Posts by KungFuSquirrel

  • Mazy & Lynch. :)

    Quote from Mazy

    Gameplay wise this is very much like Freedom Fighters

    Holy.

    Quote from Mazy

    That said, the combat is A LOT more interesting, intense and personal than Freedom Fighters' ever was

    Hell.

    I'll not call it FF2, if it makes you feel any better, but that sounds fan-freakin-tastic.

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    I'd wager it's a conspiracy by neurotic programmers afraid that their designers are too stupid to use reasonable scale

    Only other editor I'm aware of that officially supports model scaling was the Serious Sam editor, and they applied that to everything - helllooooo ridiculously sized enemies. You can do it in Radiant with some incredibly terrifying rotation key fiddling (one number in each set represents size) but it's not highly recommended.

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Quote from ElecHeadMatt

    Hey. Here's a few shots of a deathmatch map I'm finishing up.

    Oh, hey, Lunaran showed me these

    Gotta say, I really like it. Love the simplicity of the design. Good lighting choices, too. Shot 3 definitely stands out, but I really like 2 and 4 as well. Only thing that sort of stands out to me is the building to the back left in shot 1. Tough to see what's going on there... maybe just a bad angle. It almost looks like the windows have windshield wipers? I'd be curious to see that up close.

  • Your username/nick

    Once back in my CS day I had the need for a martial arts furry critter so I started shifting around between: KungFuSquirrel, JudoMeerkat, KarateKangaroo, TaeKwonDoKitty, and the likes. It was all for the sake of being ridiculous, but KungFuSquirrel had a nice ring to it.

    Also may have been slightly instrumental in eventually leading me down the path that got me a job - Ken has rather spitefully declared that if I had shown up in the NS community as "KarateKangaroo" he probably would have never spoken to me, thus no friendship, and no referral up here

    Prior to that I'd played as Gimper and then TacticalMoron (easily read as "TacticalMormon"). I also played Quake1 under the odd name of "Flitter." I don't know how I came up with that, but it's probably best I never repeated that process. Ew.

  • mjdm1 - Hunky-dory

    I think your geometry is in pretty good, shape, actually. The lighting is the biggest hurdle yet to come, methinks, especially comparing this with your q4 map you showed - both show very competent shapes that could be greatly improved just with some more interesting lighting. Some ideas that instantly come to mind are some bright cool lights filling up the vertical areas and casting shadows down from those pipes with warmer smaller accent lights providing the lighting around the rims.

    only comment I'll offer geometry-wise: it looks like that angled curve in between the downward staircases ends in a corner; I'd keep the (I assume) 45 but nudge it upward a few units so you've got at least 8-16 flat around the bend at the top... some thickness looks like it would help.

  • Storm Damage

    oh, yeah, this is nothing, really, at least except for the big chunk of building missing. The snapped over tree wasn't healthy to start with, though the one uprooted next to our building had always appeared very healthy so that was a little shocking.

    Officially it was just strong wind, but the localized nature of where the damage showed up (and the wind going one way one second, the other way the next, and all over the place the next at the time it happened) has me thinking funnel that just didn't touch down. Reminded me of a smaller-scale version of a wiped-out department store from when my town got hit by 4 tornadoes in `96 - the building right next to it didn't even have a window blown out.

    The old Raven building had a near miss the night I moved up here - funnel came down over best buy (pretty much straight opposite a big grass field is all) and touched down a couple blocks down the road from the apartment I had just been settling into. There was an earthquake on my birthday 5 days later, leading me to believe I had brought some sort of apocalypse with me to Madison.

    Town between home and lincoln also got wiped off the map in 2004 by the largest tornado ever on record (2.5 miles wide)... definitely familiar with what real weather can do But wanted to have some pictures of what happened yesterday.

    Mojo: again, we didn't atually get it that bad. MN had it much worse, but we were getting pelted with a severe thunderstorm about every 5 minutes Had a bunch of tornado sirens wednesday night plus ridiculous hail (my car somehow made it out unscathed), kinda quiet on thursday, then all of this friday morning. I could use some sun again.

  • Company of Heroes

    Quote from Izuno

    I agree. I think in the long run if all windows titles had this kind of standard packaging (making it similar in packaging standards for console games like 360, Xbox, PS2 etc) then we would get used to it and ignore it.

    Eh, reminds me of a 360 box, in a good way. If this actually becomes a standard in place of the everyone-do-their-own-thing standard of today, I'd have no problem with that. If it just adds another way for everyone to do their own thing, I'd be annoyed.

    oh, and I think that's the first time I've seen the game from the real top-down perspective... looks great Stupid low-angle screens and videos; why the hell would you do that for an RTS?

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Insta: looks like a pretty good use of the stock content.

    Lighting will definitely take some time to master, just remember - keep your overlap down and watch your shadow counts. Some cool geometry there; I think it'd pull off really well with a better lighting pass.

    As an MP map, I'm not sure it'd fare so well. You probably won't want any doors at all and you'll need to be really careful with brushwork and lighting. Right now it looks a bit better suited for SP.

    Also: you can take screenshots at any resolution you please - try "screenshot 4000 3000" and then sample down if you want to smooth things out as much as possible. Poor man's AA if your hardware can't handle it (plus the editor doesn't like to run if AA is enabled).

  • Modularity

    I think the first shot looks really good and I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that was the first piece you built? Very creative style; it looks like it'd be well-adapted to Portal in the future

    Comparatively, I don't think the tiny squares motif holds up in the rest of the room. The ceiling and big inset piece (right side of shot 2) end up looking too uniformly built. I think you hit your sweet spot on the longer strips in the bottom left of shot 2, and I almost dare say the first shot would have worked better with 4 strips instead of 12 squares each.

    Obviously this is finished, so you won't really be revisiting this map, but if you do give another shot at the style (I'd say models are your answer assuming that's all brushwork), I'd put more emphasis on more varied sizes, maybe losing almost all of the squares in favor of staggered strips of varying sizes and angles.