Posts by ReNo

I just ordered an import Japanese one since it was a bargain (listed in an inappropriate ebay section - nobody noticed it ), but its not arrived yet. Should be here tomorrow, and it had BETTER be here at the weekend as I'm off on holiday and would really like to have it for the journey!

It comes with Spiderman 2 the game (not exactly a game I'm bothered about!), but I also ordered myself Metal Gear Acid (which arrived today) and Lumines (which hasn't). I'm planning on picking up Ridge Racer and Wipeout Pure at some point, but decided not to for now as I didn't want to get import versions and possibly miss out on being able to play multiplayer games. Other games on my list are Dynasty Warriors (more of the same I know, but I still enjoy it ), Untold Legends (lots of hack and slash action a la Diablo I hear), Burnout Legends when it appears, and I'll probably import the Japanese "Bleach 2" since I love the anime. Pity I completely can't afford any of that!

Go go wireframes - I'm sure people will point out at least one or two possible optimisations if you just give them the opportunity Skin looks nice on that palm but as Philip said, could probably use a little bit more foliage.

Here are a couple of mossman for the sake of completion

http://www.snarkpit.net/pits/reno/random/mossman1.jpg

http://www.snarkpit.net/pits/reno/random/mossman2.jpg

That was my thinking mazy I like the front part of the ship but as you were thinking Andrew, the back doesn't quite suit the rest of it. I'm also not too sure about the underside of the ship, where it suddenly extends downwards and gets much deeper in the middle section. The rest of it looks pretty steamlined but that bit sticks out to me as being a bit restrictive. Unless it was meant to be some sort of vent or something I guess.

Neat little practice work though - would be a fun project to skin it too

Quote from RD

reminds me of the inside of a UFO

Well that explains a lot

Interstellar recives my upmost love. Awesome!

Thats just typical isn't it. Its like when you feel like you are gonna spew so you run to a toilet, and its only when you leave the toilet later on that you are actually sick. Bad shit seems to happen when you aren't prepared for it, and when you are prepared it puts itself on hold.

You rock hipshot; you are fast becoming the saviour of people without resource making talents

I find it so strange when I hear of people having to be in for so long. I typically spend about 2 hours a day in uni, sometimes less. Obviously we are expected to be in there more for doing our own work, but most people prefer to go home and use their own PC's. We used to have 24hr lab access which was handy for working on things we couldn't do at home (eg. PS2 programming), but I think they cut that down and we now get kicked out at around 10pm or something in general. Been a while since I bothered staying that late though so I couldn't say for sure.

Pity CJ didn't take his own advice on board when making dm_ominous

Only joking cj, don't hit me!!! You know its true though

I'm with Defrag. My course (the same one) is teaching me something I'm not really planning on pursuing as a career, but my level design probably isn't strong enough to land me a job just yet. I really need to build up a better current gen portfolio but I just don't have the will to do it these days. I guess I'm kinda worn out of level design at the moment, which isn't good if I plan on making a career of it! Maybe trying an engine other than source would refuel my fire, so to speak.

Funnily enough though, my current idea is to make a mobile phone game. I'm familiar with java programming, and the artwork requirements are pretty low considering the 128x160 typical screen resolution and 60-120kb typical file sizes, so its probably something I'd be quite suited for. Would let me design something entirely of my own, and hopefully due to the short development time of such games it would keep my focus more. Being able to walk into a job interview and hand over your phone to show one of your games would be a novel portfolio piece too

I feel your pain curman, so many people make that mistake that its inevitable it will get the best of you sooner or later

I'm actually impressed by that FPS stuff - its a very neat throwback to the games. I'm sure it will get a bit old, but if it only made on really short appearance it would seem disjointed and out of place. I guess its gonna be a balance to get it right, so it fits in but doesn't get too boring.

Most people bitch that the films of games never relate to the games themselves, but this is looking more and more like it does. So many of the settings shown in that trailer look like they are taken straight out of Doom 3 Even the exterior part near the start looked very much like the entrance part shown in the D3 intro.

That said, I can't say I'm excited about this film, and I doubt I'll bother seeing it at least until its out of the cinemas.

I really enjoyed DoD, but I want the game to have evolved from then. I'm not particularly excited by DoD:S simply because it is basically a port, just as CS:S is basically a port. It wll be fun again for a while no doubt simply because I haven't played it in so long and due to new graphics and sound effects, but unless they have really changed a fair amount in terms of gameplay I don't see much to get excited about. I don't want ported maps, I'd far rather they built new ones. The scope of the original DoD maps wasn't particularly huge, and if they are much the same I can't see it living up to BF2's "the enemy could be anywhere" sort of gameplay.

After hipshot's favourable introduction and gifts I think he's pretty well loved round these parts now Cool to have a game musician on the site - always good to have a broad range of talents in a community. Welcome to mapcore

Nice one man, many congratulations!

Ouch, a sad tale Best of luck getting your comp back up and running. I'd also like to add that going by your rate of improvement, the next map you start will probably be even better than the one you just lost. I'm sure I'm not the only one who can relate to losing a map - I had a hard drive burn out on me while I was making what I deemed to be my best mapping effort several years back, but once I got to computer back online and restarted the level it turned out to be a far better in the end.

I didn't mean my comments as offence and I'm not biased toward bluestrike or anything of the sort, its just my thoughts. I was probably being overly critical because everybody else was being so positive, which might be a bit unfair but I was caught of guard by the amount of praise that these three screenshots (two of which are essentially just showing off one arch model) were recieving. Don't get me wrong, this IS looking good, better than the majority of maps, but I don't think its at the point yet that it could be described as anything like "nicest thing in source". It could get there of course...

Realistic was maybe the wrong word. Perhaps I should have said smooth, or seamless. Making a player character grab a ledge is easier due to the fact they aren't being "ragdolled" - or at least not in any situations that they can then go into a situation like grabbing a ledge in current games at least. You can be sure that the player is going to be in a reasonable range of movements; be it a running animation, jumping animation, falling animation, or whatever. You can do the same with non-ragdolled NPC's - you can merge animations and the interpolated frames will look fine because they are going to be reasonable movements (eg. moving an arm from pointing a gun forward to reaching upward to grab that ledge).

Once you give up strict control of limbs and let them play victim to gravity or whatever other influences, you can't very easily regain control and pull them back, in a convincing way at least, to a controlled animation. One arm could be bent back over their shoulder, their legs doing the splits, and their back in some horrible contortion - how do you pull that together to a "grabbing" pose, quick enough so they haven't already fallen out of reach of the ledge, and yet slow enough so they don't look to be moving at light speed and just snapping into place?

I'm no animator so perhaps there are good workarounds for this that I'm not aware of, but as far as I can tell, with current tech we can't really expect ragdolled bodies to snap back to life realistically. It would essentially require that NPC to learn a way to pick themselves up from any given pose and work out how to get into another, which isn't feasible for a real time game.

Well there ARE certainly both friction (to an extent) and buoyancy in source - don't you recall putting bouyant barrels under that ramp in HL2's water hazard level, or building a little bridge at a certain point in nova prospekt? It might not be perfect, but its not bullshit either.

I agree that it does look overly fake in games when anything that is killed instantly becomes a lifeless ragdoll, but the scenario you described is just about an impossible pipe dream for the time being, at least for it to be done in an any way realistic and animated way.