Posts by KungFuSquirrel

  • Crysis demo out

    I do prefer first person cinematics on paper, but in practice they tend to be more annoying than awesome.

    The biggest issue with a first person cutscene is you're blatantly taking control away from players in the very element they're used to controlling. Cinematics generally need to be pretty snappy already to keep people in the action; I think first person cinematics need to be even quicker and more to the point, particularly in a fast-paced game.

    Call of Duty 3 is a good example of first person cinematics gone wrong. There's many sequences in the game where you meet up with people and look back and forth between people during briefings or get knocked down that are handled pretty well, but numerous times (and specifically at the end of the game) entire action sequences are played out with no player control. No thank you.

    The escalator scene in Condemned I think is one of the best brief first person cinematics in both length and presentation. It's built into a normal camera-controlling move in the game, then plays out as a continuation of that action before dumping you right back into gameplay. Hooray.

  • Crysis demo out

    Thrik - yeah, once daylight hit and the beach stuff came into play, it suddenly got veeerrrry ugly.

    Also, it has to be said: I hate the controls in this game. Binding my controls was approaching (though still not nearly as bad as) Battlefield 2 levels, and there's just too much random shit that has its own dedicated button, to the point where I'm reminded why I enjoy my shooters more on the 360 these days. Then there's little stupid stuff, like whyyyyyyy do vehicle movement controls not automatically map to the first person movement controls? It's not like you have to do both at the same time. It's also not impossible to condense the scheme down, as the game ships with a functional config for a 360 controller (though I would argue that a few buttons are still wasted or misplaced compared to more standard/natural 360 configurations).

    Even that's a nightmare, though, because by default if you have a 360 controller plugged in it defaults to force feedback and the in-game reminders default to the controller buttons. Because I play with a non-standard (ESDF) keyboard layout, I have to go back into the menu every time a new thing comes up to remind myself what I even had to bind it to in the first place to make everything fit. And it was maddening to just be playing and all of a sudden have my controller dancing across my desk. You can disable that, but the default experience for a keyboard player who happens to have a controller connected to the computer is absolutely terrible.

    I'm all for complexity and depth in games where it fits, but it's games like this that loop the pro-keyboard/mouse argument of "but look at all the extra buttons" around from a positive to a negative. I'm playing Crysis, a first person shooter, not Steel Battalion.

  • Crysis demo out

    Are you running a Dell 2407? I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the non-native resolutions I was running; 1680x1050 wasn't nearly as blurry as I expected it to be, nor was 1024x768 (the resolution I had to settle on to get things running at medium/high). It looked pretty bad at first but I went into the display settings and switched it over to aspect instead of fill and it looked much cleaner. Still not ideal, but sharper than on some other monitors I've seen.

  • Advanced Source Level Design DVD

    If you do think video tutorials are the way to go, I'd snag the 3DBuzz selection on HL2. I can speak fairly highly for what I've seen of their productions in the past and their HL2 content is completely free. You'll need to register for the site, but that's another game you can buy this holiday season.

  • Advanced Source Level Design DVD

    Quote from Rick_D

    no better way than to learn from the people who use it 24/7I would recommend it as it'll save you lots of back-and-forth between tutorial sites written by people who don't have a full grasp of the tools

    Quote

    About the Director

    Case Noland is the Creative Director for an award-winning Silicon Valley production company. He started Modding as a level editor and scripter for Duke Nukem 3D. As a filmmaker and compositor, he realized the power of next generation game engines to revolutionize modern moviemaking and create unique interactive gameplay withing two rapidly converging fields. A co-founder of Noiesis Interactive, Case is committed to finding new convergences in the developing technology and raising skill levels in the worldwide gaming community.

    Product Description

    Advanced Source®Level Design, part of the Noesis Interactive, MOD Your World training series, teaches you to "Create Your World " by focusing on designing and constructing your own custom levels within Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life2, Day of Defeat: Source and other Source SDK powered games. Learn the fundamentals of Hammer as well as advanced texturing, displacement, functionality and optimization techniques. Atmospheric effects & entity descriptions 2D & 3D skyboxes Create level overview maps Apply cinematic style color correction Create maps for a range of Source games

    Not made by Valve. Also part of a series with "MOD" in the title instead of Mod. Boo!

  • EA buys Bioware and Pandemic....

    Quote from jaboo224

    Not to mention crysis did fund and did market crysis really well !

    EA doesn't own Crytek, though; Frie, correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall Crysis being published through the EA Partners program (the same distribution method Valve uses for the retail copies of its games). This is massively different than being owned by the publisher. They still make the game they want.

    Quote

    If people weren't in it for the money ,they'd make mods like the communities spawn. not go work at some bigshot contracter right? So i can't say i blame them for 'selling out' really, and if EA does what they did with DICE it should be alright ,just a little more money for the company to spend on employees and game improvements i guess.

    I don't think that's entirely true. Yes, there are some people at all levels only in it for the money, and businesses have to do well financially to survive, but a lot of people just want to be a part of something awesome and share their work with the world - something you can do far more effectively making a full retail game, even from a small company.

    Also keep in mind Bioware and Pandemic didn't exactly sell themselves out to EA - this was a sale by the people they sold to before. Yay \o/ while I imagine they (being the management of both studios) had to know if they sold to some random company they'd eventually get flipped around to a publisher for a profit, I also imagine part of their goal was to secure large streams of income without the demands of a publisher behind them.

    Quote

    but they've balanced this with purchasing independant developers and letting them do their own thing

    Just like all those other big name studios they swiped for their franchises, then dissolved? :\

    I will say, though, thank god it wasn't Activision

  • Soldier of Fortune 3?

    Quote from Thrik

    The article says it does have 16-player multiplayer KFS, so I drew the connection based on that. The older games were more popular for their MP than their SP from what I remember, so I thought they'd put some heavy emphasis on it.

    Er, doh, hadn't seen that one yet. Fail! Well, that should be interesting then. Still expect them to focus on SP - even if the MP modes were more popular, it's always received the brunt of its focus on SP.

  • Soldier of Fortune 3?

    Quote from Thrik

    Graphically it's very nice, but if it's a budget title I expect the single-player campaign will be very lacking.

    For this very reason I expect it will be only single player. Budget MP titles aren't good business, even for the Value label.

    Personally I'm going to pretend this title doesn't exist... there was a video that showed up yesterday (looks like it was a marketing pitch video, it had powerpoint bullet points at the end talking about a loyal online fan base, 31% take rate, and the sales of the first two games) that was... well...

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    moroes - I'd look at the windows on the right building in the last shot. They just don't fit with the rest of the structures. Otherwise, nice take on it

    Albatros - biggest thing I like is the variety in the skybox. Very nice silhouettes in the background. How well do those show up from the ground? If you're crafty, you might be able to turn some of that detail into locational reference in moving around the map.