nipsen

..I guess they could probably use some sort of emboss filter, or something like that? Take the 3d model, let it be movable, etc. But blow the model up and make it look more like the scene transition pages. ..or not. I hope they don't spend huge amounts of time on this. And I don't want a character creation screen that has hundreds of animations you never see in the game, better effects, and blades and weapons with detail that never will be there afterwards. And so on. Pretty please.

Thank you for putting this topic on the right track: And I like to know this as well? I'd guess it isn't, but there are other folks here on the forums that are much more qualified to discern stuff like that than me. It is a bug with the normal mapping on those tiles. I am pretty sure it is fixed in the current build. If you look closely, you can also see the same effect when the torch moves near the tile borders. Tell us more! :D

Mm. I'm probably going for "bubblegum candy trollop" makeup for my bouncy elven chainmail armored spellsword. She's obviously not defined by her trollop makeup and smoking hot ass, at all - just so we're making that absolutely clear.

Yeah, but that's the trick, right - the framerate for the overlay effects and the 3d animations will always be on or towards the vsync. While the backgrounds and so on are static. So even if you have variable framerates, you don't get that world-wide stuttering you have in 3d games that use static 2d assets or pre-rendered light sources, pre-rendered lighted textures, etc., to alleviate the shader budget.

It's likely one static resource/animation that fires from each of the pillars... as in they don't create the flame with fake physics by lighting a volume-body on fire, and so on. And that most of the effect is a 2d overlay effect. But each of them, each of the flame animations ..could.. :D have an element to it with the smoke, secondary fires and glow and so on that is rendered depending on whether something is underneath in the non-background areas. Very easy to have anything under an animation like that essentially be invisible. And I'm not completely sure, but it doesn't look like that's actually happening. Very much like the swirls and overlays in Dungeon Siege 3 (which were brilliant - that there's essentially an effect swirl rendered in a separate layer on top of the image, twisted depending on the view-angle from above. So depending on your definition - all realtime effects, but some of it is pre-rendered and placed only on the overlay. None of which you will notice, because the camera-angle is fixed. I.e., it's the 2d detail of the scene from the infinity engine, but with scaleable and amazing "next gen" tech, and without the obvious 2d breakage. ...incidentally, stuff like this is what Obsidian really should advertise more, because it's awesome even if you don't know anything about animation and rendering). I'm pretty sure that the actual flame animations also have "tints" that follow the lighting theme, or flame colour in outside and inside areas as well. That even if they have different flame animations and effects, that there's possibly some dynamic element of it that decides whether the flame looks yellow in the middle - instead of searing red and black, like it does in the trap. But instead of me randomly making guesses about something I really wouldn't know - click your heels together a few times and wish for Josh to answer it instead...?

I don't understand. ...so are they going to convert the dragons from heathenry? You know, strap them down on a bench and pull their wings slowly off their joints, until they admit to believing in the one true god, so they can die and go to heaven?

..well, if we learned one day that Lucasfilm had hired an expert to take on the entire "laser blast" idea. To attempt to make it sound more scientific and probable. But then gave up, and came back with a very embarrassing report about just how laughable it really is to create a solid bolt of light from the discharge of a laser beam. Then that wouldn't be much of a surprise, would it. Lots of possibilities for narrative physics to cause disappointments, really. Light is one that real physicists struggle with too, but it's the worst offender in narrative science: "If you travel faster than light, you travel through time and space and infinite dimensions!". No. "If you slow down light, the energy constant will create a super-dense material that contains all it's radiation inside a very limited sword-like shape, or at least a bomb!". No. "If you send fifteen laser beams together in a focal point, it creates an infinitely more powerful beam pointing out at the apex!!". No.

