Drop technical support for toasters

[Teraku]

Seriously. I've had it with this constant "Keep it under 512 MB RAM" rule Tripwire seems to enforce while developing. It's really starting to restrain the game. Just now, I tried to toss my Support friend an AA12, which promptly disappeared because it was the end of the damn wave. And also, the clearing of actors causes a lagspike at the beginning of each wave, which really detracts from the game experience IMO.

Tripwire, do you really think clearing dropped weapons will help that much in keeping the game under 512 MB of RAM? Just drop support for old PC's already. You're making 20000 players suffer just because 5 players refuse to upgrade their toaster's hardware.

EDIT: Guys, I appreciate it if you bring good arguments or counter-arguments, but at least think them through. My main problem with Tripwire not wanting to drop support for these people is that the rest of the people have to suffer. Who knows what decisions Tripwire didn't go through with just because that would exceed the 512 MB's of RAM.

[Murphy]

Hm. Certainly a fresh, new perspective. I'm sure they never looked at it this way so: thanks for bringing that up.

I would go even farther though and make the idea even fresher!
Drop toasters on technical support!

Huh? How's that for a revolutionary suggestion?

[nutterbutter]

I agree with you 100%. However, what do you tell the people whose hardware can no longer run the game after the changes? They purchased the game. They should be able to run it.

[vealck]

Well, that 512MB limit can be useful when KF will be ported on mobile devices.

[Gartley]

It's a bit more than 5 people.

I would wager more people would want to keep playing KF then there are people wanting KF to be upgraded to current gen.

Real players don't give a crap about the weapon clean up thing, it only effects those that are so bad at the game they must spam M1. Next time either throw a weapons sooner or wait till the wave started. It's been around since xmas and it's not rocket science.

[timur]

so you want to take away the game as a whole for a number of people with bad comps, just so it can be more convenient for the rest? I mean, it really isn't a big deal- it is only a wave-end cleanup. Sure, more people have better comps nowadays, but you are sacrificing the entire game for the minority just for some small feature that most of the majority cares nothing of, and will only effect people once in a blue moon.

[greenlemonade]

Back off.

One thing that has helped Killing Floor sales is low system requirements.

I've personally sold Killing Floor to at least 8 people based on this. Killing Floor is a great gateway drug to PC gaming. TRUST ME!

[Gartley]

Originally Posted by iwantoseeprofiles

Quote me where I actually say I'd like for this to happen. Despite everything I'm saying in this thread, I wouldn't actually "press the button" so to speak and alienate that group of players. I'm just saying that it makes a lot more sense to do it, but since I also happen to like the game at the moment enough, I'm not past the threshold where I'll alienate those people for the sake of making myself a little bit better off.

Despite you saying it outright your support of the OP makes it rather clear you support the action. And explain -how- it would improve the game. This is a pro/con situation here. Cut off a sizeable portion of their player base in return for... what exactly?

Originally Posted by iwantoseeprofiles

You're fixating on this one example and not seeing that OP used it as just that: an example of the way KF is currently optimized. OP did not structure his entire argument around this one example, so please don't treat that as his argument. It was probably just the first thing that came to mind.

Then provide some more examples please otherwise the argument becomes rather flimsy.

Originally Posted by iwantoseeprofiles

Have you spoken to most of the majority? I know this isn't the best way to check, but just a quick glance at your profile shows you haven't been playing KF very recently. However, I also looked at the achievements section and noticed your last unlocked achievement was from January of this year. This wouldn't normally be a good indicator, but then it also appears that you lack nearly all of the map achievements, so I'd assume that if you were to have played past recently you'd have at least unlocked one of those. That being the case, how can you possibly say you have an idea of what the majority thinks? You've barely been playing, yet in your post you speak for the majority. This isn't an attack, mind you, but it's just a bit frustrating that you exaggerate for the sake of your argument.

But the fact the likes of Timur and most of the people who have posted against this have been playing for a long time. Some from the mod days even, so it's while no one discounts the new players comments, it'd be probably safe to say most don't support your notion.

Originally Posted by iwantoseeprofiles

And let's consider another thing: no matter what "side" of this someone is on, no one (as yet) can predict the future. Supposing TWI decides to do away with the limitation, how can you know what they might implement? What if it happens to be something really cool that you end up liking a lot? You wouldn't know that, of course, and it's also possible that they do almost nothing even after lifting the limitation, but then again, look at the lengths TWI has gone to in providing cool stuff while under the limitation.

Limitations work wonders for creativity. And if TWI decided to expand on KF I'd hope they'd use a newer engine for 'kf2' as that'd be the smarter move.

