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Wasteland The Wasteland 2 Beta Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

buzz

Arcane
Joined
Apr 1, 2012
Messages
4,234
Here, let me help you guys a bit. Technological advancement means moving (not just in terms of graphics, but sound, NPC interactivity,loading times and so on) from this:
wizards-crown_5.gif

to this

pools-of-darkness_8.gif

to this
Darksun90.jpg
to this
play-fallout-1-in-windows-7.gif
onwards with this
greyhawkToEE_071703_012_640w.jpg
finally to this
drakensang202009-12-222011-08-35-10.jpg

not a TB game, I know, but it was RTWP and party-based and pretty decent
and then somewhat staying to this ?!?
wasteland5.jpg
which is okay, except now you need a multi-core processor and more than 2 gigs of RAM and GTS 260 to run it because reasons.
 

FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
13,716
Get with the fucking times, technology moves forward, even if your games do not.

Likewise, get with the fucking times, games move forward, even if you do not. Enjoy your Skyoblivion.

Also I hope inXile puts "needs SSD (or two video cards)" on the box, if sea was so kind to tell us that an SSD improves performance. Get with the fucking times, already!
 

soulburner

Cipher
Joined
Sep 21, 2013
Messages
809
I'm afraid "needs SSD" is not such a crazy idea, I moved my Divinity: Original Sin to SSD to reduce the loading times and it takes only a few seconds to load now ;)
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
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Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
2D backgrounds/animations requires nothing but more memory, I'm pretty sure largely system RAM rather than virtual RAM. At worst it will run around the same as Shadowrun Returns.

I'll bet an onboard Intel GPU chip will run the game no problem.

Even if it does, which I doubt, we're not talking just about GPUs. We're talking about old/crappy PCs in general. And Shadowrun, really? That's a freaking tablet game.

"2D" isn't a magic solution that makes everything fast. You weren't around to have experienced this, but when the IE games were new, my PC at the time, a Pentium 2, was rather slow at running them. These games can crawl just like anything else.
 

Ramireza

Savant
Joined
Apr 14, 2013
Messages
287
2D backgrounds/animations requires nothing but more memory, I'm pretty sure largely system RAM rather than virtual RAM. At worst it will run around the same as Shadowrun Returns.

I'll bet an onboard Intel GPU chip will run the game no problem.

Even if it does, which I doubt, we're not talking just about GPUs. We're talking about old/crappy PCs in general. And Shadowrun, really? That's a freaking tablet game.

"2D" isn't a magic solution that makes everything fast. You weren't around to have experienced this, but when the IE games were new, my PC at the time, a Pentium 2, was rather slow at running them. These games can crawl just like anything else.

Well, i know that noone realy likes the EE Versions of Baldurs Gate. But one thing is realy great about this Version : The multicore optimization. When i play BGEE/BGEE2 (wich lookes better then W2, much better) my CPU hits maybe 10% usage while my GPU does nearly nothing.

I am realy curious about PoE and the CPU/GPU Usage of this game...
 

buzz

Arcane
Joined
Apr 1, 2012
Messages
4,234
Infinitron, refer to my last post. Also take this in consideration:
Pentium 2 - 7.5 million transistors
Frequency: 233 MHz to 450 MHz

Core 2 Duo E7500 - 230 million transistors
Frequency: 2.93 GHz

When IE games were new, they were NEW and cutting edge. PoE is an IE-style game with with some aditional pretty effects on top and bigger resolutions. I'm not saying it should work on Pentium 2, but not make a massive jump that it can only work on i3 upwards either.

If someone was to make a Wizard's Crown-type of game in 2000 and that game would take as many resources (or more) than Baldur's Gate did, wouldn't you find that ridiculous?
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I'm not saying it'll be a massive jump, but I definitely don't expect it to work at Sensuki-approved frames per second on a crap-tier PC. You can probably expect things like awful loading times, stuttering and slowdowns when there are lots of characters on screen or lots of spells being thrown, etc. At the very least.
 

DosBuster

Arcane
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The Real Fanboy
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God's Dumpster
Codex USB, 2014
Remember, this is the Unity engine we're talking about. They may not have the source code, (it's a bitch to get for Unity) and Unity can be a bitch to work with depending on the size of the game. Unity 5 should help with this however, I think inXile will benefit from Global Illumination quite a bit.
 

soulburner

Cipher
Joined
Sep 21, 2013
Messages
809
Installing to SSD also can reduce stuttering if a game engine heavily uses streaming data from the disk.