I guess some of the intention with not having too detailed or characteristic player responses is that you can fill in your own more easily. Always hated that with voice-acted player speak, for example. In the sense that the developers want to impress on the NPCs what you really meant. Mass Effect 1 did this well - had short descriptions Shepard expanded on when acting the situations out, that worked, if you wanted to guide Shepard around. Planescape Torment was sort of the same approach, that the player is characteristic on beforehand, but his intentions are what you decide.. But having a shorter line where you see the intention, or it's flagged on beforehand, but that isn't littered with characteristic flairs and so on -- that helps a lot when you don't want to have fifteen different lines for each class and sexes and combinations and variants, and so on. Sounds like some liberul elitist school bs to me! ..seriously, though. Most of the time lately, the problem is that people in "the public sphere" are getting better and better at using exclusive code when they speak. Until no one really knows what it means, just that they like the sound of what is being said. And couldn't care what those words actually imply. And don't insult people's intelligence by suggesting that labels singling out specific people from a group - aren't used with that specific intention. Frankly, don't even claim it is something else, or that the purpose of that is only benign appreciation. One example of how this works was a guy who genuinely believed for himself that he wasn't a racist, because he didn't use the wrong words. Asked him what he thought racism was. Couldn't really answer, had never spoken to a black guy before, but had seen a black murderer on tv once. That's some inter-planetary class self-insight going on right there. The second most favourite version was a guy who hated everything politically correct, but thought he should be taken seriously since he obeyed the "political correctness" demand. That his actual opinions were **** -- no big deal, he thought. After all, it's only the words that matter. I was being unfair for making him look bad when untangling his bs. After one of these exhaustively interesting conversations, one person volunteered that perhaps getting to a reasonable level of half-orderly thought was necessary to get anywhere at all. Like a foundation. I said, like school, for example? Yes, yes. That was perhaps it, they said, though they were not certain. I mean, it's not exactly strange that while traits of different kinds have evolved in humans over thousands of years - the brain hasn't changed at all. That's not how we evolve, right? That's not what the survival trait was, to have individuals who can think for the entire tribe, and move **** with their brains and crush enemies with extremely hard thinking. We have stories we tell instead, so people can learn things, and society evolves instead. Or so the theory went, anyway, until I got involved with politics.

..ok. I think people who essentially dismiss opinions that are different from their own on principle are unintelligent, unpleasant idiots who should **** off to whatever backwater of a town they came from, and stay there and mate with their relatives until they all die out of natural causes and evolution like god intended. *shrug* Now, come see the SOCIAL JUSTICE WHITE KNIGHTS ATTACK ME IN A MOMENT GUYS. Holy hell these guys should grow a thicker skin and just leave people alone instead of being hysterically mad about something these fools think is important. Like I'm going to change my mind anyway, or ever stop spouting these astute observations about how things really work - while making the forum sour down until everyone but myself leaves. Which will be fine, because obviously my opinion is the only one really worth reading on the internet anyway! Hoho, I'm sure this makes you so mad, social justice warrior!

Go Zoroaster. ...Just a point about the dialogue options and the role of the playable character - anyone else thought it was refreshing to see a lowly caravan guard actually not be anything else at the start of the game? No one defers to you, the more experienced soldier thinks you're a fool, events will continue without you, no one pays any special attention to you, etc. Thought that was really well done. Pretty tired of the entire "Hallo, oh completely unproven foreigner/elf/farmer/shoeshiner with a suspicious air of commanding authority and whose word will decide the fate of the kingdom for no apparent reason".

Oh, I'd like to play a rogue agent for a galactic super-agency gone wild, starting intergalactic conflicts by accident, sponsoring slavery, acting with impunity in any planetary matter, with complete and total authority, for my own personal gain! ...oh, wait.

I was going to say something about how girls who enjoy playing Call of Duty probably also have just as serious ****-compensation issues as the boys. But then it sort of seemed just.. completely unnecessary to point out as I read more. I mean, look - they're not girls, who are gamers. They are gamers, who happen to be girls. Difference. ..Anyway, back to the program. --- First time I'm seeing actual gameplay at least.. The shaders are sweet. Not extremely impressed by the fighting animations so far. They're perfectly fine, on the level of everything else. But the shaders for the fog and light-effects following the terrain and so on are really good.

Bullsh1t. People have been saying girl gamer since like the early 2000s at least, as far as I can remember. It's because gaming has traditionally been more of a male activity, it's only now that gaming is a part of pop culture that it's evened out a bit more. It's like in a majority white area and you say "that asian guy" to refer to your friend called Steven Ho. It's not being racist and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Same with saying girl gamer. ..just like I feel I should say things such as: "This is my good friend, who is a girl", sometimes. You know, it means something. Does "girl gamer" mean something other than that "awkward boys are here" in this case, though? Anyway. Well done, Josh. Very nicely presented :D

