brave words but most people here are intelligent as far as i have seen on the forums where people defend gfwl to death,lol what everyone knows them supporters got ripped off buying gfwl games and now all they want to do is drag more innocent ones to get ripped off by microsoft, wont work :P

I thought they would do this after failing at the PC game DD 'hardcore' market and then doing a half hearted attempt at saving themselves in that respect. What shocks me is the lateness of it. An idea like this was best deployed 2-3 years ago, even 10 months, but the social game train has been hijacked by facebook. Like pc gaming has been attached to steam, social gaming has been attached to FB.

A plan like this requires massive investment, not only in money, but in time, manpower and marketing also. Going up against FB won't be like valve, since they are a magnitude more richer and powerful. The market for these games are FB users, who have everything they need in that website.

If ms really go for the market, and I mean really, really, really try then they'll see some success. The ms of late does not convince me at all that they can try.

Anyone forking from the Khronos Group is free to do so, given it is a Open standard. How that's some kind of great sin by the Khronos Group to give vendors the freedom to choose their own way, if they really want to, you've yet to establish.

I see claims without support, and material disagreeing with it. Ars Technica is usually reliable enough and claim feature parity as of OpenGL 4.0 vis a vis DirectX 11 with 4.1 improving integration between the various Open APIs.

_If_ Apple makes their OS incompatible with a well published API standard how is that the Khronos Group's fault? They can't force Apple to do anything.

Here's the original source article link. You will of course note AMD has reliably been first to get full compliance with new API versions, and he's not saying AMD or he wants anything.

That's three for three where I'm standing.

A) 1992 is in no way part of the 1980s.
B) Versions _are_ standards. What you're trying to say is a older initiative/project/other appropriate verbage. That statement only works if you ignore the Windows 3.1 APIs that predated Windows 95 introducing the DirectX moniker, which is rather silly as the implication revolves around the window in which experience has been culminated.
C) Microsoft can't lock OpenXL out of Windows, they can and did lock it out of the XBox series. So you're going on about throwing around their weight as a major OS vendor, instead of console vendor, is nonsensical.

PS3 thanks to its funky processor approach is pretty much its own animal if the developers optimize for it and doesn't really use OpenGL in the normal sense. Wii isn't really part of the multiplatform group relative to Windows PC. Linux is still mostly ignored by major videogame publishers. And the various pay for WinE service vendors have Macintosh versions of their services for a reason.

None of which shouldn't be common knowledge to anyone who bothers to dig a little.

I think you should read that article again:

"Whether this truly constitutes a leapfrogging of Direct3D 11 is not obvious. Direct3D has long had the ability to save compiled shaders, and has long provided rich debugging features. What Direct3D doesn't offer, however, is the kind of cross-platform support that OpenGL has."

You might also benefit reading this thread about it (can't find the other ones right now) and some rebuttals by people who actually code against DirectX and OpenGL. Oh, and there's also this thread and this one. I recommend you read them.

OpenGL still doesn't offer the threading support DirectX 11 does, nor is it class based, nor can you create a 4.1 object on D3D9 hardware (which leaves you with software rendering), nor is it supported by most hardware out there

The problem isn't that Apple makes their OS incompatible, it's that hardware support is lacking for the new features and as such isn't feasible to implement.

I find it so funny to read that because it's clear that he is a person with no technical knowledge whatsoever; almost every statement he makes sounds really uninformed and very 5 years ago. Since you can create VBOs and Shaders in both major APIs along with deferred shading, and immediate mode rendering rapidly is going out of style anyway (hence why I cringed at the “X000 API calls”*), graphics performance is now mostly a matter of on-GPU memory speed and driver maturity, up to the point that the ball is actually not in the API-vendor’s park anymore. He refered to “30.000 chunks of geometry”, which may as well be stored each in a vbo. This means an average screen area of 8 by 8 pixels on an HD-Display for each object, which is quite a lot of visual information. What happened to optimising engines so that stuff that’s not actually visible is not issued for drawing, the arcane knowledge of frustrum culling and visibility computations?

