The important thing is that you can build a reliability mechanism on top of UDP so that only certain messages are treated as important whereas the others can be discarded without much of a problem. I.e. the protocol doesn't guarantee delivery, but the application code adds in that support. It's a bit more work, but a fairly common thing to see in games.
Posts by Defrag
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The more I play this, the more mixed feelings I have about it. I haven't played it enough to form a full judgement yet (particularly regarding the SI combinations), as I've been pretty busy lately. I'll post a revised opinion after I get in another few weeks' play.
Anyway, here's my bitch list. Many of these are problems that have been repeated from the first game which I find to be very strange.
Swamp fever is deathly dull with a terribly boring finale, Dead Centre's mall is hardly dripping with detail and even hard rain's "ooh it's getting stormy" thing doesn't distract from the rolling greyness. I quite like The Parish and Dark Carnival is the best of the bunch -- I think that's a really cool map; it has a lot of distinguishing features and things to see and do. Compare Dark Carnival to Swamp Fever -- is this made by the same company?
Quite a few of the maps are obscenely short and easy. E.g. Hard Rain 1 & 4 are almost a joke. On Hard Rain 4, a rushing team will face 3 (three) SI attacks; unless something goes badly wrong, nothing is going to happen. Many of the maps have limited cover for SI. Various routes involve walking along a road with parked cars and nothing else to help. This gives many of the maps a Death Toll 4 feel -- rubbish for attacking. Throw in the fact that there's lots of unnecessary medkits + pills and they're even easier. Worse still, there are extra medkits in the safe room or immediately outside the safe room most of the time, rendering early attacks pointless.
I'm still convinced the variety in things like shotguns + rifles is largely pointless. More to the point, as with the first game, tier 2 weapons are still too strong. Instead of being auto-shotty biased like L4D1, it's all about the rifles now. 3 or 4 people with AKs shred just about everything. The game is a lot more balanced and challenging with tier 1 weapons.
Tanks get shredded by assault rifles. You can't even throw rocks from afar as they get shot to pieces more or less instantly when rifles are involved. At least in the first game it was an actual distraction to shoot rocks. Valve may have done this to try and force tanks to rush, but rushing on a lot of maps is suicide. Disappointingly, teams can still set tanks on fire when they're AI controlled if the tank gets a poor spawn, plus many tank spawns involve the tank being cut off by a doorway or something similar, meaning you either lose control or get set on fire instantly. This wouldn't be so bad if the choke points let the SI spawn, but you usually end up with 4 survivors in a room blocking all the spawn points.
I'm getting somewhat irked by the ineffective combinations of SI, too. There are many critical points where you need a charger in particular, but you may not get one. Worse still, you end up with a smoker and jockey in enclosed spaces where you need a charger, boomer and spitter. This is really annoying. In L4D1 the main gripe was that you didn't get a smoker at critical moments. This problem has now been exacerbated by the variety of SI in L4D2. I guess this was somewhat unavoidable.
Oh and the characters are still boring me. I found the original game's characters a lot more interesting/amusing ("attention all boat owners: We are the boat cops! We command you to pick us up!"). Regardless of the new narrative (which makes versus feel a bit weird) and linked maps, I've yet to come to really like any of the characters other than Coach, and that's because he's a one man cheeseburger apocalypse.
What do I really like? The charger is awesome for splitting teams up, the Jockey is a funny fucker, 4v4 matchmaking is very good, zombies + frying pans = good combination. The rolling crescendos are much better than the old cupboard fest. It's generally easier to wipe teams and the scoring is better, though not necessarily fair (almost won a game yesterday despite getting owned on for most of it solely because I wiped them as tank on the finale -- we ended up losing by 50 points or so).
I fully realise that I'm excessively critical because of how much love I have for the first game, btw. I just expected better.
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Small, incremental goals help. They help me focus and break up the day.
"I want to complete task x before I take a break"
I always used to find it really easy to get overly excited at the beginning of a project, then find myself exhausted and somewhat aimless after the initial, giddy design phase had passed. Structure is your friend
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PC: 1 & 2
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They should have a motorbike with a raptor riding in the sidecar
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What we need is Fisheye!.
It's hella cool. Unfortunately you need to render the scene five times per frame to make this work, so it's only viable for old games.
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It should be a well known problem. Play through Half-Life 2 and you'll notice that when you get in vehicles, the fov is dynamically increased by something like 15. This isn't like a GoW running effect which is stylised, it's done to reduce nausea. A selection of Valve's testers felt nauseous or even threw up when playing through the vehicle sections. The combination of low fov + high speed compounds the problem.
It's not fair to assert in a blanket fashion that it's "someone's own fault" for feeling sick while playing a game. You may end up with extreme cases where the person is far outside the region of tolerance of others and that's fair enough, but it's up to the developers to ensure that a wide spectrum of gamers can play the title without feeling sick.
I used to play TFC with 110 fov and I know people who played with 120 and beyond. IMO anything below 80 in a fast-paced game is asking for trouble -- it just feels 'wrong' to me. I get a much nicer sense of speed with a higher fov
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Uh, my friends and I played a couple of campaigns on advanced and made it without dying or getting incapped much either -- it's not hard. So, either the 360 version is buggered or their review is way off kilter.
