So what do you suggest , AH stays playable on 5 year old + computers because of a small older player base, or develop a new graphics engine,physics and FM to attract new customers and keep AH development going forward for the future?
I suggest you don't know what you think you know. The player base cannot simply be discarded with the assumption that a bunch of graphics first gamers will take their place. In addition HTC does not have 80 artists working to pump out those high poly count graphics that EA has. As to the engine, I trust HiTech is telling the truth when he says that this engine can do the stuff people are asking for, if HTC wanted to do that with it.
They can always run two arenas, AH2 for old spec computers and AH3 for higher performance. Eventually the AH2 arena would die off along with it's customer base and could be closed down. Allowing the AH3 arena to continue and develop..
No, you really can't with a small company. You end up having two development lines or you abandon the older line and lose those players.
Unless of course HT doesn't have any plans to keep AH going, and happy to let it slowly die off which is what seems to be happening given the average MA peak numbers these days..
I am sure HTC is more aware of the subscriber base and what it means for them than any player. I am also sure that suddenly pumping out the computer crippling graphics will not increase the player base.
As for having a 2005 PC with a 2012 graphics card and not being able to run at full detail. That's because it's pointless to match a 2012 graphics card with a 2005 CPU,Mobo,Ram etc. Especially with AH since it is more CPU intensive than GPU and still only DX9. You probably could of saved a bit of money and just got a 2006/2008 graphics card, same performance..<S>...-Gixer
Nope. 1) a friend gave me the card for free and 2) while my Athlon 64 4400 X2 is certainly not getting everything out of that card that a modern CPU would, it did noticeably improve the performance of the computer over the Dec. 2010 $100 budget card that was in it before, which was in turn an improvement over the $300 2008 video card that was in it before, which was a massive improvement over the 2006 $350 video card that was itself a massive improvement over the 2005 $300 video card that I put in it when I first built the computer.
The fact is that I would love to build a new PC, but I am not sure when that will happen. I used to do it every three years, but now it is coming up on eight years in September. I am hopeful I can build one soon, but I am not sure of it. Playing around with New Egg and retaining my existing video card and power supply I put the parts together for a nice I7 system for just under $1100, but for now that is a pipe dream.