Posts by ReNo

Well it's not too surprising that Disgaea hasn't had a mention, seeing as the thread is about what games we are currently playing, and it is an old game A good game for sure, but it's not one I've played in a fair while now. Cool about the sequel, though I'm kind of tiring of Nippon Ichi's formula. La Pucelle Tactics, Disgaea, Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom all seemed very very similar, with tweaks to the gameplay that undoubtedly made a difference, but perhaps not enough difference. I've only played Disgaea myself, but watched my flatmate play the others, and they had a bit too much in common for my liking.

Well I got the wrongly provided Extreme-G 3 replaced with what I had actually tried to buy - Extreme-G Racing Association (or XGRA) - and I'm fairly impressed.

- Very fast game, but then the XG games always have been.

- Looks better in some ways than the third game, and worse in others, but that might just be because this is a PS2 game and I have the GC version of 3.

- Quite a nice weapons system, which has a primary weapon with limited ammo that recharges over time, and a secondary weapon which changes as you pick up powerups on track. Each time you pick up a powerup it goes further up the list of weapons - so if you pick up just one powerup and use it you get an energy draining device, pick up two before using it and you get mines, three and you get a speed boost, and so on.

- Pretty cool track designs with a fair amount of route choices, though in places the meandering track can get a little too hard to navigate without using the sides.

- The camera often has trouble showing you what you need to see. With sudden and extreme dips, rises and corners it can be down to luck whether you are aiming for the right line.

- Hated the soundtrack in the third game, but this time around it seems a lot better. It gives you the choice of techno or rock soundtracks, or a mix of the two (which I went for), and the tracks in each genre seem to work very nicely with the theme.

Hopefully they can. Everything I've seen looks beautiful, but there was a very scathing report recently about hideous pop-up / draw distance issues, and near constant (though tiny) loading screens. As to whether or not it was trustworthy, I guess we'll just have to wait for some proper reviews.

I agree, but then I never did particularly dig pure realism. Style over realism any day

Yeah, this guy got my flatmate's credit for GTA:SA...

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/shee ... Id,115062/

It seems kinda like they go "ah, they have the same name, must be the same guy!"

I've found the SDK pretty stable as of late. I've frequently got Visual Studio, Hammer, and HL2 opening and closing dozens of times without any drastic performance loss after hours of work. Then again, maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe my AWESOME CODING has fixed any of HL2's memory leaks and whatnot

Lovely atmosphere too it, and entirely not recognisable as the source engine which is always a nice thing to say about a level (well, maybe not always!). Not too sure about the detail sprites to be honest though. I've never looked into them, but can you set a max distance on them? If so then it might be cool to have a fairly tight radius of pretty densely packed grass sprites. Dunno if you've tried that, but just an idea. Any particular reason for this scene by the way; part of a map or just screwing around?

I'm sure you could find a walkthrough on GameFAQs soon enough (if not already!) that covers the jist of it, but I wouldn't know where to look to get a script or anything.

I'm pretty certain it is actually between series 2 and 3 - the Palmer being poisoned and introduction of Chase era, in other words.

Hehe, that map brings back memories Hasn't really translated too well to source to be honest, but with a little love (and for the love of god, a new texture in place of those giant windows!) it could do.

I'm listening to quite a bit of Japanese music lately;

Orange Range

Home Made Kazoku

Asian Kung Fu Generation

Road of Major

FLOW

UVERworld

High and Mighty Colour

Blankey Jet City

And the non-Japanese;

Our Lady Peace

OK Go

Arctic Monkeys

The Ordinary Boys

Maximo Park

The Go! Team

Yellowcard

Picked up Mace Griffin uber cheap for the Xbox, simply because I seemed to recall hearing it was pretty good. Can't say it's quite reached the lofty heights of "pretty good" as of yet, but I've played worse games. My thoughts...

- Aiming seems a little odd to me, with vertical looking being quite speedy but horizontal looking starting slow and accelerating. Not in a nice "easy to make slight aiming adjustments" way either.

- The space combat sections are fairly awkward with the default control scheme, which you can't change in-game - really, in this day and age, what the hell?

- Your character seems a bit...crap. Granted, I'm not far in, but he just comes across as generic and unlikable.

- Fairly lame weapons

- Horrible AI, and I mean horrible.

You know what? There isn't much to like about this game. Oh, it uses the Halo recharging armour system, which I do enjoy. I'm not too sure I can cite that as a positive point...

Sure it does, it's just all about working realistically for your proposed scale. You could build an entire planet in a source map if you wanted; it would just have to be ludicrously simplistic. You could build an entire city, it would just have to be low detail. You could build a city block with relatively high detail. You could build a city square with high detail. Scale your level of detail to match your scale and you can make whatever you want really.

Learning to use max or milkshape (and others, I'm sure) takes less time than you might think to reach a level at which you can knock out props, but it's the skinning that kills it for me. I don't know the first thing about texture creation, and without that, props aren't much use I too have had little success finding custom models for source, but to be honest I think it's down to there simply not being much. These days it all seems to be done with mods in mind, or if not then for specific maps (often with the prop modeller being the level designer too). I suggest raiding the GCFs of other mods, or downloading plenty of maps that use custom resources and asking permission to use them.

You could do it, you just need to scale the detail level to keep it manageable/realistic.

I don't think wanting to make money for doing something means you don't love it. What if they want to start their own fully fledged development company? That's what it sounds like. Does wanting to start a business doing something, not suggest that they might love doing it? Not everybody wants to go out and work in an existing company, making something they don't give a shit about. It's harder these days to break through yourself with a commercial product, but isn't that exactly the sort of thing that Steam hopes to change? Isn't making a mod, as opposed to a stand alone game, the ideal way to make a breakthrough, given the shorter development time and lesser/non-existant startup costs?

Pretty funky, but also a bit sporadic and inconsistant. In places you have an upper section of wall hanging over what is below it, in others you have it leaning in as it extends toward the ceiling, in other parts it is flush with the lower wall. The support beam across the ceiling in the first pic looks awkward where it meets the angular section of wall, as it meets at a plane that isn't perpendicular to it. You should also try and do something to break up the flat wall surfaces, and get in a bit more texture variation.

Your recruitment post here is very professional and makes it seem like a commercial project, but the website makes it look far more like a non-commercial mod project. Just so people are clear - are these paid positions, or just normal, unpaid mod work?

Post the entire error message - it might help.

BF2's load times are what stopped me and my flatmate playing to be honest - they were horrible. I did hear they improved them in patches so maybe now the situation is better, but it was pretty horrendous to begin with The whole optimising shaders fiasco each time you wanted to change video settings made it a pain to get "just right" for your system when you first got the game too - it took about half an hour to do what in most games takes a couple of minutes.