I can't tell you the number of times I've walked from point A to point B in my city, (about 100,000) and gotten hassled by people in cars being dickheads. I'm not obese, I'm not missing a limb, and I'll dare say I'm about as average looking as they make lower-middle class white American males, and yet, when I'm out on foot, I usually feel so isolated from the rest of the world, because there is fucking no one else walking, and 300 cars blowing by me a minute.

My city is by no means big geographically; any physically fit person could ideally walk or bike anywhere they needed to go. But the thing is, people like cars. They like feeling invulnerable to the things around them. They like honking, and yelling out the window, and driving 1/24th of a mile to go get some Grilled Salmon flavored ice cream.

It's not a stretch to say that the majority of American cities that have between 30,000 and 100,000 people are too big to navigate by bus, bike, or foot.

Yet in my city of 100,000 people, if you see an adult walking down the street, you think they're homeless, crazy, a rapist or all 3.

We could very easily get by, and generally be a lot better off if people gave up relying on cars for every place they need to go, no matter the distance. But as long as people look at cars as status symbols and mobile suburban fortresses of doom, (tm) that will never happen.

I personally hope that the impending oil and gas crisis will help people to get back to walking, riding bikes, and public transportation. It's nice to see other people out getting fresh air and just conducting their business.

People will be a lot nicer and more considerate when they don't have the luxury of hiding behind fortified steel and 20" tires. I just know it. 

Grahf, really good stuff here; I have long been a skeptic of the Times, given how they allow their paper to be used for political agendas (see the last eight years of Judith Miller's alarmist coverage on Iraqis non existent WMD's), but this article is quite substantial in its arguments and rebuttals and fleshing out the different point of views. It certainly caught my attention that a CFR guy (Simmons, who is profiled in the article) is at the heart of the peakist debate.

Thanks for this heads up. 

CFR guy Council of Foreign Relations -- not implying conspiracy, I know how popular those are around here -- right, Phait;) CFR is pretty open and transparent about its motivations, and they publish a journal Foreign Affairs that outlines there ideology and what the goals they have for anyone who is curious. That they would work towards undermining a Monarchy like the Saudis is not suprising (nor is it necessarily a bad thing). 

yeah read grafh's stuff. For a more alarmist viewpoint, check www.survivingpeakoil.com

Was it Hubbert or Campbell who predicted back then that the US oil production would fall into decline in 1972. And it did.

Indonesia used to be an oil exporter. Now they have to import it, and the government has to inject subsidies to avoid riots.

The north sea oil fields have turned to decline in 2000. Russia and the Caucasus region can still keep up about ten years. Knowledgeable people are just waiting for the big word to drop: when Saudi Arabia's production turns down.

Sadly, or to some people, happily, there aren't any good alternatives to oil. Hydrogen sucks for a multitude of reasons, mainly because it takes a lot of energy to create it and because it's very hard to store.

Oil is still currently practically free energy pouring out of the ground. Some have said that when the price reaches 200$/Barrel, real economic implications will happen.

Might just be that if you want to live, learn to grow cabbage and work with horses. It might just turn out that this period of urban development and science and technology and whatnot was just an odd historical bubble made possible by a certain nonrenewable resource - oil makes life such as if you had 50 slaves in your personal service. From a warm shower in the morning to your clothes, transportation, and food. 

I was on vacation for two weeks... but i'm back now! Still messing around with those texs (you know...).

Your map is r4wk btw! It was fun to see it gradually bit by bit getting better and more polished. I still think you rushed the release a bit, but oh well.

Come to irc and we'll talk, you homosexual! 

/me reads his post from last night again...

Doh, I'm not an economics major, I might have fumbled my arguments a little bit. Ray, the point I think I was trying to make was that if oil becomes extremely expensive, alternative energies that weren't competitive in the past will become so, and the market will naturally transition to the cheapest technology. That's theoretically speaking at least, I worry that it may be too late if we sit around and wait for "the market" to iron things out for us. About "oil prices never coming back down," that will be the case only as long as the present demand for oil keeps up. If some other energy replaces oil's dominance, or we become vastly more efficient at using oil, then yes, the price would drop again. 

[17:00:11] <bambuz> yea
[17:00:26] <bambuz> and of course, probably do a bit harder tricks in the first few maps
[17:00:33] <bambuz> since you can restart if you fuck up

I really hope you don't think that entire-game runs are really done in 1 sitting. Speedrunners do dozens and dozens of runs per map and then merge the best runs together. You even see the runner credits at the end of QDQ and other similar full-blown runs, which runner did which map. 

Recently came across some thread about death metal and I remembered I had the Quake Map Name Generator:

http://www.phait-accompli.com/crap/php/quake_map_generator.php

So here's the Death Metal Band Name Generator:
http://www.phait-accompli.com/crap/php/death_metal_generator.php 

Grahf, nice article.

Blitz, I know what you mean. In a lot of newer areas of Savannah the infrastructure was so dependent on cars they just didn't bother to put in sidewalks at all. It was just malls and apartment complexes connected by six-lane roads. :(

I'm fortunate enough now to live in a city that puts bike lanes on every road it can, and I plan on biking to/from work as often as possible. 

http://www.kolumbus.fi/anttih/lumoboing.gif 

I got, Evacuated Xenapistia; I think I had one of those by a realy kinky doctor once. 

We also get nutters who do whole game runs in one sitting -- check the latest SDA update! (for the lazy: Nightmare 100% of all of quake in 78:01).

The easy and nightmare runs have both been improved recently too. 

some speed runs are of the special type that an episode or even many are done in one sitting. (like all of id1 or just e1 or all the terra maps) The qdq runs were not, they were of the other type - just parsed together single level runs, maybe with some continuity twists (i.e. rl from some previous map, don't remember).

That is precisely the difference I'm talking about - if you have a map that has a trick that has 50% chance of working, you can pretty much rely on it on a single map run. If you fumble, just retry the run.

If you run ten maps in a row, and every map would have to have that 50% trick to work, the chances of completing them all is one in 1024. In other words, the expected number of runs to do before succeeding all the tricks would be over a thousand. Of course, it sucks if you complete all the other tricks and then fuck up the last one since you lost so much playing time and effort.

Therefore it's wiser to try harder / the hardest tricks first and if you don't succeed, just restart since you didn't lose much time or effort trying anyway. 

1.heresp4: beyond the black sun.
2.heresp3: castle of pain.
3.tris: The Rest is Silence.

http://www.planetquake.com/underworld/index.html 

What's up with your screenshots? Those TRIS shots almost make the map look fullbright in areas... =\ 

I think it all depends on the individuals monitors settings, but ill take your note into account. 

 

I'm coming home for a night, so if anyone would like to play me on my map, I would be quite pleased! ...I'll be on irc probably around 6-7pm EST (which is GMT -5). 

OK I'll be there yo 

The next time anyone wants to organize one of those "pack of maps that require the name to be taken from the complete works of author X" type things, perhaps for Halloween, please use the obvious Mr. Lovecraft. Just a thought, thx. 

Someone else! 

Because of the title SoE:Indian Summer, I thought Tronyn was going to go with Morrison for the titles on this pack. I have found a decent phrase from The Fellowship to work with but still I'm looking for something more evil themed.

When I do one of these packs, I'll use Steely Dan
lyrics (Kid Charlemagne alone has at least a dozen worthy quotes) 

"What's 'taters, precious?" 

I fulfilled my end of the bargain, you cad! 

Good one. Quoting from the True hero (as opposed to that whining, 'woe is me' Frodo) of the saga will always win points with me, Kinn. One quote I found from a song in The Fellowship kind of sounds like a line from Shelly's To Autumn, so it fit's Tronyn's theme in a pretentious enough fashion to satisfy me. 

Antediluvian

http://www.planetquake.com/underworld/index.html

very nice map indeed. :) 

unless you've defeated ballos... 

Anyone know the story with quakeworld.nu? I haven't been able to get to it in weeks, it seems. 

Servers have been hacked at some point during the summer, that's all I know. 

the old fashion way, and I get nada but weird static. Someone really buried that site.

An odd thing to note as well, there were a few days last year that I could not directly link to _Func, but when I went through a link to a discussion thread in the Quakeblog that Megazoid was running at the time, it came up fine. I've tried old links to threads like that for Quakeworld.nu and have not had any success. 

because I can't even access the Google cached pages of quakeworld.nu; they're just empty. 

http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20050902/easier_games-01.html

Tom's Hardware has a nice article that I whole-heartedly agree with. Kill quick saving and go back to the "save only at the end of the level" method. 

Article seems entirely irrelevantly focused on mario-type nonsense games.

I scanned through to find any support or justification for the assertion of "Kill quick saving and go back to the "save only at the end of the level" method." and couldn't.

However I can safely say that that is a truly atrocious idea that has been proven (in both directions) to only result in frustration and reduced enjoyment for the player.

The evidence is obvious - nearly all games have situations which "force" you to die by unexpected circumstances. Nearly all games are more enjoyable playing the first time through. If you encounter an death trap (of whatever type) and you have quick saving, it will not be frustrating as you have likely saved nearby (or at least, can do so the second time around). If you encounter a death trap and don't have quick saving, you likely have the frustration and/or reduced enjoyment of replaying a section once if not several times. This DOES happen in games with save points or other non-quicksaving options and it IS frustrating. Simple as that.

Sorry if that was long-winded but if you are stupid enough to suggest that particular idea you probably needed it spelt out clearly....

(If you wish to do something about quick-saving, there are other methods) 

But everyone who complains about the shortened length of games should not argue with that article.

"Mario-type nonsense games" are no different from the modern FPS or RTS in the sense that there are still goals and things to be accomplished. Why is it that we should get the chance to save wherever the fuck we want where our console bretheren started over in World 2-1 because mom was yelling at them when they were trying to jump some gap?

The fact is that mastering a game by learning it in and out is the test of what makes a game great or not. Sure you can do that after the fact like so many do with speedruns, but the initial runthrough of a game is diminished by the advent of quick saving.

Is it frustrating? Sure it can be. But I remember being frustrated with those console games too. But I stuck with them and came back to them later on, and it was damn rewarding to move on.

I guess I don't know what the fuck I'm trying to say, except that it seems unfair compared to past generations of gamers, where beating the game actually meant that you really thought out how to beat the pitfalls (especially in Pitfall) and traps that get thrown at you, rather than quick saving every 5 minutes as to have no event in the game really mean anything at all. 

