ArenaNet Licenses Umbra for Guild Wars

Which means that Crysis 2 would cost me L300 instead of L50? I am not paying that for game. Ohforfs, One is better of buying console for this think of stuff (stuff is not intended word here).

OR you can use your current rig and play equally fun game that does not double as hw purchase incentive. All It takes is to grow out of orgasms about slightly better grass.

(Goes back to playing World Of Goo on OCD mode, screw fancy stuff that does not add anything to gameplay or fun factor and gets old in about 10 minutes. World of Goo is the only game i purchased this year btw.)

Seriously i don't understand the whole vista hate..i know that when it was released it was crap but now...ive had it for about a year and i haven't seen any bugs yet...i run my games fine. Anyways u cant expect companies to always make products for bad computers with the technology evolving so quickly, computers are getting really cheap these days..and 500$...im a student and i can make that in 2 weeks. (altho i may understand that maybe some of us are adults with homes etc and have better things to spend the money on) but still since the game will be in like 2 years..you should probably start getting a new computer because in 2010..i dont think dx9 will be very popular.

This is very good news. Shows GW2 is still alive .

*crosses-fingers* hoping for screen shots sometime in '10

High settings is all you can ask for really. Even God can't run that damn game on highest!

hey lady, that's DOCTOR Jones.

lol @ GW2 and it's speculation. when tech junk updates every what...month these days?

A piece of small middleware (and this is small, compared to a program that makes random generated trees and full blown out engines, a program that just does occlusion culling is small.) isn't overly complicated to add to an engine, so you're not really going to be able to derive if the engine is done or not (but it most likely is, or close to it.). It'll be here in 2k9/2k10 most likely. I don't think GW1 will survive much into 2k11 since that's 6 year life cycle with almost no new content for 3 years.

Heh, alltough that would be cool I really don't think (and hope) it will be implemented, all those destructions have to be synced and that's going to take up a lot of bandwith.

Listening (reading) DarkNecrid, sounds like this is going to come in handy for world PvP. I was wondering how they were going to reduce the load my vid card was going to have to handle.

Good to hear.

-ANoid

But Darcy, its 4 years since Guild Wars was released... it WILL BE half a decade...

Hell, the new Windows 7 is out in 2010, that was confirmed by Steve Balmer of Microsoft in a recent keynote speech
Sorry I did mean highest... but your right, after seeing how pretty it was, I turned it down a lil

Warhead on the other hand, runs ont eh same rig on Highest no troubles

ok,first, english man, that was tough to read

Second,a Motherboard and RAM can last for 2, 3, maybe even 4 years... the only real upgrades you may do as a serious gamer, like I do is CPU and graphics card and even those are only once a year things and with the prices dropping, not a hassle...

and yes, I have a 360 and I would rather buy my games on that

In january I shall be doing my twice yearly upgrade... I'll be going for an AM3 motherboard and Phenom quad core with a 4870HD X2 Graphics card (a treat for myself) and I expect that to last me 18 months

Well, you have google "Umbra FAQ" and 10s later you were there:
http://www.umbrasoftware.com/index.php?products&faq

And it says: "which makes the game run faster by removing the objects that would be hidden from view."

So basically, GW2 designers and world-builders create the GW2 with all possible polygons, but using Umbra your computer only renders the ones visible. In other words, Umbra frees the processing power that would have been used to draw these invisible polygons (they're still here, just not drawn), and it seems from their success that running Umbra is a LOT cheaper for Anet than designing an occlusion system and, most importantly, a LOT easier on your computer than letting the engine draw invisible things. THE JUT technology means that you don't have to store preprocessed information, the program computes it at runtime ("on the fly"), it's one way of replacing storage space (the big GW.dat file) with processing power (you still need the storage of the program data, but it's in memory).

Oh, and about the GPU thing, not only will it be more commonplace in a few years, but I guess it's a possible hardware optimisation that won't really affect the game. Basic GPU philosophy: if you have the hardware, it goes faster; if you don't, it goes at normal speed.

The vaporware-rumour may have evaporated! Anyway, at least some kind of news .

EDIT: much better explanation of Umbra here:
http://www.gamedev.net/columns/event...le.asp?id=1327
And this could tell us roughly that Anet's progress through GW2 development is ok, but there's a solid year of work ahead I guess (second-guessing here, the annoucement could have been made later than when the deal was concluded).

The only important thing is...

Will they apply this engine improvement to GWO, like they did with other changes we can see in the Graphic Options? (Shaders, Best Teture filtering, etc...)

You can't apply engine middleware to websites. </smartass>

Probably not since they'd have to make it work with the engine GW1 uses. Also it's probably just easier to call it GW1...

By the time GW2 is out, you can get a high end computer from today in the bargain bin.

This is going to be sweet!

I think that's great news!

this addition to me seems like something that is still early game defilement also this my guess to another 2-3 years isnt unrealistic nor is it a doom and gloom scenario look at other games that got sequels that started with a new game engine perfect example is half life 2 that game was in development for 5 years before it was released. it has been a little over a year, i think a safe estimate would be if we are lucky late 2009 they will be in alpha then around august of 2010 there in beta then in 2011 the game will come out.

I think that's overly pessimistic really. Anet originally planned (and made an announcement) to start beta testing in late 2008, but it was pushed back and Anet said they will start beta testing closer to the GW2's release. I expect the beta to be early-mid 2009, with the game either late 2009 or early 2010.

This I see as good news of where they are at in development, because this is the type of middleware you get when you are working on the details of server load and memory issues, technical details cleaned up towards the middle/later point of a game's development. It's something you might consider if you have the working model, and are adding it in to make it run smoother. That means(I hope) they have the basics of the game(combat, spells, classes) worked out, and are enroute to alpha soon, if not there.

RE vista lovers. Microsoft moved up their release date of Windows 7 to late in 2009. That is a short run for an OS that is supposed to be so great. They are still selling issues of XP to companies that are demanding it, and a year after they said they were going to end updates, released SP3. Most software magazines(PC Mag, PC World, etc) compare Vista to Windows Me in its failure. When the company that made it admits, through their actions, their product was a failure, it's a FAILURE!

Oh, and I'd rather get 4 gigs of RAM to use playing GAMES, not so I can run an OS.

I agree with Clarissa F here, I see this as nothing but good news. Lots of areas in Guild Wars are open spaces, not a lot of foliage, not a lot of things are being hidden behind other objects. They must have a lot of maps for Guild Wars 2 made up if they think they need some middle ware to hide things behind objects, otherwise they would run the risk of wasting money on something that wouldn't be used much if they decided to change the terrain to something more open.

I smell sometihng very bad here.
I tried to play UT3 on my ONE core p4 processor.
It failed.
Simply, if this game requires dual or more cores, I'm going to go NUTZ.
>.>
I do not want to spend 400+ when my systems is fine as is.