Star Wars Empire at War demo released

Wait.. a demo larger than the available space on even high-capacity CDs?

I guess they don't do enough drug testing at LA, because someone there is obviously on crack. :p
 
Yeah, although the demo size is substantial, it's actually not anywhere near some of the worst offenders. The first Dungeon Siege II SP demo clocked in at a lean 1.4GB! :p

Cheers,


BrynS
 
I have played the demo...and I have also a mixed opinion about it.
One the one hand their are games in each categorie that are more fun and better (techincal) then in Empire at war.

Spacebattles:
In the demo I have made just a rush with Xwings...won, Ywings...won, Corvettes...won, Nebulons....won.....and no I wasn't playing on easy. Actually I found it much easier with the just one type squad.
So their isn't much of a tactic part. Just make sure the shieldgenerator is take out in the first run...the rest is waiting.
I hope with the other units that wheren't possible to be build in the demo theri will be some more depth to the tactical part...else it will get quite booring over time.
Also its not real 3D combat...at least I didn't found a way to move units up and down...its more like StarTrek Armada.
For the graphics. Well it depends on you setting but even with everything at highest levels, specbloom and soft shadows it is just a middle class graphics in my opinion. Only the hase/explosion effekts look cool.
Well all in all I prefere Haegemonia or Nexus when it comes to spacebattles where you mostly just sit and watch because they are looking much better.

Fazit: A good middle-class part. Not much tactis and mid graphics, except for FX.

Groundbattle:
Its a little bit more tactical then the spacebattles. Still not that much fun IMO like Dawn of War can offer. Also its all very slow...and thats not because of my system performance (have tested it on even the lowest setting I didn't got the feeling of a smooth interface use and unit controle).
Graphics is the same as with spacebattles...good solid middleclass.
I would prefer Dawn of war, Act of war or even MechCommander.

Fazit: Same as Spacebattles but with a little more tactic...oh and watch the friendly fire...its nasty ^_^

I can't say much to the spacemap since they turned the KI for the enemy of so thats without any consequenzes when you set your buildstock and go away.
It looks good and the idea of fixed building instead of building them during a fight is nice thought.

Overall...a middleclass game in the techical department but could be real fun in the final gameplay...special in a one VS one where one Player is the Rebels and the other the Imperials. Depending on the KI it could also be fun in singleplayer but since they turned the KI off for the demo I can't say.

I will first try to get a copy at a videotheke for testing before I buy it since the thing I am most interested in is the big map and the KI.
 
BrynS said:
Yeah, although the demo size is substantial, it's actually not anywhere near some of the worst offenders. The first Dungeon Siege II SP demo clocked in at a lean 1.4GB! :p
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Were I conspiracy-minded, I'd be wondering if these folks are in collusion with broadband ISPs, to get more people to buy fast connections so they can get demos in less than a month's time, or the gaming mags, to increase sales of magazines with demo discs.

(Another Konspiracy Kook option is that they don't actually want a lot of people to try the demo but still look like they're being generous to the sucke... erm, gamers, and make people buy the game to find out what it's actually like, instead.)

The most likely (and far less kook-ish) explanation, though, is that they're probably thinking "everyone has broadband nowadays", even though the facts suggest otherwise.
 
Well when Wing Commander III was released they too didnt care much that not all people did have 4x CD-Roms at the time of the release so this isnt realy something new.
 
Blargh! I've tried to download the demo three times, and it failed all three times. Damn you, Gamespot! I'll try 3DGamers.
 
Zelvik said:
Well when Wing Commander III was released they too didnt care much that not all people did have 4x CD-Roms at the time of the release so this isnt realy something new.
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While true, a 4x drive wasn't absolutely necessary to play WC3. Hell, I played it on a 1X drive, in a system that just barely met the minimum requirements for memory, and was mediocre for just about everything else.

(A friend played it on a 2x drive, in a system that, while only a 486DX33, also had 32MB of memory and used a SCSI drive interface, back when EIDE was brand new.)

Contrast this to these massive demos, where, unlike waiting 5 minutes or so for a mission to load, those on dialup may have to wait 5 days or so, depending on the regularity of their online access.

I miss the days when coders had to concern themselves with writing "tight" code, thanks to dinky (by today's standards) hard drives and slow (again, by modern standards) systems...
 