It was taken down since the server was hacked (again). The material is ready for it to be taken up, they even have a computer for it, but no worthy net connection (we're talking quite a lot of traffic here, although it's cheap nowadays).

The leagues and ladders were also lost because they were on the same computers. Leagues always have a summer break anyway so I think they start working with it in earnest real soon now. Now that paradoks doesn't run the show that much anymore since his clan slackers is disbanded, they lack a powerful (and notorious) figure to hold the lines.

Use http://www.besmella-quake.com in the mean time for qw news. Then there's quaketerminus, quaddicted and quakeworld.us too (they have some useful files too). Oh and challenge-tv too.

It's done some good too that qwnu has been down, people have been doing their own projects and not bashing each others on the forums. Take for example inertia's map. 

I guess I don't know what the fuck I'm trying to say

I'd have given up before starting if I was you, because that was the biggest pile of shite I've ever heard uttered on this forum (including Phait's and Headthump's posts).

So FPS PC gamers should have to suffer frustrating and cumbersome gameplay/save combinations just because some console gamers do?? Boohoo, let me cry my eyes out over the suffering of those console gamers who have to do without saving. My heart bleeds for them. Actually, I don't give a shit about them. They choose to play frustrating games, whatever. PC gamers can have fun, balanced, non-frustrating games, and I don't see "the grass is browner" as a good reason (or indeed any reason) to spoil that status quo.

And "mastering a game by learning it in and out is the test of what makes a game great or not" is it?? Is it really?? So nothing to do with many myriad factors that might make a game great?? Forget graphics, design, architecture, maps, story, atmosphere, sound effects, creature design, weapon design, progression, exploration, gameplay balance, challenge, or god forbid FUN!! Forget all of those, what makes gaming great is learning it like the inside of your arse?? Well forgive me, I must have been doing something wrong in the dozens of games I've played where I've got enjoyment out of the other factors listed instead.

Blitz your view is coming from a single, specific-challenge-orientated perspective. Just give up trying to apply it to everyone else. 

that are bound to fizzle in a day or two to pull out of your ass, MopLady? 

if you don't like quicksaving, then DON'T USE IT.

but leave the option for people who aren't morons to use it. 

Saving....

is good....

sometimes. 

Y'know Shamb/Necros, I might be more inclined to argue if your entire debating technique didn't consist of repeating "you're wrong, and stupid too" in a variety of different ways. 

I would like quicksaving as well as autosaving. There is a downside to quicksaving for people with bad self-discipline like me, getting upset at losing health they didn't need to lose so they reload from the quicksave, I think for example Max Payne I officially finished without taking any damage at all. Quicksaving between every fight. It was a fine art and a fun process too though, but it sorta sucked and was lame as well. What I would like best is autosave every 2 minutes or so, with quicksave disabled, and the time space between autosaves rising on the higher levels of difficulty(?). 

It was a fine art and a fun process figuring out how to not take damage at all during a fight* 

LOL I never knew you felt so strongly about quicksaving.

*backs away while Shambler carves out a hole in F6 where he can stick his cock*

Yeah so, getting back to talking about this reasonably, I'm just saying that we should consider the possibility that having the quicksave/autosave feature makes us obsessive about having enough health, or doing some kill over again in a more stylish manner, or trying unsuccessfully to jump on some ledge inside a chasm 200 times in a row.

With the feature enabled, things are less tense.

Example, I played metlslime's latest without quicksaving, and I died a few times at that outdoor battle before I realized what I had to do to be a super-bas-ass and wipe out all those baddies whilst maintaining my health.

It wouldn't have been nearly as intense if I quicksaved right before and just kept doing it over and over until I did it *flawlessly*

Those 30-45 seconds of nailgun wielding mayhem in the outdoor part of ant.bsp would definitely have been diminished if the threat of doing it all over again wasn't there.

Sure it's fun even if you quicksave, but you're just raising the stakes and making everything that much more meaningful in terms of the value of life and death in a game when it means doing it all over again. 

Restricting saves to arbitry points, or at the end of levels, is all well and good if the audience of the game is hardcore gamers and will put up with having to progress or reattempt.

But this ignores the point of save games, and what every other 'casual' gamer will be doing with them, saving the game so they can take a break and come back to it later. If the only thing designers can think of to create tension in their games is to space save points further apart or throw challenges before/after them, then it's likely the gameplay at fault, not the fact you can save whenever you wish.

Games have cheats and plenty of other things to 'ruin' the original gameplay/story/feel of the game, but it's up to the player to choose if they'd like to take advantage of them or not. The designer should just concern himself to do what he can to create a fun experiance.

Blitz, I don't feel offended if you use Quicksaves/Loads, or if you don't. That's your choice as a player. I don't in Quake, but if I was playing another game, I'd completely appriciate the option to save whenever I was ready to stop playing for the time being. 

if you want to make the game more difficult, simply don't save.

but leave the option for players who don't want to have to restart a spot because they had to go shopping or pick someone up.

i didn't feel the need to write up a huge novel with what could be contained in a few lines. :) 

I don't want to have to remember to save. Allied Assault's system of having auto-saves carefully spaced through the level, combined with the option to quicksave, means that you can just go on your merry way and if you die, you'll restart a reasonable distance back, but not lose 30 minutes of progress.

I think one pitfall of quicksaving is that it encourages designers to make levels that require quicksaving.

I do like the mario system, but it only works when the level takes 1-2 minutes to run through. If the level takes 45 minutes or whatever some EA executive decided was necessary to hit their "20 HOURS OF GAMEPLAY!!!!" requirement, then things have to be done differently. 

like in half life or allied assault, that was good. 

Would you like me to update your specsavers subscription because you've completely failed to notice the reasons I give against lack of saving and against Blitz's so called arguments against it??

Example, I played metlslime's latest without quicksaving, and I died a few times at that outdoor battle before I realized what I had to do to be a super-bas-ass and wipe out all those baddies whilst maintaining my health.

What you have to do? Not much really. Try entering that area with 8% health...

Mmmmm I bet it was SO MUCH FUN replaying 3/4 of the fucking map time after time to reach there again.... 

this seems to be legit:
http://johnromero.com/phpubb/viewtopic.php?p=85667#85667 

Properly designed games shouldn't need quicksaving - a checkpoint and/or autosave system should suffice. And on the whole, I think checkpoint save systems generate a more rewarding gameplay experience. 

Now that's a game save scheme! 

I can see quicksaves being left out as long as the level design supported it by not making you attempt dumb shit you could die attempting. They remove most sense of danger by acting as a safety net,

AvP had no quicksaves. It was finish the map or bust. It didn't have silly sequences with smashing walls or jumping on swinging crates hanging above pits full of killer crates or any of that nonsense, it was just a dark alien hive. It made you terrified of dying, as you should be, which intensified the game incredibly for me.

Not to say that with today's long-ass modern maps that at least one or two mid-level autosaves wouldn't go amiss. 

As the next post on that forum says: "Unfortunately John, that link caught the attention of many leechers, it does not work anymore". I have a legit Daikatana CD on my desk right now tho, so I have no need for it :) 

erm, if you are an ion storm lawyer, note that I mean that in a metaphorical, hypothetical, covering-my-assical way 

Scamp nailed it. Basically, there are no excuses for not giving your player the option to save where and when she chooses to. I have a life, I don't want to structure my life around the game. Let me save and get back later. It's a game design crutch. Let it go.

The same thing with unskippable cut-scenes by the way. Hey, Shakespeare, I don't care about your shit story. Especially not the second time I have to sit through the crap voice-work and "artistic camera angles." 

That title was wrong. should read just "saves". I blame the sauce. 

the real crutch is HAVING saves. Saves may be essential for players to play the game way they want (same with pausing), but if a designer uses saves to justify his badly-balanced impossible bottleneck sniper puzzle, that's unacceptable. I shouldn't NEED to save and reload to get past some stupid challenge. 

If you're going to talk about how the player shouldn't need to save and reload, then you're not really living in reality. Humans are inherently fallible; and likewise whenever they are introduced into a system, the system inherits their fallibility. So it's impossible to design a reasonably complex game where there isn't a need to save and reload. Proper design acknowledges the risk of flaws and accounts for them (e.g. save/loading).

And that's not even touching on the issue of the subjectivity of each challenge: what I find difficult you might find easy. Should I be punished just because you have an unnatural ability to aim at individual pixels?

So no, it's not a crutch; it's a well-designed solution to a common problem. The question that is often asked is "Is there a better solution?" 

I think the solution must be decided on a case-by-case basis. Games with small, randomly generated levels have little to no need for saving and loading. Games with large, linear, humanly designed levels have a greater need.

Also, who would want to play a non-linear 80 hour RPG without saving? That would be insane. 

i'm saying that quicksaves are necessitated by the needs of the players, but shouldn't be seen by designers as license to make challenges that practically require quicksaves/quickloads. 

... saves don't kill games, games kill games. 

Obviously being able to save is necessary, it's whether having the ability to do the level in 1 second sections is a good idea or not that is at issue (though lotsaquicksaves was the only way I finished sm103_starbuck).

I've been playing a spot of Marathon 2 again these last few days which only lets you save at predefined points, and it definitely adds some tension when you get a bit low on health but aren't sure where the next save terminal is. It also adds to the tedium when you get corwardly and scurry back to the last save term before you dare going into the next room.

As people have been saying, the level design needs to take the saving possibilities into account, and quicksaving frequently being all but mandatory means the level sucks. 

One of the best save systems I've come across was in Eternal Darkness. You can save anywhere during general exploration, but not when there are enemies in the room are just before/during certain set-piece sequences.

Worked very well. Trying to save and being told "The darkness is near, you cannot save." was a good tension builder.

For Quake, I find it essential. Practising a trick that takes two seconds to perform just wouldn't be worth it if you had to play for 5 minutes before hand every time. 

In quake I try to resist the temptation to quicksave in the middle of a battle - it trivialises the combat a bit imo. 

Well, I try not to save (or quicksave) too much when I play a map.. It essentially depends of the difficulty: the more a map is difficult (according to skill setting), the more I save game... it's obvious... At least I try to save between big fights, not during big fights... and when I'm too short in ammo/health as well (security saving here !)...
Well, maybe it's obvious, but it has to be said... 

I play a lot worse when I load a save and encounter the monsters the second time. I don't care to play so precisely anymore. Even when I know where they are and what will happen next, I always lose more health because of impatience and carelesness. I'm kinda bored then already, and the game goal is no more to survive and explore (which I think is mostly the goal on the first run) and but to just run as quickly as possible. 

gimme the top three q3a duel maps, I crave me some good shootin an lootin. 

