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Incidentally I just received a Starter amBX kit (lights only), and after playtesting it I'm pretty disappointed. This stuff screams "beta for the masses", it relies so heavily on drivers/profiles, adds stuttering to games, and browsing the official amBX forums I realized this supposedly hardcore gamer-friendly technology is actually being developped by a bunch of guys who think Flash rulez and 1280x1024 is a big res. :?
It seems the colour analysis program scans the entire display before converting all relevant info for the light bulbs, so the bigger the res the more stuttering you get, even with a powerful multi-core CPU. My dream of late night playing on TripleHead2Go with dynamic lights brutally ended because of that. The more action on screen, the worse it gets too even at lower res. And that's for fully supported games. Then there are modded ones, and then untested titles - expect even more stuttering here... Software updates happen but they're scarce. At the moment you have to download and install 3 different files (drivers, update to drivers, FX generator program) for the thing to work - again, lights only in my case. Add to that a clumsy though minimalist interface, no button or hotkey to enable/disable dynamic lights on-the-fly, and the waste of desk space (the central hub, which will most likely be sitting between your monitor's back and a wall, has all connections sticking out from behind it, wtf ??), and you really wonder what else could have gone wrong. :evil:
Once the game has been detected, relaunched, and the lights start doing their dynamic thing it's pretty nice though - except for the stuttering which removes twice as much "immersion" to the gameplay experience as the lights would bring in. :? Plus some choices for "light events" are not really satisfying. In Assassin's Creed, a tiny icon on your "sync bar" turns to red then flashes yellow when you're chased; well, that's exactly what the side lights do now, and it's totally annoying. You can hide the bar (AC is so much better without that beeping HUD) - but the lights will keep flashing yellow whenever guards are on your trail. :x The lights flash red when you get hit too, which is much closer to what dynamic lighting should be, although not at all a necessary feature imho. (Furthermore, it seems the newer patch 1.02 removes all fans/rumble pad effects... A software update would be needed to get amBX fully working again, but it's not available atm. Glad I was never interested in the Progamer or Premium kits in the first place...)
I'll certainly keep an eye on amBX and see what the future holds, but as it is now, this solution for dynamic lighting is just too immature, both on the hardware and software sides. As of now, don't bother !
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