I suppose it was a bit of an attack but no more than his suggestion to prevent people from playing.

[Benjamin]

Narrowing the band of potential players won't do much to extend the lifespan of the game.

Besides I thought TWI were taking such measures (end-wave cleanup) due to engine limitations rather than machine limitations? I mean it wouldn't be much to have low-end users simply bump their settings down a bit.

[Undedd Jester]

Perhaps if the entire KF community chipped in £1 to buy those 5 people a new graphics card we could have our higher spec game

Ofc personally I feel removing weapons end of wave is a good thing. Stops those crap Firebugs in their tracks, keeps the FB awesome

[Althamus]

Just to add my 2 cents incase a dev happens to look in and counts up votes, I personally really like that KF is ultra-low spec. A while back my computer died on me (as in literally, the PSU-motherboard plug melted) and I was playing on a very old computer. Killing Floor was the only game that'd play on it that was still relatively current and didn't rely on me playing against an AI or people who'd been playing the game for like 10 years and were ridiculously good at it.

So yes, even though my computer is now significantly better and could play it even if it had a major overhaul, I'd prefer if it stayed as it is. Slightly better graphics < more people being able to play it IMHO.

[YoYoBatty]

The silly thing about this is that Killing Floor is a great game, like Red Orchestra, both use the same engines, and one has considerable more detail then the other. But TWI is dropping the minimum requirements so things like my netbook (flimsy piece of garbage) can run it is unreasonable because wanting to play games on things as fast as my flimsy piece of garbage is stupid, in my opinion. Upgrade, it's as simple as that, buy a 50 dollar graphics card, game runs perfectly. Next thing you know RO2 on my beast computer can't even run that game on maximum without slowing down, yet IMO it doesn't even look as good as Killing Floor for overall detail. I mean what the heck? That's just lame. RO was their original mod/game yet the recommended and maybe even minimum requirements are beyond of what a fairly large amount of PC users have. It's kind of ironic.

Back to the topic. They could have atleast expected people to have half decent computers from 2007 and yet they thought it would be a good idea to have minimum requirements for the specs of a computer from the Doom era for a game which previous development as mod for UT2004 would be a good idea? Meh. Perhaps it was considering the KF mod ran very poorly on decent computers and anyone interested in the better looking and improved game would have a high chance of running it without seeing the spinning crawlers and jumping scrakes. But seriously most people who ran UT2004 had over 512 mb of RAM, and that number was even higher as the years went on. Then 2009 came. Anybody to think that someone didn't have over at least a gigabyte was probably an unreasonable thought. It is now 2012. 2 gigabytes of memory is more than likely a standard on almost all computers, it might even be 4, and you would think that those people who "game in the kitchen, if you know what I mean" would have upgrades their "appliances" and got something half decent. Almost everybody has done that. OP is right, it is about time we should drop the support for kitchen appliances and move on.

Edit: Okay, so I lied, a few people have been blessed by the fact that KF has such low requirements, but I think it is a little unfair that the majority has to "almost suffer" due to the fact that some people are unable to upgrade. I think of it as from the Movie "Full Metal Jacket" when Private Pyle has a doughnut in his foot locker and everybody else must pay for him having that, yet at the same time, Private Pyle can't really help his temptation to eat, kind of like how some people here are unable to upgrade or are/were stuck with a peice of crap computer due to financial issues, or like Althamus said, his computer broke down and was forced to use an old one.

[greenlemonade]

I personally know some people that would be upset if system requirements raised. Just look at Counter Strike 1.6.
What keeps this game so popular? One MAJOR factor is low system requirements.

[YoYoBatty]

Originally Posted by greenlemonade

I personally know some people that would be upset if system requirements raised. Just look at Counter Strike 1.6.
What keeps this game so popular? One MAJOR factor is low system requirements.

The possible reason for the low system requirements is the fact that it was from the year 2004 and it's the highly optimized source engine

[Gartley]

Ok, so far we've had more against the proposed idea than for, and still no actual benifit to doing so.

Also Benjamin is right, it is more about engine limitations then client machine limitations. iirc Unreal 2/2.5 can only utilise about 1GB. So it doesn't matter how much your machine has. Won't make a blind bit of difference.

So one last attempt. What possible advantage would the proposed idea have?

[ElvenRed]

I agree in that if the game was originally planned to run on 512MB RAM, then it should keep being developed with that constraint in mind.

However, some of the changes implemented did more harm than good. There is this one cleanup which was mentioned earlier on this thread, which happens at the beginning of each round, and triggers a stutter on the game.