Lun3DM4
RPG3DM2
q3dm17 

q3dm17 is crap for duelling, ztn3tourney1 is probably better. Or maybe hub3aeroq3 or whatever it's called, it doesn't look very nice though. 

maybe its me, but i require lots of new and exciting stimuli, very frequently, to remain interested in a level...

I'm kinda bored then already, and the game goal is no more to survive and explore (which I think is mostly the goal on the first run) and but to just run as quickly as possible.

i can totally relate to that 

Yes. Teh joke. 

check your mail 

Lun3DM4
RPG3DM2
q3dm17

Wait. how many of those are sarcastic? :( 

ALL OF THEM! 

More votes for lun3dm4 and ztn3tourney1. I haven't played and/or don't remember R.P.G.s map--sorry, the early onset of senility is a bitch. :( Dead Souls by Glassman is one I liked as well, and Grindall 2.0 by Quaker-X kicks ass, but might be a tad big for tourney, depending on your tastes...

Of course I can't resist pimping my own stuff. Depending on how cramped you like your playing field:

pjw3tourney2 - pretty open
pjw3tourney3 - pretty close
pjw3quickie4 - ridiculously insanely asses-and-elbows tight 

Only the last 2; although RPG3DM2 might possibly be worth checking out.

pjw: That's ok; I don't remember them either. 

.. or maybe I missed a post... ;P

http://www.planetquake.com/quake4/wallgallery.shtml 

... I was talking about the result of the contest ;P 

Well, one of the commentors had a very good point - there was too much going on. I hadn't even realised it I was too absorbed ind doing something COOOOL. There were some stronger concepts out there, but I totally disagree with the (lack of) concept with the winning entry and some other top finishers. 

At least you are in the "top ten", which is not bad at all, IMHO... 

the winning contributor produced the only entry in the top 10 which was handpainted (digitally) pretty well unlike many others, which used Photoshop effects on existing concept art and preview screenshots. He clearly put a bit of time in.

The prizes weren't very high quality though! 1st prize wasn't bad i guess, but who wants a bloody Quake 4 t-shirt (2nd prize), or worse, 3 months subscription to something no one really wants (3rd prize), Gamespy Founders Club. It seems to give you Fileplanet, Gamepsy Arcade and some crappy Insider exclusive content bollocks. 

That 3rd prize seems more like an insult. 

Well done for placing in the top ten. I do agree that there's too much going on, but equally I think the screenshots on the monitors look really cool - those with a simpler overall image could have done very well IMHO. 

Is anyone here experienced with Google AdSense? I am having problems making it display ads that are actually relevant to my site. I have a blog at http://dnaumov.blogspot.com/ and have had AdSense code in my pages for over a month now, so I'm guessing that it has been recrawled by the bots at least once or twice now. Yet, the only ads I see being displayed are related to blogging. Not a single ad related to games, marketing, level design or whatever at all. What am I doing wrong? 

REAL Quake 4 t-shirt!

as opposed to a fake one? o.0 

necros: yes, which can easily be made.

I'm proud to have a REAL Quake 4 t-shirt myself :) also glad I can wear it to work without looking like a dweeb :) 

likely it's due to being hosted on blogspace, and that's taking precedence in the googlebot's mind. 

Well I just took a look at some other blogs hosted on the same site and their Google ads are working fine. For example http://dsweeper.blogspot.com/ shows bible and religion-related ads. 

I have one too :)
http://arkhytas.blogspot.com

Thought to try out the fashion... :P

Nothing much quake related there yet.. :/ 

Wow, awesome blog, beats the hell out of Jago's "Let's all be salesmen" stuff. (Sorry Jago.) Interesting subject matter I must say, but only because I'm addicted to being a physicist-wannabe. 

You make me cry inside. 

more like aeronautical engineer wannabee

or just a layman interested in spaceflight! 

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/portable/frog-design-mind-124912.php 

The iPod looks clean because its design references bathroom appliances? heh.

Fair play to them though; The black iPod NANO is possibly the sexiest gadget I've ever seen... goddamn beautiful. 

Scampie said - "I'm proud to have a REAL Quake 4 t-shirt myself :) also glad I can wear it to work without looking like a dweeb :)"

You're a bastard. :(

;) 

to wear the t-shirt of the rock band you are going to see in concert?

Wouldn't the same thing apply to wearing the t-shirt of the game your company is currently working on to work? 

there's a whole shitload o' dweebs wandering around here then. 

dweebier to wear the band t-shirt of the band you're in, esp. while performing. 

a "#TF" shirt whenever i connect to #tf. It goes nicely with my "OMG BANNED" hat and my "OMG MR HANDS" tattoo. 

I'm seriously considering tatooing "mrhands.mpg" to my right bicep. 

you suck 

you guys make me look at the most horrid stuff on the internet. 

No doubt a /google mrhands.mpg would turn up sufficient evidence, but I just ate. So what's mrhands.mpg? A making-of documentary of goatse? 

You heard of the story about the guy who died from infection after a horse fucked him in the ass on video tape?

Well, it's certainly not THAT. 

...dweebier to wear the band t-shirt of the band you're in, esp. while performing.

I dont know about that, the cheering crowd last Sunday must've been dweeb lovers. 

@ posts 8813 - 8818 

didn't his colon rupture or something? I think it's fairly possible that that cock ruptured a lung or two. 

remove stupid content from the internet please... at least this corner where you have control over. Sham, metl, von, chaps please I ask of you. :/

Yeah everybody's a cynic and all empty inside and laughs at torture etc etc whatever. 

u mean i have to destroy my site? 

I wouldn't be surprised. I only heard about it from word of mouth (czg) so I don't know the exact details, but this guy died after getting fucked in the ass by a horse. I mean it was bound to happen. Horse cock + ass = death, it's obvious really. 

I haven't dared download the video, but there is a massive commentary thread on it over at the Somethingawful forums. 

bambuz,

so don't watch it, you self-centered dummy. 

Well, I've watched it and if he did die then it serves him right - the horse was not wearing a condom and everyone knows you should not have unprotected sex with casual partners! 

I'm at work, so I'm not able to watch it "safely" and completly..... I just saw the beginning, and it seems it's the video you are looking for... or at least talking about.. There's a guy, and a horse, and ouch... pain in the ass... ;P

http://www.jegergrim.dk/video/mrhands.mpg

...and now go map... 

You fuckwit. Don't fucking post the links.

Anyone else, go read the SA thread, 100 times more entertaining than the video. 

...that I was crying. Those forums are the best general-purpose forums ever. I decined to watch the vid though.

(and c'mon bambuz, if you can't laugh about someone who is such a shining epitome of astounding dumbfuckery that they die from Teh Horsecock, then...well...what can you laugh about really?) 

Ouch, I've just watched the video at home: how a guy can "eat by his asshole" a 50 cm horse dick ?? Either this guy has a "cavern-assshole" or he is really dead now due to a huge "anal perforation"... It's frightening... and bleuargh... 

After that he can't even have normal gay sex. It would be like throwing a pencil down a mineshaft. 

A video:
http://cubemovies.ign.com/cube/video/article/651/651334/revolutiontrailer_091605_qtlow.mov

The swordfighting part has SOLD written all over it. Gamespot impressions: http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-15143-2567-x-x-x 

If you have ever played Diablo 2 on Battle.Net, you might want to see this: http://mostlycloudy.net/~dnl2ba/images/humor/LOTR-soj.gif 

Yeah we were talking about that at work. My initial impression is "unwieldy gimmick", but I agree that the sword fighting looks fun.

I'm not sure how it's gonna work with cross-platform licenses though, what with everyone else using the traditional controller approach. 

It's precise enough, it could be a mouse replacement. Doesn't need to be as accurate as a mouse, but maybe a quarter of that or something. Maybe one could even paint with it.

Play adventure games where you can interact with the environment in other ways than to just run and hackslash.

Nintendo is prolly the only company with guts to do any kind of innovation (hint, not the same as bringing in stuff from pc's or one-dimensional increasing of stuff)

Think of what one could do with two of these. Minority report style UI's.

A year back a friend showed a mobile game where one could play 3d pong on a mobile where the club was the phone itself so you would have to move it... too bad the display was in the phone itself. Really crude solid state accelerometers.

I wonder if the nintendo thing has a laser gyro or something for better precision. That would make them a tad more expensive. 

SOUTH KOREA, Seoul -- A young man strangled his friend today with a Nintendo Revolution controller after he accused his friend of cheating in Mario Teaches Masturbation. The assailant, 17-year-old Gno Havva-Phun, used the controller as nunchakus to knock unconscious his friend, 19-year-old Yu Gno Me, and then used the chord choke the victim to death. 

RPG, Those aren't valid Korean names.

Yeah, nintendo controller looks interesting, I'm a bit sceptical and will wait until I can see some actual games taking advantage of the movement stuff, but I applaud them for their attempts at innovation in gameplay instead of just pushing out better visuals which is what most other people are doing noweadays.
Oh and kinn, there's an extra accessory (hopefully it will be cheap) that you slide the revo controller into so it becomes a standard controller. 

Read them with English phonetics and maybe it will make more sense. 

I'm pleased to see nintendo doing something weird enough that people are actually uncertain about whether it'll be good. Sony and MS have basically been been iterating on the dualshock for the last 10 years. I like the dualshock, but i don't think that's the only good controller archetype.

Yes, I have concerns about how this breaks controller standards for cross-platform games, battery life, and the inelegance of having two a buttons and two b buttons. 

The Revolution Controller makes my penis hard. 

Animated Doom movie, looks like a joke but I'm betting it's trying to be a decent attempt...

http://www.forumplanet.com/planetdoom/topic.asp?fid=4952&tid=1745934 

Phait, that trailer made every cell in my brain that ever contained knowledge of design or animation to spasmodically constrict in embarassment.

I'm going to go lie down. 

At first I cried at the Revolution controller.

Now I am grinning after thinking about it more.

For cross platform games it has been said a case will make it more like a wavebird type of shape, so there will be no problem there, and for fps games I can actually see it working.

The more I imagine holding it in my hand I can see it working, the thing is basically an evolution of the mouse. 

I don't think Nintendo is really that worried about cross platform games anyway. The best games on a given system, and the ones that sell the system, are the ones designed specifically for it. Plus, I think they relieze they're going to be 'the second console' for most gamers, so the need for cross platform isn't there. Nintendo seems content to not compete to be the #1, but to make great, fun games that will hold their fanbase and perhaps expand it. 

