Fletch

To follow up on what TWTW was talking about, I read an interview with some of the level designers from Turtle Rock about the design process for CS:S, and they all said they had little to no modeling or texturing input on their levels. They simple requested certain resources while the art team worked to feel the overall "feel" the same across textures, skins, and models. While it's nice to have those skills, they're not really needed to put good quality out. A lot of people still subscribe to the "cult of the new" where they expect every single project to be 100% new content, but all that really does is set the bar unreasonably high and kill off a lot of projects that were fine to begin with.

That looks a hell of a lot more interesting than Ep1 ever looked.

Holy hotness. Not sure about the marble floor (need to see it in action to see what the shader is doing), but the rest looks amazing. This map has come a long way.

OH NOES!!!!

UT is far from dead yet. There are lots of singleplayer projects going on, and the mapping community is still huge. Not compared to what is being put out for 2K3/2K4, which was my whole point. Game communities "die" when their heydey is over, but there will always be the long and steady stream of releases by the diehards.

I saw that yesterday and gave it a whirl. It's fun for about 15 minutes.

If MTV or Sex in the City made people act like that, then video games and movies make people into killers. I refuse to accept that line of logic. People have free will. They choose to behave how they want to behave. If they choose to behave like morons, that is on them and their parents for raising them like that.

Half Life is jsut as dead as Q3 and UT. They're at least one generation ago (about to be two generations). Yeah, some development still goes on, but it's the long tail of the bell curve and will continue to diminish over time. HL has been dead the second HL2 came out. It's not a bad thing. It's not a good thing. It's just the natural progression of game technology. It's still a good starting off point for people to learn to design and code on a more simplistic level before jumping into the modern tech, but there hasn't been any serious development of mods for over a year and a half, and there is no reason to believe that will change. For HL loyalists, there is always the positive way to look at it in the sense that people still develop for Doom and Quake. So people will still probably continue to trickle out stuff for HL for some time. Whether people are around to play it is a different question. Put it another way: If a level is released in the woods and there is no community around to notice, does it make a sound?

The camera/viewable portal functionality is already in Source. It just eats resources like Oprah in a cake shop. They probably just found a way to take that existing tech and make it smoother.

Thats a ignorant and egocentric view because you know as good as i do that millions of kids have horrible parents and there is no way to change this within a short time period. The TV station has a responsibility to make it not even worse for these kids. Question: Do they show this show uncensored in the USA? With tits, fuckscenes and all that? On premium cable it is uncensored. On basic cable syndication it is censored (would be about PG-13ish). As for the responsibility of the media, I don't really think it's the state's duty to enforce morality into the media. It always starts with good intentions and ends up being a slipperly slope to censorship and forced morality. The industry is best served when it self polices. But when the government gets involved to try to be everybody's parent, bad stuff always goes down. Morality gets politicized. Minority views gets squelched. It never ends well. So yeah, if you don't like it don't watch it and don't let your kids watch it. If you want your range of influence to go any farther than that, send a letter to the TV station, complain to the broadcaster, or encourage your friends to boycott. But bitching fromt he sidelines doesn't help.

Thats your opinion about the show. But imagine you were a father. Would you like it when your kids watch it in the evening program? (the same daytime simpsons and comedy shows usualy were on this program) If I had a kid, I'd try to actually be a parent and talk with my kid about what TV is okay and isn't okay for them to watch. The same way I'd take an interest in what video games they were playing to make sure they weren't playing games that were too mature for them. The same way I would make sure they would see movies that were age appropriate. If I were a parent, I wouldn't need somebody else to do my parenting for me. Apparently you do.

Sex in the City is a good show.

JAL: I'd say you have to give a little to get a little. Learn to code. Learn to map. Learn to produce some sort of art asset. Coding would probably be the best start since it will generally be hard to find a coder that wants to work purely off of somebody else's idea.

