Posts by ReNo

Grrr, Hammer seems as buggy as ever. First HL2DM will only load in the 2006 version of the SDK tools, which just renders empty blackness in the viewports on my ATI card. Then after setting it up manually to use the 2009 version of the tools, it appears to be working fine but will only show 1 of the 4 viewports at a time, even if I tell it to reset the 4 viewport windows. Some of the keyboard shortcuts (cut/paste for example, and tool hotkeys) are either not working at all or working with a weird delay, while others work perfectly fine!

Think I might build an entry in UDK instead...

This sounds right up my alley! Haven't cracked open an FPS editor in almost a whole year, so this provides the perfect excuse to give it a shot again. 20 brushes sure sounds limiting, but in a really cool way, and as said it really lowers the time investment required which will hopefully bring in a fair crowd.

I don't think unlimited faces is a problem - surely we're assuming a brush has to be a single, convex primitive right? I don't think adding one with hundreds of faces really gives you much more flexibility than one with, say, 10 faces, if that is the case.

Not at all! I agree, spy party does look very interesting. From what I've read it is a strictly 2 player offering (I'm sure the principle ideas could extend to more players though) but focuses entirely on "blending in" gameplay, similar but more elaborate than that The Ship used. BGT doesn't put as much emphasis on that, so if that was what drew you to The Ship it might leave you a little cold.

I'm definitely interested to see Spy Party's take on things. My understanding is that it is quite rigid in how it plays out - 1 spy inside the building, 1 sniper outside, and no option for the sniper to do anything but watch and take 1 shot. It's extremely focused gameplay, which isn't a bad thing, but isn't quite what we wanted to go for with TS2 which was more open. I hope it does well when I comes out though, I love games that tread a different path to the norm

Here's a rather long, random bunch that spring to mind. I tend to find world cinema more interesting than UK/US, so it's rather weighted, though in truth I enjoy English movies just as much. They just tend to be less memorable for me, and so less likely to come to mind when thinking of movies I really love.

The Fall

Pan's Labyrinth

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

The Warrior (Musa: The Warrior in some places)

Sunshine

Brick

Tekkonkinkreet

LOTR Trilogy

Infernal Affairs

Heat

Gattaca

Tale of Two Sisters

The City of Lost Children

Fast and Furious movies (yeah, absolute guilty pleasure!)

Battle Royale

Sinbad movies (another guilty pleasure)

Ping Pong

Versus

The Usual Suspects

Goemon

Oldboy

Dark City

Taxi (French series, not the US remake)

Brotherhood of the Wolf

Oooh, also, just noticed that we got a Eurogamer review today...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010- ... iew?page=3

We got a 6/10, which is lower than we'd hoped, but at least they are mostly positive aside from the legit criticisms levelled at the aiming/shooting. There is a lock-on if you click the right-stick in when aiming at somebody, but we didn't do a great job of making that obvious, and hitting people with some of the weapons WITHOUT using that can be quite a nightmare on the Xbox controller. It's not an issue on the PC, but that's not really an excuse, it just says we shoulda done a better job of making the aiming work well on Xbox!

Yeah I agree with an awful lot of your comments Thrik. It was an interesting u-turn in design intention through the life of BGT. Right after The Ship we started working on a few different prototypes for other game ideas, but The Ship 2 was one of the bigger ideas we shopped around to publishers. Our ideas for The Ship 2 took pretty much everything from the original game and - while simplifying a lot of the needless complexity as BGT has - also added lots more depth.

Some of it was really really cool and I'm convinced would be a lot of fun. I don't wanna go into detail, as who knows, maybe one day Chris will get Outerlight back off the ground and The Ship 2 could happen, and I'd hate to let the cat outta the bag prematurely Suffice to say, while BGT made changes such as removing the "passenger" NPCs (technically they still exist as "extras" but the tweaked gameplay makes them less influential) and made identifying player names automatic (mostly in an effort to speed up the gameplay), The Ship 2 would have gone in the absolutely opposite direction. The intention was to make the process of stalking and killing your target (and most importantly, getting away with it!) an even more elaborate process than it was in the original game. Think of how it was in The Ship, but bringing in more elements of "Guess Who?" and "Cluedo" Oh man, thinking back on it now, I can't help but get quite excited about it again

Easy to see why Ubi wanted us to go more in the direction of BGT though, even if our ideas for TS2 seemed to build a more interesting game for the "hardcore" TS players. The Ship has earned a somewhat cult status with PC gamers and has a good reputation with almost all who remember it, but the sales weren't fantastic. It was just too slow and complex for what people expected in an FPS, which lead to many people trying to play it as a deathmatch game and ruining it for not just themselves but everyone else on the server too. Speeding it up and simplifying it to try and appeal to a wider audience was a no brainer, and it's hard to fault Ubi for taking us in that direction.