Wasted potential, yes. Was funny, played through Jedi Outcast again -- still a good game, just very difficult (or, it isn't gated down a tube, and the tutorial doesn't take up most of the first act).. But I don't think it's very curious that a game like Force Unleashed would exist. It's this cross between the other story-driven Star Wars games and a more .."serious" format (in first person) with it's own spin-off story. Which in a sense is exactly what Jedi Outcast (and Dark Forces) was at the time. A darker spinoff for the..somewhat ageing Star Wars audience. And I don't think the game would have been so terrifyingly bad if it hadn't been written by a room full of shrill right-wing bloggers, who apparently took turns at challenging each other with the most comical combination of messiah-exceptionalism and false moral equivalence. Before they had a skilled accountant fuse down the most gut-wrenching bits of text in a way that parsed grammatically. And it could have been a neat setup if the segments of the game hadn't been designed by a committee of people with difficulty holding their concentration for more than three minutes at a time. --- Anyway. Playing through Xenogears again (on the psp - had to hyper an emulator to get the pic). See - that's how you write childish nonsense!

Huh. It's almost like Darth is slapping him in the face.. Over and over again. Btw, want to read my review of Force Unleashed? :D "I will admit that if the choice was between seeing my nephew play this game, and between letting him pull the legs off spiders for entertainment, I would have a hard time making a choice. But rather than meddle in such false and completely unrewarding philosophical problems, I think avoiding this game altogether might be an entirely valid option."

Destiny tutorial: "Shoot guns a lot!". Weird how fun the game is, though. In spite of being the most derivative game I have ever seen. It shouldn't have the right to work, but it does. It's basically Phantasy Star Universe meets Halo. And the missions are well made enough to not be extremely repetitive. Random events as well should not be as fun as they are. But they've got these.. tricks with the gameplay that makes it fun. Aiming really well to blast off shield plating suddenly makes weapon damage almost irrelevant, etc. So you don't really play for farming equipment. Play 15 minutes or a couple of hours... makes just as much sense. So yeah. I like a game that is the definition of derivative mush. Mark the calendar. It'll never happen again. (edit: by the way - refuse the "Join the Hitlerjugend" flyers on the way in. They'll make you really depressed if you pay them any attention.)

Actually, the numbers usually indicate that if the piracy bracket was decreased to 0, then the music and movie industry would make money without selling a single movie. My guess is that if we used the estimates UBI and Activision use, then Activision would earn infinite amounts of money if they stopped developing games and axed the advertisement budget. Microsoft probably has the best variant of all of this - they will actually sell OSes with every hard-drive sold in the universe. Because that only makes sense, to have a license for Windows sold every time you buy a new device, rather than keep the license from earlier. So in Microsoft's case, they are actually not only able to earn money by converting over time every pirate into a paying customer. But they also infinitely expand their market share to more than the amount of people on the planet within the same period of time. Sweet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0 ^Copyright Math ..well, for any first attempt at digital piracy the laws on the book actually cover, it's not too bad. You know, growing pains.

I'd like to see a game again where most of the story-telling happens with just text. But when all the live action - gameplay, combat, quips, dialogue between characters, responses to smaller events, and so on is voiced. Lots of games did that out of necessity I guess, with just sparse events in the game, and so on. But maybe if you wrote the game consistently as if all that happened while there was any movement on screen was in a different space - that would set up the story-telling sequences in text as easier to read into. Flesh out the movement more, put the choreographed events there. Let them reflect back to the increased amount of text you would get away with during dialogues.. If you read.. Jack London, or maybe Conan Doyle could be a good example, they maybe use something similar. That they describe the characters and the scene in almost obtuse detail ahead of when the actual talking happens. But never actually add or reveal motivations and thoughts directly. Except through dialogue during the conversations (or with London, internal monologues more often), that only make sense because of the long descriptions earlier..

...a real beta, where all the participants have paid for access, and also paid for the final game. And where the ruleset, and the game in general is more or less finalized. Mm.. What about recruiting people who didn't want to play the game, but who could be convinced to try it a little bit if prodded? At least it would be an idea to state on beforehand what parts of the game they can tweak or change. Or, for example, what parts of the gameplay they might want to hear feedback on. Are designers interested in hearing about shadow artefacts in corners and rocks. Does shader artefacts turn up on lower detail settings that may not have been exhaustively tested earlier. Can you launch multithread/single-thread builds, where are the logs, what parts of the feedback can Obsidian use, how do they want it categorized. You know.. That's what a beta is if you want to get some useful feedback. Else it's just a demo, that you pay extra for. And where suggestive references to... classical English literature.... will be censored by popular internet forum vote. To protect impressionable young children from all kinds of inappropriate and unbiblical things, as they heroically wade through seas of blood and corpses, in the otherwise approved family-friendly messiah-adventure.

