Posts by Defrag

It's not a piano, it's a gun!

Compared to mudbox, Zbrush2's interface is convoluted IMO

Have they actually sorted out the interface? That's what I want to know

I finished it and handed it in on Wednesday. Thanks to everyone that offered me stuff!

Since someone asked for the code:

Dissertation (5 megs)

Program code [100k]

I can't upload the compiled program as I didn't bother to compress some of the resources, so the textures are too big to upload really (I'd have to compress to .dds and then go through all of the meshes and rename the texture references, so I cba)

From what I understand, you'll also face precision problems. The bigger your game world (relative to the default 1 inch = 1 unit), the less precise things like physics/collisions etc. become.

Cheers for the link.

904: Nice job. Out of interest, do you have any good resources on how hammer stores its displacement data? I'm interested in writing tool to manipulate displacements.

Rick_D: If you can show me a seamless, fully working implementation then great, but I'm not aware of many (any?) games that allow all of the things in my list to happen. I know certain games allow a ragdoll to get back up from an arbitrary position, but I don't know about the rest of that stuff.

Quote from leileilol

Which the old Quakeworld TF could already do. Valve's just pushing these out as 'revolutionary new features'.

Whats funny is that on some other board i'm bashed for not sucking up to the face tech that's gonna 'save the game' lol. It will be a short-lived novelty that will get out of date in years and no one will look back on as if it were 'great', like XIII.

I don't think they are pushing it as revolutionary (the spy invisibility). I would bet my house on invisibility being brought back because feigning doesn't play nice with ragdolls.

Some problems have to be conquered when a ragdoll feign happens:

1. Ragdoll can't fall down somewhere that is not normally accessible to players, but it can't look goofy when blocked or it gives the game away

2. Ragdoll has to be able to get back up from an arbitrary position

3. Ragdoll has to be networked & accurate on all clients

4. Above step has to work AND not have any tell-tale signs that will make it obvious as a feigned spy. Any lag or jerkyness = easily identifiable as a networked object and thus a spy (all corpses are usually client objects as they have no effect on the game world).

So there's a whole host of challenges to conquer. It was probably just a lot easier to implement invisibility.

Quote from ReNo

I really enjoyed both Halo games, for all their flaws. The basic feel of the gameplay and the health/shield mechanic just worked so well IMO that I was having a great time playing it despite the obvious shortcomings. Plus split-screen coop is always fun, particularly on Legendary difficulty

Legendary? Did you beat LisaSimpson45 on the MechAssault deathmatch? What's that? No? Well then. There's only one legend.

I've only played it a few times at a friend's house, but I found it utterly monotonous. My friend then bought HL2 and didn't play Halo2 again

Grenades were always a love it / loathe it feature. I played TFC for about five years and, while grenades were brilliant when you'd mastered them, they also came back to bite you a lot. They had a huge splash radius and, since every class had 'em, the primary means of combat was to simply run around spamming them everywhere. This basically meant that they retarded the skill level quite a bit -- as if you could hit most of your shotgun shots and someone spammed a mega-splash gren in towards you, you'd still lose most of your health. The emphasis moved from skill to spam.

It was still a lot of fun, but I think it's a bold & ultimately a good move on valve's part to remove primary grenades.

We'll see

I'm glad they have had the balls to make some big changes. I think everyone was worried that it was going to be TFC + new graphics, but it's looking like a real departure from TFC.

koko: FF is in the perpetual stage of being 'nearly done'. It's unrecognisable compared to the mod you worked on (in a good way!) so have faith. I finish my degree on the 18th and then I'm going all out to finish FF, even if it means living a hermit-like existence

You don't need to make textures to make a 'new' theme Go take a look at some of the 1024 contest entries and you can see how some level designers can construct really different themes using stock resources.

I don't see why the thread got renamed. We had a discussion; nobody got abusive or pulled out their ding-dong.

IMO that's splitting hairs -- other than the scope your focus is rarely going to be on those parts of the gun. I've never once played CS:S and thought my gun was blurry/ugly so I don't think your assertion that it's very noticeable holds. It is noticeable if you specifically look for it (but even then I don't think it's bad at all and I play at 1600x1200). I still don't think the result justifies doubling the texture size.

I'd rather see a contest where people have to take the stock HL2 content and make something new with it, much like peri did with tobor. I always get a kick out of watching people turn a familiar texture set & engine into something entirely different. I remember looking at scary_1's HLDM maps with their violet & soft red lighting and original texture usage and thinking.. holy shit, this is... Half-Life?

I agree that it's overkill Unless someone is playing the game at 2560xwhatever then they're probably not going to notice. The argument about next gen etc. is largely moot if people still run the games at similar resolutions and thus can't actually notice a difference.

Also if you need more space and have to choose between one and two textures, it should nearly always be done as one texture unless there's a technical reason for it (e.g. one alpha channel representing self-illumination, the other for specular). Less texture changes = faster rendering for the game engine

I tried that application, but I found it awkward to control and difficult to make any kind of shape beyond simple curves