In sales? Good question. I would think they balance each other out, but I have no idea. I can imagine CoD4 gets a boost from its MP facilities on PC (more of a MP platform than Xbox) but also that it sells more on Xbox regardless of any such considerations.

The problem with sales figures these days is that they rarely ever take into account digital sales, only retail. I don't just mean re: PC/console sales comparisons, but also the whole 'pc is dead waaa!' vibe coming from some corners of the intarwebz using the figures as a harbinger of the piracy apocalypse.

Even Valve, owner and proprietor of Steam for crying out loud, has steadfastly refused to release numbers on their own steam sales.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/43343 ... es-Figures



Now, take that information and look at this:

http://www.garry.tv/?p=694

This is a relatively small mod we're talking about, that was free at first and then went on steam for paying customers. It's been bought over 300.000 times since then. Three hundred!! We can only imagine what the steam sales of other, full-fledged games are. Not a lot of games sell even over 1 million in retail.


EDIT: lol...I accidentally found this screenie from a Yahtzee video review:



'tis only in jest!

Hehe thats a nice picture.

All hail Yahtzee!

lol @ the graphics.

Personally I think the PC is a superior gaming platform. In some cases a console is preferable (like racing games), but to be honest that's just because of the control. If I was fully kitted out with a pc driving wheel, pedals, flight stick, etc, I think I'd prefer the pc as a gaming platform for anything.

However, I've been a pc gamer since the 80s, so that may skew my perceptions. I like playing some console games. Assuming it's a learned thing, I could see how someone younger than me (goddamned kids, get off my lawn!) who grew up in a console world might prefer consoles to PCs. PCs are too complicated.

From a retail point of view, I prefer consoles. Harder for a retard to screw up the buying of said game ("Have you checked the specs to make sure it works on your PC?"..."Sure, I have Vista!" /facepalm)

Brilliant.

That reminded me.

In far 2000. I had such a retard seller trying to convince me a game (Delta Force 1) won't work on my PC. The guy wasn't put together and it took me time to convince him to sell me the damn game (it was cheap there, I had to be stubborn ). His goodbye sounded like "We won't take it back once you realize I won't work."

Well, wtf... I wouldn't care at all if a teenager wanted to screw his budget by buying in my shop.

Did you guys know, btw, that DF1 is based on voxel graphics?

Yea, I played DF3 for awhile. Fun game, though it had some serious issues. I did know the earlier games in the series were Voxel based. So was DX3 terrain, if I'm not mistaken, which is how they managed to make terrain that was basically limitless.

The terrains in first DFs are made of big samples that repeat over and over. Just buildings and stuff are placed on fixed locations. And the best of all (I am not sure how they did it but I give it a rough guess) that a whole sample could be stored in a simple 256x256 BMP. Yeah, pretty cool solution for late 90s. Even for today.

To the laymen and laywomen: Don't get confused by the smallness of the bitmap and bigness of a terrain that's generated from it. That's just an usual thing in the CG minimalism.

Now, just using simple floats to position the player in all that space would not give us limitless space at all. But lets use three floats to place the player on the current sample, and then two integers to mark on which sample repetition the player is. Yeah, it would be a long ride till some counter exceed the range of int. And even then, with only two integers more, we can just expand the whole space for the range of int power 2. Basically, probably enough to prevent someone from finding a hole for a lifetime.



So much that costs.. 7*4 = 28 bytes. Why not add two integers more, and be sure few generations won't break it? It is just 8 bytes more. We could consider shorts instead (each 2 bytes), just to make it golden 32 bytes in total.

I think the early incarnations of the NBA Live series on PC used voxel technology too - oh and the TOTALLY INCREDIBLY AWESOME Bladerunner adventure/action/puzzle/RPG game as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runn ... video_game)

One of the best SF franchised games ever, easily. Anyone play it?

I think Outcast (much underrated Belgian game) and Tiberian Sun (what a pos game that was tho) used voxels too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game)


I felt it was time for a sig change, btw. No offence Mole, I play console too! Spent much of the afternoon yesterday kicking my brothers' asses in a football tournament in FIFA 2009.

I played Germany
Middle brother played Italy
Youngest played Spain
Friend played Argentina

I won the overall, of course. Which proves the sig, actually, cause they rarely ever play games on the pc.

Can you make the sig smaller?

There!

I liked more the previous one.
To be precise, I loved it. Made me a LOL every time I read it.