Yes, but how real your science is and how good your writing are are totally unconnected. Larry Niven is a great sci-fi writer, but I thought Isaac Asimov was boring as hell, even though his attention to detail is astounding.
Agreed that "hard science" context and good story are two different factors and one does not need the other. Yeah, I never really had a problem with the "movie" minimalist interpretation of science in Star Wars (except for that midichlorian rubbish). I think it definitely holds up under the "Rule of Cool" and that's fine. I just knowingly shake my head at fans who try to justify lightsabers and whatnot as "totally a thing that make practical sense". I just can't treat SW's Force-related canon as holy as some people do, because to me, SW light side vs. darke side mantra makes the most sense when it is at its most ridiculous. Like pretty much every scene with Mace Windu in the Clone Wars series and Boba Fett picking up a lightsaber to fight Darth Vader... because fuckit... why not? It's probably also why I think Disney taking over is probably a good and healthy thing for the franchise. .... Somewhere far, far away, I think I just made a fanboy's nose bleed.
Yeah, that often works much better. And tbh, people don't tend to stand around talking a lot of technical exposition about common and accepted technologies, particularly in high-pressure action situations. You also avoid the tendency to date yourself when scientific progress invalidates all your best "hard" sci-fi theories ten years later.
Exactly! Sometimes things are just fun because they are fun and a little bit crazy. For example Tarantino movies. They don't make a whole lot of sense but they're also often very entertaining.
that's okay. there can be only ONE slave leia and she will not be forgotten (Carrie Fisher is awesome)
Just happened to see this on PCGamer. Graphics mod makes game look awesome, almost like a movie. http://imgur.com/a/ib8nW
Seems more like they were down scaling the PC version so it wouldn't out class the consoles so much. Which is most likely Needed a beefy PC to push that quality which would be around 2 to 2.5k dollar computer.
You called it and that's exactly what happened. Because, .. sigh. Beat dead horse and all. Ramble ramble "AAA" not really AAA etc. And you're wrong about your last line about beefy PC. LOD levels and all? It is literally merely unchecking a checkbox to reduce quality and improve performance. Stuff like shadow draw distance, maximum texture sizes etc. - in fact texture sizes, shadows and lighting are the big ones. That they cut the 3 highest tiers from LOD levels to make consoles look better. It says nothing about what a good gaming rig can run. My year old budget gaming rig can outperform PS4 and Xbone anyday while also playing other stuff on the background. But they don't want you to beat them.
Read the whole article after and he said it is a good 30 to 40 fps drop. That's crazy. No clue what current fps are but yeah neither of the consoles could handle that.
They can barely peak 30 fps on what would be considered "very low" settings on PC. So yea, that sort of drop would turn it into a cartoon. If it worked. In reality the application would crash because it ran out of memory. Oh yea, memory- consoles don't have any memory and that is one of the reasons you don't see a lot of customization or strategy etc. on consoles. Because it bloody doesn't work. They made Sims 2 on consoles and you had one floor and you could place something like 6 desks and 12 chairs and it was already hitting memory limit which was nicely portrayed during play and labeled as "fire hazard". On PC if you drop from 100 to 60 it's still pretty perfect. It doesn't necessarily even lead to elevated temperatures. Anyway I like to cap at 60fps because it does me no good to draw more frames. Physics are handled separately anyway and I can't see all those frames, it merely makes very rapid turns even smoother but you'd have to spin pretty fast. Interestingly enough there are a lot of games that have 20 millisecond interval between physics steps anyways! So it only calculates physics changes 50 times per second. And that's plenty enough for most games. What I'm saying really is that if you fix it to 50 calculations per second then there's no point in drawing more than 50fps because you're eventually going to redraw the same state every now and then. At 100 fps you'd be drawing every frame twice always - without any changes in between, except smoother turning. Of course you *can* have different sized physics steps or if you're really retarded you can perform physics on render steps... But that's...
I've come to the conclusion that AAA now refers to the projected sales figures, not any indication of the quality. :<
... that is actually kinda close to what wikipedia says. In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion or the highest ratings by a consensus of professional reviewers.[1][2][3][4] A title considered to be AAA is therefore expected to be a high quality game or to be among the year's bestsellers.[5][not in citation given] For a title to remain AAA post-launch, it must be either commercially or critically successful.[citation needed] Origin Classif If you omit the one phrase mentioning quality it is pretty much what you said. And i think they have a very loose definition of quality.
Don't tell EA that. They might just get the idea of labeling all their titles "indie" from now on. If I was running EA and I was concerned about making money, I would start by firing their whole marketing department. Madden and COD doesn't fucking need more commercials. I lost count ages ago, but they are up to Madden 16 now, btw. And COD... COD is as inevitable as the fucking ocean tide: Funny how they stopped using numbers halfway through as though to say "No wait! It's different now!"