They aren't asking you to buy a computer capable of beating Gary Kasparov at chess or Ken Jennings at Jeopardy. They are asking you to have a video card made in the last 5 years...and you've had 4 years to prepare.
Or you could just keep on playing the old client.
I'm sure some hater will rub their magic ball and take their own biased, speculative answer of zero, just to prove their point. ;)
The fact is that some volume of people will come back and some volume of those people will stay, even if it's just for one month. Some people might chalk that up as a 'huge phail' but I don't honestly think that the upgrade's primary purpose is to get players back for a second coming anyways, so that kind of failing assessment isn't meaningful. I believe that it's simply a matter of making AO a game they can continue to develop in their own studio with their own tools.
In otherwords, after the upgrade, they probably won't be supporting the current tools that enable them to continue developing AO.
If you could avoid snarking at each other in this thread, that would be nice. Take it to PMs, if you please.
Better watch out. Sometimes snarks turn out to be boojums, and then you'll "softly and silently disappear."
Actually im using this computer My uber hypercooled PC. I will be still able to run anarchy ? :O
You can run AO on this, though it'll run a little warm.
I predict this weeks FWuM will be a picture of a picture of the new engine, see what I did thar?!
I've got a question.
Why would you make the grass completely flat in the swamp for instance? Why can't you make it more "alive" with a natural movement? Like the video Means posted on youtube December 11th 2009?
You dont have to make the grass very long or so, just make it atleast a couple centimetres (ingame). Do you flatten the grass because of the overload of moving things on the client?
What do you even mean "flatthen the grass"? If you read the various other updates you'd know there's been issues with getting the floral maps to display properly and that it hasn't worked till just recently, far later than this post.
What I mean is that they have just put in a picture of grass and make it display on this ground. There is nothing sticking up, just completely flat. a pic of how the normal grass in ao looks like
I have zero experience with game devlopment or anything at all in that genre. But if we are to have a new engine it would be nice to see less "flat grass" and more sticking-out-of-ground-grass.
I tried to google grass in a game but I didn't come up with any good examples of how I'm trying to describe the image in have in my head.
Flat grass aint beautiful to watch at all.
So, you mean like everyone else does it and has done for the last 20 years of displaying grass? :p 3d grass is a feature. If it'll be everywhere, who knows.
I don't think you'll find major changes in graphical display technology coming out of a 1 man operation for porting a graphics engine to a 10 year old game of limited success.
I dont think that video is no longer proof of how the new engine will look like. Iiirc that was engine footage (or cinematics, non existant engine footage) from the old ogre engine which they later dumped.
I'm more than happy to be prooven wrong because I think that teaser looks beautiful.
Would be nice with a new updated graphic engine trailer :)
For an actual preview of how some of it might look, you could take a look at the grass in Age of Conan.