Digital Duke4?
Duke Nukem Forever
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Well everyone around here who put more than a moment of thought in to the industry
probably realizes that digital delivery is set to become a huge part of the game industry.
Half-Life 2 was a huge step and now it looks like 3DRealms is now hopping aboard the
digital delivery train. Here is a quote from Scott Miller about Gamesxtream a Steam-like service.
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"Games xStream is the first and only online delivery platform that can satisfy a gamer's desire to buy a game on impulse and start playing minutes later, regardless of the size or complexity of the game. 3D Realms is extremely excited by this ground breaking technology, and we plan to use it to sell our future releases"
There seem to be a dozen new game streaming technology companies showing up every time you blink. Try to keep the Duke4 jokes to a minimum and save your comedic skills for the Apollo or something.
Which also means you do not have to wait for the entire game to 'unlock' to begin playing.
You can play and stream at the same time, not 1 or the other.
You can also play online and stream without it killing your ping times (yes, its game QOS aware).
When you close the app, its gone. No memory resident stuff, no taskbar icons, no bloatware.
It has provisions to allow for offline mode as well, and can autodetect it (not forcing you to manually set the mode). If you have not streamed the entire game, it will let you know this (since if the game pieces arent there, its hard to play) (not in the current release, we're testing online, not offline)
It supports patching, and updates if you want to use them, and can do it 'on the fly'.
You can still plant your updated media / files / etc into the game path and it can pick them up, you do not need to do anything with the client. Gamesaves / configs are written 'in the clear' so you can edit just like you are used to.
How do I know? I am one of the coders and the architect of the system.
on a side note...
I bought HL2 from steam as well (prerelease). So i've experienced it much like others. I play games as well, so a lot of this was built from a gamers perspective.
The game images are from a mod I am part of: http://www.hackerz.tc based on the UT2004 engine.
--Royal O'Brien aka OBWANDO
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