Regarding hardware requirements of modern games... I think a lot has to do with how their engines are programmed nowadays. I think even Baldur's Gate uses some assembly code to make some calculations faster, while today programmers use many layers of APIs to not have to deal with low level coding. Things are begining to change, though, with the introduction of things like AMD Mantle, nVidia's OpenGL extensions or DirectX 12 wich all aim to reduce API and driver overhead, plus new GPU architectures allow direct memory access and other low level stuff. Why are previous generation consoles still so powerful even today? If you'd build a similar PC to them you could never run anything looking and running like an Xbox 360 or PS3 game does. It's because programmers have direct hardware access which was pretty much absent from PC for the past decades.

So until PC developers re-learn to use low level programming, the current generation consoles which are pretty much a PC will still be capable of more performance than a comparable PC.
 
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buzz

Arcane
Joined
Apr 1, 2012
Messages
4,234
Yeah, you're probably right. D

I mean, here's the sys requirements for Shovel Knight on Steam, a kickstarter-funded platformer that's meant to look and feel and play like an NES game (Megaman, Ducktales etc).

  • Minimum:
    • OS: Windows XP SP2
    • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 ghz or equivalent
    • Memory: 2 GB RAM
    • Graphics: 2nd Generation Intel Core HD Graphics (2000/3000), 256MB
    • DirectX: Version 9.0
    • Hard Drive: 200 MB available space

Here's how the game looks:
MxXPv4n.jpg


Here are the requirements for an NES emulator for comparison
Processor: Pentium MMX or comparable AMD
Ram: 32MB
Video: DirectDraw 7 compatible graphic card
OS: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP
Software: DirectX 8.1

It isn't made in Unity but they're using C++ according to google. And I'm pretty sure that a 3DS (for which this game was ported) is weaker in processing power and memory than the minimum for PC.

EDIT: In fact, the Ducktales remaster with updated graphics requires even LESS power than this game :lol:, Pentium IV and 1Gb of RAM. This is absolutely crazy.
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
W2 was always going to be an old school design made for modern systems. Even if it's simple enough to run on a C-64, that doesn't mean it was programmed to work on a C-64, and it doesn't mean that they're obligated to port it to C-64. The engine just wasn't built to do that. Get a fucking computer from this century.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
buzz I wouldn't always believe the minimum requirements you read on Steam. That might be the weakest machine they bothered to test the game on. In practice, it might work on older PCs.
 
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soulburner

Cipher
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Sep 21, 2013
Messages
809
I rarely look at minimum and recommended specifications for games. They are rarely realistic - you can often run a game smoothly on below minimum specs or not have smooth framerates on a recommended spec. I have no idea who comes up with these.
 

Sensuki

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New North Korea
Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
2D backgrounds/animations requires nothing but more memory, I'm pretty sure largely system RAM rather than virtual RAM. At worst it will run around the same as Shadowrun Returns.

I'll bet an onboard Intel GPU chip will run the game no problem.

Even if it does, which I doubt, we're not talking just about GPUs. We're talking about old/crappy PCs in general. And Shadowrun, really? That's a freaking tablet game.

"2D" isn't a magic solution that makes everything fast. You weren't around to have experienced this, but when the IE games were new, my PC at the time, a Pentium 2, was rather slow at running them. These games can crawl just like anything else.

What?

I got BG1 almost right after it came out in my country which was either Dec 98 or Jan 99.

I had a Celeron 500, but my cousins ran BG1 on a Pentium 1 just fine. When BG2 came out however it struggled during mage duels on my Celeron 500, but I'm pretty sure that was largely due to the fact that I had an onboard 2MB Intel graphics card. When I got a GeForce 2 MX-200 and switched to OpenGL, BG2 did not lag.

SRR being a tablet game doesn't matter. Josh said that PE ran fine on a tablet as well. The use of huge 2D pre-rendered backgrounds only adds a higher memory footprint. Unity itself is not very resource efficient and SRR has some horrible lag during the loading of certain assets from the HDD, and even basic animations / FX do lag the game (where my FPS would drop from 120+ to 80-100 or something). That is just from poor coding.

I expect PE to perform better than Shadowrun, and I imagine that a Core2Duo with some form of video card from the last 6 years should be able to run it fairly well. The largest frame rate issues will probably come from creature animations and FX and the resource intensity behind number of units on the screen. Josh even said that the game slows down in their test level on a "don't make this encounter", meaning it's tied to what units are on the screen at the same time - and that's on a "run of the mill PC", which is probably an i5 with onboard graphics - which is the standard office computer these days.

Spells also may be another issue, if they go with big pointless lit effects and stuff.

*Hopefully* they make it so that the 3D rendering/FX and stuff is offloaded onto the GPU.

