Thrik

It looks good, I really hope they can nail it. Doing the assassination side-missions in MGS5 has really given me a taste for this kind of thing, but you have to get the systems and AI just right or stealthy games feel like the worst thing ever.

Naughty Dog's tech is consistently incredible, also it's so nice to have a game that is genuinely witty. One thing that seems to be consistent with most games writers is that they're not funny.

Omg. I was just thinking it's time to replay them too. I'd better finish The Last Of Us first...

It's so good, UC2 is still one of the finest titles of the past 10 years for me. Give it a go from the first game, but there's such a big jump in quality between it and UC2 that if it starts feeling grindy then just read a plot summary and skip to the fabulous UC2.

jesus christ jesus christ jesus christ!!!!!!!!!!

It looks great but I just can't muster the excitement after waiting for it since... 2007? It doesn't even look like it's progressed much from the footage we saw before, making me think the project must have been on ice for years while the developers did other things, or maybe it was done with a skeleton staff. Very strange. Undoubtedly it will delight though, even if it's already starting to show its age. Hopefully that won't put people off of trying what will probably be quite an emotionally stirring journey.

jesus christ

Looks excellent, hope they make full use of the varied environments Star Wars has to offer though, and big maps please.

yes

Nothing wrong with asking. I'll be handling the MapCore swag and there isn't budget to dole out separate pieces for each team member sadly, FMPONE would have to confirm but I expect that the same goes for Valve's contribution. The swag is sold at the same baseline price I pay though, there's no profit unless you go for the donation edition — so teams could always use a bit of that prize money to get some swag.

What a wonderful actor and person. So sad to see him go.

Just noting that MapCore has a playtesting server (not specific to this contest) that runs sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays. See the thread here:

Yeah I'm not sure what you mean by fat because she looks pretty damn toned to me, and I don't see what her appearance has to do with her views on gender — but she definitely seems more Caucasian compared to her previous depictions. Considering the current climate in the industry surrounding diversity and such, it's a very curious change to make. Of course, maybe it's just the artwork. Remember when everyone was saying Far Cry 4 was racist because they thought the box art depicted a white man? (It didn't.) Anyway, whatever. The game still seems like it'll be hot.

I don't remember what they were to be honest, but if the functionality isn't there then maybe some things can be re-introduced as plug-ins if they exist. It would definitely require a lot of coding to develop manually.

​Sadly the old shortcuts aren't present, but you can get to some information in other ways. For example, searching members and sorting by reputation. I've also seen a way of searching by popular posts somewhere. ​I've very occasionally had this, I assume it's some scripting going belly up. The forum does seem to use local storage to retain posts even when such screw-ups occur, so usually if you refresh your post survives (in fact I've come back the next day and it's still there). Hopefully the next maintenance patch will help. ​I think I'm soon going to empty all signatures (they seem to be broken beyond repair) and then re-enable them with text only. This will allow simple signatures for linking to portfolios and providing contact information, without slowing everything down and/or taking up lots of space.

I don't think that Readability is particularly optimised for forum parsing, I just tried three leading types of forum software with it and it came up with nothing useful for all of them. It looks like it was just about able to parse the previous version of this software, but in all honesty I think that was a fluke because the current version does make more correct use of accessibility attributes, tags, etc. Maybe Readibility just has a certain formula/pattern of markup that it 'likes'.

Drinks are all on knj.

Yeah, seems wise to me to do testing with the map in a basic state so you can make big gameplay changes if needed to keep it fun. That's one of the most useful parts of having playtest events with fellow designers, they don't care if it looks all greybox.

Wow, those new prize levels. Hot rewards for mapping, which is great fun anyway! It's making me want to dust off Hammer and create a CS:GO successor to my much-loved classic from the early 2000s.

There are a few issues with signatures, including the fact that they bulk out the mobile layout even more and also many signatures' formatting was broken by the update. It's not so much that they're super low-priority — although they are lower than some things — but it's just quite a bit of work to get them working. What I might have to do is blank all signatures and start again, with a limit on size and I'm not sure if images should be permitted. Although whatever I do, signatures can be turned off by users so I guess that it doesn't matter a huge deal. I'd be interested to know what people generally think of browsing the forum without signatures, because I've never actually asked?

There are bugs with the editor, but again I'm really hoping these will be resolved soon. That's a deep rabbit hole to start messing with myself. That'd be very kind of you. As it happens, I've been looking into setting up a way of allowing people to easily do this and will get some details up soon.

Don't worry I'm not offended, bear in mind I didn't build all of this myself. Some of the things you describe are clearly issues, however because the software is still relatively new there are lots of bugs going through the vendor's bug tracker and being fixed with maintenance releases. For example, I believe one has just come out that I need to schedule time in to install. When it comes to things that seem downright buggy such as the back functionality, I would expect those to be fixed relatively quickly now the software has out been out in the wild for a while, and also I am reporting things that seem like they should be fixed at the software level. There's no harm in letting me know about problems, whatever the case. Regarding the mobile view, I think that we're entering subjective territory here. In my opinion the mobile layout works well in that it retains most functionality without adding very much to the scale of things. There is more scrolling, but in exchange it means that everyday functionality such as 'like' and quoting aren't buried beneath taps like they were before. I also find the text more comfortable to read thanks to the additional leading between lines; it might not be as efficient, but it's better typography. Also, the forum listing is more loaded with content but actually includes things like articles and various other data now, and of course the articles themselves barely worked with the previous layout. Speed is something I've noticed, although it is an inevitable side-effect of now streaming all of the JavaScript, avatars, attachments, etc that were often just missed out entirely with the previous layout. I have been taking steps to address it a bit at a time, for example we have Varnish caches and potentially with time CDN-served assets. I'm also experimenting with various server-side ways of caching data and layout. I'm not completely dismissing your concerns, there are areas that need improvement; as I say, feel free to share which things specifically are hindering you and I'll do what I can. But overall I would say the mobile experience is a big step forward, as someone who spends at least 50% of my MapCore time using it.

The graphics discussion is potentially endless, but in my opinion once you become accustomed to a certain level of graphics it's difficult to be easily immersed in something that falls short. It's like when you watch a film and the CGI is a bit passé, or you play a game that you missed from the last generation (or two). I mean, if gameplay were the only factor why bother making assets better than PlayStation 2 levels, right? Obviously such a step back would be widely considered unacceptable — but the same exists on a more micro scale too. Of course, I did say that I like the visuals.

I've updated the configuration of buttons for all screen sizes now. It's no longer possible to fit any more on without some proper messing around, so BBCode will be needed for additional functionality. To fit the font formatting onto tablet-size, I've had to take away the (very rarely used) alignment options.