Mine would be somewhere between and

I'm not going to lock this, but I'll be the nice guy and ask that the rabid hordes not flame this guy to death. Instead, I'll point out the obvious and we can all go back to our day to day lives. Ciraco, you've got nothing and you're asking for everything. Nobody is going to volunteer because as of right now there is only a .000001% chance of return on their investment of time. You don't have a coder, which means you've got nothing. In addition, you don't appear to have any art or level assets. It's great you have a gameplan of the type of team you want to put together, but it really reeks of somebody with no mod exerpience. You don't start off and ask for concept artists. Concept artists are like people with two perfectly good legs but never learned to walk. They don't really contribute much of anything besides BS to give to PHL. Most level designers, modelers, and other artists are perfectly capable of sketching out their own work and usually hate working off of somebody else's design. You're also asking for a web developer even if they don't know how to make websites. See my previous analogy. The scope of your mod is very large and suffers from the "ship it all once" syndrome that a lot of failing mods have. They want all their features, lots of models, lots of maps, and lots of gameplay types all in the first version. Successful mods rarely do this. They usually aim for something small and managable to begin with, perfect the gameplay, and add things as they go. Also, any mention of beta testers when you don't have a single line of code is like asking your neighbor to pick up your mail while you're still trying to find money to go on vacation. The cart is so far ahead of the horse you can't see it. Just being honest because it's my job. As I said, I'm not going to lock this thread in case you want to discuss things. Everybody else, please don't be dicks... too much.

Dude, the President has a mecha. That's all you need in a game.

Nice show off of the cineamatic effects, but i want gameplay damnit. I want to see what the levels are going to look like and how palyer movement looks.

Makes you think that maybe the portal could be used a few different ways in MP...like maybe there is a mode where you always have it and perhaps it is the only weapon...or a mode with normal deathmatch and you pick up a portal weapon and it is only good for a certain # of portals or time limit. Lots of possibilities need to be explored. I'm just having all kinds of fun thinking of ways to use it in MP. Fire a portal at somebody's feet and send them screaming across the level. Trap somebody in an infinite portal loop and blast them away as they helplessly fall from ceiling to floor over and over again. And what happens when you shoot a portal directly at somebody? Do they end up floating in time with Mr Peabody? Imagine Portal CTF. Portaling with the flag could result in an auto-drop (like UT), but you could still do some massive portal invasion into the opponent's base. Some guy is running across the birdge with the flag and you toss a portal right under his feet, making him drop the flag as he fall helplessly back into his own base. You could also add a portal-destroyer gun for defensive purposes. I like concepts like this where the initial mod may not be that fun to play, but the sandbox nature of the feature could lead to some really cool stuff down the road.

It's a neat tech demo, but i want to see what they're real level and game design is going to look like. I do hope it has multiplayer though. Imagine the fun of diving through a wall and popping out from the ceiling above somebody chasing you.

Prey in 1/7th the time.

Moral of the story is that sometimes you need to know when to quit moving the goal posts and just ship the damn thing. I honestly hope they'll think of open sourcing some of the maps/textures/resources if for no other reason than to show aspiring community members some examples of SP design.

First off, let me say that this new art style's milkshake is bringing all the boys to the yard. Hotness. Second, this makes me happy that somebody at Valve understood the value of the TF franchise. It's not supposed to be a hyper realistic military ops game. It's camp. You've got a spy with pills for grenades. You've got engineers building automatic turrets in hallways. You've got someguy with a fucking chaingun on his hip. It's campy fun that buildings on classic stereotypes, so I'm glad they're playing it up. As for FF, I think it will still have a niche market. It has one thing going for it that TF2 won't: the possibility of innovation. TF2, when it comes out, will essentially be locked down. It might get a new map every few months, but the rules and gameplay won't change much. FF provides an outlet for innovation. It has the ability to add new weapons, abilities, classes, and most importantly: custom maps. Part of CS and DoD's success was the fact that the community could actually change the game by getting new levels in. If somebody make a really badass TF2 map, it will be just that. Maybe some servers will give it some play time, but it will never be drafted into official rotation. That same level ported over to FF stands a chance at going into an official rotation into a mod. I think there is value there simply from the vantage point that level designers can keep it alive be co-developing for TF2 and FF. So I hope the FF is able to key in on that. Valve is a lumbering giant. You can't take it down, but you can stay alive with the ability to be nimble and quick changing. But still, TF2 just made me buy Ep2.

I get the feeling we're all going to be standing around for a while looking at each other going "did you buy it yet?" because nobody wants to plop down $15 until we see some reviews.

Does it have decay in it like the PS2 version? Well, no, since the DC version was cancelled.

best of luck with it regardless. Something I think would actually make for an interesting read would be doing case studies on popular levels from multiple genres (SP, DM, Teamplay, etc) to show what does and does not work from a gameplay perspective.