Posts by Skybex

Quote from blackdog

On 11/5/2018 at 6:48 PM, blackdog said: As devs are you angry about this fan reaction?

I would say I'm quite happy about these reactions.

A lot of decisions recently are being made that are completely anti consumer. Game ideas being made by what seems like marketing or business people with little input from actual designers. With the express purpose of milking a fanbase instead of providing content that people want. I would point to Fallout 76 being the perfect example of this, the Fallout IP slapped onto a very generic MP survival game. And what ends up being made is a micro transaction store with a half arsed game attached to it. Diablo Immortal is no doubt going to be the same.

If that entire building is a mesh then for CS Source this is fairly normal. Models are so poorly lit so should only be used for the smaller details while any large structural things like buildings should be brushes

To avoid the hard crash when loading the map you need to type in the console

game_type 6; game_mode 0; map dz_blacksite

I think this is what you are looking for

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/$seamless_scale

Quote from Radix

On 8/3/2018 at 2:38 PM, Radix said: Probably I'm the last person to know this but afaik no one shared this so far:

It seems like CS:GO community mappers can now use the static prop combine ("autocombine") feature which is used in newer official CS:GO maps (especially de_nuke) to improve performance significantly.

So we have a guide how to use this: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Static_Prop_Combine

Not as easy as I hoped, because we will need the source files of every model (*.qc etc.). But still good to know.

Any idea if this factors in the new prop scaling?

A list of confirmed info here

https://www.reddit.com/r/fo76/comment…_we_know_about/

No offline singleplayer. No human NPC's and quests are gained through holotapes or notes, but no info on non human NPCs. PVP is something they are encouraging. The game was also described as an "online service" in an interview with Todd Howard.

I'm still somewhat interested in it and lucky we will be able to get a lot of info from those who preorder and gain access to the beta. I imagine there will be plenty of youtube videos long before release to judge if you will part with your money for it. But based on what I am reading, there is no way I will be looking to play this solo. Much like all other survival games, it will quickly turn into a "kill anyone on sight" affair.

Quote from Beck

1 hour ago, Beck said: Ok, I'm a little hyped about the new Fallout after watching the E3 presentation.

It's fully online with dozens of people (Dedicated servers!) but you can still play offline in single player if you wish. Map is 4x the size of FO4's map and you can build settlements with your friends which you can then move to anywhere you want on the map. There looks to be a few different biomes and new enemies and nuke silos dotted around the map which you can find launch codes for to use against enemies/players. What I like about the nukes is they leave behind a wasteland area with high end materials inside it.

I'm glad it still looks like Fallout underneath it all though. I probably won't bother with the building aspect but it'll be fun to play with my friends. Looking forward to 14th November!

There was no mention of offline singleplayer, only that you can play solo. With him also saying the game is "entirely online" it suggests that you can play without partying up but still in the online world. Also the wording on moving your base seemed a bit vague. Lots of people online seem to think you can move your entire base but to me it just suggested that you can move your CAMP and build elsewhere, leaving everything else you built behind. No idea how they can have large bases just pack away and be moved elsewhere, especially when you might have built into terrain features.

The presentation didn't really answer any of the important questions and actually seems like they were purposely vague or used words to dance around the questions.

From what I have seen it really does just seem like a rust clone but they are trying to present it more like a quest based fallout title by using very specific verbiage or generally being vague/misleading.

Not sure how I feel about it being multiplayer/online if its true. If its more a coop single player like borderlands or something more like Terraria with the base building focus with some added adventuring I would welcome such a change. But judging by Bethesda's recent actions, ESO being a lootbox extravaganza, Legends purely designed to milk its players and the paid mods they have pushed so hard. I cant help but worry the main design decisions revolve around "how can we sell as many lootboxes as possible"

I really hope I am wrong, but I would place a bet that it will be all about the lootboxes.

Had it before as well. Usually happens when you type something incorrectly after "map" and it doesn't know what to do, so just loads the first map in alphabetical order.

I used it while working on cruise. It allowed me to watch Netflix or do other stuff while compiling as the computer I was using at the time would completely freeze up using the hammer compiler.

This does not come at all as a surprise to me that he won, but first I will point out that I had no horse in this race. I have been following Trump since before the primaries simply because he was an entertaining character, listened to a lot of his speeches and read up on his proposed ideas. For me this whole ordeal was like watching a soap opera.

