. Arma2 is one of tem (and no, no art resources inside, it would be over 1GB in that case).
Yup. The very first time a data loss occurs, there will be some rude awakenings for people.
When the Sidekicks dropped everyone’s data, people switched phones in droves.