Posts by Defrag

Brooker is ace, and that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. I should point out that there's quite a few mac users who aren't tossers and who don't advertise the fact that they love macs, but the moment Steve Jobs scratches his arse or some largely meaningless "lifestyle accessory" or other is announced, the most vocal apple fans turn into massive jabbering arseholes. They all droned on about the iPad for the best part of a month prior to release and I've yet to see one. It's vital, though. Right? Guys?

It reminds me of Anime extroverts who wear leather trenchcoats and won't be silenced. They're in the same bracket of dreary twats who need to shut the fuck up and stop trying to stamp their tastes on other people.

Can you tell this irks me?

Apple fanboys do more to turn me off macs than anything Apple ever did. I work alongside quite a few Mac/iPhone/iPad zealots and their conversations make my eyes glaze over... zzz

I'm sure Apple products do a great job in certain areas, but fuck, it's just a computer/phone/tablet, not a way of living. Give it a fucking rest, fanboys!

That sucks, GL.

^ lol

There's no way in hell I'd ever pay for a single player game that drops me back to the menu every time my internet dies.

Batman was amazing. So well executed and so addictive.

I find rolling in bacon grease and wearing a sack with two holes cut out of it does the trick.

I think Hourences hit the nail on the head. You certainly can get a job without a degree, but getting a degree makes it easier to open the first door. On the flipside, having a degree means nothing if you have no distinguishing portfolio at the end. Nobody hires on the strength of a degree alone, particularly if your portfolio is the same university deliverables that everyone else has.

I'd personally stay away from game development degrees and do something more mainstream (vanilla computer science if you're a programmer, traditional art / design stuff if you're an artist) then improve your game development skills via modding & personal projects. I think this is a good balance.

Looks pretty cool

Interesting thread.

CJ: One of my friends who's been to a few conferences observed the same thing regarding Crytek, so I wouldn't feel too bad about it (he found it pretty funny, but then he wasn't trying to get a job, he was just watching / chatting with folk).

They probably had to take it down because of a claim by the Film Actors Guild

Nice

I detest you, Furyo! You deleted some internet text!

"bitches, leave." is one of the finest lines of dialogue ever spoken in a motion picture. "Can you fly, Bobby?" is also up there

This map is looking beautiful!

My only worry is that there's a lot of areas bathed in light. Light is usually employed to guide players through L4D maps, so it may confuse things a little. Either way, I love the look of this.

I couldn't get it working in the beta. My server browser displayed "-" for the pings and I had no ping on the scoreboard ingame, so it was impossible to tell whether the reg was crap or whether I was just on a bad server.

Are you joking? One size does not fit all. When you generalise to the extreme you end up with something that's flexible, but ultimately unwieldy to develop for and unsatisfying to use.

My favourite bit was when he said "our roof tile has more detail in it than their entire level", while neglecting to mention that the 6 year old game looked better o_o.

It looks similar to what Carmack was talking about (sparse voxel octrees). Note that Carmack didn't sound like he was going to eat himself when explaining it, though. He was very cautious and stresses the caveats / challenges associated it while also reinforcing the case for triangles. As usual, there is no magic bullet, so my money is on the "unlimited detail" video being implementation similar to what Carmack has already explained. If Carmack doesn't predict the end of graphics cards any time soon, then I'm happy to go along with him rather than this other dude.

Tech demo of sparse voxel octrees:

It looks kickass, but it has many limitations. Besides, geometry fidelity is no longer the final frontier IMO. We can now throw enough polys at stuff that it's not too bad -- this is why we're seeing a lot of new research going into screen space effects and advanced shading models rather than just blitzing through more and more polys. In short, I highly doubt this company's technology will be going mainstream in games. I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the environments in the video were both static and ugly -- the caveats aren't taken into account and there'll be a lack of decent tools. Is anyone going to switch over to some new fangled tech if it produces inferior results compared to what we've got right now?

It's like ray tracing -- people always show 30 reflective spheres in tech demos and people go "OMG!!11 look at that! It's ace!". Where does the rubber hit the road when it comes to games, though? Answer: It hasn't. There are no ray traced games that look half as good as triangle-based rendering because triangle-based rendering is well established and produces good results. I'm betting this 'silver bullet' turns out to be useful in some circumstances but that's about it.

Boo, I was enjoying that discussion. For shame!