Posts by Steppenwolf

Valve added DK2 support for Half Life 2 today. This is like the best shit ever. The game is extremely fun in VR. And that's coming from someone who never even was a huge HL fanboy. The VR just adds so much to the experience. Interacting with life size NPC's, shooting at life size stuff, seeing the huge citadel in the backdrop etc. The dated gfx are no issue at all with the current screen resolution. It looks actualy pretty good.

The biggest surprise is how well it works already despite it being highly experimental. Everything is functional and can be played perfectly fine. I didn't expect fps'es to work well in VR due to motion sickness. I played for around 1 hour straight, only feel a tad dizzy and have a slight headache. No comparison to the Tuscany demo that makes me feel queasy instantly as soon as i move. VR is the future! You heard it here first.

You are right about that. But as much as the internet helps us to get together it also helps idiots to build networks. It's a force for good and for evil. I don't see it moving just in one direction that helps improving the human condition in the bigger picture.

Look at all the Europeans fighting for Islamic State. That wouldn't be possible without internet and propaganda spread via internet either. Or the way how twitter has deteriorated the quality of journalism. Even on more serious news outlets it's all just "some random guy said this or that on twitter. we don't know if its true but we will report on it anyway just in case".

Sounds like it's time you work on your own game Pogo or for a small company.

Me, i still enjoy my job. I started as a level designer when i had my first freelancing gig then moved onto environment art, doing simple props and textures. With more experience the things i got to work on got bigger and more complex. Nowadays i also do weapons and vehicles. Ther's always new challenges ahead. What i like is that i have the time and freedom to learn and experiment with new tools and workflows. I'm also now at the point where i'm something of a senior figure to some of the other artists, helping them with my advice and learning stuff. It's feels a bit strange because no matter how much i've improved my own skills over the years i never can shake the feeling that i have to learn tons more stuff to feel proper confident about myself.

I'm excited about the next couple years because thers lots of cool new tools and intersting things to work on ahead.

Quote from Minos

I kinda see us going in the opposite direction even if we hit some bumps on the way. Internet gives humanity unprecedented access to information and education, which in the long run will generate more "great people", or simply just more people doing the right thing.

That's just a nice vision you have there. In reality internet is full of bigoted shit, conspiracy theories, esoteric crap and people figuring out things to be offended about. The plebs have no interest in scientific or humanistic stuff that's available on the internet. The intellectuals are fascinated by political dogma and sideshows.

Quote from FMPONE

Im losing confidence in our ability to arrive at this kind of a solution. It seems like income inequality is just growing, and government is more and more carrying water for the same businesses it's supposed to regulate. In other words, what were dealing with really resembles unfettered capitalism.

Yea we are steering towards a dystopian future with all the oligarchs ruling our societies instead of the people. I think there will be some second wave communism or fascism eventualy overthrowing this system. And maybe when that is over mankind will look into a brighter future.

This is only a horror scenario in a world of unregulated capitalism. In an ideal world the wealth generated by the robots will be taxed adequately and distributed to the population. Maybe then 20 hour weeks will be the norm and lots of vacation days.

spence, with just 4 layers from a world machine terrain you have: 4x albedo+ 4x normal for sub materials, 1x splat map for layer maks, 1x albedo+1x normal for macro terrain, 2x landscape coordinates (which seem to count aswell for some reason) and you sit at 13 inputs already. Throw in some detail normals, blend mask for sub materials, rougness maps and it gets really tight. Add a fifth layer and you can pretty much forget about any fancy extras. (and i was silly enough to work something out that spits 7 layers from world machine out)

Sure ther's ways with some trickery but that's quite a shitty solution for something so in the face of the player. I don't remember the landscape layering to be so restrictive when i did something similar in cryengine couple years ago. And here i thought epic had catched up with the landscape stuff. I guess ther's a reason why they used meshes for the backdrop mountains in their demo levels. Something tells me their landscape demo is gonna be super hacky aswell, some overlapping terrains, lots of meshes, some complicated material trickery etc.

The landscape system seems to be really fucking hacky. 16 texture inputs limit so realisticaly you get 4 maybe 5 somewhat basic layers out of this for the whole terrain without a lot of trickery/magic. And there doesn't seem to be a way to feed material functions into the landscape layer blend so you have to make your submaterials directly inside the landscape material wtf. So no easy way to switch out sub materials and it's a node mess galore on top of it. I hope Epic releases their landscape demo soon. Want to see what magic they use to get around these limitations.

Kickstarter was a great idea initialy but they are losing so much credibility with money grabbing schemes like this and all that potatoe salad crap. Eventualy people will just lose interest and stop caring altogether. And the ones who will suffer most from this are the small teams who actualy have some good ideas and talent but no budget.

