Gas Powered Games boss Chris Taylor's let slip that PC hardware is currently stalling plans to deliver a full-blown sequel to his RTS Supreme Commander.
Speaking about the addition of new faction the Seraphim in Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance in an interview with PC Zone magazine, he explained, "... the only thing stopping me from doing it [adding new factions] on any sequel is memory".
"I've been told by my engineers that for Supreme Commander 2, I don't have enough memory in a PC with 4GB of RAM to have more factions".
"I'm like, 'That's insane!', so we've got to work that one out", he continued.
"We'll return to the SC universe again," Taylor went on to reveal, "but we'll just have to see when that day is. Maybe when everybody has 64-bit processors..."
PC Zone's full interview with Chris Taylor can be read in its new issue, #193, which is now in subscriber hands. It'll be gracing your local newsagent's this week.
Oh dear, please don't encourage yet more ramping up of system requirements, it's exactly what should be slowed down. Supreme Commander was a big disappointment for me, yes it looks beautiful but the game feels so soulless and lacking, that I felt totally apathetic while playing it.
Oh dear, please don't encourage yet more ramping up of system requirements, it's exactly what should be slowed down. Supreme Commander was a big disappointment for me, yes it looks beautiful but the game feels so soulless and lacking, that I felt totally apathetic while playing it.
I like what you are saying about the ramping of system specs. People need to slow down saying 'when everything is loads better' and do some shorter term thinking.However, about supreme commander, you are dead wrong.
I've said it before and I'll say it again but for me SC is the best RTS ever.
How can this man even talk about a sequel to SupCom when his original was such a memory hog most PCs couldn't even run it properly. Fix the original, and no i don't mean with a payed "patch" as Forged Alliance was just that, nothing more. The gameplay isn't bad, but it just doesn't run well enough for long enough.
The game isn't even designed to acces large page files (a user made mod adds that feature) so most computers simply flood their 2GB memory cap after 30 minutes or so with 8 players, even if you have 4 or 8GB installed.
Designing a game means marketting it to the largest audience you possibly can to recoup investment, not design it with such specs that even an absolute monster PC won't run the game well for more than a bloody hour before crashing due to a memory overrun.
Someone really needs to tell mr. Taylor he needs to stop using those halucinogenic drugs, because its not helping his company. What's next, him telling everyone they need to invest in PCs that cost 4000-5000 euros just to play his latest financial fiasco??
As for the 64-bit CPUs, most of us already have those. Anyone with a Dual-Core CPU has a 64-bit CPU, its just that most programs don't use them all that well, you need a 64-bit OS to get the most out of them. Guess its waiting for the next OS from Microsoft to come out.
Oh dear, please don't encourage yet more ramping up of system requirements, it's exactly what should be slowed down. Supreme Commander was a big disappointment for me, yes it looks beautiful but the game feels so soulless and lacking, that I felt totally apathetic while playing it.
I thought the requirements for SupCom were pretty reasonable, considering the scale of the maps, the large amounts of buildings, units and the insane battles. I have to agree that it did feel a bit soulless, but that's because you spend half your time 100miles above the battlefield with just coloured blobs representing your units, not to mention that they were all pretty similar looking big robots which you pumped out like 10 a minute. But I couldn't imagine how you would make a game like SupCom more emotionally engaging. Maybe more human interaction and dramatic cutscenes? I don't know, just the scale and sci-fi elements of it makes it pretty impossible to grab you.
I can see the guys from Crytek adding to this call of how technology isn't letting them create the games they want to.Said it before and i'll say it again,I've run out of internal organs to sell in order to upgrade my pc. . .
I think it's just logical sense that SupCom 2 would have even higher systems specs than the original.
His "otherwise we can't add new races"-logic is a bit odd though (FA specs didn't really rise that high, had more to do with graphical improvements) but as long as SupCom 2 in comparison to SupCom 1 will feature the same huge leaps in possibilities (8000x8000 maps? Space warfare? More terrain props? More unit animations? More unit AI stances and settings?) as SupCom 1 had in comparison to TA then I am fine with it.
Anyway, more interesting would be some info on that second addon or is The Experimentals already canned because of those urban-legend-spreading goofy people talking about SupCom's technical flaws in extreme, rare situations? Funny to see the same valid-or-not complaints pop up as with TA's early years.
Hold on a minute! Didn't Mr. Chris Taylor himself, only a few weeks ago, go on record as saying that the insame system specs of games today is what's damaging the PC gaming market and that he was hopping over to console development! I remember reading that on this websites news recently.
