Posts by KungFuSquirrel

  • [GoW] SP - H.O.P.E Chapel

    I think one thing that will help you a lot is adjusting the way you're casting the light in the scene. It looks like right now you've just got big high-radius lights sitting near every fixture, and you're getting the classic "big glow" on the walls next to the lanterns and a really harsh divide between the blue lighting on the side and this column of the warm lighting in the center, as well as dark spots where the radii of two lights don't quite fill in the gap.

    I recommend that you add a lot of low-intensity and large-radius fill lights within the scene to more softly blend the colors together and get better brightness control surrounding each light. What you'll want to do is use small-radius and brighter lights around the light fixtures, then manually create a falloff with gradually darkening and widening lights as you get further away from the light. In theory you'll get more intense light sources and that better blend of color through the scene, as well as start to get a few more surfaces to "pop" with multiple light sources and colors on them, which is a big part of getting normal mapped detail to really become apparent and add to the scene.

  • OnLive

    Quote from Buddy

    Selling used cars should be illegal, too.

    Irrelevant example. A car is an object that degrades and loses value over time. New "copies" so to speak have an inherent advantage over those sold used. No one is going to buy back a used car for 25% of the original cost and then sell it right back to someone for 95% of the original sticker price, and it's not uncommon for the automaker to be directly involved in this process.

    Used game sales are selling the exact same product at the exact same quality, and being used as competition against developers' own product. GameStop is the #1 game retailer in the US, and they make something around 50% of their profit competing directly with the people who depend on them to sell their product. In what other business does your #1 retailer put your product on the shelf, then actively talk people out of buying them in favor of the $5 cheaper (and $20 more profitable) used copy? It's a horrible arrangement, and unlike other forms of entertainment there's no other secondary market like a theater, live shows, etc. to offset it.

    If those shelf copies they talk people out of don't get bought and enter the used cycle, they get shipped back to the publisher, and the money for each of those copies comes straight out of the developer's pockets. I think there's fair reason to be upset about it.

    It's not that no one should be able to sell a game off when they're done with it, it's that our supposed "#1 partner" is raking in billions in profits and hanging us out to dry. That's a problem that needs fixing.

    That said, I'm going to call that OnLive is years off from being in any way viable, if it ever is. Hardware and bandwidth to pull this off is ridiculous, and I highly doubt latency will be at acceptable levels when you're also seeing significant input lag. Word is their stream is pretty terribly compressed at the moment right now.

    Steam, XBLM, and PSN-style digitial distribution where you download a local copy is going to stay the best online distro for games for the foreseeable future.

  • UE 3 Rookie dynamic shadows question

    Don't feel like you have to label this a "rookie" question, lighting channels are finicky.

    First, let me give a disclaimer that it's been a while since I've messed with this...

    The first thing I'd look at is bForceDirectLightMap on the floor mesh - turn that off. Also add the CompositeDynamic channel to that mesh, since you're using that on the other objects. I'm blanking on whether or not you need to disable bUsePrecomputedShadow, but keep that in mind as an option too.

    If that doesn't work, you might try ditching the CompositeDynamic channel and shadows and using regular Dynamic instead, again making sure that the light casts in the Dynamic channel and all objects are set to accept it.

    I hope that'll help you. I'm pretty sure that should do it, but like I said it's been a while since I had to fiddle with this... so my apologies if I'm incorrect.

  • Left 4 Dead 2 Tools!

    It's similar to using prefabs, only instead of adding a group of objects directly to the level, it adds instanced references to separate .vmf files. Any changes you make to the source .vmf file automatically updates everywhere you've instanced it, and the instanced geometry and entities are added to your level at compile time. It's pretty much the best feature ever added to Hammer. You can use it on the small prefab level, where you have lots of repeated objects all referencing a single file - for example, a light prop with player clip brushes and light entities. It's also good for large objects, where you can have an entire building at a weird angle in your level, but reference an axially-built file for any changes you need to make. And it'd work great in a team setting, where you could instance out entire chunks of a level for someone to work on in a separate file, and have their changes automatically update in the main file.

    Infinity Ward has had this for a while in COD and it lets them do some insane stuff that would be brushmonkey suicide otherwise... Should open up some really badass possibilities for L4D2 work. Hopefully they'll be kind enough to roll it back into TF2...

  • Medal of Honor

    The beard is actually common in special operations groups in Afghanistan - beards are the norm there, to the point that having them helps them interact better with the locals. Check the picture in the Red Wing link stolve posted.

  • Nightwatch textures

    So I don't see there being a big market for these in 2009, but I had a request to release these and I probably should have done this years ago. I know there's a few versions floating around but as far as I know these are the most recent.

    Here's a small sampler:

    [Blocked Image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JJj9-UhyofE/S…/textures_1.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_JJj9-UhyofE/S…/textures_2.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_JJj9-UhyofE/S…/textures_3.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JJj9-UhyofE/S…/textures_4.jpg]

    http://www.filefront.com/15027791/night ... tures.rar/

    Credit to:

    Quote

    Textures by:Adam Foster, Henning Horstmann, Mohammad Alavi, Tomislav Spejic, and Tom DiLazaro. One additional texture by Cayle George.

    Includes additional textures created from bases by and/or originally authored by Randy Reddig and Kevin Roberts.

    Enjoy!

    Edit:

    Here's some of the .rad files used by Adam Foster, Zach Ford, and Mohammad Alavi. These are the only ones I could find: http://www.filefront.com/17048783/rad.rar

  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Teaser

    Quote

    ":q6s21t4j]Yep, IW asked for it, IW is getting it.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8373794.stm

    They're only using MW2 specifically for the header, this is a much broader scope:

  • Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter?

    Flow is awesome, but it in itself is not the future of games. Nor is Braid, or Call of Duty, or Today I Die, or Uncharted, or anything else. Sony and MS don't need to make motion control stuff just because the Wii did it (though Natal could be interesting). Nothing should be supplanting anything. This is a huge industry and we're only just cracking the surface of the different ways we can reach people. Doesn't matter if you're big budget AAA or shoestring indie.

    For all people complain about linear games, everyone seems to want to treat the game industry as a linear progression when we're all better off recognizing it as the branching path that it is.