Posts by Psy

I would care if Game and Gamestation bothered to stock PC games other than 3 for £5 offers, the Sims and WoW.

Okay, okay. Another question regarding UV mapping but this time...a chamfered box!

[Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12589538/box1.jpg]

Now what would the easiest and quickest method to unwrap it like so?

[Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12589538/box2.png]

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":syl6w4y5]It's gonna be dificult for us living in germany to find the uncesored version tho! :Xhttp://gamerant.com/call-of-duty-black- ... pen-49626/

I really don't want to fire up utorrent for this, I havent downloaded a game for years now! I am willing to pay for this game, but not for a chopped version! I mean:

• A scene where an enemy is shot in slow motion with copious amounts of gore has been toned down for the German release.• A torture scene involving a prisoner has been completely eliminated from the German version.

• The song “Sympathy for the Devil”, made famous by the Rolling Stones, has been removed.

• No explosions that lead to limb loss.

• Removal of what Germany deems ‘anti-constitutional symbols’.

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wat

Ahah! That's super useful. Thanks for the help.

Whenever I attempt to cylindrically map this pillar this happens...

[Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12589538/3dsmax.PNG]

How come middle section is off-set slightly and how would I fix it?

I want the faces of 1 to be in place of 2 without me having to manually break the faces off, move them across, them reattach them.

[Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12589538/3dsmax-2.png]

I find it kind of depressing how I've only played a few new games this year; BFBC2, Pokemon and Worms Reloaded. :X

Quote from 3Dnj

Ho ! And congrats for the contest, i hope I'll found some time for the next

Ah. It's a good thing you did!

Anyway, I've updated my port so it has a less generic colour scheme and looks a lot cleaner.

Youme emailed Robin about his concerns over the pricing of levels ($3000) compared to items.

Quote from Robin Walker

We’re actually very concerned about this, and getting level designers fully into the economy is actually the highest priority thing we’re working on right now. We’ve got a bunch of ideas for how we’re going to do it, and we think you guys will be happy to see them. The solutions we’re kicking around will all handle the case where maps are being produced by collaborations of people, like you [Youme] and Alex.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

[Blocked Image: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41XuACjaD6L._SL500_AA300_.jpg]

Awesome, awesome show.

Congrats. I hope you have better contact with Valve than I ever did.

Unfortunately, Rob's right. Even though IE is a huge pain in the arse you can fix your site using conditional css and HTML so that you can get the site working properly in IE but still have it remain the same in anything else.

For instance, you could add this to the head of your html.

So if the browser is IE it'll load up that stylesheet in addition to your normal stylesheet. Then, for the empty IE stylesheet, you can start to add the classes which are causing issues and tweak them until the site at least looks functional.

Congrats on your success!

Quote from dux

Well how many MAC address can there be? I thought there was only one.

Oh, silly me. You want a Migration Authorisation Code not a Media Access Control address. Two completely different things. Gotta love dem acronyms.

Heh. I'm 99% sure that the MAC address they want is not the one assigned to your router or network adapters.

Fantastic work.

There's an interesting article on the Guardian about this here and I also found a interesting insight in the comment section.

Quote from CodeMan

I used to work on APB too, and I thought I'd add a few things. (Disclaimer: Everything I say is my personal opinion based on observations from my point of view and may not be 100% correct.)Regarding development, there were several reasons why development was extremely slow and we often failed to work on things that made sense.

First of all, we did all the important stuff last. If you want people to play your game, customization should be secondary. Why did we have customizable cars, a music editor, and customizable death tunes before we had a game?

The fact is, we made a huge, slow system with no game design, and subsequently tried to experiment with different designs on this monstrosity, while under time pressure to finish the game. We would spend significant time implementing a game design, realize that it didn't work, and subsequently change it. I don't know off the top of my head what would have been the best way to iterate on different designs, but the way we did it feels to me like the worst possible way.

The UI was changed at least a dozen times in the course of the project. They kept changing their minds whether or not they wanted health bars, stamina bars, a radar, a map, and so on.

People complain about the simplicity of the AI entities, but what they don't know is that much of what they see was added in the last year of development. A year before launch, you couldn't even kill the living city pedestrians. You could literally drive through and walk through them, by design. The original justification was that we don't plan on making GTA, we're making a different kind of game. The so called open world activities, along with notoriety and heat, were added fairly late in the game.

Regarding the failure of APB, we did feel this coming at some level. Personally I began looking for other jobs months before APB launched, and I wasn't the only one. (As a non-EU citizen on a work permit, I'm very much screwed if I lose my job in the UK without a backup plan, so I had to be careful.) Regardless of the success or failure of APB, there was no real plan for what would happen after the launch of APB. Sure, there were some wild ideas thrown about like creating a Zombies district, and suggestions of various patches, but these didn't emerge until a few months before release and were never very well thought through. This sort of thing raised red flags for me that the game wasn't being managed very well; they hadn't even thought about what would happen after they launched!