I think he was complaining about rampant piracy, you must have confused Taylor with Brad Wardell from Stardock who says piracy issues are to be neglected and that providing lower systems specs in all games is a more important point of attention.
Anyway, both are right and wrong; fighting piracy is a dead end if that's the only thing you're doing but you shouldn't discount its effects either. Lower or very scaleable systems specs are a big positive point in a game but technical advantages often give a different (and sometimes even better) game experience. I think it would be utterly ridiculous for anyone to suggest that SupCom or Crysis didn't benefit from their technical achievements.
Togra i have a suggestion for you, install supcom, vanilla no mods, patch it up, then start a huge map with 7 random Normal AIs and yourself on free-for-all and play, don't kill of AIs, just defend. The game will stall and in all likelyhood crash after aproximately an hour maybe 90 minutes because it exceeds its 2GB max buffer. That is what's wrong with supcom, nothing else. Even a monster PC won't hold for much longer.
Its simply unplayable at the largest scale and that was the game's biggest selling point, infact for many it was the only selling point.
Complaining about how technology fails his demented brainchild is simply proof that the man can't design a game to save his life.
I was playing one game against lots of computers and they weren't attacking me or seeming to do anything. Then when I attacked them they were all still on tech 1 units about 30 mins into the game with very few buildings. Has that got something to do with this 2GB buffer?
As for complaining about not being able to create supreme commander 2 on current tech I don't buy it. Plenty of other large scale games have come out and its not exactly as if Supcom looks very impressive, especially as you spend most of the game looking at your units as dots.
I've said it before and I'll say it again but for me CoH is the best RTS ever.
I agree.
Sup Com was sh*t. Pointlessly big rock, scissors, paper battles with a poorly thought through tech tree and p**s poor story. Try Company of heroes, its far, FAR! better.
This is soooo stupid!!! You know what he's really saying?!
'We're moving over to console'.
It just shows the mindset of publishers when they say things like this - what we need are games that sell brilliantly and help make a PC gaming come back, to do that you need DECENT graphics, GREAT gameplay, BELIEVABLE NPC's, BRILLIANT story and you need to have it all running on a medium PC with high settings.
STALKER was supposed to have 'dated graphics' according to lots of magazine reviewers, and yet they were brilliant! STALKER has sold very well indeed (selling more than Crysis in the U.S.) and surely shows you don't need 4gb of ram or anything else to write a great game!
It's articles like this that make me very concerned for PC gamings future. If this is an industry leader, well.......
i couldn't agree more Humorguy. Sins of a Solar Empire is another good example, a RT4X game that has topped the sales charts in the US a few times last month and continues to sell well. Probably because it simply runs well on a very wide range of computers, despite being a real niche genre. What's even more hilarious that despite those great sales no european publisher wants to sell the game here, because apparently "there is no market for it". I know quite a few EU people who now own the game by purchasing it through Stardock's online store. "no market" indeed.
As for Chris Taylor being an industry leader, sorry, but don't make me laugh. He's only one in his head. He used to be quite good when TA was still around but currently he's just hot air.
@Vandelay:
The T1 unit spam is dependent on the AI archetype and difficulty setting, higher difficulty levels and non-rush AIs are less prone to it.
Whats he on about 64bit processors? this guy hasnt got a clue, i would say the majority of PC users have 64bit CPU's cos all amd chips since the Opterons and Athlons have been 64 bit and from some of the P4 chips onwards, they've been common since 2004
I think he means 64bit operating systems in which case if he knows nothing about hardware he shouldnt be pretending to especially when its their reason for not releasing another SC at the moment
And any idiots that think its ok to have more than 4 gigs at this point for a game need their head examined, 64bit XP and Vista only supports a max process size of 2 gigs( with the other 2 used for virtual mem ), it can be got around, but there are very very PC games that require more than 2Gigs unmodified
Im going to write a game in Basic that looks 10 times better than Crysis, but the processors wont be out to run it until 2050 lol,grrrr, its annoying when devs are just demanding higher and higher spec PC's, its fine for progress, but not huge jumps just for 1 game, i.e. Crysis
The T1 unit spam is dependent on the AI archetype and difficulty setting, higher difficulty levels and non-rush AIs are less prone to it.
I can't remember what difficulty it was set to so maybe you are right. However, it did seem like the AI had stalled, for example it was a water map and they had no water units.
Supcom wasn't a bad game but certainly not the greatest RTS as some say it is, probably not even in the top 10. But I really don't think it should have had the requirements it needed, it smacks of a badly programmed game.
