i noticed why there isn't any me3 mod section here

[Mashi]

ID tried reallllly hard to follow Epic on that whole path. Look where it got them, that's right. They're now owned by Bethesda. Epic isn't doing so shit hot either according to the rumor mill.

[prideslayer]

The death of the retail PC gaming industry won't entirely kill PC gaming, but it will definitely return it to pre-boom days. I don't think the industry is dead yet; dying perhaps, slowly, but it's not dead.

 

If it ever does actually die off, expect a "rebirth" of shareware and indy games not too long afterwards. Not saying I'm looking forward to that from a "what cool game should I buy" standpoint, but I admit I am a little bit from a "lets see what we can build" standpoint.

 

It may eventually lead to the death of high performance 3D adapters at a consumers price point, but software rendering is actually pretty good these days, and will only get faster.

 

Times are changing, for sure, but there's no reason to panic.

[Mashi]

Well the indie game market is already booming. Heck small time guys are already popping up all over the place. CDR(guys who did witcher) started out as a really tiny shop to begin with, doing their own stuff. Even the indie guys who thought consoles would load them down with money are abandoning them and moving to steam, and GoG because they make more money. I can't remember the name of the developer, maybe it was the guys who did Super Meat Boy, but anyway, they said that they did more sales in one week on Steam, than they had done in one year on XBL at the same price.

 

Heck, I doubt it would even lead to the death of high-performance 3d adapters. What it could lead to is the death of DirectX, and people moving back to OpenGL, because there's no associated licensing fees to use it. With that, it would bake the windows platform alive as well, and you could very well see MS release DX into an open format just to keep it relevant against 'nix machines.

[prideslayer]

There are no "licensing fees" for using DirectX, and it is royalty free. Having coded in both, it'll be a cold day in hell before I go back to OpenGL. The OpenGL ARB is one of the most politicized bodies in the IT industry; which is to be expected when a bunch of competitors get together and try to agree on a standard. Nevermind that it's entirely too cumbersome to use. There's a reason commercial games don't use it anymore unless they're trying to be cross platform.

 

If anything is to replace Direct3D, it's going to have to be something created with similar goals, by software developers rather than hardware vendors.

 

Consumer grade 3D hardware will die out though, it's just a question of time. They are a solution to a problem (CPUs being slow at floating point math, lack of cores) that is rapidly becoming history. AMD acquiring ATI a few years ago will only hasten this, and if intel doesn't gobble up nVidia in the next couple of years, I'll be pretty surprised.

[Mashi]

Not really much of a difference between licensing and royalty. One rapes you in the ass, the other rapes you in the face. We deal with both at work, it's neither fun, nor profitable. And OGL isn't perfect, and politicized, there's been a hell of a lot of problems especially since the fudgeup in 3.0, it has gotten better. It would get better if everyone would stop their constant pissing matches and hosing everyone else down too. I personally don't like DX though.

 

As for consumer grade 3D dying? Meh. The only place for it to go is on onto CPU dies, which is where it's slightly moving the only problem is, it's not powerful enough. There's limitations, the channels are there, but yeah. But there's heat dissipation issues that need to be solved too, otherwise you're just baking everything. As for Intel gobbling up nVidia? Meh, I'd actually expect them to take out matrox first. Especially since they're making a very large push onto intel's tablet and lower power market. Maybe 10 years, if it makes it past the regulators.

 

Then again, we just might see the emergence of new GPU makers in a few years too. The markets are shaky enough for it.