Death said:
The most likely (and far less kook-ish) explanation, though, is that they're probably thinking "everyone has broadband nowadays", even though the facts suggest otherwise.
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http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0511/ says that as of a few months ago, almost two thirds of Americans with internet access were accessing with a high speed connection. "At the current growth, broadband penetration among active Internet users US homes should break 70% by February of 2006." And people who play new games are going to be disproportionately higher. Certainly 80, and maybe 90+ percent of their target audience is going to have broadband. Nintendo and Microsoft both require broadband for all their online multiplayer. Sony does with the PSP, and although the PS2 supports dialup in theory, most of the newer games require broadband too. There's still tens of millions of US households with dialup internet access, but the gaming market has almost completely transitioned to high speed now.

Death said:
Contrast this to these massive demos, where, unlike waiting 5 minutes or so for a mission to load, those on dialup may have to wait 5 days or so, depending on the regularity of their online access.
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Nobody with dialup is expected to download these huge demos. I had to wait an average of 10 minutes for my WC3 missions, sometimes 15. Something like that would be absolutely unheard of today.

Death said:
I miss the days when coders had to concern themselves with writing "tight" code, thanks to dinky (by today's standards) hard drives and slow (again, by modern standards) systems...
Click to expand...

The huge file sizes today aren't because of code. You can strip off the engine for any modern game and it'll only be a small percentage of the game's file size. High definition videos, high resolution textures, multi channel sound and things like that are what's pushing the file sizes up.
 
d3r3k said:
Blargh yet again! 94%! Ninety-four freaking percent and it quits on me!
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Are you using a Download Accelerator/Manager, such as GetRight or TrueDownloader? This is where I find Bit Torrent really shines and if a demo is over 250MB or so and popular, I usually always look for a decent torrent, as BT has integrated error correction and considerable data integrity mechanisms, allowing one to stop/start the process and ride through any connection problems.

Cheers,


BrynS
 
ChrisReid said:
The huge file sizes today aren't because of code. You can strip off the engine for any modern game and it'll only be a small percentage of the game's file size. High definition videos, high resolution textures, multi channel sound and things like that are what's pushing the file sizes up.
Click to expand...

Indeed! The last game I worked on had around 80GB in art assets - both final DDSs and TGAs, and working PSDs. CInematics were around 50GB of data (not counting the final rendered frames - just the source files) In comparison, the Audio only took 25GB, and the code only took 1.5GB. Sloppy coding isn't the problem, folks. In fact, most of the code today is tighter than ever - the reaon that games don't run as smoothly as you might expect is that they are trying to do so very much graphically that the VRAM and GPU just can't keep up. The system CPU and RAM usually has a much smaller load on it. If anything is sloppy, it's the artwork. You guys would be really surprised if you saw how many of these "professionally done" textures and UV layouts are just hugely inefficent. I swear, if I see one more ashtray with a 1024x1024x32 texture on it.....it's not going to be pretty. Howie Smash.
 
BrynS said:
Are you using a Download Accelerator/Manager, such as GetRight or TrueDownloader? This is where I find Bit Torrent really shines and if a demo is over 250MB or so and popular, I usually always look for a decent torrent, as BT has integrated error correction and considerable data integrity mechanisms, allowing one to stop/start the process and ride through any connection problems.

Cheers,


BrynS
Click to expand...

It took me a day and half a dozen tries, but I finally downloaded the Star Wars: Empire at War demo. No, I'm just using straight-up Firefox. I was actually considering BitTorrent because this file was so troublesome.
 
I finally got a chance to run through the entire demo today. I enjoyed the space combat, and the ground combat was pretty good once you got the hang of the game. My only gripe with the demo is that is quite short.
 
d3r3k said:
It took me a day and half a dozen tries, but I finally downloaded the Star Wars: Empire at War demo. No, I'm just using straight-up Firefox. I was actually considering BitTorrent because this file was so troublesome.
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That's crazy. You can use BitTorrent if you want, but I wouldn't even think to download a 780 meg file without a resuming utility. It's not just to avoid getting cut off at 95%. Most download managers also are a lot better about maintaining a stable transfer rate than regular browsers.
 
I guess so. I've never really experimented with download managers. I haven't seen a need for them. I honestly don't know much about BitTorrent. Maybe I should check it out. In hindsight, all that time was not worth that little demo.
 
You're either getting cut off from the server after a fixed amount of time or the file is too large for your browser's cache. Increase the cache size or use a download manager like Getright.
 
Bit torrent is a good idea.
And Boy, I really waited a long time for WC3 missions to load. It made dying or failing twice as bad.
 
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