Supcom wasn't a bad game but certainly not the greatest RTS as some say it is, probably not even in the top 10. But I really don't think it should have had the requirements it needed, it smacks of a badly programmed game.
Actually the game's memory hogging surprised me on release, i was in the closed beta for quite some time, but honestly the beta client actually ran better than the final version because of its smaller memory footprint. (lower texture resolution for starters) Sure the network code of the beta was nothing short of mindblowingly stupid (half the anti-virus software in existence aswell as the nVidia nForce drivers totally disabled multiplayer), but it ran better if you managed to connect.
A solution to your AI problem would perhaps be to download the mod for the Sauran AIs, its a community project and those are nasty, very strong AI opponents able to give anyone a run for their money.
Togra i have a suggestion for you, install supcom, vanilla no mods, patch it up, then start a huge map with 7 random Normal AIs and yourself on free-for-all and play, don't kill of AIs, just defend. The game will stall and in all likelyhood crash after aproximately an hour maybe 90 minutes because it exceeds its 2GB max buffer. That is what's wrong with supcom, nothing else. Even a monster PC won't hold for much longer.
Its simply unplayable at the largest scale and that was the game's biggest selling point, infact for many it was the only selling point.
Complaining about how technology fails his demented brainchild is simply proof that the man can't design a game to save his life.
Even TA crashes in such extreme situations (huge maps, lots of AI players). Just watch the pathfinding breaking down once the unit cap reaches 200 with each side or try reloading a savegame of such a game, it'll never load completely again. That's no excuse for SupCom but it just goes to show that you can't compare this kind of tech to more traditional, non-weapon physics games. This is a full-on simulation, not a predetermined cardgame in disguise like most small-scale RTS's. Also, if you do have a top-of-the-line PC then there are enough ways of getting SupCom to run that way (patch it, install AI mods for lesser performance burden, etc.). It has always been said that those big maps and multiple AI players were meant for high-end users. Be happy you can even "play" them as it is now (for the first hour or so) on a lowspec PC, TA back in the day harshly discriminated PC's based on how much RAM they had.
This is soooo stupid!!! You know what he's really saying?!
'We're moving over to console'.
Sure and that's why Space Siege, Demigod and the second SupCom addon are console exclusive, right? The only console game GPG has officially announced is the SupCom port and that's not even really done by them but by Hellbent Games.
Comparing STALKER to Crysis or even SoaSE to SupCom (all good games in their own way imo) isn't worth the effort, if you can't tell what seperates those games technically (and then I am not just talking about 'prettier graphics') then you should play them a lot more.
There are not more laptops than desktops. Not in installed base, and not in number of people playing games with them. I think you're confusing laptops outselling desktops for the last couple of years.
WoW is the only real mass market PC game and something like 30% of those players are on notebooks based on something Blizzard said last year.
I kind of agree with the general sentiment that PC game hardware requirements is often unreasonably high but you've taken it way too far.
90%+ of laptops are based on integrated graphics solutions. That's got roughly the same sort of graphics prowess as a Playstation 2. Nothing like the current capabilities of consoles.
If what you're saying is that you think PC games should all be targetted at integrated graphics than what you really *are* doing is completely destroying what remaining platform USPs there are for the PC gaming audience. Taking away the vibrant high-end market, hardware sales etc which is really the industry that sustains PC gaming.
In terms of a viable stand-alone target for gaming, the PC has already dropped below critical mass for high-budget development due to piracy. Of course gamers typically jump up and down and claim this isn't true, without any data except for the fact they would like it not to be true. Unfortunately it's demonstrably true and the publishers know it.
The PC's continuing reason to have AAA titles is because the platform is a natural fit to be developed side by side with the Xbox 360 version. Essentially the same tools, the same API and so on. That's why so many PC games are showing up which have front end menus that are essentially console menus.
Even so PC sales on a game on both platforms is really quite remarkable. UT3, CoD4, Bioshock etc. A fraction as many sold as on 360.
The 360 has substantially better graphics than 99% of laptops sold. So if you really do want to do portable gaming, you have one of two choices.
1. Buy a laptop that actually has worthwhile graphics. Alienware Area-51 m15x is a good example but there are others with NVIDIA 7600 and 8800 parts etc. 2. Buy a hand-held.
"An entire generation of kids and students are being raised on them as it's pretty much compulsary to have one in school, college and university now."
Yep and those guys basically pirate PC games anyway so the're the last group you should turn to as a savior of the platform.
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He's only one in his head. He used to be quite good when TA was still around but currently he's just hot air.