But I have to say that the liberals/left brought this on themselves. I has been clear for a long time that the "ordinary" people feel very disenfranchised by the status quo. The biggest most recent example being the brexit result, but also the rise of more right wing parties over Europe. The left recently have been pushing too far left with crazy ideas such as safe spaces, trigger warnings, what toilets trans people should use as well as more every day things that people care about such as immigration, BLM and certain socialist views. So much of this goes against what many ordinary people care about that you end up with groups such as the alt right cropping up. It feels that a lot of people just want to push back against all this neo liberal ideology.

Then of course you have the whole political ruling class thing. Clinton represents everything that supporters of both Sanders and Trump were against. You couldn't have a more clear cut case of someone being more of the same, yet they pushed so hard for her to be the nomination and in doing so cheated a very popular Sanders out of the nomination which of course made much of his voter base go over to Trump.

And then of course you have the attacks. Anyone who didn't think Trump was "Orange Hitler" is and uneducated racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic. They tried these attacks on people who wanted to leave the EU with brexit and it backfired. Trumps opponents in the primaries tried it and it backfired. And then Clinton tried it and it backfired. All while the media is reporting such obviously biased news that it turned so many people away from them and reinforces that the media is in Clinton's pocket. The polls are saying that Clinton is ahead, but Trump is bringing in many thousands of people to his almost daily rallies while Clinton's rally every few weeks gets a couple of hundred at best. Clinton has such strong supporters that she needs to invest millions into CTR to blanket online communities to support her. Then you have all the criminal activities that they tried to deflect onto Trump. All of this just united all the Trump supporters and turned off so many on the fence people to just avoid Clintons horror story.

In this soap opera I watched for over a year, Clinton is the clear cut villain of the story while Trump is the anti hero and Sanders the defeated hero.

http://i.imgur.com/8o8MKrM.gifv

Been enjoying it so far, its in a much better state than V was on release.

Got my first win as China on emperor difficulty. Played quite passive and got an easy culture win so decided to play a bit more of a warmonger as England on immortal difficulty. Early game wars tanked my economy so later focused on getting as many trade routes and possible and pushing a science victory, but England have such powerful late game museums that 2 turns before my last science project would finish, I accidentally triggered another culture victory.

They have some excellent new additions. I actually really like that they removed a lot of stuff that added complexity but didn't really make the game more fun. There are a lot fewer units and are now basically divided into four groups playing a rock paper scissors game. Spearmen > horses > swordmen that later upgrade into anti tank > tanks > infantry so all fit the same role. then support units like archers and catapults. Its the same with the districts and buildings, far fewer buildings but all have more perks. So you really have to think about what you want to do as placing a district doesn't really give you any benefits, just allows you to build its associated buildings so you really have to decide early on what you want from that city as you cant build all the districts early on.

Biggest improvement for me has to be the removal of workers and now you have a builder that has 3 uses and its gone. It forces you to think about what you want to focus on in the early game instead of just hitting automate.

Tech balance is pretty horrible right now as you can end up having all the end game tech by the 1600's. And the AI has no idea how to properly organise districts and seem to have no idea about culture so towards the later 1/3 of the game you can really push past them regardless of how poor you were doing in the beginning. My immortal game I was still in the renaissance era while 3 other civs were in the atomic era, but I still managed to win culture and 2 turns later would have got science.

Other things like coastal cities being a waste as water tiles are pretty useless right now and the AI will never be able to capture one of your cities as long as you have a single range unit protecting it. Diplomacy is also a bit crazy.

I'm certain that after all the updates and DLC releases it will be a far superior game than V, but right now there are quite a lot of issues with the balance of the game that can be annoying.

Since I am not as familiar with SD as some on this forum, ill just answer your examples. I'm sure someone else can go into more detail for you.

Yes you will need to export the substance as a TGA to then convert into a VTF, source doesn't support substance materials.

For models it depends on what you want your result to be. SD is good for all the procedural variations you can get, but since source doesn't support substance materials you are probably better off with SP or a combination of both. Main issue you will have here is models need to be high poly or have a normal map, something you wont get from the valve models. Substance uses the high poly of models to generate a lot of other textures so the procedural generation knows what to do. Without the high poly, substance isn't very useful.

I imagine there are no substance to source guides out there as source doesn't support substance, but there are a lot of general tutorials around.

Quote from DrywallDreams

3 hours ago, DrywallDreams said: What were you expecting to see, though? Real time procedural tech isn't going to get you anything more than goofy looking Spore creatures and somewhat standard looking voxel terrain. Especially out of a 15 person team, the stuff they accomplished is absolutely nuts.

