Invisible War apparently didn’t rape you of your innocence …
… Warren, my ass still hurts!
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Jesus Christ. I was thinking, when I originally posted, about including a disclaimer – something to the effect that Deus Ex 2 did not rape me or my computer, but decided that would be far too crass. I guess I should have known that this metaphor would come up eventually when discussing a computer game. :roll:
Let me just say that I enjoyed DX2, I enjoyed the first one (more), and I think that a fair bit of the criticism about DX2 is unwarranted.
Like I said, performance was less a fault of the game itself and more of the weak D3D API.
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No. Better performance on release day from a relatively top of the line computer. My computer was near top of the line then, my computer was near top of the line in december. DX2 ran better overall. Taking two snapshots of then and now, DX2 is a better performer than DX. Of course DX runs better than DX2 now. I’d be really fucking surprised if a 4 year old game ran worse than something new.
And you can’t blame the D3D api, because you cound run Deus Ex in open gl, and it ran just as bad. Meanwhile, I’m playing UT on the same computer in the same time frame, and getting smooth framerates, with better looks.
You don’t need a ‘routine’ to do something like that. You need a for loop and an event. It’s pure oversight or laziness that they didn’t implement it.
Uhh… I am bitching that it didn’t have stealth support! The gameplay, story, and upgrades implied that there was a stealth system, but overall, there just wasn’t.
Yeesh, you really decided to go to left field with that one didn’t you? All I meant was that I see most games moving to a first person interactive system. Using the term FPS was wrong, yes. But I feel that as it stands, you can make a first person system work in almost any genre. This doesn’t mean that every one will use the exact same system as Deus Ex 2. That’s just absurd.
It was more of just a point to add to list similar things between the games.
The OpenGL API for the Unreal Tournament engine was never fully supported and very buggy.
The game was for Glide cards. Hell, I played Deus Ex on a K6 400, 128MB RAM and a Voodoo Banshee and I had no performance problems. D3D sucked back then in general, and especially sucked for Deus Ex.
You don’t need a ‘routine’ to do something like that. You need a for loop and an event. It’s pure oversight or laziness that they didn’t implement it.
A for loop/event would only tie as many AI objects as you hard coded into it–if a fellow AI died next to an AI which wasn’t a part of the mutual checking array in the for loop, the AI wouldn’t notice. Something more complex (I used the generic term “routine”) would be needed for one AI object to recognize a fallen AI object and recognize the fallen AI object was part of the percieving AI’s “team.” Not too complicated if you’ve got a bianary dead/alive on every AI object–the tricky part would be keeping track of every AI’s perception. If you could do that, it’d just be a matter of “pinging” every AI object, living or dead, in the perception area.
Uhh… I am bitching that it didn’t have stealth support! The gameplay, story, and upgrades implied that there was a stealth system, but overall, there just wasn’t.
I meant to say, if they didn’t even try to add stealth, you’d still be complaining that there wasn’t stealth. I’m suggesting that you’re more of a faultfinder than anything else when it comes to DX1–I guess you think it’s cool to go against the grain, or something.
Stealth wasn’t perfect. Ok. Move on.
Yeesh, you really decided to go to left field with that one didn’t you? All I meant was that I see most games moving to a first person interactive system. Using the term FPS was wrong, yes. But I feel that as it stands, you can make a first person system work in almost any genre. This doesn’t mean that every one will use the exact same system as Deus Ex 2. That’s just absurd.
Well it’s totally idiotic to say the future of every genre is FPS. Sure, you can shoehorn anything you want into the FPS model… but would you want to? It’d get pretty freaking dull…
And my “left fieldness” with the unified ammo comment was only there to show you how utterly absurd taking one gameplay mechanic is and saying “every game will be like this!”
It was more of just a point to add to list similar things between the games.
The game was for Glide cards. Hell, I played Deus Ex on a K6 400, 128MB RAM and a Voodoo Banshee and I had no performance problems. D3D sucked back then in general, and especially sucked for Deus Ex.
Again, what part of the universe are you from where D3D sucked in 2000? One of the primary complaints against DX was its abysmal D3D support because by that point it wasn’t acceptable for a game not to support D3D just as well as OpenGL or Glide.
D3D was just getting over sucking in 2000, IIRC. But you may be right, I have a crappy memory and the Mobygames 2000 list isn’t helping me remember much.
Mr. Grey is right. D3D was a fairly solid API by then and many games used it well. Glide-only games were becoming the exception rather than the rule and that’s why so many folks with NVIDIA and to a lesser extent ATi and a few other types of cards were so ticked off at the horrible performance.
Another part of the performance issues in DX1 was that the engine couldn’t handle a lot of the maps very well. They gave nearly zero consideration to how much of the levels would be drawn all at once. It wasn’t meant to handle the big, wide open maps that the DX designers went apeshit with. The larger maps in Unreal were reletively flat compared to, say, Liberty Island or the underwater facility map. The UT2k3 engine didn’t have as much of a problem with it, but DX2 seems even worse since they blew their load on dynamic shadows that were totally superfluous and made up for it with really tiny levels.
Don’t be a moron. The AI in those games are dumb as bricks, and Blood 1 barely even had enemy AI. What the hell?
Hmm, okay, you may right in Blood 1’s case. It’s certainly far more challenging than Deus Ex, but it might not be because of advanced AI.
But THIEF?! You’re calling me a moron for saying Thief 1 & 2’s AI is better? Or Unreal? Or UT’s? Have you even played those games? Deus Ex is maybe on a par with Unreal, but the other games smack it down nicely.
Thief’s AI was fine for what it needed to do: walk around a building and not see you if you were “hidden”. It’s not like they sat around forumlating elaborate traps while you waited for the map to load. DX enemy AI responded to sound just as Thief’s did.
Unreal was a joke. The saving grace for Unreal’s enemy AI was that they could strafe excessively. For UT they upgraded them to cheaters on the higher difficulty levels.