Ultimately, even as a simplified version of The Ship, if you play BGT with a group of like-minded players you'll still find a game that rewards those who play it in a very different way to your average FPS. It's definitely no simple deathmatch game, regardless of how the trailers (that Outerlight had no hand in making) make it appear - and that's a claim that even has merit when you look at the deathmatch game mode!

Worst thing about it from my point of view is the marginalizing of the Xbox Indie Games marketplace. Previously once you hit game marketplace we had our own row, just like XBLA, showing the top downloads in a row. This gave a direct window into the XBLIG market and what was available (ok, not always appealing games on show, but still!) which helped pull in potential customers. Now we are the second box along in speciality shops, with a rubbish picture of some avatars as our "box art".

But hey I'm not privvy to the same marketing data that Microsoft is. Maybe they're right and this is truly the best place for XBLIG to flourish. We'll need to wait and see what it does to sales. There's a lot of conspiracy theories going on that we're being pushed to the side in order to avoid cannibalizing sales/exposure from XBLA titles though, as well as Microsoft trying to turn all us XNA developers onto their "sexy new market" on Windows Phone 7. As said, just need to wait and see how it pans out.

One thing I CANNOT see there being any positives to though is the removal of box art, game descriptions, screenshots, and (most importantly) the ability to RATE a game from your game library. Sure, they've made a nice new page for the games when you view them on the marketplace, but once you've downloaded it and access it from your game library you are presented with a bland, boring menu allowing you to play or delete, that's all. Who the hell is gonna rate games now you need to go in to the marketplace page in order to do it? It makes no sense whatsoever to remove this function from the place it was most likely to be used. It makes the box art of DLC titles feel much less important now too, which will discourage people from putting in as much effort.

It's not ALL doom and gloom though. There's a few really nice changes too. Once you actually get in to the XBLIG marketplace they've made great improvements, particularly in the genre browsing and increasing the length of the top rated/downloaded/new releases lists from 20 to 50.

Sorry to hear you didn't like it Rick! It's definitely not a game that will appeal to everyone, and we knew it was gonna divide opinion, but more sad that you wasted your money than anything. Still, at least it's cheap right?

Pogo, yeah, we all essentially got laid off. Ubisoft scaled back the budget on the game, and as a result Outerlight started having to downsize, which meant the game was taking longer to finish, which meant more people had to get laid off in order to stretch the budget, and so on The Ship still sells a bit but not enough to keep the company going. Eventually there were just a handful of us left (from 20 at peak down to 4 in the final month IIRC), and we just had to leave as there was no more cash. Sad, as at this point the game was as good as done, bar bug-fixes and TCR compliance. That was at the end of last year, and Ubisoft took the project over to an internal team in India to finish off. Afterwards, I went into business with a couple of ex-colleagues as Haiku Interactive. We ended up helping out Ubisoft on getting the game to market since we had experience on the project, but it was at that point definitely a case of plugging up the holes rather than any major work on the gameplay or content. Sad end really, none of us would have wanted it to go the way it did. Still, Outerlight is still technically trading - surviving as a one-man-show off The Ship's sales - and hopefully one day will make some money off BGT's royalties. Who knows, it might make a resurgence, but it's gonna take a LOT of sales when we're only selling at £3.50 or thereabouts!

More info can be read here if you're interested in the story - my old boss Chris gave an interview on the topic recently, think it was linked earlier in this thread...

http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/10/04/ ... loody-goo/

Quote from deceiver

Will all the money be going to Ubisoft or will a portion of it go to Outerlight's ex-staff?