I have no desire to own a ps2 or xbox since I can play most cross platform games on pc, but have been tempted by a gamecube many times. 

Bler is a chav 

Ah, ummm...

* Paintingbler sets mode: -b *!*@69.210.38.231
* Paintingbler sets mode: -b *!*@adsl-69-210-38-231.dsl.milwwi.ameritech.net
<Paintingbler> hmmm whooops
<Paintingbler> it seems i forgot to unban him hours ago
* Paintingbler feels faintly guilty
<Paintingbler> ONLY FAINTLY THO 

Homebrew
http://www.grandtheftendo.com/ 

Fixed up the last few bugs and its ready for release.. this will be my last Q3 map, but I think it turned out to be my best map.

More info & Download links can be found here:
http://www.planetquake.com/shadowdane/maps/shad3dm2.htm

Some HUGE screenshots here:
http://shadowdane.shackspace.com/files/shad3dm2_pic1.jpg
http://shadowdane.shackspace.com/files/shad3dm2_pic2.jpg
http://shadowdane.shackspace.com/files/shad3dm2_pic3.jpg 

Please.

Also have you heard of these programs called names like "Paintshop" and "Photoshop" - they can be quite useful getting screenshots to a size that is visible for people who DON'T have an array of 4 monitors set up in a square... 

xnview or irfanview work just as well and are small, fast and free as in free beer. 

Will resize well and show thumbnails of images and allow a little quick editing and batch convert without the wait-load of big apps.

http://www.acdsystems.com
http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=acdsee 3.10 best version (anything too early won't have the editing abilities) 

anyone know whats going on with edgenetwork and quakepit.com?
they used to be my host, my files are still on the ftp but the address links to a domain snatcher type portal. :(

can someone recommend a good free web host? 

And wondered what Sega was up to, and dreamed a little...
http://phait-accompli.com/crap/ps/newsega.jpg 

http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgsmenu.html 

Dude you know sega doesn't make hardware anymore right? These days they just make games for other consoles and devices (including Nintendo hardware, believe it or not). 

back from vacation, ya'll :)

re: image resizing, handy doodad here as a shell extension for windows xp, right click to resize image file from within windows: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx 

Yeah I know, but I'm of a crowd who'd like to see them come back, even if all the wishful thinking won't make that happen. ;) 

I doubt Sega will ever return to the console market. Software is incredibly more profitable and they have a great name with some good titles. I hope they don't come back to hardware, just because it'd be sad to see them lose in the console race and die off. 

As much as I like Sega they are never going to return to the hardware market. Although I am dying to see what they come up with for the Revolution. The Revolution controller is definitely the type of thing I believe Sega would have made if they were still in the hardware biz. 

I will be so pissed off if Shenmue III is released on XBox 360 only. I was a huge fan of the first two games, and if the third comes out, I will buy it, whatever the platform. However, I have pretty much decided that I will buy a Revolution, but I don't want to blow 300 quid on another machine.

Sega are still making hardware for the arcade sector I think. I would prefer they didn't make another console, because there are already three main platforms out there - we don't need another one. I wish Sega decided to only make games for the Revolution and arcade in the future though - or at least no exclusive games for other platforms!

By the way, has anyone heard the rumours that the Revolution is actually going to be as powerful as PS3/Xbox360? There were some "leaked specs" revealed recently, and they sound pretty competetive. 

With the gamecube Nintendo gave very conservative estimates compared to Sony and Microsoft, I suspect the same thing is going on with the Revolution. The comments about how a controller shell is going to be available from cross platform games would at least suggest they expect some games to be released for all three platforms. 

played some outrun arcade game a week ago. Was quite crappy (it probably was a few years old) and boring for some reason. Wasn't realistic but wasn't arcadey either. I think it was sega software with mostly amd hardware.

It seems the format hasn't moved anywhere since the original sega rally. 

I sent you email last week. Did you receive the stuff ?? 

hey guys.. I thought it was about time I redesigned my website. The old design is pretty bad, and well its quite old. I think the base design I made up in 1999 or 2000. lol

Anyway been working on this for a few days.. what do you think of the layout?? I've only done the front page thus far, but all pages will share the same design.
http://planetquake.com/shadowdane/test/

Let me know if you notice any odd glitches with the layout, but it should look fine in Firefox or IE.


old design for reference:
http://planetquake.com/shadowdane/ 

 

Otherwise I think it's a little minimalist, but good. 

What RPG said, make header larger, and get rid of the giant browser propaganda button at the bottom, or at least find a smaller version, cause it looks shite. 

The new page is ok, the above comments are agreeable. The old page seems pretty ok too.

I'd test the look if header was the same width as the postings. 

Safer, faster and better than what?

I hate people telling me to "get firefox" when I have "got another browser, and hugely prefer it to firefox, so fuck off telling me to get firefox, please."

I'm not a (complete) idiot and can choose my own browser, thankyou.

Don't take that personally, btw. I am just SO fed up of seeing website authors pledging their allegiance to firefox - it's like the placards you see outside folk's homes in the run up to an election. 

That is all. 

amen. 

 

 

Design looks fine - I'd put it up as is, except make the firefox banner bigger. I suggest using this for the link:

http://www.takebacktheweb.org/downloads/wallpaper/ff_1600x1200.jpg

That should be visible enough. 

 

w3m! Or 'telnet www.google.com 80'! 

LYNX FOR WORLD DOMINATION 

Or ELSE! 

http://www.muchosucko.com/modules/My_eGallery/gallery/Funny/1115249525723.gif 

an oldie, but a goodie nonetheless 

On a completely unrelated note, necros and I are working on a new Quake enemy:
monster_wizard_ninja

totally AWESOME! 

http://kell.spawnpoint.org/crouchingshambler-hiddendagon.jpg 

Where is the katana ?? A Ninja always have a katana ! At least it should launch "shuriken" stuff ... 

Is that the update to your "monsters" page we all have been waiting for? 

haha! i bet it strafes from corner to corner in a splitsecond and fires shurikens insterad of green shit :D 

I rawk =) 

I rawk++ =) 

I sent you email 1 week ago. Did you receive the stuff ?? Eh, are you dead or what ? 

 

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_user.php?name=Scampie

[16:40] <PuLSaRius> scampie u have cool statistics on func atm
[16:40] <PuLSaRius> Number of Posts: 1300
[16:40] <scampwork> ?
[16:40] <scampwork> ok
[16:40] <PuLSaRius> Number of Threads: 37
[16:40] <scampwork> yes, I always have cool stats
[16:40] <PuLSaRius> 1300+37=1337
[16:41] <scampwork> haha
[16:41] <scampwork> awesome
[16:41] * scampwork will never post again as Scampie
[16:41] <PuLSaRius> lol 

Happy Birthday Zwiffle! 

I rebel against the statistics by always forgetting to login. :) 

/me throws a blanket party for Zwiffle 

Got me a Wacom with Corel Painter 2 and Photoshop Elements 2, basic stuff but so far it's really cool. Most fun I've had with a gadget so far!!! 

rejected news... it was a long political rant -- metlslime 

I guess it must have been painter classic 2 or something because painter is at version 9 now (and does indeed r4wk). 

Yes, IX is t3h r4wk from what I hear, but I only have a stripped down commercial version, which is still r4wk, just not as r4wk. 

rejected news... it was a long political rant -- metlslime

The hell? You don't think we'd bite, do you? Let us have him, throw him to the lions! 

what kind of wacom did you get btw - graphire or intous? 

-_- 

happy birthday m8 

Thx for being like a day late. 

Don't feel bad. It's not like we could have bought you a hooker or anything.

I mean, all we have are those icons and ONE font to play with. 

Some speedmaps would've been nice.
/me castrates Scampie. 

well more specifically, it was political spam. I deleted it for the same reason I'd delete commerical spam -- it's an attempt to use the board for broadcasting, rather than conversation. 

GARIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIJJJJUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"!!!!! 

Actually, I couldn't get the last speed map I made to compile, but AquiRe has done so with out any trouble. 

Actually, I have Zwiffle's address, so we could have got him a hooker, except we're all stingy bastards who hoard the hookers for ourselves.

Just don't let Zwiffle know that. 

lol, it reminds me of a conversation I had with a Vietnamese pimp in a bar some time ago. He told me he could get me anything, and I said, "How 'bout an Amerasian with naturally red hair." He shook his head and told me I was crazy. 

Yu crazee gee-ay! Nou sucha ting - yu hea' gee-ay? No! Such-a! Thing - red hed! Crazee yankie gee-ay. VeeSee gonna geet yu goud, crazee gee-ay. Yu dee - mash payn. 

I'll pay you buck fifty a month to screen my email too. :P 

I believe we may now have a purely ethical purpose for cloning. To build the perfect woman! (To sell on the streets for fun and profit, of course). 

I'd like to see a poster. On the left is a picture of an adult penis, cut. On the right I'd like to see a bloody flap of skin. The caption should read "Separated at birth?"

Just an excuse to look at a penis I suppose. 

...thank you for your concern. I'm alive :)

Your exceptional artwork arrived safely and I'm about to proposition you for more... but I think I'll do that in private. 

Whoa. And Kell says I have Freudian issues. O_o 

what the fuck is going on here! o.0 

Sparth joined ID. This is news to me!!
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=53303 

what the fuck is going on here! o.0

When you find out, please be sure to let the rest of us know. Maybe it will help me make sense of my roommate who pours out the milk from her cereal.

P.S. the topic is a summarization of my comments from work today.

P.P.S. I forgot what this post post script was supposed to say.

P.P.P.S. e/n generation unite! 

Woaw !! This screenies would take place in Half Life 3 screenies preview!! They are very nice and impressive ... 

Agree entirely, that is perfect concept art for HL3. So....are Id making HL3 next then, lol.

Seriously nice one Sparth and GG getting hired. 

Sparth rocks so much, I knew he had had an interview at ID a few months ago, but didn't think he had accepted in the end.
I have to pester him into sneaking in a Nunukian style space map into whatever ID's next game is, he hasn't mapped in too long. =D 

That nunuk's hiring at id should be a news post here for a number of reasons.

