Flexman
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Posts posted by Flexman
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Not so much that as daft story-telling. I think there's George Lucas syndrome at play here. Nobody dares tell the boss his writing sucks. It's a good job the rest of the game isn't too bad.
A recent game release, Alpha Delta, an espionage RPG From the team that made Neverwinter Nights has the same problems except they didn't have a decent game behind it. According to one employee interview the company boss was micro-managing everyone and keen on "his" system. It might be buck-passing.
Never let ego get in the way of your project. A team leader should foster an environment where the professionals you're employing should feel comfortable in saying your work needs a second opinion.
Watch the extras on any of the recent Star Wars DVDs and look at peoples reactions when Lucas enters the room. Tell me if there's anyone there that looks like they have the balls to come forward to say, "this makes no sense." There's an uncomfortable silence, you can almost smell the urine.
Thats all
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I'm in rant mode. Few things get my blood boiling more than Sony and Microsoft shovelling gruel down our throats and expecting us to thank them for it. Halo, treated like the second-coming. 3D games presented by shiny people with a grin that suggests they've just come back from the joke shop and btw you'll really like this exploding cigar.
There are some exceptions, franchises that do well because frankly they deserve to. And there are IPs that are in between worlds, both good and bad. Schizoid games.
Hideo Kojima's continued success with Metal Gear Solid both pleases and confounds. With the release of Metal Gear Solid - Peace Walker, the series continues the tradition of exciting sneak-em-up game-play separated by long (and I mean long) periods of incomprehensible story telling.
The early Solid Snake games were no different. The stories follow a formula. Bad guys, check. They've taken over some secret installation/region, check. Your current/former elite unit are the only ones who can save the world, check. But then the story seems to diverge faster than the solid-rocket boosters of an exploding space shuttle. The bad guys have adopted silly names, all share a gene pool, is your mother, your in-ear contact is a triple agent(!!!), it's all a virtual reality simulation and there's probably a wedding/funeral/both at the end. What?
Snakes "new" (it's starts in 1974) adventure is visually arresting for a PSP game. Great texture work and use of the hardware. But once again, action is stamped on by a Monty Python foot sized lecture at any opportunity. Fives minutes into Peace Walker and there's enough time to go into the kitchen, boil a kettle, make coffee, two slices of toast and marmalade...oh and a bagel for a little girl who's off school sick. The on screen lecture still wasn't over. I actually did this, it's no exaggeration.
And this time the story hits you with laugh out loud silliness. Everyone except the dog is named "peace" in different languages. And characters insist on calling me by some porn name, "Big Boss". I haven't seen a dog yet but what are the chances it's called "Peace" in dog language?
All of this Kojima oddity is nearly made up for by the in game ability to sneak up on enemy guards, knock them out then send them sailing into the air attached to a helium balloon, where (we are assured) they are collected by helicopter and put to work making shoes at your secret base. Did I say shoes? I meant weapons. But shoes make as much sense, it is a sneaking game after all.
Solid Snake is a great character locked in a strange world I couldn't understand without the help of medication.
Metal Gear Solid - Peace Lecture, is out now. Someone please tell me I'm not the only one who finds the game quite fun but the story arcs complete twaddle.
Rant over.
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Well it's a marvellous technical achievement, I don't fully understand the depth of what you've done but it all sounds great. Well done sir.
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I read it too although it's not something I've come across, I've never tried to do what you're doing. But I'll give it a go tonight and see what happens.
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When will these commands to change the default ranges be available?
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Having to paint grass on larger maps really soaks up load time and shouldn't be necessary. Maybe a system to procedurally generate ground detail/clutter would be a nice to have feature.
Or even some data on how the vegetation system stores data so we can maybe attack this ourselves.
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NaughtyAlien you certainly have my support and blessing.
The trick is in how you process and set-up those things, the language is of no consequence, the principles are the same, if you're cleaver enough to understand the those you should have enough technical know-how to work them into whatever language you like. And I'm sure someone else would anyway. That's a non-issue. If anything that would work better as the translation process requires closer understanding of the topic.
I could use it myself as I'm close to implementing a generic animation and event system which I want to use to push little infantry guys around from waypoint to waypoint. So this is a hot topic for me. I've been looking at OpenSteer for inspiration and ideas.