It's a bit messy really. Until Ubisoft reclaim their costs from the title, they'll be getting all the cash from sales (minus Steam/Microsoft's cuts). Once they've done that (IF they do that), then a cut will start going to Outerlight. Just now Outerlight is just my old boss Chris, who is keeping alive a "shell" of the company so that if there are any royalties to be taken, the company still exists to have 'em The hope is that it'll accrue enough cash that Chris can use it to get Outerlight back up off the ground and return to being a functioning company. The money won't be going out to previous employees though.

I'll be up for a game sometime, though gonna be pretty busy tomorrow so maybe not then. Think my SteamID is reno84, though it always displays my name as just "ReNo" in the community section, so not sure what to find me as. My steam avatar is Kim Jung Il from The Ship's "World Leaders" update, if that helps you identify me

Yup, I've bought it twice now - once on XBLA and once on Steam. Not bad for under £8

Really glad it's finally come out, and totally impressed that Ubi decided to go for such a low price point. I argued all through development that we should be aiming for a bargain price point, since being a multiplayer game meant we'd live or die on the number of people playing, and with only 3 maps we are fairly content lite. Coming out so cheap is a really big help to building an audience.

For anybody on the fence about the game, my (completely biased) opinion is that for under $5 the game is a steal. Although it only has 3 levels there's quite a lot to the game, with a pretty wide range of weapons that vary a lot more than in The Ship, and quite a lot of different rules and mechanics you can play around with. Pickpocketing, boasting, "murder aids" that you can use to distract or entrap your hunter or quarry, traps dotted all over the place, insta-kills on people using needs interactions, bonus rounds breaking up the action with new gameplay, security guards wandering around, etc etc etc... It's a bit rough around the edges but it's a lot different to other shooters out there (with the exception of The Ship of course) and that originality is what makes it special. Hopefully that'll earn it a bit of a cult fanbase

Condolences Minos, never a nice thing to go through. As has been said many times already though, if you're willing to travel there's no doubt that you'll get snapped up somewhere. Hopefully somewhere you can really shine in some more ambitious projects too Good luck in the search!

Quick reminder for everyone that this is out tomorrow! As a big fan of the Penumbra games I've really been looking forward to this. If you pre-order it from their website or from steam you get a 20% discount, so get your order in quick if you wanna save a bit of cash. My purchase on Steam came to just £10 with the discount, but even without it's hardly breaking the bank at £13.

http://%7boption%7d

Highly highly recommend any survival horror fans take a look at this - if it can live up to Penumbra it'll be ace. Eurogamer seem to think it does from the 8.10 score, but to avoid spoilers I didn't read much of it

http://%7boption%7d

Nah dux, not back with em. Can't really talk about the situation in depth here, but myself and 2 other guys left to do our own thing as Haiku Interactive at the end of last year. When we left though the game was basically done except for bug fixing. Since then it's been in a sort of limbo, but looks to finally be ready to go.

Yeah the TF2 comparisons are a bit annoying. I mean I can get the visual comparison but some people are writing it off as a rip-off when the gameplay is completely different. The only gameplay it shares with TF2 is that both are FPS games. While TF2 is as team-based a shooter as it is possible to be however, BGT's gameplay is completely every-man-for-himself. Even the graphical comparison is annoying, given it's a fairly natural evolution from The Ship, which predated TF2 by over a year...

[Blocked Image: http://imgarchive.info/200912/th_244622.jpg]

But anyway, I guess it's inevitable if you've got a cartoony shooter just now. MNC got a lot of trash talk about it for the same reasons, although I'd say it was better warranted since it is so strongly team based. People came around to it in the end though!

The teaser video isn't something we did in-house at Outerlight - it's Ubi's marketing material. I'd have to agree it's a little baffling if you don't know anything about the game, but like the fake "movie posters" they released a few days before the game announcement, I guess it's all designed to get people curious rather than being informative. No doubt they'll have gameplay trailers and the like before release

At long last the game I worked on at Outerlight before I left has been unveiled! It's called "Bloody Good Time" and it's being published by Ubisoft. Should be out on XBLA and Steam before the end of the year.

For those interested, it plays a lot like our previous game "The Ship", only quite a bit faster. It's a source engine based multiplayer game in which you play the role of one of 8 different Hollywood wannabes filming under the instruction of the sadistic Director X. Each player is given the name of one of the other players and is tasked with killing them using one of a whole bunch of weapons. As in The Ship you've got to take care of your needs as this is happening; visiting the toilet or grabbing a drink at the bar to avoid falling asleep on the spot or becoming weak with hunger, for example. All the while one of the other players has been given your name and is trying their best to take you down, so you've gotta keep looking over your shoulder for any suspicious stalkers...

