I actually used an old Intellimouse Explorer 2.0 from 2003 today -- it's in my laptop bag for those times when the trackpad just doesn't cut it.

Still works pretty well. The button hardware switches are a bit old and some of them produce signals that are too noisy for the signal bounce processing chips to filter out. So, the wheel button registers a single click as a double basically 100% of the time (PITA when using it to open new tabs in a browser), and the "forward" button does the same 50% of the time (much less frequently an issue). Not half bad for 15 year old hardware, really.

After these phased out of popularity, I switched loyalties to Logitech and then more recently Razer. But the hand feel of the chassis (which will be the exact same for this reboot version) of the Explorer was really quite excellent. Might have to look for one!

>> ^L0cky:

Real Time Reflections!
Mandatory staple of graphics demos since bump mapping retired.


It's odd that reflections aren't used everywhere. I seem to remember that Duke Nukem 3D had reflections. It's certainly nothing new but even many new, high spec games still use silly silver surfaces. I suspect it's not that it's hard to implement, but that it's so expensive in terms of CPU,GPU and VRAM requirements that it's not worth the fairly marginal visual quality improvement. Hopefully CryEngine does this cheaply enough so it can be used without sacrificing much else.

If I was posting this on Bluesnews someone would blame consoles and they may have a point - when you're try to make ever prettier graphics using the same 5 year old hardware, something's got to give.

Why are you demoing your technology-heavy game on 5-year-old hardware? God damnit, guys! At least the Battlefield 3 demonstration was done on PC.

If not realtime, would not put it past having acceleration using a GPU with todays hardware.

When nVidia put out the first physX for GPUs there was a realtime softbody demo, slow... but proved the principle on now 4 year old hardware.

Some of that must have taken DAYS to compile on that old hardware available at the time.

In addition to the initial boot being on old hardware, as Sketch pointed out, it also was booting the Ubuntu Live CD. Live CD's are slower than an installed OS mainly because of two things:

1. They're loading from CD/DVD which is quite slow when compared to a hard drive.
2. They create a RAM drive and expand their file systems there, thus reducing the amount of RAM available for normal use.

Delicious old hardware and luverly tunage :-D