I was expecting planets to be different along with the resources you can gather. Find a planet that is barren of everything but one resource but mining it might piss off the local mining group, another planet that has lots of sentient life, another that is constantly hit by meteor storms or a planet that looks like its recently been hit by some massive natural disaster.

So far we just have a varied bumpiness, colour and different lego piece animals. And instead of searching for rare materials and minerals, it seems that everything is abundant and its just a grind to keep certain meters from nagging you constantly.

Also I see that "its only a small team" argument on reddit a lot. Quite frankly I don't care how many people or who made it. The price point is all i care about, and at $60 I expect a full AAA title in terms of quality. But what i see is a game with much less depth than Minecraft or Terraria offered on release, both of which i paid about 8 dollars for.

To be honest, the game reeks of being a programmers game. A game with some nice features that can serve as a quality starting point. But did they have a singe game designer on the team to focus any of these ideas into an actual game? I really does just look like a tech demo and at some point someone decided to cobble together some form of game and what they ended up with is the "inventory full" simulator @Mazy mentions.

Exploration is fine when there is something worth seeing. So far it seems like planets are all the same but a different colour and the animals are random Lego pieces put together by a child.

http://imgur.com/Mfrz3Uk

I didn't expect the game to be close to what they promised so wasn't expecting an amazing game, but so far the game is looking pretty terrible. Early reviews are also saying what most in this thread are. Boring grind with survival features that do nothing for the game.

Quote from Tyker

2 minutes ago, Tyker said: Did that part feel like it was glossed over? I hoped with the words I used and the inflection of my voice to really set straight that this 'pause-edit' system was absolutely amazing and that any editor benefits from such a system, regardless of team size or game genre. Please let me know if I did not make that clear enough!

Well, glossed over in the sense that you are discussing such a complex topic in a one hour segment. So a little hard to understand just how much value each individual aspect has if unfamiliar with any of the tools. I personally believe that being able to run the game and editor in tandem and make real time changes is possibly the most powerful feature an editor can have.

I'm not sure anyone who has used all the tools mentioned in the video could make a valid argument that Hammer is better than any of the others mentioned. It does have some aspects that are better than in other editors, but they pale in comparison to all the drawbacks Hammer and the source pipeline. I could list maybe 5 or 6 things hammer does better than other editors, but write entire essays on its drawbacks.

Max, as powerful as it is, suffers purely from the fact it is not an engine level design editor but a 3rd party tool that is designed to cover many facets within many industries and skills. Sure with a programmer designing some tools to fit your project can make things a lot easier, but it still keeps the very steep learning curve and prevents people who may not work with the design tools every day from doing simple tasks to test their work. Issues such as an audio guy wanting to test and make alterations to their sounds suddenly becomes a much more difficult task because the tools are more complex, and the tools are separated from the engine.

Unity I think is the shining example of a quality toolset and one that has adapted over time to fit its users needs. What he does at timestamp 51.28 (editing the game while its running) looks kind of small and is glossed over, but as a level designer this is such a huge thing that I could write pages and pages about its usefulness. Something that cannot be achieved in an editor like max because of the separation between tools and engine.

Basically what I am trying to get at is that as great as some tools may be, Having an editor that runs the engine real time cannot be underestimated and is probably the greatest time saver for anyone that ever needs to use the tools. And can save an insane amount of time during all stages of development for multiple departments, not just the level designers.

Quote from 2d-chris

2 hours ago, 2d-chris said: The fact is that different developers use DRASTICALLY different workflows for creating levels, none of which are necessarily better or worse than each other

While I agree with most of what you said, I cannot agree on this part. Unity/Unreals method of click dragging meshes into the editor is unquestionably better than hammers and the creation kits. The same goes for many of the aspects spoken about such as preview images, search tagging or custom libraries, testing the game in editor and many more. There are so many things with some of these engines that is just a step above completely unusable or broken, mostly so with Hammer and the Creation Engine.

And something @Tyker didn't specifically mention, but maybe implied. Is bad UX not only causes worse work to be performed, but in some cases no work performed at all. I can't count how many times in hammer I have abandoned ideas simply because I cant be bothered to go through the model importing nightmare or mess with the VMT's to bother with a texture. I know something is bad, but don't care to improve it at all. And since I love Skyrim and Fallout so much I would have loved to work on a mod for them, but one look at their toolset instantly puts you off. Games using Hammer and the Creation engine are the most modded games out there, but their toolsets are absolutely terrible and I have to wonder how much UGC is lost because of how bad they are.

Also a shame you wasn't able to speak about flowgraph as well as in editor animation systems, such a huge time saver that is so powerful short and long term.