1) The timing of Adrian's lawsuit

2) The fact that nunuk/sparth has been known to frequent these parts/#terrafusion, and now he works for id...it's like, the ultimate dream

3) The fact that the hiring of such an extremely top-notch artist like sparth means that id is takking a radically different turn in terms of art on their next project. sparth's style, in my opinion, is very fantasy/ethereal, and much more conducive to adventure games and "far out" settings than Adrian's typically war-ish evil artistic feel.

So this news definitely has implications all over the place, and we need a thread to discuss them in! 

So this news definitely has implications all over the place, and we need a thread to discuss them in!

Go create it ;) 

was Adrian carmack Fired...

Bluesnews says the reason was that he had 41% of the shares and wanted to sell id to activision. They other owners fired him so the company wouldn't be sold and they could buy the shares cheaper from him directly.

Greed makes people do all kind of stupid things.

I've always loved his art. 

2) The fact that nunuk/sparth has been known to frequent these parts/#terrafusion, and now he works for id...it's like, the ultimate dream

<brainfart>

Oh, I don't know about that. Not anymore. I think there are several companies ranking higher than id on the omgloligotanindustryjoblolkeke-scale. Valve. Epic. For one thing they have better tech. And their projects seem more innovative.

</brainfart>

3) The fact that the hiring of such an extremely top-notch artist like sparth means that id is takking a radically different turn in terms of art on their next project. sparth's style, in my opinion, is very fantasy/ethereal, and much more conducive to adventure games and "far out" settings than Adrian's typically war-ish evil artistic feel.

A good artist can apply her expertise to many different genres, ideally. She'd better, or she's just a one trick pony. Of course, that's fine for some people, maybe the contract is just for one project. It'll look good on the resume either way.

Anyway, this doesn't really tell us all that much about id's upcoming projects.

bambuz;

There're legal thingamabobs flying all over and claims to this and that. For one thing, I'm guessing Blues was not privy to any special information. Adrian Carmack claims he was effectively forced to resign, after he refused to sell his stock to the other owners following the activision bid. Having left id he is supposed to do so anyway, but his team of power-tie wearing walking excrement argues he shouldn't have to. Plus, he says he got shafted on some profit-sharing thing.

That's what he says. That's not necessarily what happened. Also, who cares?, id hasn't done anything remotely exciting in many years -- except for releasing old sources.

Chances are Adrian Carmack leaving is good for the consumers. What with id hiring new artists, if for nothing else. 

id hired anyone. Thought they were just the regular group of guys since they started (except for Romero and Petersen after awhile).

Conceptart.org is full of elitists. But I remember Sparth, and I saw that thread - some good work... but it leaves me bitter. 

id always hire at the start of projects. kenneth scott got a lot of press for q3, and they hired a bunch of new guys for Doom3 (I remember one new level designer worked on kiss: pyscho circus) 

id: "hey can we get that guy from KISS?"
id: "gene simmons?"
id: "no psycho circus, the game"
id: "y'serious?" 

...I thought Quake4 going Gold on Monday (see http://www.bluesnews.com/ ) would've warranted some sort of news post here. 

this isn't a general gaming news site. Nor is it a blog. So that's why there's no news when doom3 or quake4 or half-life 2 go gold, or when one of us gets a new job or buys a puppy. (Though, some people try to stick their puppy into otherwise legitimate news posts, I've noticed.) 

of course you can post about it in the GA thread! 

....ya, I guess I expected a bit of reaction in the GA thread. Meh, I'll assume people are too busy walking their puppies at the moment. 

 

to PJW that now he has some free time, he may want to make a Quake single player level, but then I remembered Scampie mentioned earlier that that sort of thing is prohibited by the company contract.

<me walks a puppy instaed, darn> 

You can't be serious... right? 

I know of more restrictive clauses than that; my friend Hutch plays for a Minor League baseball team, he doesn't dare even to play a game of catch. 

I don't think CA.org is full of elitists. Quite the opposite actually, although I've never posted any of my artwork. I find most comments to be actually very helpful, and a lot of people there are actually just really good.

As for Sparth, that's why I didn't submit a news thread. It's good for him, but not news worthy at all.

Still, you shouldn't have rejected my news about getting a kitten for my birthday. Now you will pay. 

... mebbe it is, and then...

BTW: are those textures still on your list of things to do, or should I elicit another's help? 

ConceptArt.org is less elitist than func_msgboard in my opinion, hehe, there are some much more elitist art forums around really.
Hmm, and sparth joing ID isn't good for sparth, but good for ID, they are lucky to have such a talented artist. =)

Oh and Phait, for the record, Kiss: Psycho Circus was a good game, so bleh. 

that id stole Steve Rescoe from Ion Storm in order to have him do level design for Doom 3. That's right, the guy who made Village of Dread and, even more brilliantly, Shadow Over Innsmouth, way back in the day.

Which made it even more surprising to me when Doom3's level design sucked. I guess Willits must have said something like, "Now no large rooms people, in fact stick to small square rooms. But heap on the detail, and keep it really dark, to hide that fact."

I see Quake4 as id's second chance at getting what Doom3 should have been right. Since it has exactly the same graphics and art as Doom3, maybe Raven took the development time to improve the *rest* of the game (you know - the things that were shit in Doom 3 - AI, level design, multiplayer, basically everything but the graphics).

Sorry, this quickly degraded into a bitter Doom3-bashing post. Oh well. 

I think there are several companies ranking higher than id on the omgloligotanindustryjoblolkeke-sca... Valve. Epic. For one thing they have better tech. And their projects seem more innovative.

SINNER !!!

HERETIC !!!

FAGOT !!!

Your FIRED !!! 

Id Software, Raven Software and Activision have confirmed that Quake 4 for the PC is GOLD and will begin shipping to retail stores nation-wide on Tuesday, October 18th!

Sounds good !!! but does it mean that Quake 4 will be avalaible in the next weeks ??? More info at http://www.planetquake.com/quake4/ 

I think there are several companies ranking higher than id on the omgloligotanindustryjoblolkeke-sca... Valve. Epic.

So that makes id what, only the third coolest games company in the world to work for? Gee, best hang on for that better offer then. 

Max/Maya users might be interested to hear that Autodesk have just bought Alias.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=5970886&siteID=123112

I wonder what this means for the future of Max and Maya as seperate products? 

 

err, half year ago they announced the end of 3ds max development, then they announced max 8,
now they got maya

I`ll stick to max anyway... 

I read a weird news... After Doom movie, here would come in summer 2007 a Halo movie.... o_O ...

Peter Jackson will be the director... Also, note he was already the director of Lord of The Ring trilogy... Hopefully he would do something cool regarding what has been done concerning Tolkien's trilogy adaptation...

Wait and see... 

I totally agree with speedy about valve and epic. The only thing from epic that looks good is that Gears of War thing, and to me Valve is just the biggest piece of overhyped, overbloated, overhyped piece of fucking piss shit since Pool of Radiance for PC. I just absolutely despise Valve. There is NO WAY WHATSOEVER that Valve is better than Id. Epic has some purdy graphics... but.. cough.

I heard about the Halo movie, and that a LOT of big names were signed up for it already, but that Uwe Boll was directing it (no lie, they said it in an issue of PCGamer.) 

If not for Valve we could not have Barney circlejerks and fanparties 

No, I don't mean that way... anyway, Valve should burn in the fires of hell along with Scampie and the Virtual Boy. 

So that makes id what, only the third coolest games company in the world to work for? Gee, best hang on for that better offer then.

That's a nice man you got there. Made entirely out of straw you say?

But fine, more examples. Bungie. Anything involving Sid Meier or Warren Spector. DICE seem to be a pretty good place to be right now. I wouldn't mind having Broussard and Miller running interference for me, however long time DNF has been in development hell.

I'm not saying anyone should turn down id -- I'm saying they're not the be-all, end-all one-stop shop for high profile development they once was. Hell, Raven seems to do more fun stuff.

speedy,

I hope you brought enough drugs for the whole class, young mister.

Valve. better tech? haha. q1 with some shaders

Now see, that's just so damn stupid I hardly now where to begin. So I won't.

Suffice to say, there's more to the tech than just the renderer. Consider Steam, for one thing. Consider the brass balls on Newell. You bet your ass I'd rather be a part of Valve's future than id's - but that's just me.

< Epic. more innovation? yeah sure. cant have enough UTs
You know, I watched Sweeney's gdc keynote. What epic are doing in terms of empowering artists and refining the scripting process gives me a got damn erection.

zwiffle;
I just absolutely despise Valve.

Yeah... So tell me again why I should value your opinion on them, you just threw away every last bit of credibility you might've had on the subject. But sure, let's play.

There is NO WAY WHATSOEVER that Valve is better than Id.

They made the fps sp genre. MADE it. They fucking totally blew everything else out of the water. For years, I might add. With the exception of Bungie, no other company has so totally dominated the FPS single-player genre. Other companies have been trying to dethrone them, no one has looked at id and said 'these are the guys we have to be better than.' They've looked at Valve and said that. Valve is the benchmark. They are the Blizzard of action games. 

Consider Steam, for one thing


haha 

and lets not argue what game you like more
its just a personal opinion

I gave up hl2 at ~50%.

halo is just crap with amazing ad budget and the privilege of being the only shooter on xbox at its time 

The low gravity and utter amazing slowness of halo makes me hate it, while the story is very nice and the concept of the halo is very cool(which is from a book), the makers had to make it enormously sluggish for gamepad jockeys to have a chance to aim in time, which kills it for me, also the forced fov value at 60 ruins it even more. 

Valve "MADE" the FPS genre? You better start sharing some of that stuff you are on. ID and Epic made the fps genre. Valve rode on their success. 

FPS SP genre. Single player. They set the bar for it with Half-Life. Reading, mofo, can you do it? 

voodoochopsticks: lol, you can't bash Halo without at least mention it's level design:

1) Build a large, generic box room (try to make it as symmetrical as possible, but put in enough dividing walls and random crap on the floor to make it hard to see where exactly you are in relation to the exits).
2) Build a straight corridor and a corner corridor.
3) Take the aforementioned three prefabs and ctrl-c/ctrl-v as many times as is necessary until the level hits it size budget.
4) Profit!!! 

JPL: Peter Jackson is not directing the Halo movie, although he may be producing it. 

its ok that u are mad about HL and that you want to work at Valve

Just dont get angry and bitter every time subject of Valve vs ID appears 

Yeah Kinn, I remember some of those levels, like running down a spiral staircase for 20 minutes straight, with the same enemy positioning for every 5 floors, and the ones in between empty.

I thought that game looked so cool before, I wonder if it had been much better if it had been made for pc in the first place. 