It was way more apparent on my old setup (it would hang up for about a second up to three times on the first 10 seconds of the round), and still happens with my new boss computer (the freeze time is now very brief, and I can't remember an instance where it happened more than once per round, but it's still there and it still can cause some problems in very unlucky scenarios).

While that may or may not seem like too big of a problem, I have a few times died due to fall damage because I was either trying to run up some stairs, or position myself next to a ledge, or just plain out trying to heal a teammate that was close to one, then the round starts, and suddenly I am dead (or nearly, and completely out of position to help the team), because the game is completely unresponsive to any commands during that freeze time (such as "stop moving" or even "back off").

I did not have this problem before the update that implemented this memory management (I had a similar one but turned out it was something related to steam that has already been fixed).

Apart from that, I'm all for a new KF, with a more powerful engine and higher minimum specs to begin work with.

[Gartley]

Originally Posted by iwantoseeprofiles

512MB =/= 1024MB

TWI isn't keeping it's memory under 512, that's the recommended minimum spec.

Originally Posted by iwantoseeprofiles

I've listed my reasons more than once. I even listed them in different ways in case one of those ways wasn't clear. I'm not doing so again.

Ok, lets revise.

Spoiler!

#1 Keeping the game fresh with new content.
-TWI isn't obligated to do so.
-They do so already, for free.
-Only trade off's are, that I can remember, a weapon clean up between waves and some lower res textures and sounds for last xmas event. -which was barely noticeable.

#2 "The way I see it, TWI is keeping a few people happy at the expense of everyone else."
At what expense exactly? You really are going to have to spell this one out.

#3

What's more important is all the potential stuff could have if these limitations weren't in place. I already said this - if these limitations weren't in place, who knows what kind of stuff TWI could have already done with this game, considering what they've been able to do with it with the limitations in place. Basically, don't discredit the possibilities solely because they are possibilities; this is a "theory-craft" discussion to begin with.

I concede this point.

So as I see it, you would be happy to exclude a portion of our community, who for whatever reason can not afford an upgrade or have limited access to hardware in favour of potential? Potential for what, we don't know. But potential for something.
(Just to be clear I don't hold this for new projects. Just the idea of one minute you can, the next you can not.)

I'm sorry but that is an idea I could never support.

[Gartley]

I'm not past the threshold where I'll alienate those people for the sake of making myself a little bit better off.

My bad, I missed this line, either through misreading or some other mistake on my part. I apologise for assuming otherwise.

Originally Posted by iwantoseeprofiles

We all have our opinions. But at least we can agree that if KF2 ever gets made, we'll both buy it

Which leads to one final question, when can I preorder?! =D

[nutterbutter]

Originally Posted by iwantoseeprofiles

It seems like you're thinking about it in terms of what's ethical. Yes, it would be a dick move to those 5 people, but it's a much bigger dick move to the >2,000 veterans who don't use toasters and have had their game as they know it taken away from because of the other group (eg weapons disappearing - that didn't always use to happen).

Not only ethical but legally actionable as well. Plaintiff John bought a game. Company SVH pushed out an update than made the game unplayable. John sues and he'll win.

Just because you want an update to a 3? year old game that uses a 5? gaming engine that is paid for by people who can no longer run the game doesn't mean you'll get one.

And for the people who are saying "Just new a video card" are ignoring people who run games like this on their laptops.

[Spicy]

Hmmmmmm.
Doesn't really affect me, so it kind of goes into the "don't mind/ don't care" pile.

*However* assuming I'm one of those people hovering around the minimum system requirements, I would be disappointed if TWI were to update the game in such a way that it was made unplayable for me. Granted, age of the game, availability of pc components, cost of said components make it so no one currently playing the game should be that far down the ladder in terms of a computer's ability to run the game. But I'm sure that is the case for some.

The only "loss" that I can really notice is removing non-spawn weapons from the game at the end of a trader wave. In the situation the original poster gave, yes, that blows. There's a sooper sekrit bonus though! It further encourages players to keep an eye on how much ammunition they're using. Too much and they have to use their 9mm for the rest of the wave. I think everyone can agree that this is a welcome change for one reason: Firebugs. I love playing Firebug. I really do. But when the end-of-wave change happened, I kind of got...excited...if you will, ( ) at the people crying about how it made Firebug even worse because you could no longer stockpile flamethrowers. Which meant a poorly-played Firebug could no longer blind the crap out of his team the entire wave.

Not really sure where I'm going with this post, but super-ultimate-main-point could be something along the lines of "take what we can get?" *shrugs*