Some facts you lost along the way:

* The game that created the RTS genre was Dune II. Stonkers if you want to be anal retentive.

* The original Command and Conquer used sprites for graphics.

* As the paragon example of gameplay refinement, Cavedog Entertainment's acclaimed Total Annihilation from 1997 distilled the core mechanics of Command & Conquer, and introduced the first 3D units in real-time strategy games. A significant achievement in the days before graphics cards with hardware based 3D acceleration became commonplace.

C&C3 will be a good game, but Supreme Commander will be a great game. And this is not fanboyism, it's a conclusion I reached after watching both games being demoed, and seeing what each one is setting out to achieve.

....yessir, i would have to second that last monkey-muse...which brings me to another suggestion for the self-appointed, tidiing, and blingin' sprite...We aught to have a ticker, countin' off the seconds, mins etc, since each member joined...Ha! Geezers! I see all kindsa new opprtunities for ball-busting...
CHOGGIE_74 days 8 hours 25 minutes ago
....(coincides with the last time, perhaps, you got lucky,lucky-or someone's bithday, or gall bladder surgery, etc...

...all for more bells and whistles, as it does'nt compromise the current ease of navigation, or become so convoluted that it causes seizures, or blends into greytones, from vomitous colour combinations....

So...do they mix and create Sprite?

Impressive as hell! The game is Lifeforce, the US sequel to Gradius on the NES. I believe it was Gradius 3 in Japan. I remember always wanting to play Gradius 2 but it was not brought over from Japan because the graphics used a very limited pallette to facilitate more and larger enemy sprites. At NES age I could never have completed Gradius or Lifeforce without the Konami code (up up down down left right left right a b a b start). I got better at shooters as an older teenager... my one friend used to watch me play and call me the "Dodge-it Man" so I am totally down with this little girl's playstyle.

Cmon...the GUY shoulda put on the bottoms and fetched the other person the sprite...help Choggie out, is this hard to make....I'm a guy and know why guys like this and still think it sucks!! Does noo-ne like Japanese commercials? ??!!! Hell the colors they use are better....Pooooo! At least they are like little kids-I'd put all the innuendo I could if it meant I'd be makin' a repository....this Blows???!!! Yeah, my hormones are outta whack! Somebody get laid!!!!(incldng me)

Ok first, get a freakin' paypal link for donations off of the main page. It won't pay the bills, but it can help reduce costs.

Second, I'm not sure what kind of cpu and memory requirements a page load takes, but I imagine you can save some resources with cached pages. I think the v2.2 might kill the website when you triple the visitors. So maybe cache a static version of the front page and update every ten minutes. (At least for non-logged in visitors, this may help)

Third, goggle ad-sense crap? I'm not a big fan of adwords, but you might be able to sneak some into the far right column at the bottom, or even on an actual videos page underneath the related videos.

Fourth, you could do secret marketing deals with say Sprite and sneak on some frontpage ads for them. heck, some user are probably getting paid to get frontpaged videos for xbox anyways, why not have VS benefit for it.

It's not the show per se. It's the Lost Experience online thingy. Basically a way to get more people to look at Sprite ads.

No current hardware or anything that we have seen in futrue lineups can do real cimematic quality in realtime. There are just too many factors that are preventing it at the moment.

Texturing and physics are the two major stumbling blocks at the moment.

There is always a limit to how effective bumpmap textures can be and throwing more memory at it will take decades to get to cinematic quality. Procedural textures based on vector maps is one way of getting around the problems but I'm sure more efficient methods will be developed in the future.

Physics is the other big problem. When I say physics that also includes lighting and the behaviour of liquids and gases. Ray-tracing is currently the most accurate way of emulating real light in a 3D environment, but is very processing intensive. There are solutions being developed but as there is no demand for real-time ray-tracing its not comming along very quickly. Liquids are represented reasonably well in fixed bodies but when it comes interacting with that fixed body or with dynamic effects such as rain or from a tap then you can really see the deficiencies of the current methods: water has no mass or fixed volume other that aplied in specific situations.

Finally the physics that everybody normally thinks of in games (solid objects interating) is also pretty poor. Rag-doll looks nice and is a good emulation but it causes problems like stretching which can lead to rather obvious glitches. Using sprites and predetermined models to represent damage patterns doesn't help matters. Currently a bullet will make only a single impact pattern when it hits an object (or only a few variations), so wether you fire perpendicular to the surface or at an etreme angle there is the same visble result. Object collision needs to work on a per-polygon basis with procedural texture effects to look tryly realistic.

If all this sonds like its gonna take a lot of processing power then you'd be right. Unless major steps are taken to improve efficieny on both the hardware and software sides then its not going to happen for a very long time. Add to that the many other factors like AI and player interaction that I haven't even mentioned and you can begin to see the size of the problem.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Nice viral, I thought it was real until the end.

I don't know if it would make want to buy a Sprite Zero. And what's with the "No Bulls***t". It's not edgy if you have to put asterisks over the letters for a naughty word.

I wonder if the creative team sat around a table and decided how many asterisks they could get away with.

Wooo sprites for bulet holes (with paralax mapping it seems).

The thing is that the moment you added AI to that field of people you'd get maybe 1-2 fps

Still looks very nice and is very impressive from a visual standpoint. Lets hope devs can turn good graphics into decent games and good performance. My prediction is that it will take at least 3 years to fully exploit all the power this console has to offer. Once that is done these early tech demos will look pathetic.

thats pretty interesting. sometimes a 'normal' person is just pushed too far, and ends up getting a sprite at a jack-in-the-box before going to prison. dag has a good point too; he may have just been drinking a sprite and deciding to try to do his kid's time.

The epilogue:

Reporter: A Sprite you say? Do you mind if I have a drink of your tasty beverage?

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

yeah, he does seem really calm - "Where have I been? I was just over at Jack-in-the-Box, getting a soda, a Sprite." I wonder if he's a noble dad taking a fall for his son. Kind of sounds like it.