Posts by Sentura

  • What have you purchased recently?

    Quote from DUFFY

    [Blocked Image: http://www.hickorees.com/images/ConverseRubberBoots_L1.jpg][Blocked Image: http://www.hickorees.com/images/ConverseRubberBoots_L4.jpg]

    1950s Converse Leather & Rubber Hunting Boots

    after looking really hard for a vintage hunting/work/service boot and finding nothing these babies land right in my lap in the perfect size. 100% better than any of the other shit I came across.

    [Blocked Image: http://www.blackbirdballard.com/Images/Products/41487_1.jpg]

    These are pretty sexy too...but sold out

    the first ones look pretty bad, but much love for the second ones. what are those called? they look bitchin

  • What have you purchased recently?

    Quote from Rick_D

    my old pc had an asus nforce along with an nvidia card i can;t remember the model of.every 50 or so reboots it stops working, you have take out the ram, start it up, turn it off, replace the ram, and then it continues working.

    what a farce

    mine's never had that. the only reason my stopped working was because i installed some bullshit beta software. no I/O from keyboard or mice

  • What have you purchased recently?

    Quote from Minotauro

    I actually have a decent gigabyte motherboard that should run this card with no problem. This problem is so specific and rare that neither XFX or gigabyte ever cared to make a fix for it or even make it public

    Anyways, do you guys have any recommendations? I'm a cheap guy and I don't want to overclock anything so anything with a PCI 2.0 slot is gonna do it.

    asus is a good choice..

    The funny thing is that this problem is even more common with Asus motherboards than with gigabyte ones. More about it.

    maybe try and get one with an nforce chipset (i know they stopped producing them, but nvidia's chipset work flawlessly with their gfx)

  • Level Design Books

    well what do you know, i never expected this from you ricky. good on you for actually bothering with this!

    i may have gotten too far ahead of myself when i said that immersion was measurable. it is measurable in the sense that you can tell whether or not a person is immersed, but there are no degrees of immersion.

    Quote

    the best you can do to learn, is to take somethign you enjoy playing, be it fps, rpg, platformer, whatever, get a game that has mod tools, and experiment by doing, learn to use the tools, learn what makes a fun experience for you, get others to play it and learn how they felt about it.

    Quote

    saying that fun is not important and that you should focus on trying to be some artsy ponce making braid all over again is a waste of everyones' time and doesn't help the OP who wanted to know what to do next. and frankly there's books out there that don'ty really explain shit. you are better off learnign by doing, getting a job as a junior, and learning from others with more experience. some of the best level designers and artists have never written a book in their lives.

    i agree to an extent, although there are certain concepts i know i learned myself from reading about level design (especially from the valve developer wiki). i did, however, not consider the OP's statement or request when writing what i wrote about immersion; it was solely to counter the point that chris brought up.

    Quote

    i will not argue that psychology of human beings is not important in level design. i think it is important to understand that peopel do certain things when they are under pressure, to know the kinds of patterns our brains are receptive to, and the type of imagery that we are repelled by. but it is a vitally important step to simply create little arenas of gameplay to find out how to do things, what is actually enjoyable (a far better word that combines both fun and immersion ) and how to guarantee you can recreate certain feelings and experiences in different situations.

    i would actually argue that once you get into the state of immersion, your level of involvement is so high that practically anything will be enjoyable. why? because with each step the player will take by then, he or she knows that he or she is crucial to putting an end to whatever struggle there might be in a game. there are of course restrictions to this, and the breaking of immersion could essentially destroy a game's potential. my point with my previous statement was that immersion is a state of mind that puts the player inside of the game. it is no longer 'just a game' when you reach that point, it is a second world.

  • What have you purchased recently?

    Quote from Skjalg

    My entry position came with a 45K euro salary and now after a year its 48K euros. I get a raise in march tho, so I'm hoping to pass the 50K mark.

    But, I'd MUCH rather be programming a game. Life is too short to make JTable's and JComboboxes only to have some weird Swing bug fuck your program up randomly.

    my word, i wouldn't go back to java for double that salary. C# is a minimum requirement for me!

  • Level Design Books

    Quote from Rick_D

    basically, you talk a lot of shit for someone who has never had to actually deal with the day to day implementation of gameplay.

    basically you don't know what i'm talking about then =)

    not that i'm surprised...