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Positives
I'm thoroughly enjoying the game when I can actually play it. The sense of urgency and a need to move forward now exists in a way that the original lacked. The best thing is that you are no longer safe in any area. I'd say outside is still the most vulnerable place to be, but inside you have chargers and spitters to contend with. One charger can skittle your whole team in a tight corridor which means no more dicking around and spending a lot of time thinking. You have to stick together and move quickly, while also balancing the need to move forward with the need to scavenge for items.
In short, it's pressure pressure pressure!
The scoring is much more straightforward and easily graspable, too. While I'd argue it is an improvement, my only quibble is that you don't get much of a completion bonus. I.e. the scoring is improved, but I think they may have gone a little too far in making it almost purely distance based.
Negatives
[*:17eksmkm]There's still a lot of lobby/server issues to be ironed out. I'm really disappointed by this, particularly because the first game had almost the same issues, yet these mistakes have been repeated and, in some cases, made worse (local hosting is now unannounced... fail).[*:17eksmkm]Various bugs such as the "I'm stuck in geometry" one after a charger slam. This is a game breaker -- if can easily cost you one of your team, and once that person is dead, it is much harder to proceed with 3.
[*:17eksmkm]I personally think some of the new levels lack an easily identifiable path to the goal. In the first one, you nearly always knew where you were meant to be heading as all of the levels were dark and they showed the path via lighting. Alright, the sequel is definitely less linear thus making the problem harder to solve, but I still lose my bearings and start running in the wrong direction a lot of the time.
[*:17eksmkm]There's multiple weapons that feel much the same. Unless I'm missing something and they are actually different, I would've rather they just consolidated the similar guns into one gun model to avoid confusing players. E.g. there's a couple of auto shotties and assault rifles that are extremely similar. Am I wrong here or are they noticeably different? Despite people bitching, I felt the first game's simple "shotgun/smg" + "assault rifle/auto shotty" choices were simple and to the point. They were distinct and the differences were obvious. Now it's a case of a lot of shades of grey with no intuitive feel of each weapon's strengths and weaknesses.
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That ain't got sort it in an online game because it requires sv_cheats. The best way to get freed is to get charged or hit by some other special infected -- that sometimes frees the character.
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haha dux, I was just about to post the exact same Word quote
It's a really good read. Especially this bit (after struggling to get the game marketed properly for ages):
QuoteJanuary royalty check came in at $56,000. I’m still in a daze. That’s the whole next year paid for right there. I guess now I can stop worrying about money.
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It's really difficult to get a good server right now, plus they've removed the sound you used to hear if it was starting up a local server. We just started up about 20 versus games tonight and half of them resulted in a local server being used (1500 ping + instant quits from all concerned). There's nothing like starting up a level (takes a few minutes) only to find it's a local server, then repeat the process another 10 times before you get something non-shit.
Hopefully once the post-rush settles down there'll be better servers, but this is like early L4D days all over again if you ask me. The lobby system was and still is not good enough.
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Hah holy shit, this topic got moving. I finally got some spare time and purchased, and I'm loving L4D2 so far.
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Congrats folks!
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Bah I got jumped! I thought it was out next week. Gonna have to buy it now
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Aye right. Read the boycotters' "manifesto" and it's the same old shite.
*edit -- I don't really see how much has changed or why people need to be in that group. It's still the same jumped-up outrage-over-nothing, as far as I'm concerned. Valve released a two stage versus map and a few updates; none of this is out of the ordinary or any different to the way Valve has or will be doing things with their games in terms of post-release updates.
Even if the original founders of the group closed it, does anyone actually think for a second that the results of the group's "campaign" changed anything of note, or that the mob of purportedly enraged gamers were placated by the outcome? It's exactly the same as the MW2 group. Process = Whine => Join group boycotting sequel => Buy sequel anyway. Rinse repeat. Do people even know what "boycott" means?
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I called this a long time ago -- it was inevitable. Following on from those funny MW2 screenshots, here's another fine example of silly gamers. Now, due to all of the incessant drum banging that went on for the last six months, you'd think this lot were nobly standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, appealing for world peace. Instead, they were displaying faux outrage at Valve releasing another excellent game.
Anyway, enough words, more funnies. This is the second page of the L4D2 boycott steam group and probably 1/3 of the people on that page have bought the game. I mean, I didn't even have to try to get a good picture
[Blocked Image: http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/7780/boycottfail.png]
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Frie: I tend to order my planned purchases via play.com. I browse in shops and make the odd impulse purchase, but that's about it
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Quote from Seldoon182
lol. I called it with L4D2 and this is absolutely no different. That's hilarious.
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It looks neater and possibly does do a little good, but it's a fairly pointless optimisation. As Chris said, there's little point in spending any time worrying about low-level optimisations. If I can't measure the difference, I don't care.
Besides, it always used to really annoy me when I was resizing brushes and forgot the corner was mitred. IMO you get far more bang for your buck if you do high level visibility sanity checking early on, then do a func_detail / hint brush / LOD pass as you reach the end of development.
I had very similar results to stepp on an optimisation pass using the exact same tool, and none of the significant improvements were down to mitring.
