Posts by Jetsetlemming

That seems WAY too pro to be non-official.

Random speculation: The "emulator" is for XNA-made XBLA games, which are written in C# and ran in .net, a VM. Rather than indie devs picking and choosing platforms, they just release to "Live" and it's on PCs and Xboxes. It'd be a good business move, and not quite so herculean from a technical standpoint.

Quote from Sentura

pretty sure this is how compatability mode is handled in windows today, but that wouldn't require them to run simultaneously. as for 360 games, i doubt it, seeing how difficult it was for people to create a ps2 emulator. hardware is very hard to translate.

PS2 emulation was hard for amateurs working backwards from a complete system. The company that actually built the thing knows a whole lot better how it works and what calls exist that need to be interpreted etc. than fans without insider info.

Yes the decision to use .NET and Java and numerous other controlled, isolated systems is all retarded, and nobody, certainly not Microsoft, knows what they're talking about over your opinion that performance is all that matters, Sentura.

I said "the" performance cost. Of VMs. Not in general performance doesn't matter. Especially for programmers less superleet than you clearly are, managed code like cs and python can offer significantly more performance than something that lets you fuck up as bad, like c++. Automated garbage collection is great, it makes my life way easier

Not perfect, of course. The other day I accidentally left some debug output shit in my data tree management while stress testing the system with 1000 nodes. It shat out 160 50MB .txt files, each 22 lines of around ten million characters, and crashed when it ran out of hard drive space to write to.

Quote from Sentura

it'd be costly to maintain many different vm's at once...

Java and .NET are both VMs, and your browser practically is as well. Compared to natively running code, maybe, but computers are so ridiculous anymore that the performance cost basically doesn't even matter.

A game set in the Appalachian mountain area of the US, with ghosts and stuff, drawing from shattered memories's "player-customized scares" concept. The Appalachian mountains were full of coal and had a rush of people over the last century, but within the last few decades that all collapsed, leaving millions poor and living in mountain towns hundreds of miles from affluence and luxury. The coal industry has been instead replaced with mountaintop removal, literally exploding entire mountains, burying the valleys around them with the rubble, and taking out the ore and moving on. Hundreds of square miles of west virginia alone have been reduced to worthless wasteland.

This part of the world has lots of ghost towns, deep forests, long lonely roads, old steel mills, industrial areas, extreme poverty, etc. that could really serve as good inspiration for atmosphere, imo. Here's Bethlehem Steel, for example:

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They tore it down years and years ago after the american industry collapsed, and replaced it with a football stadium. But if you're getting into paranormal shit, who's to say you can't have a ghost building?

More photographic inspiration:

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/effortpost

Quote from Rick_D

origin is to steam what google+ is to facebook

Maybe I would care more about this analogy if I had more than just family + a few random people on facebook rather than like 70+ people on g+ already (hooray for getting on the new fad bandwagon early!)

Steam's not perfect. Anyone who's ever got disconnected from a l4d game due to the "No steam login" bug will attest to that. But what it gives back, and that, having been the only game in town for years, we've all put hundreds of dollars into it for a game list that is non-transferable to some new competitive program, and all the friend lists, groups, achievements, and history PC gamers have put into Steam, is it REALLY that surprising that people choose "Stick with the established thing we've invested a lot into" vs "This new competitor that so far only seems to offer 'me too'"? I'm willing to buy a game from EA, if they want, and offer a good, speedbump-free service, like Gamersgate and GOG manage. I'm not willing to run Origin, based on what I've read about it.

That ground texture might as well be straight out of TF2, but the character design sure isn't.

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":18o8qvz1]

You give my biggest ups to the team man!

Also tell Ken to shave

I got Arma2 for free from Green Man Gaming the other day, and then didn't bother downloading and installing it because I needed to install their client to do so. I tried impulse once, and never went back to it.

I'm fine with rival DD platforms, but not with additional programs I need to run for them. With Origin, EA wants to be Valve. They want that always running client. I'm not even that ok with Steam always running, because it's a pretty crappy program at times, but all the friends I've got on it manage to salvage it, as well as the friend-related features like being able to right click - join your friends. So I, and I've got the impression basically every other PC gamer, is tapped out with steam. If Origin was a website, not an installed application, that would be acceptable. But having to install more crap that I need to run to play my games is a very annoying prospect.