Usually it's more about the idea that "some people" will pay for it. And that if they don't buy it... the digital GUARDIAN edition.. in sufficient numbers, then the concept is untenable, and they'll pull the plug on "digital" and go back to disc again. Specially with Sony and Microsoft, who are heavily involved in formats and platform deployment presence, digital distribution is a threat in at least two major ways: 1. It allegedly undercuts physical sales. Which in turn makes a very large part of the console-business obsolete. Along with very large partners in retail and advertisement. Obviously regional pricing, region licensing, and the gnomes dealing with releases locally are feeling the pressure as well (basically because they are too dumb to say: well, this gives you more money for actual localisation and translation, then!). 2. The format itself makes differentiating releases on included content very difficult. If you had any doubt, Ubisoft people feel that they have been supremely clever by not making "artificial" extra-addons a mainstay of Uplay. But that they instead have integrated Uplay into the games themselves. Sony's solution is more.. traditional.. obstinate. Essentially they've simply established on beforehand, when first opening up for the concept of digital licenses, that every sale of any game should be a package of a specific box-sale. So when they sell ps2 games on the excellent cell-based emulator they have for the ps3, the emulator and the iso is packaged in a deployment format. Which then is sold as a box-product. Following essentially the same licensing rules and region rules as boxed releases. DRM systems and anti-piracy efforts in this part of the business is huge. It's an industry on it's own, and it would be a visible crisis if the bottom fell out of that market. Because each sale must be structured in the same way as a physical release, or else this system collapses. So they maintain the same steps in production - specially the last steps it seems - as a physical release. In fact, you frequently get the option to buy games in the shop that just is a box with a code you put in into Origin or Steam, for example. That's how most publishers imagine "digital". And.. people probably shouldn't go along with that. They're basically cutting the production costs (or, as with Sony - keeping them artificially higher, and insuring that the actual deployment cost reduction is never siphoned off to, for example, development of products). And then charging you a premium on top of that. Personally, though, I wouldn't mind paying a premium. If I actually got a portable license that would entitle me to use the product on disc, backup medium, usb key, from online sources, for download service, for streaming, on different platforms, etc., etc. Then I'd happily pay for it. But what you're paying for now is to insure, forever, that you get as little as possible (with the same artificial restrictions as before), for the highest cost the market can bear. But we will never get anything more than what we have at the moment.

..some more shamelessly than others. On a current PSN "pre-purchase" ad ahead of the "Destiny" release, they go for selling things like: "We will never run out of stock! [with digital downloads]". Play it on release-day, get early beta-access, get an extra avatar and a skin. The digital edition costs €99.99. It's called "The Digital Guardian Edition". *shrug*

..weird - that sounds familiar. Sounds reasonable, too.

Pff. Well, the present is for losers. Living in the past rocks.

..It's thanks to not relying on "big" review sites the game has sold anything at all.

"and that “it is clear to game players that his character and others that are based on real-life figures are fantasy.” Hahaha. Sure thing, Activision. So... I suppose Noriega wouldn't have had standing to sue if they had portrayed him as a CIA agent for decades, who would be excused for all wrongdoing, crimes and drug smuggling as long as he had the approval and money flowing the right way. Since portrayal like that has no negative consequences. In fact, Activision might have been able to claim some of Noriega's proceeds, according to Phil Fish legal theory. Rather than being depicted as a terrorist and a dictator abusing the local population. And, and this is important, that he looks mean and has a mustache, and/or ugly facial features. Which carries implicit death penalties by drone and/or possible military invasion. So, standing to sue, since Noriega has already served a huge prison sentence. Or(!) - since the CIA involvement never was a subject at his trial, Activision is actually projecting simply the legal truth in the first place and are completely blameless as well as the only real chroniclers of history. Legally. Yes. Clearly this PR stuff is more complicated than Activision initially believed. ---- Jane Jensen released another adventure game again http://www.gog.com/game/gray_matter (Hopefully no cat mustache puzzles this time).