It's a lot of fun and our playtests were always crazy and competitive, so we're really pleased it's finally seeing the light of day.

Kotaku article: http://kotaku.com/5628927/clowns-versus ... -good-time

Yeah I agree, there's a fair few names in there that are pretty big as TV goes. No household names I guess, but certainly experienced.

- Andrew Lincoln (main guy) is pretty well known in British TV, having starred in "This Life" and "Teachers". Nice to see him in a US show.

- Lennie James (black guy) was Sol in "Snatch", and starred in a US post-apocalyptic TV show "Jericho".

- Laurie Holden was in a bunch of "X-Files" episodes and a main character in the "Silent Hill" movie.

- Michael Rooker is that grizzled looking mean guy in a whole shit load of TV shows and movies. You'd definitely recognise him if not know him by name.

- Sarah Wayne Callies was a main character in the show "Prison Break".

I'm looking forward to it. Need a new show now most of the other ones I watch have ended. Pretty much getting by on just Entourage at the moment

Sadly not got a good enough connection for hosting myself. Got a fairly decent ADSL setup through Sky for 3 of us to share for personal usage, but I wouldn't wanna try hosting anything on it; only got 512k upload I think. Sadly Virgin - the standard fibre optic provider in the UK - isn't available in my area just now. Not sure I'd have the knowledge or desire to deal with maintaining it either, as HP said.

I think WebFaction are a fairly large provider, so I'm not too worried about them going under. They've been around 6 years, and they've got a 60 day money back guarantee if, for any reason, you choose to leave 'em, so I figure it's worth a crack.

Thanks for the advice folks, much appreciated

I'm not really sure I agree that it's a question there's no point raising, Warby. There's a lot of people here with portfolios (or more!) and presumably most of those are on their own hosting. Just looking for some info on who has been good, who has been bad, and anything anybody has to share on the big names in web hosting. There's certainly a ludicrous amount of choice in the market these days, and yeah a lot of that is region specific so hard to people to comment on, but there's a fair UK contingent on Mapcore so hoped to get at least a little insight. Beyond that, we're happy to look beyond UK offerings, though probably only US based to avoid any language barriers with support issues.

Anyhow, thanks for the heads up so far guys. UK2 certainly look good, probably the best UK offering I've seen in terms of an all round package that isn't blatantly "too good to be true" as some of those "unlimited" offerings you mention are. We're not going to be handling huge amounts of traffic and right now at least we won't be relying on the hosting as "mission critical", so we're loathe to spend more than £5-10 a month on it. Their low level business package is therefore a good match for our requirements. My only concern is a lot of negative reviews I stumbled upon, but as I mentioned before, a lot of those sites come across suspicious and potentially faked, so it's hard to judge.

At the moment we're really tempted by WebFaction. It's a US based hosting company, but we've had a few recommendations from them elsewhere and the bulk of chat about them online seems positive. Anybody know of them or used them before?

Hey guys, hoping you can offer me some advice. My Haiku colleagues and I are looking to get a new web host for our company website and project specific websites. Currently we are using one guy's personal account on fasthosts to host our only website (http://www.avaglide.com), but want to move to one for the company itself and figured we should do a little research first.

Anybody got any good advice on who to go with? Or conversely, who NOT to go with? I use 1&1 for my personal website and it's always been good enough for that, but you don't get quite as much for your money as some other places seem to offer, and as a little portfolio site it's never exactly been tested with big loads or many visitors.

In terms of what we require, we'd like Linux hosting with PHP/MySQL support, preferably allowing for multiple databases but we could make do with one. Ideally we'd like unlimited usage, and probably around 10Gb+ of space. We'd also like Ruby/RoR support, or at least the option to upgrade to that if we need it in the future.

Anything come to mind? Or anybody had any horror stories to share? Looking up reviews online, half of them read like company shills, so it's hard to know what to trust.

My condolences Defrag, really sad to hear. I've got a mate at Ruffian who had said things weren't looking good at RTW, but I wasn't expecting something as drastic as this after MyWorld was only announced so recently. Guess that was more of a "well..might as well let the world see it" kind of last-hurrah?

All the best on finding a new gig mate.