ArenaNet Licenses Umbra for Guild Wars

Or they just don't want to use vista, which locks them out of dx10. I have no idea whatsoever why people wouldn't want to use vista though... /sarcasm

Yeah, guild wars is very well optimized. My backup computer with a radeon 9800 can run it at medium specs pretty well. Those were from like... 5 or 6 years ago I believe.

I highly doubt GW2 will use the UT3 engine; in fact if it does that really just be a display of how little effort Anet is putting into GW2.

Hum, i dont see why that would be a bad thing for the game. If it makes the game look better, why not use it?

Hey look everyone, Zinger has a kneejerk ill-informed anti-Anet reaction. Aren't you shocked?

If your computer isn't terrible, why wouldn't you want to use Vista? There's nothing wrong with it.

I already admitted that I was potentially wrong, yeesh, what more do you want?

It does tell us that, but it also tells us how far along they are in development.

Thank you very much for the tech-speak to plain english translation DarkNecrid.

I can understand Zinger not finding any information on his own though (I couldn't really find anything when I search either) even if his reaction was a bit over the top.

Anyways, sounds very useful and cool.

<hizyped.

The "no monthly fees" is what sold me with GW1, the optimization + prettiness was the thing that held me. ANet would be silly to not go the same route with GW2.

All in all, it looks like they know what they're doing.

lol, pretty much any game you buy now uses a middleware engine. 95% of the games on the market don't turn a substantial profit for the company involved which means for every 100 games released, only 5 games are going to actually give the company involved any substantial money back.

But yea...screw ArenaNet for possibly (I say possibly cause I dunno if this is confirmed or not, need link) wanting to secure more profit from their games...

Japan is notorious for refusing to use middleware engines, they build a new engine for each game and throw it away, and it costs them tons of money and the games take longer to make, and they make even less profit back. With the current economic situation, Japan's been relying on mostly casual games that take less money to make to stay alive and not blow out underneath itself.

Very few companies make their own engine now and days, and when they do (See: Funcom, Age of Conan, Dreamworks Engine built in-house) it is usually suicide. ArenaNet is either going to use a middleware engine like Unreal 3, or expand on the GW1 engine by a ton (ie: keep a similar structure but rebuild it, since they're adding a Z axis etc). But using a middleware engine doesn't automagically mean you didn't put in a ton of effort, it means you're trying to keep yourself stable and not go under (with something that can do everything you want it to do anyways), a very harsh reality in a volatile industry that's already gone under once. (Videogame Crash of 1983) ArenaNet got pretty lucky and is a rare occurrence of a company making its own engine and it being stable and optimized and the game selling well enough to turn a substantial profit for them, to expect them to be able to do both of those twice in a row is pretty silly.

No problem.

EDIT:
@Meth below:
you can use the Windows XP/Windows 98 classic theme and disable all the fancy crap and wind up with a pretty good OS with DX10 support, better search capabilities, better RAM usage, and with Vista 64, the best 64-bit OS with the same specs. (++++ you can have more than 3GB of RAM with it!). Windows XP is more bug free and such, but Vista is damn good after SP1 (not completely useless, anyways

just sayin! (tho RAM is cheap, so you should get another gig of it anyways.)

Warning: mini rant on vista and dx10 coming.

Because I see no reason to take up another x gig of space on my hard drive and buy another gig of memory just so that the windows GUI can look fancier and be 3D? There is a reason most games these days have different minimum requirements for vista and the former Windows OS'es.

Besides, I haven't seen a game yet (an actual game, not mockup screenshots and crap) where DX10 has produced a noticeable improvement. Even if it did, I hardly care about not having the newest game with a new layer of bloom and shit. Half of the 'special effects' developers are adding today are BS that looks totally unrealistic and unlifelike anyway.

Unreal 3 was a pretty good engine. Sadly it did NOT work with my radeon 9800, but my geforce 6800 was able to run both UT3 and Mass Effect at mid to high settings at 1280x1024. I wonder how it will do in a MMO where you can have 100+ people on the screen at a time though. On the other hand so many people in the area at a time does mean having a good occlusion process helps quite a bit.

Better search capabilities? I haven't used search once. Better RAM usage? Thats why every game I see says it requires 1 gig for XP, 2 gigs for Vista, amirite? In theory Vista has the superior management, but Microsoft has a history of badly implementing good ideas, and it shows. I see no reason to upgrade from my 2 gigs of ram I have now. My current Windows XP install is completely stable and has been running 24/7 with no crashes for 2 months. Why should I buy a new OS just to spend a week turning off everything to make it back into XP? I certainly don't benefit from any of the exclusive vista stuff now.

Glad you added that

I love Vista, i wish I could install it on my new Asus Eee PC instead of XP

I did have only 7 FPS when I wasn't lucky.



What in particular made AoC's engine so bad?

Cool so there might be a GW2 after all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_...res#Technology

That stuff, and being made by a team that had no idea of how to make an MMO.

EDIT: beat darknecrid by 2 minutes!

Quote of the day

They used a bunch of high tech stuff and didn't optimize anything at all (i'd go into more detail, but the simple answer is: everything). On similar settings, it is more taxing than Crysis is, which is just wrong.

That's due to the programmers having no ability to code. They had no GPU optimization, and just threw everything at the processor and had your CPU chug at 99% while your GPU was sitting near idle.


edit: beaten =(

Wrong. Read that post again, this time verrrrrrry slowly and carefully. Like others have said, guild wars never introduced TOO much graphical optimization for lower end systems. This means, if i understood correctly, the people with lower system specs will still be able to enjoy a decent looking game without sacrificing too much aesthetic pleasantries. Naturally though, as computer hardware is updating ridiculously fast, the standards of "low end" and "high end" systems will be much different than they were at the time of GW1's release.

Well this is good news, hopefully. Being that it does seem like a fairly new system here, i hope it doesn't come with too many bugs upon release.

anyways..why should people have problem with graphics these days if you can get a decent 2core cpu with a nice graphic for the price of an ipod

Dear Arena Net, whatever you decides to use, make sure it does not make the beautiful scenery ugly or when players try to take screenshots everything is culled and you get half of the scene... lol