/me shouts over the noise of people who still think it's worth the time spent trying to argue with speedy

You can't be serious... right?

I never signed an actual contract that says I can't do that, but an NDA can be construed a lot of ways, and there's plenty of other "policies" that aren't in any contract.

That said, the general attitude is "if you're spending the time/ideas on game stuff, spend it on your job." I've heard it ten different ways from ten different people though, ranging from "activision owns any game work you do, so you can't release anything that hasn't been through QA" which I've still been unable to officially confirm, to "doing free stuff for a raven game will encourage/bolster the online modding community." Either way I feel blessed I can entertain myself with plenty of non-gametype creative endeavors should the need arise.


pjw doesn't have any free time anyway though. 

Valve did not make the fps SP genre - the only thing they made that was any good was mass-production of user-made Total Conversions, and they even fucked that up.

Assuming you mean interesting, enthralling SP experiences I would say look to Hexen or Duke3d before lurching to Valve. WAY before HL, these games were pushing the SP experience to the limits.

Ok, HL added some cut-scenes. HL2 added some physics. Can anyone tell me where the gameplay is? Hmm? Throwing chairs around with my grav-gun? Crawling through innumerable vents to get around a locked door? Jumping on crates to reach the vent which gets me around the locked door? I admit HL and HL2 had a few good moments, but that is all they had.

And besides those games, all of Valve's other products are just plain Made-In-America crap. Steam? LAFF. Counterstrike? CRY. DoD? It used to be good, but DoD: Source ruined most of what made DoD fun, and combined it with bad framerates.

Give me Nintendogs before you give me Crap-Life 2. Haha, that was clever. :( 

 

The kittens do.


:*( 

You're all wrong. Apart from the people who are right. But I didn't read their posts.

Anyway, can I just point out that unless metl threatens to de-moderator-ise me, I will post news items about people's puppies.

Thank you. 

"if you're spending the time/ideas on game stuff, spend it on your job."

What if you're a level designer by profession and you want to animate monsters in your spare time? Or an engine programmer who chooses to knock out a few Quake textures as a hobby?

It all sounds a bit silly to me. 

JPL: Peter Jackson is not directing the Halo movie, although he may be producing it.

OK, OK, sorry for the mistake... 

Zwiffle,

all of Valve's other products are just plain Made-In-America crap.

Have a little pride, son; Volvo, BMW, Jaguar, Honda, etc. have not been building those autoplants all over our landscape out of charity. 

by 'son' I don't mean it to be condescending. It just means I think of you as a red headed step child (I'm not sure if that phrase is regional or not). 

In Wisconsin that phrase refers to the child who you keep locked in the closet, scalp them, then rape them after sticking squirrels up their rectum. That child may or may not be yours O_O

BTW: I'm kidding. Mostly. 

raven is insecure and gets jealous of its mappers. That's why the office is way out on the tundra. When you get there, they give a speech about how Raven "has no guards... no fences... no life-sign sensors... only a transporter scrambling field" 

that's the one! 

If that's real, it's complete bullshit. And if I were someone else and in that field I'd fucking map otherwise anyway. Just use an alias, like anyone does and keep your shit covered.

That or I'd just not take the job. 

It's not that big a deal. Seriously, if I had the time/drive to work on anouther map, I'd rather see if there was a possiblity of getting a Q4 map pack together at work and doing something for that and get paid for it. But I don't. 

I'd still want to map for Quake or mess around with Winter Assault or AoE3 or something. Although if I were really happy with the project I was working on, were I in the business, it wouldn't be a big deal anyway. 

Zwiffle now you sound just like a Valve hater. They`v made two good games, cant deny that

Lun get over that really, it was like half year ago
and afterall it was you who started all the insulting

Phait: you map, yeah. You cant map even w/o such a contract ...

scamp is right, after mapping at work you dont really want to do that in your free time 

I DO hate Valve. Through and through. They've made some mediocre games people went ape-shit for, and a shitload of crap. That's it. 

They've made some mediocre games people went ape-shit for, and a shitload of crap.

You don't think perhaps the reason people went ape-shit was because, you know... they liked them? 

I know plenty of people who like cheap American beer.

Doesn't mean it's good beer. 

if 'good' simply means it tastes good to you, then arguably, so called 'crappy' cheap american beer is 'good' because the masses like it.

^_^;
*runs* 

So, what you're saying is George Bush is a good president because the majority voted in favor of him? (NOTE: No political comments, please--I'm just making an example.)

"Good" is not a measure of popularity. "Popularity" is a measure of popularity, and "good" is a measure of quality.

Definitions of "good" may vary, but then you're refering to opinion, and not actual quality.

What wrath was refering to was popularity, which has nothing to do with Zwiffle's claim that the games are mediocre. 

How do you measure actual quality then? I'm really interested in that. 

Explained here:
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html 

bad wordage, should have read: if 'good' simply means it tastes good to you, then arguably, so called 'crappy' cheap american beer is 'good' because the masses like the taste of it.

what i was trying to get at is that since 'good' can't be quantified objectively, that these arguments were nothing but opinion. it was also an attempt to add weight to speedy's suggestion that zwiffle's arguements were specious.

in my opinion (because that's all it can ever be) i fail to see how duke3d had an enthralling SP experience... the whole game was meant to be a comedy, not exactly what i call enthralling.

i seriously do think HL pushed SP games forward by showing that it was possible to have a truly involving story and yet still be a shooter with action.

if you want to dole out your way of mesuring quality to determine if something's 'good', then maybe we can settle this now. :) 

i seriously do think HL pushed SP games forward by showing that it was possible to have a truly involving story and yet still be a shooter with action.

Marathon did that, came out before quake. Next! 

you took out my opinion with your opinion...

go you. :P 

What is this Half-Life everyone is talking about? Did it have any crates? 

How do you measure actual quality then?

I think that's irrelevant to the argument. However, to attempt to answer your question, one can gain an idea of something's quality by examining the positive and negative properties and results of the thing in question. Something with lots of good properties and few bad properties would be considered good, and something with few good properties and lots of bad properties would be considered bad.

For example, it's one thing to say "My math professor is good because he explains the concepts in detail and helps us when we have problems" or "My math professor is bad because he insults us and doesn't explain any of the concepts" whereas it's an entirely different thing to say "I like my math professor because it's fun to see him insult the other students" or "I hate my math professor because he isn't a stripper."

Obviously, quality can be difficult to determine in many circumstances, such as if the sum of the positive and negative is near zero.

But saying that a popular thing is automatically good is patently absurd, just as it's absurd to say that something that is not popular is bad. 

I would say Duke3d's SP was enthralling, because it was so revolutionary its detail and interactivity just threw you into the world and kept you there. There were so many new things to do other that just run, open door, etc etc.

I tend to base a game, good or bad, in quality, largely based on game-play aspects. For example, Half-Life was a steadily good game - it had some fairly impressive gameplay, I will admit that.

Counterstrike did not. Honestly, who here will say that Counterstrike is a good game? One, maybe two people?

Likewise, Half-Life 2 wasn't a good game. 6 years for facial animation and physics? 6 fucking years for that? The actual game development took something like 9 months I heard, and the rest of that was just tech. Reverse that, put 6 years gameplay and 9 months tech and the results would probably be different.

Look at Max Payne 2. Very disappointing. Huge graphics improvement, but gameplay remained the same, if not slightly worse because the game took 3 FUCKING HOURS TO PLAY. Why was it so short? How much time was spent on those cool bullet-time effects and comic book sequences and uber-cool graphics and super-involving storyline and how much attention was given to the actual GAME?

Take another example. UT200X. WTF? Why do they keep coming up with the same game with 2x better graphics every few years?

Some talked about Halo - they regurgitate sections of levels over and over. Gameplay is severely lacking. I enjoy lengthy games, but don't just copy and paste to make your game 20x longer than Max Payne. That's what speedmappers do.

I've kinda forgotten my point amid the myriad of examples. Gameplay or something. Yeah, something about how game developers should develop GAMES, and not just tech-showcases, like HL2. 

Counterstrike did not. Honestly, who here will say that Counterstrike is a good game? One, maybe two people?

Aiming a little high there perhaps

Take another example. UT200X. WTF? Why do they keep coming up with the same game with 2x better graphics every few years?

Preach it brother... Tell it like it is...

Likewise, Half-Life 2 wasn't a good game

disagree, I thought Half-Life 2 wasn't that bad, although I could't bring myself to play it through again...
Half-Life though..., well it sucked shit through a straw 

i find it interesting that you didn't mention doom3... honestly, i think that game was far more of a tech showcase than HL2 was. I mean, HL2's story involved a fair bit, whereas D3 was really just to survive. (there was some story stuff in there, ie: betruger and his whole transformation and constant mocking) but it failed to really interest me. (otoh, D3 was a lot scarier so it kind of balances out)

also, i never knew counterstrike was considered a game, i thought it was just a mod for hl... unless you're refering to that source version they made, which was just valve attempting to milk the cash cow dry... :P 

I enjoyed every bit of Half-Life, except for the platform jump level -- even most of Xen was good.

The levels were set up to drive you forward with a clear purpose or problem to solve in each. I would say it was quite engrossing.

I thought Half-Life 2 was generally good, but the puzzles were often tedious, like Blue Shift (God, I really hated that add on). In this respect, it was very similar to Caselli's Prodigy SE, a technical masterpiece that I quit after a few levels out of boredom. 

Zwiffle, you say you judge games on mostly gameplay, then you go and pretty much talk about only tech aspects in your rants... =)

I thought HL2 was a great game, sense of location and atmosphere were perfect, and the gameplay was definatly not repetitive, each area had different kind of fighting etc, unlike doom3, which got old at around the end of the 2nd map. 

he judges them on how long they were in development. 

That explanation sounds like you are a math student yourself. Seriously though, measuring "good" or "bad" properties is too simple an approach in my opinion. First of all, who gets to choose which properties are relevant? Next, who decides what makes a property good or bad? And what about art? You can surely measure the build quality of something in this way, but what about taste? And finally, when you have all your properties, there's the problem of weighing them appropriately.

Frankly, I don't think that there always is a way to objectively measure quality. Surely, some things that have clear and quantifiable properties (like practical objects, or maybe even software) can be measured that way, but others, like the artistic quality of a piece of art, can not.

