Posts by Beck

Hi guys,

Some of you may be aware of Nysuatro's "Project Failure". He made another blog post about it last night from a level design perspective.

http://nysuatro.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/tool-d…te-failure.html

I'm going to be working with him on this project and it'd be nice to hear what you guys think about it and what you guys might like to see come from this.

In the blog post Robb talks about how a blank canvas can be very daunting. For example, pressing the "New Level" button in a world editor (or similar) will probably show on screen four windows (Perspective, Top, Left, Right), each of which will have an empty grid inside. This is fine for people who already have a level planned out; they would probably start blocking things out and that empty grid starts to fill up pretty quickly. But what if you aren't sure what you want to create or just want a bit of a challenge?

A "New Challenge" button will effectively fill the empty grid for you, placing geometry at random or modifying geometry you place at random. This random geometry could then be a starting point for creating a level. Sure, the layout of the geometry will probably be bad and not make sense within a game world. But the challenge comes from taking that geometry and trying to make it better. You might have blocks which you could turn into buildings, vehicles or hills. You might have dips in the terrain which could be made into rivers, streams, streets or even canyons.

People would be able to gain experience by experimenting with this geometry to see what works best. It could be a great learning tool for people who want to learn how to design a level. They could play with the geometry to figure out what works and what doesn't. They may make a tower too high so players cannot see who is shooting them. They may make a corner too tight in a racing game out of the geometry they've been given. They could get this feedback and then play about with the geometry some more to try and figure it out.

From experimenting and playing what they create in the "New Challenge" mode people will be able to learn about play testing and iterating. Skills which can be used when they come to create their own level. Challenges could also be shared between people (like you guys here!) to see who could create the best level out of a given set of geometry.

It'd be nice to hear what you guys think of this and if you'd be interested in such a button within your world editor of choice.

SR3 is a great game, the co-op is fun too. I see SR3 and GTA4 as different games though. GTA4 is more "serious" whilst SR3 is just crazy. I really enjoyed both. That said the DLC for GTA4 was a massive improvement over the original.

http://www.humblebundle.com/

Includes:

Saints Row: The Third (If you pay above the average)

Darksiders

Metro 2033

Red Faction Armageddon

Company of Heroes

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor.

All redeemable on Steam. This is a steal for all of these games!

This is looking great. It looks a lot easier to manage your city now. I'll probably pick this up as I usually enjoy the Sim City games, even if I do suck at them!

Love the music too. And since a guy who's worked on the game has a moustache so awesome it's worth a purchase on that alone

I found the single player campaign to be really boring in BF3. I only completed it to see the pretty environments and effects. It had some great graphics but the gameplay was boring as hell for me. Battlefield is all about the multiplayer for me.

Does look awesome. I wish I could aim in console FPS's

Quote from Taylor

Now maximum level I’m not really sure what to do. It seems I can get equivalent end-game gear from the three main avenues: kill approximately five million people in World vs. World for badges, run tens of times through the PvE instances where you beat up bosses with 64-bit integer health values and nobody really knows what the hell is going on, or chuck two months of pure grind into the mystic forge with my fingers crossed.

Yeah I was like this at first. So what I'm doing at the moment is just going round to all the zones and clearing them whilst doing the off bit of WvW. I've seen some pretty cool places I missed whilst levelling on my travels.

Though I haven't played in a few weeks since I got bored of just doing that. I'll go back to it eventually, but the end-game doesn't have any long term appeal to me. I don't like to grind the same thing over and over.

Quote from Thrik

And that right there pretty much sums up why I don't play this kind of game.

I've just gone back to Left 4 Dead vs. mode. God I love that game!

Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome. Not a bad mini-series so far! Episode 6 is out now, definitely worth a watch.

I played the one on the Mega Drive quite a bit. I was also too young to really understand what I was doing but I figured some bits out

Love the music and the locations in it though. Keeping my eye out for this

I sometimes listen to this to remind me of my days working as a forklift driver in Shenmue.

My save file got wiped when episode 3 downloaded so I've put off playing it until now. Shall probably complete this over the weekend as I've heard nothing but good things about the finale. Some people have been close to tears apparently! Can't imagine that from a game but we'll see

Maxis really are great with their ambient music.

http://www.ea.com/uk/news/simcit…EWS-twitterfeed

Hey all,

Thought this feature might interest some fellow Mapcorians. You can now view floor plans of over 10,000 buildings across the globe on Google maps.

Quote

Google Maps has featured internal floor plans in its mobile app for a while, but now they're available on your desktop, tooIn total there are over 10,000 floor plans, available in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, the UK, and the US.

http://gizmodo.com/5...dium=socialflow

I had a quick look on Google Maps but couldn't see an option to highlight buildings with floor plans. You have to manually find a building which has had it's floor plan added.

Here's Birmingham Airports floorplan:

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=…004823&t=m&z=18

The airport is pretty simple but some of the other buildings in the screenshot on Gizmodo look quite detailed.

Just thought it might be helpful to some of you

Quote from Mazy

Shenmue is still one of my all time gaming experiences. So good, and so japanese.

It's probably in my top 5. Shame we'll probably never find out how it ends

Congrats on the awesome review scores. Wasn't too interested in this after Far Cry 2, but with scores like this I might pick it up!

It's nice to see reviews before release day too! You guys must be confident about the game too.

Quote from knj

it is lol

hahaha

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Don't care what you say. I fucking love this game.

Quote from PogoP

I was 9 in 1999! Being born in 1990 makes it very easy to remember how old I am... Just gotta add 10 to the current year, then the last 2 digits is my age. BOOM. Maths, baby.

Quote from Psy

I was 8.

You guys are just babies!

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Haha awesome idea for a thread.

Quote from Zyndrome

This weekend was a one-time event that in the end rewarded players with 20 slot bag, exotic and rare gear ... it even dropped precursors for legendary items. But that was for anyone who could ATTEND to the lagfest, with disconnects and login server problems. Anyone who didn't participate got fucked basically, players getting rewarded with items that take considerable effort to get otherwise and flooding the market with said items, making the prices plummet to the earth. The shitstorm is enormous.

Yeah I heard about this. I didn't bother attending since I thought I could just visit the areas later and do the stuff. I thought the only thing I'd miss out on was stuff like intro movies introducing new bosses and enemies.

GW2guru has gone a bit crazy over the chest dropping legendary precursors crashing the price of some of these really expensive items. Had I known such hard to obtain items would have been made easily available I would have at least tried to play >_>

I still play this every so often. There aren't any dungeons until level 30 then there is a new one every 10 levels or something like that

I found levelling up to be a lot of fun. There are a lot of different zones you can go to for each level range and there are plenty of dynamic events going on in each. I basically just go to a zone, pick a direction and just head that way and see what I can find.