Thrik

Jesus Christ. I never actually got past the first couple of bosses in the original, so I might finally get to enjoy this apparent masterpiece.  

Oh yeah. Some games like Uncharted 4 are just beauty to look at in terms of faces. It's definitely not so slick across the board though.

That is absolutely superb. Uncanny how well such an old game captured their likenesses too. How is it games so much newer and better still struggle to make faces look as natural as HL2 did?! In some cases HL2 actually looks like a photo:

Yeah... I mean when you put it like that no wonder people are attracted to such a life. It's easy to disparage such behaviour when you're attracted to it in relatively cushy European countries, etc. But when it's somewhere where the options are so bad why not enjoy some years of exciting but extremely dangerous lifestyle. What a raw deal to end up born in those favelas.  

Sounds pretty sobering. Even in this modern world of communication and news it's still impossible for me to imagine myself being in a situation like that. I seriously can't fathom how I'd cope with such a lifestyle, which I guess is exactly what you'd expect some developer living in England to say, but it does genuinely play on my mind sometimes when you see the outrageously bad conditions some people are living in and here we are acting like some piece of code or website is the most important thing ever. But what can you do? Aside from donating to charities I guess, which I do but it feels like a drop in an ocean. Bad stuff man.  

Wonderful to hear that everything worked out! You'll have such a good set-up for multiplayer in a few years.

Oh boy. I really need to get around to playing Dishonored 2. I loved the original and hope to see the return of some rats.  

Weird. The forum does preserve formatting if you paste text, however a 'Pasted as rich text. Paste as plain text instead' link should appear in the editor. Does that appear if you scroll down? If not, I guess that is another bug I should raise.

I'll PM you in relation to the theme.

3 hours ago, [HP] said:

Yeah, pretty much the same story for me. It made me want to be a level designer, then it rolled off to environment art.

Kind of crazy how a video game could change my life this much, for the better. I remember playing MP1 over, and over and over again, one day I was so bored I started reading the game's manual, in the very last page there was a little section called "Modding", I remember like it was yesterday, reading that little paragraph saying if I wanted more Max Payne I could hop online and get other people's content and even make my own. I got on a bus to the nearest cyber-cafe, carrying with me an old CD-RW that was rewritten a hundred times already, I couldn't afford internet at home so that turned into my routine for the months to come, we take it for granted now but man having the chance to socialize with people with the same passion for a game and mods was extremly liberating and enabling for me. Which btw, eventually in the search for more games I could mod, I found Mapcore. 

Max Payne still has one of the best ambiance work I've ever seen in a video game, the balance between the story, design, art and music was nailed to perfection. It made me realize a video game can be way more than just  running in boring corridors killing mindless mean dudes on the screen, they can immerse you and help better your life,  I've been trying to recreate that with my art, ever since.

I liked to shoot f**kas in bullet time.

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In all seriousness it really inspired me too. I remember getting MaxED and after about 20 minutes concluded this industry is not for me. Thankfully I then discovered the joys of Day of Defeat and HL engine mapping and so began countless teenage hours of building technically sound and pretty maps that were a pile of hell to play. In the end I decided to just go for a design job because then it just needed to look nice.  

God these games' graphics blew my mind back in the day. It's incredible taking a look back (for the first time in my case) and seeing how much we've come on. In my memory they were still looking like CryEngine 10 or something.

I mean, those guys just sound like assholes @Tisky. Sounds like you aren't particularly close so you're better off having nothing to do with people who make you feel negative like that. If something isn't bringing positivity to your life then it's not something worth investing any energy into at all.

Not sure what your broader situation is, but you seem pretty unhappy. I've certainly been there and know the value of change. Is your town, job, general routine making you feel low? Change one or all of those things as a matter of priority. Variety truly is the spice of life, and it can be so liberating shedding the status quo and making new friends through a new job, etc. Screw the place you've invested time into if it's not doing it for you.

If your ex is forcing a dramatic change in terms of your children, have you considered mixing things up yourself and going and living somewhere closer? Doesn't have to be the same town, but maybe getting the hell away from what you're currently dealing with is a possibility. I guess it depends on how much time you spend doing things in your current area that you couldn't live without.

