Kaftan Barlast

I had the chance to sneak a peek at concept art and storyboard for this game 6months ago and although I cant tell if it has a real story, it does have cutscenes. Im more excited about Battlefield Bad Company though, Ive craved a singleplayer shooter since Battlefield 2 came out.

Done by the Swedes at Digital Illusions(DiCE)

Today our producer returned from Swedish Game Awards in Stockholm, with many stories of blatant ****tardism :D -So, what do you think? -Well, it would have been cooler on the PS3. Why dont you put it on the PS3? -This is a Nintendo DS game, we would have to remake it completely for it to play on the PS3. -No, you could just put it in there. It would make the graphics better. -We would have to redo them completely and add alot of assets. -No, the PS3 makes everything look good. -So you're saying the PS3 itself creates the graphics? -Yes?

Lately, we've accomplished a ton of stuff on the tech side. Among the fancier stuff is multithreading(games goes fast on multicores) and rigid body physics(you can kick a ball into a pile of cans and theyll fly all over the place) and transparency shadows(leaves on tress casts realistic realtime shadows even though theyre really just flat squares with a texture on them). And as always, the programmers realised that their shadow-thingie doesnt work on meshes with holes in them so now we have to revise every single piece of geometry we've done so far and fix them. Hooray!

At it's basic level it's a matter of offsetting a vertices position from it's original mesh vertex position, hardly a huge feat, but not entirely easy either, depends upon the constraints. A prototype system shouldn't take more than a week, but an integrated system that doesn't screw up any of external effects placed upon said vertices is a whole other ball game, it does have some really horrible potential knock on impacts, frankly its the kind of thing you'd start working on in conjunction with any said animation engine, and if the animation engine was already built then it is questionable about any ease of compatibility, at that stage it depends upon already integrated capibilities. The system alone is fairly basic. That's just the thing, it's only simple in theory. Setting up morph targets and such is fine, but then comes problems such as the need for all faces to have the exact same number of vertices and making sure the morphing doesnt screw up your UV's. Add to that the whole dimension of facial animation with facial bones, morphtarget expressions and nifty normalmaps that pop up to make wrinkles, and you've got yourself a ****load of work.

Well, to take this thread back on track, I like the idea so much Im going to preorder this game. But everyone has his hangups, and mine is with dialogue trees. Im not too keen on the idea of replacing text strings with some sort of mood indicator/emoticon/thingammabob, because it feels like the player is being muted in a way. The classic method of having dialogue options where the line the player chooses is exactly the same as what the PC says is the minimum required, IMO. I really loved ME's system of first having the options reflect more what the PC is thinking than print the actual line, and then sorting the reply options in such a way that you could always tell that, for instance, the diplomatic answer was always in the upper left corner. That way, you have complete control over your actions, while at the same time, you'll never know exactly what the PC will say, thus making the dialogue more fun to watch.

He's voiced by the same guy who does Bender

With todays technology, the only contraint is how much time and effort the top dogs are prepared to spend on building such a system and making all the art assets you need. Doing something like Mass Effects face editor is no small feat. I love making my own character, but Ill settle for a prefab if its really awesome (like marcus phoenix)

I have no one to play CoD multiplayeer with so I just finished the multiplayer campaign yesterday. ..and Japanoism still sucks

The whole idea with using static HP to represent damage taken is obsolete in todays computer games. The system used in Gears of War, Mass Effect or CoD4 is much smoother. No more medkits, no resting in the middle of a level and no more dying frrom a flybite because a previous encounter took 95% of your health bar. And yes, more contemporary game settings please. We've been wading in the same fantasy muck since 1982.

Sounds awesome. The explanation of the dialogue choices is a bit strange though, I understand it as pressing emoticons instead of dialogue lines?

You know how you come to hate a band because its fans are morons? Well, I feel the same about Japan. I dont know the official term for what I call "japanophile", but they are all complete idiots. That, and the fact that Japanse games, music, food, comics, cartoons and most of their other exports is complete crap.

The fact of the matter is that Lost Odyssey is a dirty rotten jap game. It looks and smells japanese in every aspect. ME does not, because its a canadian game made by largely canadian people in canada. Sure, they've tried to make LO look less anime than usual, but its still friggin anime. also, anyone who likes LO is a smegheaded tentacle-lover.

FFS, LO is a jrpg done by some jap blokes who used to make Final Fantasy games. You have to really push yourself to get more anime game than that.

And the fact that it dosnt seem to support anything lse than 720p makes it even less appealing. It looks like complete crap on my 1280x1024

It's a quirky third-person action/adventure game for PC and perhaps Xbox 360. It has the PC leaping between different classic litterary works that have been corrupted by a very naughty person, thwarting enemies and solving neat physics-based puzzles on the way What we're working on now for the vertical slice/demo/whateveryamightcallit is the "Don Quixote" level. Photoshop is not a good way, that we have established. We'll probably write an app for automaticly converting TGA to the proper DDS format later on.

Kaftan's Pile of Games: Army of Two (good, but not good enough) Call of Duty 4 (awesome) Forza 2 (Been playing for like 40h and Im still only halfway through) Bully 360 (SAVESTATES m*therf*cker!! I dont like running hallway across the entire gaming universe just to save) Frontlines: Whatever (uninteresting)

Im just saying that if you prefer some jap manga game over Mass Effect, it's like some gives you the choice between having chocolate cake or a mouthful of freshly squished ****roaches. I mean, sure, there ARE people who like bugs more than cake, but that is the sort of person who belongs in a mental institution.

Regarding Lost Odyssey I think its important to know that all anime games stink. badly. Unless you like anime, of course. It's alot like being a Coprophiliac, I suppose. ...and if you prefer such a game before the excellence of Mass Effect, you're completely and incurably insane.

Sky Doll a real comic? I read that in Heavy Metal and I was not perticularly impressed.

And PC and Linux is the same thing.

Ooh, it would definently be marvel-esque to have Wolverine kill Mystique, only to find out she was a Skrull. I hope secret invasion will be a step-up from "World War Hulk", that was easily the worst and least interesting crossover event Marvel has ever done. Hopefully they wont do too much history revision in the form of "well that didnt really happen because X was really a skrull", like thy usually do. Have you read that whole thing about marvel "resetting" Spiderman and nullifying everything thats happened since the late 70

I dont have the full SDK on my workstation, just a modeleviewer and some thingammabobs, so I cant take any sweet screenshots. I have been asking the programmers but they're keeping all the good stuff to themselves And also, you know how it is when you dont want to show something until its really really really awesome

Today we got the deadline for the alpha moved forward until next Friday, because they're comming from a Swedish gaming mag to have a look. We wont be able to make it, but what are you going to do? We're tweaking the main character as much as we can, but she's no Alyx Vance yet. We didnt want an overly sexified female character, so we got a real life girl to come and model for us, and another girl to record Motion Capture from. The first was a bad idea, because real female physicque does not translate well into game graphics. The model looks short, pudgy, assymmetrical, wonky, disproportionate and generally ugly.

I remember Jean grey actually said to Scott "All I ever did was die on you" the last time she died, or was it the time before that? But regarding Mystique, I miss her own series, no one can write Mystique like Brian K. Vaughn and he's on his way to become as popular as Neil Gaiman so he doesnt do mainstream titles anymore. In the last year of X-men, they've just written her as an irrational whackjob that does things like shoot Rogue for no reason. It's like the writers cant be bothered to expl