  • Level Design Books

    Quote from FrieChamp

    Have you read "A theory of fun" by Raph Koster? I'm sure you'd get a kick out of it! Seriously though, no design team on earth would waste a minute of production time in a meeting discussing these things, nor is it going to help the OP find a good book about level-design...

    haven't read it, but i'll put it on my to do list.

    as for the rest, i think you're right. i think no production team discusses this, but i know the best of them have it imprinted in their minds. also, in keeping with the times, i can mention that the movie avatar directly addresses this point,

    Quote

    when the protagonist (can't remember his name, kill me for not paying attention to details) confesses to the tribe of what he has done as a spy for the military. his change of sides was exactly the same as him "getting" the environment, and it was at that point he essentially became the avatar - not at the end of the movie.

  • 2009 in photos

    Quote from Pericolos0

    They are shooting burning white phosphor at civilians, I would call that a pretty horrible war crime considering the kind of burns it causes . That photo really stuck out for me as well

    yet the US and UN have their backs... where is the justice in the world?

  • Level Design Books

    Quote from seir

    For me "Fun" is the sum of all the factors that affect on game receiving by player. It's 100% ture that everyone have different definition and theory of "Fun". Just look at the game scores. If game have score "96/100" it means that I can like it if this is my genre and type of the game that I like. If game receive "75/100" it means that 1 on 4 players didn't like it (didn't get this type of "Fun") and it can be me. Immersion, casuality, genre and all the factors are just factors and sum of it is the final "Fun" from playing. For me...

    my point is that immersion is measurable and attainable by forcing a player's involvement in a game, whereas "fun" isn't. they're two different dimensions. i would bet that after having been immersed in a game, you wouldn't think, "man that was fun"; you'd think, "man that was a good game" or "man that was good". they aren't related, because it's two different kinds of stimuli.

  • Level Design Books

    Quote from 2d-chris

    Designers arent smart, programmers are Anyway level design is mostly about understanding "fun" not being smart.I never said that you can't learn from books, I said you don't have to which is absolutely true.

    how exactly would a level designer go about understanding "fun"? fun is such a subjective wording that is impossible to define as just one thing. one person's fun isn't necessarily another person's fun; and because of this, i disagree with your statement.

    i think immersion plays a larger role in any digital game than any trace of fun has ever done. sure, fun still exists in games. i mean, you play a game of cards or a board game for fun. you may even want to play something digital, such as solitaire or bejeweled for fun.

    however, as soon as you step into a video game, you add an entire world to your repertoire. the player's link to the virtual world, the avatar, becomes the point of interest; because it is this link from which you stimulate the player through his actions in the game world. the second a player has fully realized him or herself as his or her avatar is the point where the player is immersed in the game. from this point on, a number of psychological features will have effect; the main of these being that you feel in tune with your character. you essentially "get" the game; you understand it, and it starts mattering to you.

    i think many designers fail to create environments and characters that work towards the goal in the above statement. they choose to let immersion go in favor of adhering to the fleeting notion of "fun", or other intangible values. this is why their game becomes a virtual solitaire: something that you have so little involvement in that you practically don't care what happens next. whether you die, your teammates or anyone else. whether the world is destroyed or not. you, as a player, will sit there thinking to yourself, "it's just a game". this is not what virtual game design is about.

    this leads me to a couple of questions:

    let's take a look at a few examples: half-life 2, portal, killzone 1, resistance 1.

    would you compare these 4 games to each other in the same category?

    would you think that you got the same experience out of them?

    feel free to answer them (i speak to everyone on the board).

  • 70 minute long video review of Phantom Menace

    i also love how people comment on narrative in depth elements without first knowing the theory behind those elements. i got kinda bored through the first part, haven't watched any of the others yet. apart from the slapstick humor in his verbal dyslexia, what more is there to this?

    EDIT: cross that. the self parody in the second part is a subtle social commentary on ignorant people attempting to review things without the slighest insight into their fields.

  • James Cameron's Avatar

    i was thoroughly impressed. i had been thinking of writing something similar to this, so for me it was really rewarding to watch. i would watch this again and i will probably show this to my children as a moral lesson, that is how good this thing is. also very entertaining.