Posts by Thrik

Bleh, what a load of dog arse. I think I'll just keep my PS2 mini around (it's small enough anyway) and use that rather than spend time worrying about whether or not game X that I fancy playing works or not. It's a shame the backwards compatibility is now shit as the PS2 had particularly good compatibility that actually improved the texture rendering and shit in PS1 games.

Which makes sense really as SD cards typically have a slow-as-fuck transfer rate, or at least the majority that were on the market a year or so ago did (doubt it's changed much).

You filthy warezing bastards.

Man Zap, you deserve better than the shit you've endured. I hope you have a more sustained and enjoyable experience in this new area.

BTW, anyone who can find a high(er)-definition version of Terminator vs Robocop is awesome.

Excellent editing and also supremely entertaining!! It's like remembering all your nostalgic memories but even better because they've been merged together.

This reminded me of something that I assume a lot of people saw long ago like me, but is worth posting anyway:

Neo vs Robocop

Neo vs Robocop seemed really impressive a couple of years ago or so, but Terminator vs Robocop makes it seem kind of poor and the whole concept of Terminator vs Robocop is cooler as they delve into a similar era. Still amusing though.

Yeah, I think it's really the static, graphical nature of old-style HUDs that makes them so unappealing in today's climate. They just seem really shit.

Metroid Prime was used as an example above,and you're right in saying that it has a very good visor -- it certainly does. Here's an example for those who haven't played the game:

http://www.the-nextlevel.com/reviews/ga ... rime_1.jpg

What really sets the Metroid HUD apart though is that it is actually 3D. When you move your view left and right, the physical shape of the HUD around the edge of the screen offsets, just like it would if you were turning in a large suit yourself. In addition, the data on the HUD is 'projected' onto the glass of the armour using 3D.

When you try to achieve the same thing with a 2D system it stands out like a sore thumb and it's very hard to make it not look a bit shit. I don't think the very heavy HUD of Metroid (ie: it takes up a lot of screen room) can really work without the additional dynamic edge that the 3D brings in.

In short, the Metroid HUD looks genuinely great in-game because it moves and the 2D elements look like they're being projected, with mild distortion every now and then to boot. The same effect in static 2D would look poor, and a more minimalist style would be better.

Yeah Nexus, I guess I kind of see your poi:- STFU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's kind of the point, Spellbinder. It's a really lame video made to try and dissuade people from using warez by using cool things like rap to appeal to them. Except clearly it is shit and kind of embarrassing to watch.

It was also made when floppy disks pretty much dominated the market (1992), which should speak for itself.

The video wasn't posted because we all think it's a hot new music video.

Not sure about FPS games, but if you're working on an RTS or anything like that I'd recommend checking out Black & White 2 and The Movies. Both were fairly hyped for taking steps towards a HUD-less interface, with stuff only shown when necessary.

They managed it by making the screen almost empty during normal play, but while hovering over certain things a balloon would pop up with information; hold the mouse there for longer and a bit more information would pop up in a sub-balloon, and this could sometimes happen a further two or three times until all information was revealed. Simple, but it worked really well.

Not sure how exactly that could apply to an FPS or any other game where you don't put your mouse over things for info, but I'd still go with the minimalist theme. When I see a game with a huge graphical HUD I can't help but think it looks a bit archaic -- I'd much rather have some basic icons and numbers that give only the absolutely necessary information (health, ammo, energy); any other crap that isn't really vital at all times would be better only shown when you pressed a certain button or something. This is an approach games like Battlefield have taken.

Not to mention it takes some serious budget to get big licensed music or a custom composed orchestral soundtrack -- even more so if a real orchestra and/or live instruments become involved.

You're right Izuno, and convoluted as my post may have been that's pretty much the core idea I was trying to get across -- the importance of a level designer's artistic design and fun gameplay skills rather than the ability to work with a specific tool.

This has of course always been true to an extent; as already said, experience will always prevail. But if the hurdle of complex tools was lessened, more time could be spend nurturing and exploiting that artistic and gameplay experience rather than trying to apply your prior tools/technology experience to a new environment.

There'll always be a degree of skill when using the tools, of course. What I'm getting at is that I think the accessibility of them will eventually become more so than any of us could have imagined a few years ago; once again, analogous to picking up a piece of clay.

Sure Rick, but as tools evolve the processes of generating original content and truly unleashing what the mappers mind's are capable of will become streamlined and thus allow more creativity to occur.

I think the best analogy would be clay. Anybody can pick up a piece of clay and create something, but it takes years of skill and fine-tuning techniques to make something like stuff in certain Tim Burton films, and Wallace and Gromit. But unlike game content creation, it's not very difficult at all to pick up a piece of clay and make something that looks like a statue of a horse -- it'll be about how well you can do it rather than if you can do it at all.

