COMPUTEX: World of Warcraft on Moorestown
World of Warcraft and Quake 3 Arena were seen running on a Moorestown mobile phone.
World of Warcraft gamers may finally see their wish come true: the MMORPG running on a pocket-sized device. A demonstration during the Ultra Mobility Group Keynote at Computex 2010 showed Blizzard's PC game running on a Moorestown portable device. But we have to be honest here--based on the footage, it wasn't running all that great, rendering choppy graphics as the camera panned around the character.
Quake III Arena however was a different story--it looked brilliant, sporting liquefied framerates as if it were installed on a high-end PC. According to the presentation, the device was rendering the game at 90fps--phenomenal for a handheld device. Quake 3 Arena has already made its way to the Android platform, performing admirably (depending on the hardware) despite a lack of a solid control scheme. It doesn't look this good though. Not by a long shot.
Outside World of Warcraft and Quake III Arena, the demonstration showed other applications using Moorestown including Scalado, an awesome imaging program. The Moorestown device was actually allowing the user to manipulate images while the movie Avatar was running in a separate window. That's right--true multitasking has finally come to mobile devices.
To check out Moorestown in action, check out the video below. While the audio is hard to understand, the imagery itself is enough to get anyone excited about the future of mobile devices.
Also, remember the phone was only pushing 800x480 or so, not quite the pixel count of a modern PC monitor even at the low end. And it STILL stuttered just from changing the POV with one character on the screen...
When mobiles can run WoW smoothly under normal gameplay, let me know. Cell phones have been able to play PC games with lots of stutter for a few years now... You can even play StarCraft on a WinMo phone.
I suspect either or both of these issues can account for the discrepancy.
LOL i remember that game....those were the days...
Despite the fact that WoW is a bit of a graphical push over now, it took a pretty decent PC to run it well when it first came out. I think the fact that you're so unimpressed by this accomplishment indicates that you may not be fully appreciative (or aware) of the capabilities of current gen mobile platforms. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen a mobile SOC running a PC game as advanced as WoW at anything more then single digit frame rates, and that's only accomplished at very low graphics settings. All in all I think this is by far the best demonstration I've seen so far.
There's a huge leap in graphical complexity between Quake III and WoW, and there's a much greater leap when you consider the 2D RTS (that came out before Quake III) that you mentioned, "Star Craft". So, you're unimpressed by seeing WoW running on a phone because you've seen PC games like Star Craft on mobile platforms for years...? Again, there's a huge deference between those two games. Just half a year ago people were pretty impressed when they saw Quake III running on the droid, albeit at somewhat low frame rates (original Tegra ran it smoothly). Somehow I have a feeling the Tegra 2 will be a more capable gaming SOC then Moorestown, despite what may be a slower processor.
As for the demonstration, I lol'd at the lack of responsiveness from the touch screen interface. It didn't seem to work well on any of their demo units. I saw 2, 3, and sometimes 4 attempts at clicking or sliding until the unit responded... lol, and sometimes they just gave up and moved on.
Hey, I can FLY without wings or an airplane. Yep, it's true, I can stay airborne under my own power without touching the ground or anything else.
If I jump up in the air as hard as I can, I can even stay airborne for a fraction of a second at a time! You should see how well I fly when I jump off the roof of my house...
There is a HUGE difference between doing something in a useful fashion and doing something only in the technical sense. This demo was stuttering at low res and with nothing else on the screen. It's not playable (spelled U-S-E-F-U-L-L) by any means.
Now, considering that the screen resolution that needs to be rendered is only like 480 by 854, if someone programed specifically for the smartphones... we'd be able to see some pretty damn good looking games.
Thinking about this, something that would translate easily to touchscreens would be a MMO like WoW. I've played one handed plenty of times, using only mouse to click ability buttons, and click to move. On a touch screen I could press ability buttons with my finger, and touch the screen where I want to move. Camera panning by touching touch and drags... it'd be as simple as a web browser. Double tap to move, drag to pan camera, icon button presses... I figure they could add gesture support too (like seen in browsers like Dolphin HD).
FFXI had WoW level graphics and ran fine on the PS2. If someone actually programmed an MMO for these upcomming A9 smartphones, it would run better!
I hope a company like Blizzard looks at this, and has the light bulb go off. I mean, seriously. Well, maybe not... a rich MMO experience on a smartphone would likely result in some ridiculous all night bedroom gaming sessions on my part, that won't be healthy to the rest of my life.
Okay, thanks for clarifying, and spelling it out "U-S-E-F-U-L-L"... lol. To abbreviate, I was just trying to say your argument, citing Star Craft, didn't make a whole lot of sense, making no mention of usefulness.
Fair enough. Let me address that in a more direct fashion.
PC games have been on phones for a while now. Starcraft is a PC game that is on phones right now. Another PC game simply running on a phone right now is just not impressive. A 5 year old game running at low res with lots of stutter and nothing in the environment is not impressive.
A current game running at reasonable framerates on a phone right now IS impressive. Something like that will revolutionize gaming for a lot of people.
I have a 4870 vid card and play wow smoothly at 2560x1600x32 with everything maxxed out except shadows even in raids. A phone running at 800x480x16 is only about 5% (4.6875%) of the actual data per frame, and the phone can't do that with low gfx settings and an empty environment without stuttering.
Not impressive.
WoW is a lot more cpu intensive then normal games.
http://www.google.com/search?q=usefull&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:
"Did you mean: useful"?
(URL won't work right because of emoticons. *sigh* )