The original LE format of PDF and Videos were quite attractive. Blogs can work too, those are easier as you have a bit more control over updating.
Brilliant NA, go for it.
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Another great addition to the tutorials. I wish I knew why my LUA loaded emitters occasionally crash.
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I think this thread was eaten by the web monsters. But I had a lot of problems shopping around here in the UK. The helpful advice given by all was taken on board. Many of the machines suggested were either not available over here or had some strange UK Pound = US Dollar relationship that blew prices into orbit.
In the end I settled for a Toshiba Qosmio X300 with an nVidia 9800GTS which was around 800 UKP (didn't want to spend much more than that) and runs my helo project at around 40 fps when sat in the cockpit complete with second TADS camera which is pretty impressive for a portable.
So thank you Lum, Josh and others for the tips.
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I looked at Blender a while back, it seemed perfect for rendering bathrooms.
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Cheers Joh
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So...after searching through the Wiki, how does one set entity view distance to infinity in your program?
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Nice cave modelling too. Looking sweet.
Nice beam effect. Is that a billboard with a fullbright shader? It works really well.
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I thought it was a drop-shadow. Thanks for the logos.
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I sense some dissenters in the ranks
I've still not migrated to 2.33r5 and wont for some time till more of the niggles get sorted out. And I need to upgrade as this version introduces a key feature I've been waiting for.
But it has been a lot of work in the past, especially when documentation isn't changed to reflect new behavior, so you can't even go and look up why something isn't working anymore. A large chunk of problems come from having to reserialise assets (an acknowledged PItA) and mixing /duping old shaders/mats/models. That latter I don't see as LE's fault, just another PItA.
But I hesitate to upgrade as I don't know how long it's going to take, and if it's going to change in the next week or two.
I think a calendar with fixed update/publish dates with more stringent doc updates would go a long way. Just a matter of personal discipline which is hard when (like me) you have a brain that fires in different directions at any given tim...ohh shiny thing.
All I can do is sympathise with Pixel and Red who have done really cool things and have been able to borrow ideas and inspiration from. Although I'm not sure if you're going to find anything more suitable. Everything else I've looked at has problems of it's own. That navmesh/ai path editor is smart Pixel.
The topic name is wonderfully fitting though.
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Shrug. I'm almost ready to add a scrolling map to my GUI, so I'll just flail around till I find something that works.
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You should add to your sig what version of LE and language you're using.
Maybe there's a problem with the alpha and mipmaps? Can you try a version of the texture with generated mipmaps?
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Just be aware if you're making a multi-player game, be careful using pointers in entity user data. A remote machine won't be able to match the pointer to anything valid. Just something to be aware of.
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oh, I just saw the date of his last post :/
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To me it just seems like a lot of stuff between you and your game. I've been seeing a logo/trademark recently I hadn't come across before, "Scaleform", like Awesomium I had to Google it. Scaleform is another GUI system but uses Flash at the design stage. Seems very popular (600+ titles many of which I AM familiar with).
I don't really have a use for it as I only use LUA for trivial entity level housekeeping. But LUA is lacking a workable GUI interface, if there was such a thing maybe we'd see more sophisticated use of it. Niosop you're in a better position to judge as you're enabling cool stuff to be done with it.
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I don't think you can get around it. We ran into a similar need and got around it by having two meshes. Swapping them in/out was quite fast (same model with bits chopped out using same materials). Not quite the same thing as yours though.
Perhaps you could paint the parent entity with the "invisible" material when you want to hide it, and paint it with it's normal material when you want to display it again.
PaintEntity(entity,"abstract::invisible.mat",0)
Where 0 means "non recursive".
??
Just a thought.
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Worked a treat. The Zone is looking pretty awesome so far. I love those track textures. I'd like to get at them just to see the details of how to go about making my own desert tracks.
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These near/medium/far ranges are displayed where?
In our game, anything closer than 20m is probably under you. Object distances are typically 50m to 6,000m at tree-top level (variable according to camera zoom mode).
smak
in Game Artwork
Posted
Yes thanks for pointing us towards this program. I bought a copy of SMAK to show support, I like the easy to use nature, it's still beta and would benefit from more format support.
We played around with baking AO into models today, I liked the results but they need to be used with care when you have real-time lighting and shadows.
We could do some crazy things with the normal map generator. Especially as we have multiple LODs for our ground vehicles.