One often asked question is "How did you guys think you could launch a game with such poor driving and shooting". The fact is, APB had serious performance issues until just a couple months before launch. Bad shooting mechanics, unresponsive driving, and problem that the combat doesn't feel very solid, these were all blamed on the performance. This is understandable, given that at the worst times the client was running at 10-15 fps on the best systems, and the server was running at as low as 3-5 fps on heavy user loads.

I wasn't around for Crackdown, but what I was told was that Crackdown was slow and not fun at all until they optimized it and it became fun. We expected the same for APB: We imagined that the game would feel much smoother once the framerates hit 30 or higher.

When we finally got around to optimizing APB (much later than we should have), optimizations exposed the fact that the combat and driving were still problematic, but at that point it was too late to change anything: We had reached the code-complete stage. Optimization was more or less the last code change we did, and anything other code changes before launch were considered too risky by production.

Did we know the game sucked before launch? Yes and No. There were different mindsets about the company.

Personally, I always felt that the design of the game was lacking. I couldn't imagine how the game would succeed when its only strong point was customization. I did express when I joined why I felt the game design was lacking. I mentioned the bad vehicle handling several times during my time at RTW. Many of us did. But we trusted the experience of the higher-ups, I remember thinking to myself that maybe my negativity is why Dave Jones is a millionaire and I'm not.

One problem leading up to launch was that most people on the team weren't willing to express any negative feelings about the game. In my opinion, there was a great deal of "team spirit", too much perhaps. You see, on the beta forums, there were many players that were very vocal on explaining why the game wasn't fun. Some were extremely constructive. For the most part, these individuals were brutally torn up by the APB fan base and forum moderators. Many threads were closed, and people with negative comments about the game were branded "trolls". Not many brave souls on the team were willing to stand up and agree with these trolls.

At APB and company presentations, management went out and cherry-picked only positive comments from forums to share with the development team. At one such meeting, one team member actually stood up and expressed concerned about the dismissive attitude displayed toward APB's criticism, and received a "don't worry" response. There was a culture of emailing around only positive previews and reviews of the game. I got the feeling that many people were in a state of denial, though the fact that the denial got stronger as the criticism for APB got worse indicated that people were aware at some level that all was not well. At some point it became so blatant that I joked about the similarity to the "Baghdad Bob" situation.

But for the most part, most of us did feel at some level that the game sucked. We knew that some people would love the game for what it is, and we knew that some people would hate it for its design and technical shortcomings. What we didn't know, and what some people in management should have tried to find out, was what percentage of our customers would love it and what percentage would hate it. Instead of doing proper research, management just went by the forums and Youtube comments. However, as you can imagine, these would be a bit biased. People that liked APB would stick around the forums and give praise endlessly, while people that hated it would make their criticisms, get told off for "trolling", and subsequently leave, never posting again. We should have done statistical analysis on how many people like the game, rather than anecdotal or qualitative analysis.

Speaking of market research, another major problem with RTW was that it tried to do EVERYTHING by itself. After breaking apart from Webzen, the feeling was that "We have money, we don't have a publisher breathing down our back, so we can relax and do everything the way we want to." Deciding to use EA as a publisher happened later, and billing was outsourced at the last minute when we discovered we couldn't do that ourselves. Everything else, things like marketing, PR, and customer support, we tried to do ourselves. Management literally didn't think of a proper plan for marketing and advertising until it was too late, which is why so many people had simply never heard of APB when it launched.

PR for the game was ridiculously horrible throughout the project life cycle, probably because we didn't have a PR team. Public misunderstanding about APB ran wild and unchecked, with nobody bothering to address the confusion. For the longest time, RTW never even bothered to tell people that we don't plan on making a 360 version. (How could we? We spent man-months trying to get the memory from around 2.2 GB to under 2 GB so that the game wouldn't crash on 32-bit operating systems. To imagine that we could get it down to the 512 MB available on the XBox 360 without re-engineering the entire codebase is absurd.)

We told people there wouldn't be a subscription, but then announced a payment system that was effectively a subscription for most players (which by the way, many of us inside the company resented as well). Then there was the issue with voice ads which we nevered bothered to tell people about until they discovered it for themselves. Given that the revenue from voice ads is very minimal, this move served no other purpose than to create public discontent just days before launch. Finally, there was the review embargo at launch, which many people saw as a way to sell as many copies of the game before reviews revealed how bad the game was. This was followed by Dave Jones's interview in which he expressed that people had too high expectations of the game and that they were playing wrong, which of course didn't help APB at all.

Regardless of all of this, however, we were all shocked to see MyWorld take the hit for APB's failure, and of course the way the company closed without any real warning was horrid. It's a shame that they never bothered to tell their own employees that they weren't going to have money to pay them.

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I'm scared. Someone hold me.

+1 for the Asus Xonar. I had nothing but crap with my Creative X-Fi card. It would work fine for a few weeks then fuck up so it would start to make random hissing noises and generally cut out on it's own accord.

I'd go with ATi, tbh. Nvidia have been kinda pants lately. :X

You know what's worse then low-res textures? Quoting giant images in a forum over and over again.