Of course there might be deeper issues like depression to contend with, and those won't go away no matter the circumstances I described above and definitely should be dealt with properly. However, general dissatisfaction with your lifestyle makes it all so much harder.

I quite enjoyed getting nostalgic with this video that some obsessed rather dedicated person has put together showing a live overhead map of the routes of Gordan, Barney, and Adrian in addition to a feed of each.

Maybe this got posted in some other thread but we could use more of them anyway?!

My god it exists

I would so stand in that unlit porch and silently stare at passers-by.

I know that scene got criticised for being a bit contrived but man was it satisfying. ?

Looks great! Evokes memories of GTA5 actually, driving one of those big-ass vehicles around with the wind farm nearby.  

Takes me right back to when I visited Normandy (a completely different place but... you know). ?

I took your point about the 'Our Picks' widget being a bit big, especially on mobile. I've hidden some of the less essential information in it which I hope makes it more palatable. While more substantial changes can be done to make to possible to hide it altogether, that would require diving into the templates and potentially custom JS as it's not native functionality, and as Sprony indicates we're trying to avoid doing that as much as possible because it makes updates (which love to occasionally require resetting your templates) very difficult. So essentially it's CSS-based tweaks instead.

The dark theme requests make sense and I'll look into it once we've finished fine-tuning this update. Granted we've never had this and I don't think the forum is any brighter than it's ever been, but it's becoming a popular feature these days so I can look at doing this in a way that again is as easy as possible to maintain. The forum has robust tools for customising the colour scheme on top of a single theme, however it does fall apart a bit once you add custom templates and/or third-party plugins into the mix, hence again us trying to minimise use of those.

Some work has been underway on that, actually we had it enabled for a while last year but I had to disable it because mysteriously people in various regions couldn't access the site. We've also had other issues when I've tried to implement it since (content in posts not loading, asset problems, redirection loops). I need to do some further research and work into a successful migration because the forum software has various quirks that make implementing it less straightforward than one might expect. But it is on the 'roadmap'!

I feel like this might be one of those games where the trailer is a more resonant experience than the game itself. From what I saw they've been showing it at artsy events and I must admit I really enjoyed watching it — mostly because of the thought-provoking visuals and impressiveness of scale. But I suspect that like the closest examples I can think of (Spore, Flower), it'll end up being a sweet sandbox toy that doesn't last for very long. But hey, if it's cheap then why not?

I thought that the animation was so funky as a way of limiting costs, seeing as this is a team of two developers (plus sound people) and obviously movement animation can be really time-consuming. But apparently it's riffing off of this weirdness:

According to CloudFlare MapCore is OK. In their words:

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Fortunately, your domain is not one of the domains where we have discovered exposed data in any third party caches. The bug has been patched so it is no longer leaking data. However, we continue to work with these caches to review their records and help them purge any exposed data we find. If we discover any data leaked about your domains during this search, we will reach out to you directly and provide you full details of what we have found.

As a matter of caution it's probably wise to consider changing passwords if you use the same one on multiple websites — CloudFlare is used by a huge chunk of the internet so as far as internet screw-ups go this is a pretty big one.

If you really want to use the same password on different sites, I recommend 'salting' it with a character or few unique to that website's name/address. That way you're more protected from things like this.

While CloudFlare provides benefits my confidence in it is pretty damaged by this, so I'll be looking into migrating off of it. Thankfully MapCore doesn't use most of its features, which potentially contributes to us being unaffected.

This game really brings home the futility of war...

These GIFs are amazing. I'm going to absolutely devour this game upon its final release. I love the feeling of a new Battlefield game when everyone is still pretty unfamiliar with the levels including myself. Always feels more immersive to me when I don't know where the hell I'm going and I just follow the chaos.  

Well we clearly disagree but that's a tangent really so no need to dwell on it. Anyway, glad your mapping is coming along! Be sure to get a post in the 3D forum once you're ready to get some of that all-important feedback.