Load times in PE shouldn't be massive due to the fact that they stream in tiles. I'm probably going to install it on an SSD just in case.
 

buzz

Arcane
Joined
Apr 1, 2012
Messages
4,234
Okay, this is getting really crazy. There's doubt that a system like mine can run an isometric cRPG fairly.
People, Core2Duo E75000 is not a SHIT processor. It was released in January 2009, five fucking years ago, not eight. It was one of the last models from the Core 2 family, which is just the last processor brand no longer researched by intel. Stop making it sound like it's fucking Celeron. I've already stated multiple times that I've played plenty of modern AAA with pretty much no problem. It's a computer I bought in late 2009, not a few decades ago.

You are literally arguing that an isometric turn-based or rtwp game, that is technologically on the same level as a game from early 2000s except it has a bigger resolution, needs more resources than fucking Witcher 2. Or than GTA IV. Or than Just Cause 2. Or than Red Faction Guerrilla. Civ 5. XCOM EU. Crysis. Any Call of Duty game. Any Stalker game. Supreme Commander. Any Assassin's Creed game to date. Any Batman Arkham game to date. Skyrim. New Vegas. Shogun Total War.
The last good isometric game that I've played was Robin Hood Legend of Sherwood (Commandos clone). That shit could run on my Pentium IV years ago smooth as butter, let alone on this computer. Even the Stasis demo with its absolutely gorgeous graphics had no problems running on my computer.

Seriously, stop defending and arguing this shit. It's bad and inefficient programming, simple as that. It's not like any of these companies (Larian, Obsidian) were renown for their efficiency and good coding skills. Pretty much most of Codex's darlings were pieces of shit from a technical point of view, filled with bugs and oftentimes unplayable.
 

Sensuki

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
9,799
Location
New North Korea
Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
Okay, this is getting really crazy. There's doubt that a system like mine can run an isometric cRPG fairly.
People, Core2Duo E75000 is not a SHIT processor. It was released in January 2009, five fucking years ago, not eight. It was one of the last models from the Core 2 family, which is just the last processor brand no longer researched by intel. Stop making it sound like it's fucking Celeron. I've already stated multiple times that I've played plenty of modern AAA with pretty much no problem. It's a computer I bought in late 2009, not a few decades ago

E7500 was a budget Core2Duo though, it's only 1066FSB. I bought an E6850 in early 2008 which is better than it. Today's Pentium Anniversary single core chips probably beat it in most applications. IMO an E8400 would be like the lowest level CPU I'd want to be running, and even then that's still way behind.
 
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soulburner

Cipher
Joined
Sep 21, 2013
Messages
809
I guess it depends on what you understand as "no problems running on your computer". For me a good running game is when I can have 50-60 frames per second with at least medium or mixed medium-high detail settings with some form of anti-aliasing. Divinity: Original Sin barely meets this requirement as it often goes below 50 frames per second without a real visible reason to do so. I admit to downloading Wasteland 2 early access version from a torrent site as soon as it was available and it ran below 30 frames per second. That's worse than The Witcher 2 on high. I've heard there were some improvements made in the later updates but I haven't touched any leaked stuff since then and I'm hoping the final game will run similarly to D:OS.

edit - Sensuki is right. E7500 is a budget variant of the Core 2 architecture. Bear in mind that since then Intel introduced not a single new architecture, but three: Nehalem, Sandy Bridge (plus Ivy Bridge which was mostly a die shrink and only a few changes here and there) and Haswell. Intel will most likely keep the Core i3, i5 and i7 names for as long as possible and introduce new names probably when model numbers become crazy long, like Core i5 8890909070K ;)
 
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bussinrounds

Augur
Joined
Jun 9, 2011
Messages
473
On the other hand, old-school RPG fans are usually also PC-exclusive enthusiasts, so on the contrary, they often have newer hardware than everybody else.
Yea, if they also indulge in popamole. But if not, why should they have ?
 
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buzz

Arcane
Joined
Apr 1, 2012
Messages
4,234
Guys, you're still missing the point that a game which by no means should require such a massive amount of resources, does. I'm not making a case for my old-ass computer, I'm making a case for even OLDER computers. W2 looks worse than XCOM, that's a game released 2 years ago but which works on my computer like a charm.

I fail to see for what reason this game needs more power than say, Silent Storm or Freedom Force, with their fully-destructible buildings and actually open levels, games that can probably run on actual toasters and offer a whole bunch of content and gameplay features. I played those games on my Pentium IV/Geforce 2/256RAM computer.

Tell me 3 logical reasons (besides graphical fidelity) why does this game needs more power by several orders than a Pentium IV. What features does this game have that it needs 4gigs of RAM and tens of gigs of HDD space? Does it have state-of-the-art complex AI, or destructible terrain and buildings? Does it have open, sprawling levels or an over-world that's fully explorable and with plenty of content?

Tell me, DOES IT EVEN LIFT? I don't think so.
 

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