E.D. alway’s been console game and never a true pc game.
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No follow up post by the OP yet countering the replies?
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Perhaps he really has left, unless he's doing his paper round.
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Perhaps he really has left, unless he's doing his paper round.
Nah, if it was irony he'd have infracted you for making personal attacks
Problematic indeed... Empowerment leads to?...
Contradicting yourself. There were a few games that pushed the limits of the PC and it took two more generations of processors and graphics cards to catch up. ID Software were good at that with Doom and Quake for example. Doom 3 will happily use 4gb and more if you have it, so too does Eve Online, try them on a 16Gb Ram system. Most games only used 1Gb because that's all Windows left free for it to use if you only had 4gb Ram. Thorw 16 on it and you'll get around 7Gb free. If you don't believe me, use a third party RAM checker, don't believe what the M$ one says, it lies.
Most of the limitations were Ram related, Windoze always has had the knack of using more memory than it really needs.
Way back in the days of the 486 we tried Windows 3.11 with different configurations of Ram. 1Mb (it wasn't gigabytes back then remember), and upwards to 8mb.
1Mb - Windows ran with a small amount of swap file usage. Left 300K for user.
2Mb - Windows ran with practically no swap file usage. Left just over 512K for user.
4Mb - Windows loaded unnecessary DLL's into Ram (contrary to how they were SUPPOSED to work), no Swap file use but around 1Mb for user.
8Mb - Yet more DLLs loaded no swap file use but only around 2mb for user.
So it seems the more RAM you throw at Windoze, the more it grabs for itself for unnecessary use. If it could run in 2Mb with limited swap file use and still leave 0.5mb for the users programs, why did it suddenly need 6Mb to run when you put 8mb RAM on it? Later versions of Windows, 95, 98, ME and right up to present day versions are no different, the more memory you throw at it, the more it grabs for itself.
To get the absolute best out of games, we really need a very basic OS that doesn't try to emulate an AI, wash the dishes and do the laundry and the shopping and nag you about answering your emails, sing, dance and ring bells, using significant resources to do so, while you're trying to play a game. GemOS was ideal, it was a GUI that did nothing more than Operate the System, it ran from a single floppy disk and was basically nothing but a hardware driver interface with a GUI front end. I believe it was the basis for the very successful MacOS, it was also used on the Atari ST. A sig line that I used to use was a dig at Microsoft:
"An OS is something that Operates the System, not a complete package of every piece of software ever written."
Is it? I've not checked recently but back in beta i remember looking and i was using well below a gb of ram for the ED process. Gas it got worse or is it caching stuff to disc even with free ram?
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On a related note, why would ED require a lot of ram? the biggest consumers would be textures and model meshes (right?). In a normal game, say a fps or rpg the "map", the terrain, the crates, rooms, chairs, etc.
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ED has none of that (except the asteroids). Ok the models and textures for (at most) 20 types of ship, 2 capital ships, missiles etc will take tam but it's noworse than the different avatars, tanks and guns of (say) CoD.
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All the heavy lifting of creating and keeping track of the galaxy is offloaded onto the server
These days what actually defines a true PC game. I suppose it is the UI and input. As ED does not have mouse as the main input but rather complex joysticks then I suppose we should concentrate on the UI.
I feel the UI is fine actually.
As for the power, Xbox One and PS4 can do a lot more graphically than ED currently does...
I feel the UI is fine actually.
As for the power, Xbox One and PS4 can do a lot more graphically than ED currently does...
Easiest way to get around the 32bit address space is use the Page File to make up the "difference". Just fire up the game and watch your page file expand in Performance Monitor. In my mind it explains the "stutter" in SC when you approach a planet, it's "swapping"
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