Btw, getting back to your example - surely a student who is good at maths would say "My math teacher is good because he teaches me a lot of new things, and I can learn more than in other classes.", whereas someone who has his or her problems with mathematics might say about that same teacher: "My math teacher is bad because his pace is too fast and I can't follow.". Both students are commenting on the same property, and obviously their arguments are entirely subjective. My original question was how one would measure quality in an objective way (or at least, that's what it should have been). 

I wasn't saying that popular equals good. And you know it. But when something is so wildly popular as the half-life franchise is, well - that's a hint people might actually like it. And that, makes it good. A whole bunch of people look at it and go "Good - me want more." Yeah, it's good. Doesn't mean I personally have to agree, but if I'm a developer or publisher, I'm going to think to myself, maybe these valve guys are on to something here.

Counterstrike did not. Honestly, who here will say that Counterstrike is a good game? One, maybe two people?
I haven't played that much CS, mostly on a LAN with some friends. But I can honestly say I've gotten more hours of fun out of that mod than I have from many full price "triple a"-projects.

Likewise, Half-Life 2 wasn't a good game. 6 years for facial animation and physics? 6 fucking years for that? The actual game development took something like 9 months I heard, and the rest of that was just tech.

You usually don't design one engine to handle just the one game. You design it to be a base for several games down the line, games you don't even know about yet. You design for versatility. And you design it to be expanded and reshaped when you have the time to do it. Procedural content, streaming content, both things coming at us looking ahead. If we can't get it in now, I wan't it to be as easy as possible when we can. I'm pulling this out of my ass, of course, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the next tech-cycle for valve is substantially less than six years.

OR;

Wow, HL2 content in just nine months. Those guys are good.

Take another example. UT200X. WTF? Why do they keep coming up with the same game with 2x better graphics every few years?
The same reason EA churns out new sports titles every year. It makes them money. The fans buy the latest itiration, the newcomers do the same thing. Win-win.

In the case of epic, they also get to show off the engine that is the hottest thing to license right now. Do you know why it's popular? Not just because it's got great specs. Dev teams look at epic and go "these guys have produced alot of content, really quickly, and to great acclaim. I want to do that too." The game is a product for consumers, and an ad for the engine.

Gameplay is severely lacking.
Halo's gameplay is severely lacking? Now you're just being plain wrong. The Halo gameplay is severely streamlined, and sticks very close to the story. In many ways, they are indistinguishable from eachother. You are one guy in a big conflict. You drive cars, shoot guns and bluw stuff up.

Sure, it's not rocket science, but what it sets out to do, it accomplishes. It keeps people playing the game.

What you need to understand is that not everybody is like us here on func. We're halfway into the industry, we're not joe sixpack. Joe sixpack doesn't have time for 20+ hours of engrossing storylines, he just want to have some fun. Joe sixpack doesn't care how long a game was in development, or what physics API was used to simulate the ragdoll-effect. He just goes "cool, I can kick around the dead guy!" He definitely doesn't care about pushing the envelope the way we might.

Do I wish epic and id would use the independence they've earned to make something different? Yeah, sure. That would be cool. But they are one trick ponies, as long as they chose to be. So I'm gonna get my fix from Japan, like everyone else. Wanda and the Colossus is on it's way. But in the meantime, I'm having quite alot of mainstream fun playing HL and Halo, games that might strive not for innovation, but for solid craftsmanhsip and well-formulated fun. 

Hit me with it baby.

To be honest this discussion is so exciting I wish metl had left the viagra spam uncensored. 

Check out my PANTS! 

Wanda and the Colossus

Is that what Shadow of the Colossus is called in Japan?

I saw a trailer for that game; it showed Aragorn on horseback holding Gandalf's shining sword up at the sky, and then he climbed up the side of an Oliphaunt and stabbed it in the head. Looked quite good :} 

is Fitzquake the right engine to play DM ? I assume so, but am not sure if its DM compatible.

Also, what bots ? Are omicron bots still the way to go (even without routes) or is their better bots with waypoints for newer maps now ? 

who keeps deleting my viagra ads?!?

Just kidding :) 

Zwiffle, you say you judge games on mostly gameplay, then you go and pretty much talk about only tech aspects in your rants... =)

That's because that's all there is to talk about those games. 

Prodigy SE 4 is awesome map 

oh and I would like hl2 more if it had more shooter to it and less driving and messing around with grav gun 

QUAKEWORLD is the thing for QUAKE multiplayer in the internet. Main reasons why it is so, are prediction and 72 fps server.

Use FUHQUAKE client executable.
This is included in the EQUAKE PACKAGE. The package contains a lot of other useful things too, get it from quakeworld.us.

HAVE FUN! 

http://www.quakeworld.us/?a=downloads&d=equake/ 

I <3 Boobs 

hey folks, where can I get World Craft1.6 ? 

only interested in solo play with bots, not netplay. Thats why I was interested in normal quake DM, not QW. 

with the same settings as I have for sp and omibots. It's a bit choppy, especially whenever someone dies and respawns. Any ideas how to resolve this ? 

http://www.mybarbarian.com/mb-web/video/unicorns_hi.mov 

It has been already posted, but I suppose the website has been updated... just check the end of the trailer... ;P

http://www.doommovie.com/ 

You could try my engines, I've done extensive testing with loads of bots (frogbot, omicron, qbot, reapers and zeus) in big maps to make sure it works well. I've also fixed quite a few engine crash scenarios with bots, e.g. reapers on dm3. 

And i thought the video for Lucifugum's "Dukoso 3Bepr" was the most hilariously bad D&D based video out there. How wrong i was. 

there are bots for qw too 

It all sounds a bit silly to me.

Right, it is. Assisting a Quake mod team doing free content while employed at a game company could be construed as conflict of interest (not that a Quake1 map could infinitesimally dent the sales of Quake4).

scamp is right, after mapping at work you dont really want to do that in your free time

Well, speedy, I guess you'd be the authority on what all other people think and feel. I've been fixing script bugs and making performance adjustments to the same four or five maps since I was hired. I, for one, still have map ideas of my own I want to explore, that wouldn't fit into Quake4 or Wolf. 

thanks, I'll take a look. 

rpgdm1 is an awesome map.

I downloaded that map first since it was the only recent q1 dm release I remembered off the top of my head, and ended up playing two hours straight on it.

Great work rpg 

Thanks. That brought a smile to my face. It's always nice to hear comments other than when the map is first released. 

It's a good map, above average. I had no idea about the ladder's tho, and wondered how RPG kept magically teleporting one level up. I'd prefer stairs myself, but oh well, such is life. 

I recall beting some one (prolly it was Zwiffle ) on rpg q1 dm map
good layout 

no idea what's wrong; i've only tried it with reapers but it works. I guess i need to test it with omicrons and see. 

yeah that'd be good.

Maybe it's the maps though, I remember reading that dranzdm7 and dranzdm8 werent r-speed friendly. 

With big maps you might need more heap for FQ, otherwise you'd get similar hitch symptoms. Check for a flickering disk icon in the upper right screen corner. 

http://wtf.bbq.co.uk/ 

What size storage on that iPod? 

The page says a 4gb nano
http://omg.spam.fuck.yu/
You have to do one of the offers,
the best one atm appears to be the
RealRhapsody one for 99c then cancel before
30 days. 

OMG SIGN ME UP NOOOOWWWWWWWWWW 

I only read that far because this seemed to turn into a lame flamewar after a while. But, counterstrike is a fantastic game. I haven't played the version for HL2, but the original was a phenomanally fun game to play, with friends or strangers. I don't see how anyone here can say it was not a good game.

But the crowd that gave it 'popularity' is not something to brag about. That's a different issue! 

It all sounds a bit silly to me.

Yeah, well, like Lun, I haven't heard anything authoritative from anyone re: free-time mapping (and I certainly didn't sign anything to that effect), but I would be pretty surprised (and pretty cranky) if someone decided to tell me what I could do on my own free time.

My best guess (until someone tells me otherwise... /me looks over shoulder...) is that I can damn well do whatever I please on my own time with my own tools as long as that activity doesn't damage the company in some way, or detract from my ability to do my job. And, obviously, I shouldn't be representing anything I do on my own time as having anything to do with Raven. It seems like common sense to me, and is easily summed-up by "don't be a dumbass". *shrug*

As far as having the time, that's a different matter...I haven't really felt like working on something as involved as, say, a Q3 map for quite a while now (plus, Q3 just wasn't as attractive anymore), but I simply love making cool stuff, and I'm certainly not going to get tired of that just because I get paid for it.

For instance, I've been regularly making new tracks for a racing game that has me badly addicted, and it's fairly likely that I'll play around with something Q4-ish when it comes out.

We'll need a Q4 icon here soon... 

more spam...

guess i need to make myself a "delete post" button. 

we haven't needed a new one since serious sam -- every fps since then has been a sequel. 

We could do with losing the Sam and DKT icons, for the obvious reasons that they have almost no use.

In their place, I'd suggest a "Fantasy" icon and a "Strategy" icon (not sure what these would look like :), as those would be useful to cover other general genres of games, e.g. Tronyn's Rune maps or Lun's DOW map.

Maybe a general "Sci-fi" icon too. The Green Target already covers realism games, I reckon.

Q4 could be covered by the Q2 icon. 

for amps that go to 11. 

speaking of dow, why can't I play your map in skirmish? 

 

I see it as standing for "crap game" 

...so tired 

That's what I use this one for. 

...even more tired 

Because, either your an idiot, or because you haven't upgraded to the necessary patch. It does work in Skirmish. 

You don't by any chance think it might be both? 

LOL 

I hope this isn't stating the obvious, but the reason those two students' comments are so subjective is because they're not commenting on whether or not the teacher is good or bad, but they're commenting on whether or not the teacher is good or bad for them individually. If they wanted to be objective, they should have looked around them at how most of the class was doing, and maybe a few other classes, too.

How to measure quality objectively? Determine the properties that are most important to the largest number of people, and then see if those properties are positively or negatively affecting them.

As for art, as you mentioned you can measure the build quality. But the whole point of art is that it is dependant on individual interpretation, so obviously you can't objectively measure artistic value because it is entirely subjective. So artistic value can be "good" or "bad" for you individually, but it cannot be measured universally.

However, there truly can be a problem in weighing the positive and negative properties because there might be slight variations in our perception of those properties. Sometimes they will be obviously good and sometimes they will be obviously bad. I would argue, however, that because we're dealing with properties affecting most people and not properties affecting very few people, that our disagreement about the overall positive/negative judgement would differ only to a very small degree. For example, you might say it's great and I might say it's good, but it's probably somewhere in that range. Or, I might say it's slightly good and you might say it's slightly bad, but it's probably closer to mediocre. 