It's also funny for you to quote that as he wants devs to move to programming direct-to-metal and not through an API which leaves your precious OpenGL in the dust as well, not just DirectX ;)

Little bit late in the race for this sort of thing aren’t they? I mean if they are tying to appeal to the people who play them sort of games Facebook has kind of had it covered for a while now.

Whether or not Farmville sucks or whether or not buying clothes for your Xbox 360 avatar is stupid, is a matter of taste and subjective opinion... And I agree, Farmville does blow, and avatar clothing is a scam...

But being pissed about social networking?

Why is that in the list?

You might not like Facebook or Twitter... but "social networking" is a far bigger (and older) thing than those two individual services. I mean, these GOG forums count as a social networking tool. Anything that facilitates the ability to communicate over the Internet with other people is a part of the social networking umbrella.

I meant social networking becoming a part of video games, not the entity itself.

Have you guys even logged on to the Windows gaming site lately? It's most of this crap already, all they're doing is tying it together in that video. They already have all this social stuff, automated transactions, and all.

The promotional video is clearly aimed towards non-gamers/casual gamers.

I'm not too worried.
It already was, that's half the reason people like MMOs, Steam, and anything else that let's you get together with buds, outside LAN party and play, not even mentioning making new, virtual friends. Hell, we put up with GameSpy to get that shit, people want it bad.

Fair enough...

But just for the sake of having a thing to talk about... what do you have against (if anything) social networking as it relates to gaming?

Personally, I find the social nature of Farmville to be... shallow and largely incidental to the greater purpose of selling Zynga dollars, or whatever they sell. But I've been using social networking for gaming since the days when we all dialed in to local BBS(es) rather than a commercial Internet provider. We just weren't using the term, social networking, back then.

MUDs were (are?) social networking games. That online text based Star Trek rpg thing people were doing in the late 80s was too.

Later on, Starcraft, Diablo, Doom, Quake, etc., all thrived and built the gaming industry. I argue that the social connection with your friends (and strangers who'd become friends), and the ability to hit your friends with rocket launchers and Zerg rushes, made gaming grow far faster than mere single player experiences.

I for one prefer the multiplayer gaming experience over most single player experiences. I'm looking forward to Duke Nukem Forever, for example, ONLY if the multiplayer can offer me something as fun as Duke 3D deathmatch was in the 90s. If the multiplayer isn't so hot, then DNF will become a title I wait for until it is dirt cheap.

And just to stay on topic, Microsoft's GFWL blows goats. :-)

I particularly like these responses.

If that's the future of PC gaming, I'm going back to a deck of playing cards.

So, now because I have a vagina I'm only allowed to play Bejeweled and Farmville? You know. When I'm not in the kitchen.

What I would term "bad" social networking in games would be when the social aspects supersede the gameplay. When achievements, avatars, facebook updates and things like that take the place of real gameplay and in-game rewards or richer, long gameplay.

It was kind of tossed in there, it's not as heinous as other things like buying better weapons with real money and what-have-you.

I frankly don't see why people hate GFWL. I like it. The achievements go towards my gamerscore and it feels oh so slightly better than Steam achievements. Granted, I'm a PC only gamer so my GS is quite low, but it has the potential to be seen by more people. I have never experienced any problems with GFWL.

Yes, clearly, and make sure you're barefoot while you're at it!

I'm pretty sure this stuff is aimed at gamers waaaaaay more casual than you are, which you know, are predominately women. Just like most gamers playing sports games are men, it doesn't mean there's no women playing them, just that there's more men. Did you need a female fake avatar in there blowing the head off one of those guys in Call of Suck, Avatar Edition? How do you know one of them wasn't female using a male avatar? Your avatar on this site looks like a male superhero (I actually don't know who it is, just looks male to me).

Out of the sexist crap in gaming I see every day it seems weird to get bent out of shape over this promo.

Well, I do agree 100% with you about all that.

I've argued in the past that Farmville, for example, negates meaningful interaction in favor of just hawking Zynga cash. I hate that stuff.

On the other hand, the people I've met when I played EvE (3 years) or my clan friends in Team Fortress, all had a positive impact on me and added greatly to the worth of the game(s).