I personally believe tools should be as absolutely simple to use as possible while allowing maximum quality. Allow users to create models by painting them up like in zBrush. Let people create their own textures by blending together shitloads of stock materials in the editor. Make creating caves, valleys, rivers and volcanoes a walk in the park.

Only then will their imagination come into play rather than whether or not they have the ability to model a volcano surrounded by rivers, valleys, and caves. Then the question becomes: how can they make this scene look visually stimulating and imaginative? You know, just like an artist would ponder upon how to make a picture of a plain volcano surrounded by rivers, valleys, and caves look interesting..

I realise I'm over-simplifying things a lot here (and this post is rushed as I'm about to leave work), but I've long held the view that game technology is excessively hard to work with and thus discourages participation from people who are extremely creative and imaginative; they end up doing concept art or something because they don't want to deal with constantly changing, complex game engines. And isn't that what we really want?

Some of them certainly are, so it's definitely an illegal list. Whether or not you find it ethical to download soundtracks from games you own is your choice.

Sounds like it's getting to the inevitable point where having extremely good design ideas and a true eye for artistic creation are going to completely outweigh the ability to use complex tools as far as employee worth goes in the level design world. I can see why any asshole being able to produce wonderful looking maps might be a worry for some (this came up in IRC recently), but at least it'll push forward truly creative design rather than spending ages worrying about optimisation, fiddly vertexes, and understanding obscure entity names.

I always thought of mapping as a way to do this kind of thing without the mess and clutter. Guess it could be quite fun though.

4GB seems a bit excessive at this stage in the game; I think I'd rather invest that money in the CPU or GPU, which is pretty much what I'm doing by going for the 8800 GTX.

I've come to the realisation that as long as I use such a non-standard resolution, I'm never going to be able to run the latest games on full for long as developers will obviously focus on squeezing the most out of the cards on the more common resolutions such as 1280x1024, which takes considerably less power.

It kind of burns a little, to the point where I'm now considering buying a smaller widescreen LCD and selling off my 2407. The screen real estate is nice, but I'm not sure it's worth having to constantly upgrade to keep games running decently on its epic resolution.

I really wish a display technology without massive inherent flaws would come along. If a monitor doesn't weigh a million pounds and have an ugly case, it can't display true black (instead, dark grey) and is fixed to one resolution. God.

Haha.

It's actually interesting that both Barrysworld and Blueyonder did try to go pay-to-play if I remember correctly, but both fell flat on their faces and still ended up having to shut down due to being unable to sustain the ever-increasing costs of hosting servers for newer games.

There's no doubt about it, hosting game servers is incredibly expensive and this is a fact that most players either aren't aware of or conveniently ignore.

As games get more complex and require more intensive processing to host, some kind of payment system is inevitable; bear in mind that the servers hosting the games require similar specs to the systems playing them with many engines. In addition to that, game servers use a massive amount of bandwidth constantly, far more than any web serer generally does -- most server hosts run on 1gbps connections, and more than one in the case of larger hosts. Yes, even in countries where bandwidth runs at an extortionate premium such as in the UK.

Without a payment system the server quality will just become intolerable as the only ones around will be hosted by clans who don't give a shit about anyone else because they can use it for matches -- nobody else is going to pay so much to host it out of the goodness of their hearts. Clans will be pretty much the only groups with an incentive to host a game server, and this is already widely becoming the case. And in my experience, most of them are shit and the admins don't care too much about outside players' enjoyment.

You can all call it unreasonable, but when you step back and think about what it takes to fill up your server browser list, you should realise that paying a few pounds per month to keep things running isn't much to ask at all -- far from it, in fact. The only requirement is that servers are indeed provided, and that they're very good (ie: plenty of well-administrated servers for each major region).

It'll take a giant like Microsoft to pull it off though, as the failures of Barrysworld and Blueyonder (both massive in the UK but unknown elsewhere) demonstrate. However, if it is pulled off properly the quality of online play would almost certainly go up as it'd all be centralised and properly managed.

I would probably consider it if it were a similar price point (or tied into) Xbox Live and there were very nice servers provided internationally. I can't be the only person who's noticed that large GSPs are becoming rare due to the immense costs of hosting games these days, and that many clan servers (only affordable because they all pool into the fund) are a bit shit to play in due to a lack of professional management.

Gone are the days of services like Barrysworld, NGUK, and Blueyonder hosting about 10-20 servers per game with great management/admins, simply because they'd need so many computers to do it these days. If paying a small fee can bring that level of multiplayer quality back then I'd pay -- simple as that.

I think it depends on the service. If you also get a load of services and Microsoft host extremely fast game servers themselves then a small fee is understandable (especially with game servers becoming really expensive to run these days, meaning hosts have to pay like $100+ a month for them -- a fact many players happily ignore as it doesn't affect them), but if all you're paying for is a server browser then obviously it's not acceptable and they'll be boycotted. I heavily doubt that's the case though.