Posts by Thrik

Was given some sponge cakes at work and asked to use my imagination for cake Wednesday.

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For this interview I got together with Paul 'PaulH' Haynes. A seasoned Senior Level Designer who worked on games like Crysis 3 and the DiRT franchise. He's currently busy with Homefront 2: The Revolution. From the asphalt of Codemasters to the newly formed Dambuster Studios. Read about his journey and enjoy a breakdown of his Crysis 3 multiplayer map 'Airport'.

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Haha yeah I'm sure we talked about this, but it does still look great and I can't wait to watch it. Holy shit that trailer though, skip to 2:32 of this...

I've been chasing down the cause of this and it looks like it's due to DNS connectivity issues with the datacentre the domain is on. The forum itself has been fine, but some haven't been able to access it because of that. I'm pretty pissed off about it because this should basically never happen with DNS, so I'm moving our DNS hosting to a more redundant service.

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really really WIP - spent a few hours in it so far, maps called DM-Helium - tis a helium harvesting facility in low orbit connected with a space elevator shizzle me dizzle

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Dat lighting.

BTW if anyone does open another thread for their WIP stuff rather than posting it here can you at least reply here when you've updated it? Makes it much easier to follow if everything is in one place. I'd just post it here though unless you're doing like daily updates...

So I got this for the PS4 the other day, and I have to say that thus far I haven't really experienced any technical issues whatsoever. I know there have been multiple patches to sort shit out on the PS4 so I'm guessing they did the trick.

As for the game itself, I think I like it more than Battlefield 3. The maps just seem a bit more my thing, very open and epic unlike BF3's multitude of corridor levels. The weapons, vehicles, gameplay really are just typical Battlefield and not very different from every single other one I've played — but it works, so why change it?

This is the first time I've experienced Battlefield in my living room and I'm liking it. Having my sound system blasting out the unsurprisingly excellent audio and everything up on the big screen is great, and although I was seriously struggling with the stick aiming I've now had somewhat of an epiphany and realised that I've been pretty much using analogue sticks wrong my whole life, lol... I'm now getting pretty good with them.

Everything else (crouching, eagle sights, firing, movement, vehicles) actually feels better on a PS4 pad, and it's a big plus over a keyboard that you can adjust the exact speed that you move with the stick. For example, making your tank crawl along really slowly to avoid detection doesn't require that you have a finger spasm on the movement key, you just move the stick a tiny bit. The same applies to crawling and proning, so you can move along really slowly to avoid being spotted.

Basically I'm surprised but pleased that playing it on a PS4 feels much the same as when I started playing BF3, BF2142, BF2, and BF1942 on PC for the first time. They've nailed the feel, in fact I suspect that due to decisions they've made with the UI it feels even better on console now. I'm sure this has infuriated a lot of PC players but that's how it goes I guess.

Overall it's good, if what you want is another Battlefield game that plays like all the rest. Also I am as excellent with jets as ever:

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I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with! Maybe I can do a UE4 version of my classic Day of Defeat map.

Thiago 'Minos' Klafke — MapCore’s top poster and one of its longest-serving members — recently surprised us with his excellent scene release for Unreal Engine 4. A perfect opportunity for us to pick his brain and get an insight into his amazing talent, a talent that landed him a job at Blizzard all those years ago. Prepare for a lot of big, beautiful images and enjoy!

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After seeing the widespread disappointment with Godus, my hopes of anything resembling a worthy sequel to the magnificent Black & White 2 were dashed. While seeing if any other god games are on the horizon I came across The Universim, which I have to say has one sensational trailer:

It's not just the trailer though, the game really does sound splendid after reading through its official site. I'm delighted that the funding was a runaway success, now I can only hope the actual game comes close to living up to its potential.

Seriously, just give me a god damn god/simulation game that isn't a massive let-down for a change.

I think 1080p should be an absolute requirement, and if developers want to get better graphics in without sacrificing frame rates then they should figure out how to accomplish that or forgo the extras. I don't even consider this being about graphics, I think of it as hitting a minimum deployment requirement.

1080p is simply the best resolution for cross-device quality without being a massive burden on hardware. While some say there's not that much difference between sub-1080p and 1080p, bear in mind that it's completely relative. Just like nobody in their right mind should want 640x480 on a 21-inch monitor, nobody in their right mind should want 720p on a 50-inch screen — the difference is noticeable, and it becomes dramatically more so as the screen size increases. Viewing distance is a factor too.

What happened to the days when programmers could ingeniously exploit the hardware and architecture of platforms to get visuals way beyond what people considered possible out of them? I might be wrong but it feels like there's more of a temptation to just say 'ah fuck it we'll drop the resolution or the frame rate' rather than figure out the performance bottlenecks and create magic.

In my opinion 720p is downright blurry on my 42-inch TV that I sit relatively close to. The clarity and aesthetic improvement of 1080p is immediately apparent and it makes me feel much more immersed because it looks closer to what I perceive as real (i.e. not blurry and full of jagged lines). There isn't a single style of game that wouldn't benefit from the clarity of 1080p.

The gameplay and graphics should be worked on however the developers see fit while maintaining this baseline resolution at the target frame rate.

Agreed. Stfu lad.

Considering that this is a Remedy game I can't say that I was expecting anything other than a shooter (cover is more like a standard feature of shooters nowadays IMO rather than a genre in its own right). While the gameplay doesn't look massively out there, the same could probably be said about virtually any segment of Max Payne or Alan Wake if you were to take a similarly sized piece. And I loved those games mostly because of their atmosphere, characters, presentation, and story — not the gameplay.

The key will be how the time mechanics are used, because that's always been Remedy's thing and this is a variation that I don't believe I've seen in another game. Both Max Payne and Alan Wake extensively featured bullet time, but these time jitters and freezes have the potential to open up some seriously sweet-ass gameplay. The whole bit where he goes onto the bridge was cool.

Of course, why they wouldn't show such stuff in the first real gameplay footage I'm not sure. Maybe it's simple caution, not wanting to demonstrate something that looks too weird in an era when people are still big into shooters. Whatever the case, if Remedy delivers on what it's traditionally been good at then this should still be worth watching out for.

For fucks sake.

Seems like a great opportunity for programmers at least. Maybe with time they'll expand, who knows. Nice to see anything at all like this happening in the UK though...

Jesus Christ the last episode of Hannibal. What an absolutely sublime series with some of the most fucked up sound design and visuals I've ever seen.

While Lenz 'penE' Monath is still studying at university, he's already made his mark on the games industry with his work on Batman: Arkham Origins and Dreadnought. This interview offers some great insights into getting started in the industry as an intern, not to mention a useful prop tutorial supported by downloadable source files.

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Looks awesome, it really evokes all those old-school post-apoc movies for me. Something very lovable about those old shitty budget flicks, lol.

I've always had the fairly certain perception that Molyneux was heavily involved up to at least Fable 2, which would make sense because those games all had a distinctive flawed excellence that seemed to have been lost afterwards. Didn't you work for Lionhead Taylor?

I personally loved both Black & White games and to this day pine for something that's truly like them. It just worked for me, including the animal side of things. And Theme Park, I lost so much time to that. Fable pretty much took over my life for a while, lol.

Jesus Christ this looks amazing.