Kaftan Barlast

Voxels are far from dead, its whats used in film VFX to do really awesome volumetric(I mean true volumetrics, not fake in-game stuff) effects like gas or flames. I dabbled with it some using FumeFX and Afterburn as you can see here http://krotma.com/vid/cannonblastTestRender01.avi but its mostly crap since it takes my computer 2 days to simulate and render 5 seconds of boom I also recall John Carmack discussing voxels as the next step beyond conventional vector/raster based graphics engines. Im not a graphics programmer so I dont understand the math behind it, but it sounds neat.

I was toying around with teh idea of using the Fallout engine to make a game that was exactly like fallout. Thatd be awesome.

I never did play ICW since I dont like hack n slash very much. And combat on the IE is about as exciting as watching paint dry, anyways. This IP is better left on the shelf, IMO.

Hasnt ATARi always had the license for Icewind Dale? OR was that back in the day when they didnt have exclusive rights to everything D&D related?

But dont do like I did and expect the game to serve you everything on a platter. You have to find all mask pieces to get the proper ending, its a bit 90's hardcore rpg in that way

And TW are still, even with an imperfect AI, the most entertaining strategy games in existance.

It will be the most awesome game ever. I mean, you can play SWEDEN!!! :D

I really missed a campaign, it feels kind of a waste to just be able to play endless skirmishes. Im also not sure what this game is supposed to be, the friend who recommendd it said it was just a multiplayer-centered RTS

But wouldnt such a revolution just serve to replace the previous leeches with fresh new ones?

What African leaders tend to do, unfortunantly, is to seize power and then immediately take huge international loans. These loans go into their own pocket, and when they are toppled by the next dictator wannabe, they bugger off with all the money, leaving the country in massive debt. I think its called the Mubutu syndrome. But on a serious note, Mugabe is a dictator who has run the country into the ground and made corruption the political norm. The bloke should be imprisoned along with all his lackeys, otherwise its going to be civil war. A friend of mine has spent time with the UN down there and his opinion is that most african countries would need constant supervision and aid to have even the slightest chance to develop into proper democratic countries.

if you go by the changes that EA have made to other companies theyve bought, nothing much would happen to the already existing franchises. What might happen to rockstar is that they would have a harder time getting ideas for new IPs through

We actually have completely random art directionsince none of us is good enough to make anything like a real concept artist would, so we use kind of say " ok, its going to be like 16th century spain" and we try to get it right. Alot of times we have to change stuff because it looks wrong. The only guy we know who can make concepts we need, like this: charges like a million trillion euros an hour. I can only draw weird people, and Ive did that.

Sorry I havent written anything lately! We've been busy annoying eachother and sneezing on eachothers keyboards. Here is a promo shot of the unfinished level

I was wondering something, is downloadable content locked to the 360 you downloaded it too, or can I lend game+hardrive to a friend and he will be able to use it? In this case it would be Forza2 with all the car packs.

Probably because of the radio frequencies these wireless headphones use.

The thing was that those headphones had 6 tiny speakers, two big ones on each side and then two small besides those. The sound was good but I never got to try them properly

I dont think they make surround headphones anymore, I know a friend of mine had a pair of Sony 5-channel but I havent seen them for sale anywhere.

Earnest Adams(freelance game design consultant) did a lecture at my school the other week, and he had one very good example of how most gamedesigners approach storytelling. He was working on STALKER and originally, every single one of the games 5 or so endings, ended up with the player dying horribly. It hadnt even occured to the designers that after playing a game for 50+ hours, the player might not be so pleased to find out that it all ends with sudden and very unavoidable death. So Mr. Adams did what he was paid for and explained all about the not so fine line between "cool and unusual" and "cruel and unusual". The world of gaming is probably chock full of similar examples of storytelling ineptitude.

Its a bit late into the debate for this, but the reason why most games have a completely retarded plot is that the designers lack even fundamental storytelling ability. They dont know how to construct an understandable and enjoyable story, so they choose to simplify it to the point where they cant fail (or they just fail). If you look at the Imdb top 100 list, you can see that many of the top selling films have relatively complex plots, yet the public have no problem understanding them. So, people are not the morons Ken levine would like to think they are. Aristotle penned down the basics of storytelling/drama 2000 years ago, and hollywood is full of "Storytelling for dummies" books. All you need to do is read the stuff and apply it. Stuff like how all stories must have a climax that is proportionate to the buildup to said ending, or that cliffhanger endings dont work if the audience has to wait more than a week for the next part etc.

Ive been playing this game on and off the past week, and its mildly entertaining in a retarded way. What Im becomming increasingly annoyed by is the complete and utter slaughter of our wonderful and awesome nordic mythology. Here we have a treasure chest filled to the brim with gold material to make a game from, yet the otherwise very intelligent designers from CA decided to take a standard fantasy setting and add some very superficial elements to it. So in a completely and utterly pointless way, I will now, for the sake of nothing but my own amusement point out annoying inaccuracies in this game. Since norse mythology comes from oral tradition, there are many different versions of each story, each no more "true" than the other. This makes it impossible to say "It was like THIS" so what I say here and what you know might be somewhat different. The dread evil legions of Hel In VBfA, this is the evil underworld hell thats full of undead and demons, and ruled by the evil dark queen goddess Hel. She takes her army of zombie-orcs and goes off to invade earth and enslave and kill everyone. In the real mythology Hel is the place you go to after death if you did not die in battle as a proper viking should(in case you went to asgard). This was were women, children and old people went when they died. Contrary to the Christian "Hell", it wasnt a place of eternal torment and punishment, but rather just a place that was a lot less interesting than Asg

The methods described here are not what I or the CIA or any other intelligence agency would refer to as torture. This is is forceful interrogation, torture is several steps above and includes things like severe beatings, burning, electric shocks, breaking bones and joints, cutting etc. And from what Ive read, many of them(sensory deprivation, slapping, grabbing, punching) are not used anymore as they have been proven ineffective. Im not too happy about forceful interrogation methods, but I do realise that they can be necessary. Religous and or political fanatics are not intimidated easily, and so I imagine its extremely difficult to persuade them to surrender information with normal interrogation methods.

Now we've hit a bit of a snag, our TGA textures take too much space on the graphics card so we're going to have to bite the rotten apple and convert them all to DDS using DXT compression. But does anyone know if the compressed DDS will remain compressed in the graphics memory or if theyre decompressed? Says you, the Lightwave man! You sir are a very sick human being! Am not! Its going to be even more fun to manually convert all our TGA's to DDS

I can give you two of the answers 1. 5400RPM is standard for laptop hardrives, you can go with 7200 but they will wear out fast, within 1-2 years. 2. You should get a card with 512mb of RAM since modern games really need the space

Well, lazy or not, today they managed to assemble the first playable build of the game! And I managed to do that "itll just take half an hour" animation exporting in about 5-6 hours, which was great fun. But the most important event of the day was when people were flocking to watch our pre-pre-pre-alpha and commenting positively on the very delicate and perfectly rounded bottom of our main character, a detail which took three artists working an entire weekend to perfect. Many people do not realise the attention and care a good bottom requires.