Quote from Pampers

Steppenwolf, look at unreals documentation and then look at their content examples, user created tutorials arent really up to par yet. For terrain you can check out the vehicle game in the game library.

Ah yes good point about the vehicle game. Haven't thought about that. The documentation could be better imo. Ther's lots of different documents for the same topics cross linking each other. It's rather confusing. Wish they had official tutorials for intermediate and advanced level materials. I learn best from step by step videos. The basic tutorials are good at least albeit the guy talks a bit too much and often doesn't get straight to the point.

Yea i'm currently in the same stage of learning UE4. It's a bit of a bumpy ride with ups and downs. That comes mostly from never having worked with Unreal properly i guess. The level design basics are easy to pick up but material system and blueprints can make my head spin. I feel like it takes me way too long to figure out some basic stuff with it when i don't have a tutorial that i can follow step by step. I guess in time it all starts to make sense but the initial learning curve is steep. For instance i try to make a layered material for terrain from world machine right now and that puts me right into a mess of nodes and a plethora of contradicting tutorials from people who are still learning themselfes.

I don't understand this whole f2p plan. Crytek was always such a cutting edge technology driven company. For the best technology and best gfx you need the best people. But i don't see how f2p would tempt anyone to move around half the globe or even within Europe. It's not very interesting from my perspective.

Aweseome. Thx a lot for sharing!

Carmack is a really good speaker. I could never just stand there for two and a half hours and keep talking and talking non-stop.

Agree the plaster makes no sense. Looks like a foreign object. Plaster diffuse is also too bright and the normal map is ugly. But the whole rest of the buildings looks nice.

VR is here to stay now imo. Even should OR, Morpheus etc. flop on the market i think it has inspired enough enthusiast already who will stay on the ball. But i really don't think anymore that 2015 will be the big year for VR as i expected. Ther's just too many things that need to get sorted first.

The real breakthrough will come when ther's small 120hz 4k screens (perhaps one for each eye even, GPU's that can render it comfortable, low latence cable free solution (something that perhaps needs to be invented first), optical solution that adjust with no effort,a fov that's at least close to real life and finaly an augmented reality component to it (see representation of your actual body, ability to switch between real life and VR without having to take the thing off each time). Maybe that will take another 10 years but of course there will be a lot inbetween that will excite those of us who care about it.

So did anyone here order a DK2? I received mine today. Finaly got my VR cherry popped.

I'm feeling a bit ambiguous right now. On the one hand i'm very excited having gotten my first taste of the future on the other hand it was a reality check just how much still needs to be done. For the next generation OR will look and feel like a Atari 2600.

The day started with some trouble to get the thing running but after a bit of research and messing around i finaly got it sorted.

First time walking around in VR felt strange. Made me a bit queasy. I was afraid that i could be one who suffers from motion sickness.

I got my first proper idea of VR when i tried some Cyberspace Ridge demo. Now that was something. I felt it in my belly like actualy riding a rollercoaster. I also knew then that i don't get motion sickness despite of it.

The real highlight of my first day with the Rift was giving Elite: Dangerous a try. The first time looking down on my virtual me, taking a closer look at the instruments, giving the spaceship a spin was a mind bending psychedelic experience. I only know such feelings from tripping balls and lucid dreaming.

Now for the not so good parts:

It became clear to me that VR is probably still a couple years off from becoming a proper consumer experience. The fov is too small, resolution too low, fiddling around with the settings and cables is a pain. It gets hot under the mask. The lenses are very delicate. Get a bit of sweat and grease on it and the experience is spoiled. I find myself cleaning them all the time.

Will keep you up to date with more experiences soon.

Looks awesome man. I think you should go back more closely to your first blockout screenshot. That kinda works as a small park and also has a better composition. You can get away without making cars or anything to bring the streets to life. Maybe put concrete instead of asphalt. That would save you a lot of work.

Yea Zelda is what got my father into TES games. He liked it on DS but his fingers are too big for it so i suggested Oblivion for an adventure on PC. First he was afraid of this sort of game because of his bad motor skills. But starting to play on easy fixed this.

It's fun he played like 2000 hours of Skyrim but occasionaly he still asks me to find his way out of a dungeon.

My father loves (literaly putting thousand of hours into each game):

- Civilization 5

- TES Oblivion & Skyrim

- Anno series

- Total War series

- Mount & Blade

He started gaming only a couple years ago and his motor skills are really bad but that doesn't stop him to enjoy the games. What the old folks lack in skill is compensated by their enthusiasm. They are literaly like little kids enjoying to play video games because it's new to them and they didn't grew up with it. My mom is the same. She's bad at pretty much every game but puts thousands of hours into Mario, Zelda etc.