PIXEL SHADERS RESPONSIBLE FOR MORE DEATHS THAN ANY OTHER GAME ELEMENT, SAYS LAN ORGANISER NEW ZEALAND - Apparently the new graphics phenomenon of pixel shaders - small programs running on a video card to enable advanced custom rendering effects - have recently replaced the Quake Rocket Launcher as the game industry's most effective means of killing players. Originally intended as a means of enabling custom processing for each pixel in a rendered image, pixel shaders are being proven to possess the strange property of paralyzing some gamers, leaving them defenseless against even fairly weak attacks by other players. This effect has been primarily observed among hobbyist graphics programmers, who while playing a game utilizing shaders, find themselves drawn to areas sporting the most complex shader-driven effects, and can often be found studying the walls, oblivious to the action going on elsewhere. One gamer, who plays alongside several graphics programmers, commented, "In a tactical combat situation, shaders can make things very difficult sometimes. I often turn around to find team members stopped some distance back, staring at a wall, or a water surface. What follows is usually a swift defeat for our team." At LAN parties - gamers' social events in which all participants bring their PCs to one place and battle it out - the once-common cries of "That's not fair, he must be cheating", "Wall-hack!" and "Noob" are slowly but surely being replaced with "That's not fair, I was looking at a shader", "He must have shaders turned off", and "Idiot. He was so busy looking at that shader, he didn't see me coming." One possible solution for affected gamers is to disable shader support through their video card drivers, but many users are reluctant to sacrifice the increase in visual quality that shaders bring to their games. Others are concerned that disabling shaders is a method of 'cheating', similar to many other devious techniques used by players of the infamous 'Counter-Strike'. Gamers with older hardware are not so susceptible to the paralyzing effects of shaders, as the technology is not supported on any pre-GeForce3 video cards. However, in some games, a slightly less potent form of graphics-induced paralysis can be attributed to a clever programmer's use of a technology known as "multi-texturing", which applies several layers of texture to each surface, combining them in a variety of ways. Some users have suggested that games using this technology may be exploiting the use of subliminal images displayed in one of the texture layers, to deliberately induce this effect, but industry experts are generally of one mind on this. An engineer at nVIDIA explained it like this, "Multitexture is a simpler technology that came before pixel shaders. It's essentially capable of the same things, with some limitations. Basically, most things you can do with a pixel shader, you can do with multitexture, but it's a lot more work." A gamer who suffers severely from shader-induced paralysis had this to say. "When I got a card that could do shaders, my performance in Unreal Tournament 2004 went downhill quite badly. I learned to keep away from liquids, and simply not play on some of the most shader-intensive maps. If you try to fight it like that, you can still enjoy the game, and still play reasonably well." Others noted that the new breed of first-person games - "FarCry", "Half-Life 2", and "Doom 3" are considerably more dangerous due to the increased complexity of the shaders in use, and in some cases have caused players to start scribbling ideas down on pieces of paper near their PCs. After detailed analysis of the scraps, experts have, on a number of occasions, identified the scribbles as code in nVIDIA's "Cg" language, a universal syntax for writing shader programs themselves. Game developers still clinging to SGI's aging OpenGL graphics API are known to encourage sufferers to buy games using the technology by using the alternative name for pixel shaders - Fragment Programs, which is a more accurate description now that many gamers are using FSAA technology to enhance their graphics - but this is rapidly being exposed as a marketing ploy. Some researchers have suggested that since gamers don't appear to have a choice as to whether they are affected by the technology, there may be a genetic element involved. Some cases exist to strengthen this claim, although only a more extensive study will confirm or discredit this.

It's not killing Players, but killing Player's Characters, or you could use "frag" and everyone will get it, cause otherwise, as-is it's rather missleading.

Quote:Original post by Ingenu
It's not killing Players, but killing Player's Characters, or you could use "frag" and everyone will get it, cause otherwise, as-is it's rather missleading.

I'll have to get hold of the original author and pass your suggestion on.

This is great! Should probably be in the humour portal though.