Steppenwolf

Crazy good Mark! I've added a couple Substances to my artstation recently that i haven't shown here: https://www.artstation.com/artist/steppenwolf/albums/45013

It's quite an interesting situation with this game. On the one hand it's most likely a big financial success for such a small team and their first game, on the other hand with the mediocre reviews and user backlash it's gonna be a tricky situation for whatever their next project is. I would say the best thing they could do is continue working on the game with some patches that add more gameplay and meaningful content and perhaps release an enhaced edition at some point.

Personaly i'm fully convinced that procedural is the future of art and content creation whether we like it or not. Procedural tools already got their foot in art creation and they are here to stay. Only a question of time that more aspects of the games we play are fundamentally driven by it. And that is not a contradiction. Not long ago i have dismissed using Substance Designer for my materials with a very similar argument. I said the time spent to make a graph i could just aswell keep making it in zbrush/photoshop. I also thought it would hurt me in my integrity as an artist. But the thing is you craft something that is designed to recreate itself into indefinitely variations in the end by putting in a new random seed or moving some slider and that is pretty neat and actualy empowering for various reasons.

Guess we are just waiting for some smart guy to put all the puzzle pieces together. A game that combines elements from Minecraft, the world history thing from Dwarf Fortress and some quests and npc interactions that go beyond simple fetch and grind missions would be pretty awesome. As for proceduraly generated stories, i think we are still in the uncanny valley with that looking at the different chat bots and things that already exist. For games it's more complex then a simple story on a page aswell, since it all has to branch out and still make sense.

Didn't seem to bother all the Minecraft players out there. Probably still gonna take 10-20 years before AI or some neural networks can create a narrative that's difficult to distinguish from something man made. But once it's there i don't think it will take anything away from the experience. It's all a question of quality and depth not how it came to be. Also procedural games being virtualy infinite is just a recent trend. I could imagine there is lot of untapped potential for shorter and more focussed adventures.

Procedural games are still in their baby shoes. We've seen some impressive tech for world generation but the next step needs to be procedural content generation that doesn't feel weird and shallow. I imagine it's only a question of time that someone makes a game as complex as say Skyrim, only that the world, quests, characters, factions etc. get generated afresh everytime you start a new game.

I've watched some leaked streams the other day and tbh the game looks incredibly boring and grindy to me. All i've seen people do is nonstop collect ressources and scan some animals for cash. I've read there is life on every single planet. I don't know what the fun is in this. Feels so shallow if thers instant "reward" for exploration around every corner. I would prefer a game that's mostly empty but where there are some meaningful things to discover if you put the effort in and take risks going deep into hostile territory with no save spots or whatever.

I'm genuinely looking forward to this game. Looks like a lot of fun to me. Reminds me of Street Rod with the car and engine building, which was one of my favourite games on the C64.

Best game ever coming to steam, hopefully. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=651939391

Watch Twin Peaks if you've never seen it.

Watched Stranger Things this week and indeed it was very good.

I'm no expert but the issue might be that you got a version with low ohms. These are for use with smartphones etc.afaik, everything that doesnt have much power output. My Beyerdynamics that i use on the PC have 250 ohms and the loudness is just right. Audiophiles use headphones with 600 or so ohms and these need an extra powered amp on the PC to hear something afaik.

Certainly true for some teams, especialy those that have only a few top players if any. But i wouldn't say it's a general rule. Germany played very attractive football for the last couple tournaments and still was succesful. Infact Germany often dropped the ball when our coach decided to play it safe like in the games against Spain and Italy.

Reminds me of Greece in 2004 but the fact that they won the final without Ronaldo for most of the time redeems them a bit in my book.

Was hoping for Ronaldo tears but that was too early. Kinda rooting for Portugal now.

Shouldn't you be out celebrating Seldoon? I don't see any reason for conspiracy theories. Germany was maybe a little better but noone to blame then ourselfs when shots don't go in.

Congrats to Frenchies! I think the penalty was a bit good luck at the right time for France but they played well. Ultimately what broke our neck was our strikers being in such a poor shape this tournament, with the only exception of Gomez who missed the semi final. One needs to score goals to win in football. Personaly i'm not that disappointed. Can't be angry with the likes of Schweinsteiger and Müller. They have done so much for German football and i'm actualy still feeding on the WC win from two years ago for my happiness levels.

Wow, what a roller coaster ride of emotions. That Germany wins penalties where Özil, Müller and Schweinsteiger miss is close to a miracle. Even the last penalty was sooo soo close. That was a win by the thinnest of margins. I stand by what i said before the match that whoever wins this will most likely win the tournament. It's Germany's to lose now. France (sorry Iceland but i would be really surprised) will be another tough oppenent but nowhere near the same hurdle psychologically as Italy.

Wales vs. Iceland final?

So Portugal made it to semi finals not leading a single minute in regular time. What a shit show.

Oh, i'm not talking about France itself. Just how the vibe is over here. Like there arn't many cars with flags or people wearing football stuff.

This is a strange tournament. I see and feel so little hype. Can't remember it ever being so calm during big tournaments. Not sure what the reason is, maybe the poor quality of the tournament, maybe because the hope for finaly winning a title again was eased after the world cup two years ago, maybe because the innocent feel good patriotism has been harmed by political events of the last 12 months or a mix of it all. I hope Germany wins against Italy but they are our bogey opponent. I think who wins this game has a 60% chance to win the tournament since the other teams are less cold blooded and experienced in big tournaments or in the case of France have big extra pressure.

On another note: when you make something like the tile shape always use tesselation and crank the scale up so you see exactly what's going on and how your tweaks affect the shape. For your large shapes in the early stage the heightmap is king, gives you a much better impression of what you're doing then looking at a flat surface with just a normal map.

Well, once the shape is fed into the tile generator it runs through a whole other contraption of filters, noises and masks to create variation and get rid of the procedural look but it all follows the basic principle of adding layers of ever smaller details on top of each other. This Substance got pretty complex in the end and getting the roof tile shape took some experimenting but as with everything in Substance it can be broken down into very simple parts. When you take a look at the graph it's really just some basic geometric shapes, gradients and 2d transforms blended and masked together. For getting some of the round and skewed shapes i used simple directional warps with gradients to drive them. I didn't use any advanced tricks.

The season finale was good. Finaly it felt like it's heading somewhere again.