Really Great Games with High Hardware Requirements

I am tired of hearing all the big money people with multimillion dollar computers complaining about how SL doesn't take full advantage of the latest and greatest hardware technologies. It is for these people that I wish to mention some really great games that have some uber high hardware requirements.

Backgammon
Requires: A game board, 30 pieces {15 each in two colors}, dice, and a second human being.
Hardware Costs: We bought Backgammon for less then US$10.00 at Wal Mart. It was bundled with two other games, as well: Chess, and Checkers.
About: Backgammon is possibly the oldest strategy game in human history, with the possible exception of Go. In Backgammon, you place your pieces on the board and attempt to remove them from the board in a race against the other player. Of course, the game isn't nearly as simple as it first appears, and a person who is highly skilled in the game can cause your play to stop for better than half the game. But the game is not all about skill, as the dice add an element of luck to it as well. Sometimes, the dice just don't like you, and even the most skilled players can still be defeated by the rawest of newbies in Backgammon.

It is my humble opinion that Backgammon is in fact the best of all strategy games ever.

Chess
Requires: A game board, 32 pieces {16 pawns, 8 each in opposing colors; 4 rooks, 2 each in a opposing colors; 4 knights, 2 each in opposing colors; 4 bishops, 2 each in opposing colors; 2 queens, 1 each in opposing colors; 2 kings, 1 each in opposing colors}, and a second human being.
Hardware Costs: We bought Chess for less then US$10.00 at Wal Mart. It was bundled with two other games, as well: Backgammon, and Checkers.
About: For a long time, Chess took second place to Backgammon because unlike Backgammon, Chess is purely a game of skill. There is no luck involved, which means that as a rule, newbies don't stand a snowball's chance in hell. But then the Catholic Church ruled that any game involving dice was immoral, and suddenly Chess became the king of strategy games.

Chess is a wargame. You goal is to totally dominate your opponent, wipe out their army, and capture their king. The game has many vicious strategies and caveats, and even now, it seems impossible to know them all. If you are looking for a really good, very difficult game to master, Chess would be right up your alley.

Othello
Requires: A game board, up to 256 two-color pieces, and another human.
Hardware Costs: Othello can be purchased for less than US$30.00, I believe.
About: Not quite sure how to describe the game, but it's an excellent game with a lot of strategy involved. Your goal is to have as many pieces on the board as possible with your color turned up. As you place pieces of your color on the board, you turn pieces over so they are all your color.

The game appears to look something like Go, but Go is an entirely different game altogether. Go pieces are one color or the other, and do not flip. Also, go pieces can be removed from the board.

In Othello, you can not make a move if you can not flip any pieces. A great player can lock a person out of the game. An even greater player can win the game before the board is filled by making all the pieces their own color, thus eliminating all possibility of a move for their opponent.

This game ranks up there with Backgammon in my humble opinion.

You want great Video Games?

Space Invaders
Requires: Various. I think I first saw it on an Atari Game Console. In 1985.
Hardware Costs: This is generally freeware, anymore, without any hardware upgrades required if you're running anything newer than an 8086/8088.
About: Monsters are coming in to invade! You hide behind a bunker, riding back in forth in your tank, and blow them out of the sky before they land on your head!

This game is truly a great, classic shooter. Anyone who says it should use the full power of a US$10,000,000.00 PC must certainly be joking, because it's great even on an older PC.

PacMan
Requires: Anything newer than an 8086/8088.
Hardware Costs: As far as I know, it's available as freeware, now.
About: I was never any good at the game, but a lot of people seem to love the idea of being chased around mazes by a bunch of ghosts and eating everything in sight. The game is quite a marvel, and is truly one of the greats.

Conclusions
It becomes emminently clear that one does not need great hardware or great graphics or great special effects to have a great game. The most important aspect of a game is playability. The most important aspect of any environment is usability. Everything else should come second.

I really don't want to see SL join the "Hardware Upgrade Fan Club" of software designers.

But I would like to see extended digital resource support. Like maybe DXT support for images so we can use DDS formats instead of the rather dated and basic TGA format.

The advantages that DXT mipmapping would give texture creators, on the area of level of detail at any distance alone, would make this worth it.

I don't think DXT support would increase hardware requirements any where beyond what they're currently at.

Simple facts are theres alot about the rendering system in SL that could stand to join us in the 21st Century. But I'm not sure we need to be introducing stuff that starts bumping hardware requirements.

I'm not going to argue this point because, in truth, I rather agree with you. SL can be made better without bumping hardware requirements.

Actualy SL doesn't use TGA for the graphics you see inworld (it does use TGA for a few specific client images). SL uses the very modern JPEG2000 compression format (which is run in lossless mode for TGA & BMP but lossy mode for JPEG), the specific library they use is Kakadu. JPEG2K is a progressive format so to get a lower quality version of the image, it only needs to be partialy decompressed; for which SL takes full advantage of when downloading textures (that is why textures change in LOD as they load).

TGA, JPG & BMP are just input formats that LL has chosen to support for encoding. The encoding is done clientside.

As long as you use lower case extensions, of course... that's one of the bugs in the latest update, upper case extensions aren't accepted for upload although it happily previews it.

Lewis

chess only costed be 4.00 pounds at my local store! jokes on you

...or they could make everyone happy, and allow options to turn the detail down, down, down until a double digit framerate can actually be maintained.

Seriously, why did they take out the "drop draw distance if framerate drops below: " option?

It would be nice to be able to drop the draw distance to say... 20 meters, if you were inside a house, and didn't need to know what was going on outside? Being inside buildings usually means lots of prims onscreen (furniture and whatnot), being able to drop the draw distance (because I haven't really noticed any change since the inclusion of occlusion culling) to uber low levels would be nice. Niiiice I say.