Posts by Corwin

A guy from where I live got sent to jail for 4 months because he was drunk and took a pee on a video-renting machine, on the street.

My sister's boyfriend knows two guys whose hobby is stealing stuff in stores... One night they built a long stick with parts of brooms and other junk and inserted it into the mail hole of a brand-clothes shop, catching shirts with a hook at the end of the stick. They had already 30 shirts out of the shop when a cop patrol passed in front of their car (they weren't visible from the street with all the cars parked) and since they had left their own headlights on, the cops found that strange and caught them. Nice try!

Thanks a lot everybody, I should have enough stuff to keep me busy for a week. Next thing to do: locate these places on a map!

Thanks guys, I note these ones down. I briefly searched some info on the London Dungeon and it definitely sounds interesting. (Though, if I look for a place to give me the creeps, I might as well visit that metal shop )

BTW, if you know about a good young hostel (cheap) somewhere, please share!

I'll be staying in London for about a week, starting next Tuesday, to visit a friend who's trying to settle there. Since he hasn't been in London for long yet, I don't think he'll be able to play the guide part, and a week can be pretty long if you don't have stuff to do on daytime but sit on your ass at the local pub.

I already went there, but I was like 12 so I don't remember much, if anything at all. So I thought I'd just ask here, as there seems to be many europeans browsing these boards, hoping someone who lives in London or has ever been there can advice me some cool stuff to do, visit, whatever.

Thanks in advance!

There seems to be 2 movies in the making based on this game actually: http://www.payneandredemption.com/

I recently had a drink with a few ex-colleagues, and one of them (a woman) was talking about the fact that all of her sisters and friends were having 2 to 3 children. Each time she had a discussion with them, it was like "So, when is it your turn?". For most people around here, having children is no longer a conscious choice: a fulfilling life can't go without giving birth, does it?

My colleague doesn't want kids for now, she thinks the world is too populated already and if she's gonna have any, she'll prefer adoption. She said she felt strange at family dinners when all of her sisters came along with their 2-3 kids each running & screaming all around, like she's a stranger.

I believe, despite the fact that this example is completely off-topic, that this is a similar thing to the circumcision in America. It's so old traditions that it kind of merged with people's instincts, even though there's no longer any good explanation for doing so. Kind of a demesured fashion: nobody remembers where is came from, but if you're to be "in", you gotta follow the movement.

EDIT: Another example an ex-girlfriend who, being 20 years old, had already decided that she'd marry at 28, and make her 1st children at 28, the second at 30 and the last one at 32, so they're all 18 when she turns 50. I found that pretty depressing. She didn't care who she'd marry or have children with ("whoever happens to be around at that time"), but knew when it would happen and there was no way to argue with that. Her parents had 3 children btw.

Great trailer, the game seems to have A LOT of potential!

I wonder what they do with the millions of skin pieces they chop off. McDonalds?

Quote from Thrik

It has been, but a lot of Americans (Majority?) who get it done these days aren't jewish at all.

Yup, according to this source, only 1,78% of Americans would be jewish. Damn far from 60%, even if these sources aren't 100% valid!

Quote from FrieChamp

But this is not the philosophy of Crytek. It's not about looking at the clientbase of the competition and build a game optimized for their PCs, this is about setting a new benchmark in FPS gaming (and a new franchise), in the footsteps of FarCry (which was quite hardware demanding back in the days as well). You create a great game and people will buy the equipment to run it, or enjoy it on a smaller scale or a few months later. And it's not like you're going to buy the rig for "just for Crysis", equally demanding games will follow its release sooner or later, but somebody has to give it a head start otherwise everybody is just treading on the same spot!

I agree. Crysis is a pretty awaited/hyped game and even if not that much people actually improve their computer to be able to play it, it'll probably push the computer market one step forward in next-gen hardware features.

When 14yrs old Jimmy goes to the supermarket with his father to buy a family computer for Christmas, he'll ask if it supports the latest next-gen games they are buying aswell. If not, he'll sure convince dad to put in 200€ more and have a computer that'll be on top *for years*!

I think games such as and following Crysis will have a similar (even if lesser) effect that all the Vista-Ready stuff has had on the minimal hardware sold in your local store: a small sticker "Next-gen games ready" might not be out of the question, if it doesn't exist yet somewhere.

That being said, I don't know much about hardware and my computer was cheap 3 years ago, so don't beat me too hard!

The only point I really liked in FEAR was all the particles effects/decals/damage animations that made the shootouts look quite impressive.

I found the flashlight running out of battery every 30 seconds or so a real pain, for my eyes and for the immersion.

Scary scenes might be scary, I felt like being tricked by the always dark environments & boo!-little-girl-flashes-in-front-of-you moments.

*Spoiler*

The worst thing is that there are sunrise/noon scenes at the beginning and end of FEAR, and it looked pretty good IMO, I would have appreciated more of such outdoor environments, more windows, etc. More contrast in lighting sources etc. and not just between plain black shadows and white industrial lamps.

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for a starter I believe my book helps heaps to better understand level design and the reasoning behind things.

Definitely see your point, reading this a few years ago would have surely been more profitable to me.

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With 55000 words I surely believe there are some errors, but I cant agree that its full of errors, and certainly not simple typos Word would have found. Believe me, if it were that simple I would have noticed them.I just scrolled through the entire thing and the only words marked are gameplay, teleporter, etc.

I seem to remember there were a whole bunch of them, but it was far ago, and I just flipped through the book and was unable to find any error. I guess my comment was exagerated, since I can't find any example, it probably means there aren't so many of them after all. Nevermind!

I've read this book a few months ago and even though there are some nice parts in it, I felt like it didn't go deep enough in the subjects it raised. Some subjects were repeated many times and explained in depth while others, as important if not more, were talked about in a single paragraph: "This concept is very important to make your levels interesting, for example this is bad and this is good. The end." (Exaggerated of course)

Obviously you weren't aiming for a book of the size of the Encyclopædia Britannica, so it's understandable why you couldn't treat every subject with the same dedication, but still, I found some chapters of the book to be pretty deceiving, in that they did little more than citing some level-design related features and then passed on to something else. It was a good introduction to level-design, no doubt with that, but I was expecting to find something more. I might have been misled by the name though, and by the fact that I'm generally more interested in reading about gameplay than visuals and that the latter was more important than the former in your book.

Also, even though I can't say it was THAT disturbing, I have found it to contain a lot of typos, missing words etc. and even though these can also be found in the latest Stephen King best-seller, I have found these mistakes to be very regular in your book, and those that I knew MS Word would have pointed out for you ended up irritating me a little bit. I'm in no way a writer, but I read a lot and expect these mistakes to be limited when I buy a book of this kind (more expensive than my summer polar I mean.)

I'm sorry if my post seems like I hated your book: it's not the case. On the positive side, I think you raised some very interested points, such as the references to photo composition, which I had never read about in any level-design/game-design book I read. I just felt like pointing out the things that annoyed me in the book, but I still keep it as a whole in good esteem. I read that you were working on another one, so good luck with it!

I like the outdoor shots (reminds me of one of the Deus Ex levels) but not the indoor ones. These rooms do contain some detail, but placed strictly against the walls, making them look too empty and somehow disproportionated to me, especially in the third shot (feels like a pretty large room for only a few shelves and washing machines.) The textures and objects in that shot feel right, it's just about the placement & size of the scene I think.