I'd like to disagree with the idea that mainstream side scrollers just improve their graphics. As I've played side scrollers across the past few decades, I've never stopped and thought that one was the same as another, simply with improved graphics. From the early days until now, puzzle and features of these games have continued to advance at a steady pace.
I desperately feel the need to jump in to refute the statement about legacy langauges. I'm sure my statement here will be ignored by some because they see me as bias based on the current language I've been releasing games in, but I feel this is important to say. Mainstream games are superior to audio games because of content, features, and perhaps sound quality. None of those are based on the language someone uses. More times than I can count I have seen people in the community blame programming languages for the simplistic nature of their own games or for audio games in general. I firmly believe this is just an easy excuse to make... a scape goat. I totally understand why having a scape goat is a nice thing because human beings make excuses all the time, but the problem is when people actually believe the excuses. If even 1 person hears that languages X, Y, and Z are the reason audio games are behind mainstream games, and believes it, then they are going to go forward with a completely backward idea of how programming works. If the programming language can accept key strokes and output sound, then that's really all you need. The developers in this community are sitting on a huge advantage that they don't seem to understand! Audio games don't require graphics, and graphics are at least 90% of the work mainstream games have to do! The question of CPU and memory usage is completely thrown out in this community. Let me explain this in terms of Swamp, since many have played that game and compared it to mainstream shooters. Because I didn't have to do 3D graphics for Swamp I got to benefit from the huge audio-only advantage of this community. Lets count all of the strikes against it which are the kinds of things I usually see brought up in these sorts of discussions. I wrote the game using a very very old programming language, strike 1. The programming language I use is an interpreted language which slows down performance, strike 2. I'm using a depreciated version of Direct X, strike 3. The game was very sloppily thrown together making it very inefficient in many parts of the code, strike 4. The multiplayer is linking people from the entire world which introduces latency issues that no mainstream FPS would ever dare work with, a huge strike 5! The server running everything is an old 1Ghz processor computer with 320 megs of ram (due to a bad chip), running windows, and sharing the system with the Castaways server software, strike 6. The game contains dozens of human players, between hundreds to thousands of zombies, all constantly performing trigonometry based calculations for movement, aiming, collision detection, and path finding, strike 7. All of the users are experiencing performance slow downs because screen readers take a hefty told on your systems, strike 8. With the exception of some modern physics based games, I am comfortable saying that Swamp handles just as much math calculation as any mainstream first person shooter game. Keep in mind that first person shooter games are among the most processor intensive of all mainstream games. So with all of this taken into consideration, I think it's clear just how amazing the "no graphics" advantage is! That single advantage has completely nullified all 8 of those strikes against the game. I hope this opens a few eyes, if you'll pardon the expression. There really are no reasons to continue spreading around excuses about programming languages or methods. The only thing holding this community back are ideas. Just ideas. The most primitive languages floating around are just as capable of producing some amazing games, because you have that 1 huge advantage that the rest of the world is missing. You might as well take advantage of it. Sorry about the rant, and I hope this didn't come across as being directed at you Shaun. It just seemed like the right spot to jump in on this issue. > true tom. > However since most sighted side scrolers just have better > graphics and such I doubt we can do much to improve them. > I guess if we stopped using legacy languages and then had > things use all the cpu to play a game we could fake it but > still. > Right now if we got all the stuff mainstreamers got they > would become to hard for us to play, I havn't even managed > to win superliam yet. > At 11:15 p.m. 26/03/2012 -0400, you wrote: --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
