Posts by Insane

Hey guys! I didn't think a lot of people would see this yet, but I guess it's one of those things that sometimes releasing something quietly can be louder than properly announcing it.

Liam has a pretty good grip on it - it's all about creating and sharing games. Imagine a LAN party where you're getting together to share and play all these weird little games - that's the kind of feelng we're going for. An important part is that we're trying to make it as simple as possible to do that. You can see some of that in the video, where instead of placing individual static meshes, you can drag out whole rooms and so on. It should be possible to just whack together a game from what we supply plus a bunch of cool stuff from the work shop but you can also import your own art, scripts; anything, really. We're trying to make that as simple as possible too, here's a video showing our model import pipeline:

One thing I'm looking forward to seeing develop is that collaborative editing of the game during gameplay is both possible and encouraged. Hopefully this can lead to cool dungeon master style situations where you are shaping a game experience for your friends as it happens. We'll see! We'll also ship a bunch of game modes that we've made during development.

Quote from Daniel Nilsson

Sounds cool but little heads up about the name. It's the title of the third Timesplitters game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimeSplitters:_Future_Perfect 
Maybe can be copyright issues, think it's EA so maybe double so...

We've been made aware of that and we ran it past our lawyers before announcing. We're good.

Quote from MaK

I'm with Dan, I saw the thread and immediately thought it was Timesplitters related. I've been diddled. You've diddled me unknown worlds!!!

Quote from Em

Same, I thought of Timesplitters !

I'm not really convince by the minimalist art, usually it gets me but here it just seems like lazyness... just hope it's early WIPs

Yes, this is SUPER early WIP stuff. The version of that level that's in-game already looks pretty different. We're cranking hard on the art side now, but didn't want to let a lack of finished assets get in the way of getting all the systems up and running.

The reason we're going for a minimalist style is that we want it to be possible for people who aren't professional game devs to be able to put something together that looks good using our art, without going to a lot of trouble. This was an issue with NS2 - matching the detail level of our own environments was really hard if you weren't working on it full time. The people who DID achieve that have my total respect.

Quote from blackdog

Sounds scarily UT4 territory

We're trying to go for something much less daunting than a fully fledged game development suite like UE4 or Unity. Think closer to something like LittleBigPlanet. Except all the heavy-duty stuff is there, if you do want to work with it. Hopefully we can pull it off!

One final thing, this is a REALLY, REALLY early work-in-progress of a game. If you're not comfortable with the idea that you might have a terrible time with it, don't buy it!

Lookin' sweet. Especially that awesome rug and the improved view.

Along those lines, I found this on an image blog a little while ago. You know what you have to do...

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YUP

Cool! Love the retro angle, and the concertina-style doorways sound like a great idea.

My main crit is that the walls are very bare right now, and some of the edges in the doorways are very sharp (particularly in shot #2 on the left, and shot #3).

That looks lovely. It might be nice to have more lights on in the foreground buildings, though, or maybe a bit more of that neon. My eye keeps getting drawn to the lights on the high-rise buildings in the background.

Quote from text_fish

So after developing their own in-house engine for NS2 how come they're using Unity for the new thing?

We are also working on a separate project that uses a newer version of our in-house engine (Spark). I actually have it running right now!

Quote from PogoP

Anyone been using this at all? I've used it quite a lot at work, and to be honest I'm not really a big fan. Quite a lot of the time, I end up just not using Ddo because I end up waiting ages for layers to update or whatever, and I just find it quicker to work in Photoshop. I'm probably just using it wrong, or maybe I'm just one of those annoying old school people now

Edit - To clarify, I have been making a lot of concrete/brick/tile materials, nothing particularly metallic/plastic, so maybe that's why I'm not getting the most out of this. It seems to be good for individual props or very unique assets more so than other environment work.

I mostly agree with this - I do Iike the package itself and the way it works, but the amount of time it takes to do things is a bit off-putting. It makes it difficult to really get the hang of a piece of software if you can't just muck about with it because every action leaves you waiting.

Just mucking about building a few areas in the NS2 engine. Not sure where, if anywhere, I'll take it yet.

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Quote from Skacky

This is for FMPONE or dux or anyone who knows about Spark. I have noticed that I have some really annoying bloom-ish effect even if I remove the atmospheric values from my spotlights, which may cause an additional and unintentional foggy effect; this is especially visible when I add a skybox texture as it becomes extremely bright and washed-out. Is there a way to tone this down too, or is this something specific to the editor?

Click "Perspective" and then make sure "Show Post Processing" is unticked. That will turn off bloom and atmospherics and so on. If the effect you are talking about is still there, it's probably the level fog. You can edit that using the fog controller entities, but I don't remember whether or not your changes will show up in the Editor.

Thanks, everybody!

It's been ages since I've posted anything here, but now that NS2 is out, I can put this up. Refinery is a large, fixed-spawn NS2 map set in a (surprise) metal refining complex. It also includes some fantastic work from dux and PogoP.

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Quote from quazilin

Some Natural Selection projects that never got finished.[Blocked Image: http://personal.inet.fi/hima/quazilin1/Maps/combat1.jpg]

Haha, I remember that! That was from the #nsmapping collaborative map we started, right? I started turning my section of that into a full map but didn't finish that either:

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I actually really liked the lighting in the first image. It worked well with your colour scheme and it was something a little different from your usual gritty sci-fi lighting. If you combine that with jaboo's suggestion of some water, I think this could look really cool.

I'd really love to show off some of my proper NS2 work, but it's not public yet. I can show off something I've been playing with a bit recently in my spare time.

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CJ, I am thoroughly intrigued. It looks like you have something really fascinating going on there.

This looks really interesting. I had loads and loads of ideas when I read the brief. I've made a start on something and filled half a notebook with notes. Hopefully I can make something of it.

(P.S. Hi merk!)

Compile it, you manly beast!

Awesomeness.

Great work, CJ.

I love that last pic. Broken stuff is cool.

That looks interesting. Right about now, creating an atmospheric map with nifty textures and such would be a good thing for me. If you want to do it on HL, you can drop me a line if you like, and I'd be happy to help you out.