Quote from csyver

if warner bros had their own exclusive theatres or some warner-specific device to play their movies then your analogy would be correct. whether warner bros or some other company publishes a movie doesn't affect me in any way. this is about convenience.

They used to have dedicated movie theaters, that would only play that studio's films. It was outlawed as un-competitive. :3

STALKER: Call of Pripyat with Swartz Mod and Atmosfear 3.

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I don't really like the depth of field, it makes the crane and stuff in the background look like toys. But god, that sky. It's fantastic.

Quote from Puddy

Been playing New Vegas the last two weeks and enjyoing it... but now I'm completely sick of it. The story and characters are all meh and the main quest is crap. Oh... and it's SO SO ugly. Bethesda did a good job of polishing Fallout 3 when it came to the environments, but New Vegas just falls flat.

I want Skyrim...

Sounds like you need some mods.

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/ ... p?id=35497

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This also adds weather events like sandstorms and stuff, and the sun and its hdr/bloom interacts properly as it passes through clouds, it looks fantastic.

Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah both owned, especially Arx Fatalis (anytime I try to play Dark Messiah anymore it just crashes on me ).

Quote from Mazy

http://www.gametrailers.com/gametrailerstv…ch=2&sd=1Pretty sweet demo, even if it is extremely scripted. You sure are able to take a lot of damage too

Gonna be interesting to see how it turns out as an actual game.

Ken Levine was on the latest Gamers With Jobs podcast, and it's not actually as scripted as it looks. The AI, including Elizabeth, have a bunch of scripted things they can do but how they trigger is dynamic. The game tries to spread them out through the level as you play so that you see the content but it doesn't get all bunched up, and nothing weird happens like Elizabeth trying to talk to you about some random detail in the middle of a firefight. Basically, yeah, there are scripted events, but only the how part, not the when part, so the player keeps his agency.

Edit: Disappointed though to see they've gone with the stupid two weapon system, though. I want my guns to mean something, not be disposable things I drop whenever I need something for the current combat scenario.

So there's a project on SA to make Far Cry 2 moddable, and that reminded me: Man, that Dunia Engine's a nice piece of work. It runs extraordinarily well for me, is fully open world, and looks almost or just as good as Crysis 1 (at least for the settings available on my computer for both games). Doesn't screenshot well, though, unfortunately. The grass self shadowing only really looks good in motion.

Also the fire propagation stuff. So sweet. Not just cool looking, but tactically useful. Like just about every single game session I end up lighting the jungle on fire to cover my tracks running away from guys, or launch a flare towards a distant copse of trees because someone's sniping from it.

Wonder why Ubisoft Montreal never did anything with it past FC2. By giving it a name and pushing it out there they seemed to WANT to. But I haven't heard jack shit since FC2's release. Wiki says it's "heavily modified CryEngine" (GoldSrc to Quake situation?), and it's vegetation, but nothing else, was used in Assassin's Creed. Kinda sad.

Quote from Rick_D

i think it's a shame there wasn't a huge push to get that level of awesomeness on consoles though.

And a drop in resolution to 320x200 to compensate!

Speaking of L4D2, a scrim I participated in drunk off my ass (as well as two other members of my team also inebriated in some manner) about three weeks ago was just uploaded to Youtube. It was a great game full of high level play and totally respectful and appropriate commentary and demeanor.

Quote from Rick_D

but no, FB2 is a fantastic engine and i don't know how much i can say but really it is one of the better engines out there. probably the best. big words but i believe it's true.

Those are pretty big words, I'd figure you'd say Cryengine. Hell, I say Cryengine and I've never actually made anything in it. The effects it pulls off for how well it runs (except the Crysis 2 beta for my PC for some reason) are unmatched.

Although that's really helped along by the lack of competition, I think pretty poorly on UE3, Source, and IDtech5 (Carmack regretting his decisions with this engine before any game using it is even ever released, goddamn man)