If you're talking about goodness, and you don't mean moral goodness, then you probably mean how effective something is at fufilling its purpose. A math teacher is good so far as he effectively teaches math to his students, so the average quality of each student's educations is what we care about.

A game's purpose is up for debate probably, which is why you'll get debate on which games were good. If the purpose is "make money" then the most profitable games are the best. If the purpose is "be entertaining" then surely popularity DOES matter, becuase a game that 1 in 10,000 people liked, and the other 9999 people didn't like, can't be good even if those 9999 people are "idiots."

Note: there are other candidate answers for "what is the point of games?" I just gave two. 

RPG, thanks for making my poing =). Because here, you are clearly contradicting yourself. From your original post:

""Good" is not a measure of popularity. "Popularity" is a measure of popularity, and "good" is a measure of quality."

vs.

"How to measure quality objectively? Determine the properties that are most important to the largest number of people, and then see if those properties are positively or negatively affecting them."

Now please explain to me the difference.

Disclaimer: I know how hard this subject is. I have had hours and hours of discussions with Aardappel, headshot and Borsato on this topic, and the bottom line for me personally was that there hardly is something "objective" because there is no higher instance that defines this term. Eventually, there is only you vs. the majority. Some people might argue that the majority doesn't get to dictate what quality is because the majority of people is dumb - and I would agree. But who does, then? Your favorite columnist? Your dad? Your art teacher?

I for one don't know. 

Really. 

That's something else that bothers me about R.P.G.s definition of quality - the selection of properties is completely arbitrary. I mean, "make money" and "be entertaining" are almost at opposite ends of the spectrum, because games that "make money" are probably those which are entertaining to the masses, but not to us. We seem to have different standards, but does that make our standards better than those of the masses? 

I think we mostly believe that there is some common property that all good games have, and that there's consensus among people about which games are good. In other words, we believe we could be objective about the matter, even if we aren't always.

If those beliefs were false, there would be no point in discussing games with other people, because we would have no common ground, no unchanging reality that both of us experience and can identify and reason about. 

I think games and other pop culture/mass pruducts (music for example) shouldnt not be judged by the popularity, cause marketing and advertisment plays a huge role. Very often a crap game gets rather popular just because its based on a popular franchize and has a massive ad compaign, but a good game might pass almost unnoticed if it is lacking the hype/advertisment 

now we need to be more specific about what popularity means. There are two concepts:

* how many people total have played this game?
* what percentage of people like the game?

This is the difference between well-known and well-liked. 

Ok, perhaps a subtle distinction, but something can be popular and still come out as a negative in the general weight of positives/negatives of its qualities. 

Now it's getting interesting, I think. Metl, I don't agree there. Even if there's no common ground, it's still worth discussing things, but you have to leave out taste. You can still discuss for example the feelings you have when you experience a certain piece of art. But you cannot make any generalized statements.
And about well-liked vs. well-known, I think that well-known does not play any role even in defining the term "popularity", let alone "quality", because a game / song / movie /whatever can be well-known, but if most people regard it as crap, well, it's not popular is it? Same goes for persons, by the way =).

R.P.G. I'm still not convinced that there are many objective criteria when it comes to art. But personally, in my subjective view, popular things / persons are usually suspect and I don't like them.

By the way, what about innovation? That is a fairly objective term, since something is either innovative (to most people), or it is not. 

And about well-liked vs. well-known, I think that well-known does not play any role even in defining the term "popularity", let alone "quality", because a game / song / movie /whatever can be well-known, but if most people regard it as crap, well, it's not popular is it?

Sure, but this is my whole point -- these are distinct concepts, and we should be clear about which we mean. When someone says that popularity is entirely the result of marketing and advertising, they must be talking about how well-known a game is. 

For software, we have a great way of defining quality. Is it bug free? The lower the number of bugs per hour of use, the higher the quality of the code - as far as the end user is concerned. 

Isnt the popularity of any commercial product measured in the ammount of sold copies? And thats about the only thing you can really count. No one knows how many of the customers are satisfied.

DKT is rahter well known game ... :) 

but thats only one aspect
there are many more qualities to code than lack of bugs 

What speedy said, plus there is a difference between quality of software (user experience) and quality of code.

But software is a bit of a different matter because it certainly is easier to quantify or to find the properties rpg speaks of. It's rather easy to find criteria that make good software.

It's much more difficult when it comes to artistic endevours. 

Overuse of coloured lighting = bad game.

It was all so easier back then. :( 

be a manly man and dare to use your judgement -
a bad game is a bad game and a good game is a good game. Bad art, good art.

You can't really run away behind some statistics or somehow scientifically factually deduce "good" from something like art.

People tend to listen to those critics they have found to be reasonable when compared to their own view, but even their ideas may sometimes deviate a lot.

Here is an example of an opinionated review that is further based on some more opinions:

Id textures are pretty good. They are detailed, handmade, vivid but not oversaturated on contrast, fit the palette well (except that one mip level of some woods get red spots when bright) and are inspired, strong, peculiar and beautiful. 

every freakshow can have an opinion. but in order to have a meaningful discussion, a rational debate, or an academic discourse -- you need definition and objectivevely quantifiable concepts with which to compare and contrast two or more different pieces of, in this case, videogame. 

well, sure, but it's just that, the user experience, that really matters. because the end user only ever see the compiled code in action, not the underlying mechanics on which it acts, that's the important part.

no end user care about the quality of code in any other aspect than the lack of bugs. excpet maybe performance, but I have a feeling performance might fall under something else than quality.

anyways, if it looks like code from hell, but runs like heaven - what do I care? and no matter how hard you try, "but it's really neat code, look - comments and everything!" is a really piss-poor excuse for buggy software. 

I'm still not convinced that there are many objective criteria when it comes to art.

Quite right--I agree, and that was a point I made. You can't objectively measure something that is defined to be subjective. Logical impossibility.

Regarding games--no matter what some people say, games contain at least some aspects of art, so they are not 100% objectively quantifiable. Even their purpose is subject to interpretation. Of course, you still should be able to examine some of it objectively, such as the build quality and the reward/punishment system. But when a game becomes popular based on the art style or atmosphere (and to some extent the story) then whether or not the game is good is not affecting its popularity. The atmosphere may have good build quality, but there will be different opinions about whether or not the atmosphere is appealing, and the actual gameplay may indeed be cack. 

Everyone's so mean and aggravated and uptight about this all the time. They're games. GAMES. Play it and if it entertains you, you like it. 

 

Has anyone chanced upon a program that will read character stats in Morrowind? I've searched various forums and the web but can't find much relevant. I've seen one program that will allow you to create profiles and edit those, but not ones you create in-game. 

<quote>But when a game becomes popular based on the art style or atmosphere (and to some extent the story) then whether or not the game is good is not affecting its popularity.</quote>

Isn't that goodness too? 

It just happens. I for one, am not espcially suprised with the review. Raven's been a worthless developer for years now, and have yet to put out a top notch, high quality game. SoF was a mediocre game, as was it's sequel. Why do you people seem so suprised that Q4 is yet another mediocre game? If id made it, I'd be ranting with the rest of you, but id didn't make this. Raven did. Check Raven's track record, it's less than stellar over the years. Why do you expect something so much different here?

http://www.forumplanet.com/PlanetQuake/topic.asp?fid=1486&tid=1760549&p=1 

I'm all stroggified by that discussion board.

I wonder if it gives cool gameplay things when you're a cyborg. 

if all you want to do is to check out stats or set them, you can do all that from the console.

i forget most of them, but it's like 'set level #' or 'set acrobatics #' etc etc 

1. In that instance people would subjectively like/dislike the art. As I mentioned, art is interpretive, and therefore subjective. Art can be subjectively good, but it cannot be objectively--or universally--good.

2. No, the game itself (i.e. gameplay) might be mediocre at best and might not be fun to play at all. 

there's more to some games than gameplay. Sometimes it's the story, or the artwork, graphics or sounds, or whatever, that can make a game good even if gameplay is mediocre. Likewise, they can destroy an otherwise good game if they suck. 

I don't know why I'm even arguing this with you since you're clearing missing the premise.

Please re-examine the definitions of "subjective", "objective", "actual", and "universal" and then try again. 

Please re-examine the definitions of "subjective", "objective", "actual", and "universal" and then try again.

It's mandatory in order everybody have "the same language"... ;P 

ok, it was half-hearted anyway,. 

Go to www.google.com and enter the word "Failure". Now hit "I'm feeling lucky" and see where you end up. I wonder if it will be the same place as me.

I am deeply sorry to anyone who already knows about this. I'm sorry for causing you to read two sentences and this apology. I won't waste any more of your precious time. 

Sorry, that was three sentences, an apology lasting a further three sentences, and this correction. 

whip up a QSP map and all will easily be forgiven and forgotten. 

http://united+offensive.istheshit.net/ 

Where the feck is your bio at Ravensoft.com? 

I've often asked the same. 

They probably looked at the out of date bio on Lunarun.com and decided if he couldn't keep his own upto date they didn't need to make one for him. :) 

Lunarun? 

Moonbuggy Race! 

http://www.pcgamemods.com/mod/16507.html 

pretty neat, and a good effort at non doom3 textures
very short
wierd thing with the guns-- there was a shotgun and a machinegun in a case, but i couldn't pick either of them up. (i gave myself the shotgun via console, then didn't bother with the machine gun)

i think the map shows a lot of potential for more in that theme (haunted mansion/house, typical spooky halloween type stuff).

d3's dynamic lights weren't really used to full effect, unfortunatly. no really cool shadows or whatnot.

overall, nice, but too short to really form an opinion. 

I only bookmarked the image but you'll find it at the site... Winamp in Doom
http://www.pcgamemods.com/core/8425/screenshots/b1.jpg 

Stupid mispelling on my part. 

http://www.vce.com/AtomicGallery/movies/cannon.html I just thought this short clip was ridiculously cool. Yes, it's a cannon shooting a nuke. 

my favourite bit is the way the sound of the explosion travels at the speed of light.

(PS: I hope they free those poor bonzai kitties soon :{ ) 

Are you implying that the video is a fake? 

Operation Upshot/Knothole, a 1953 test of a nuclear artillery projectile at Nevada Test Site (photo depicts 280 mm gun and explosion)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery

Whether or not the video has been edited, nuclear artillery did indeed exist. Check the photo on the site, which is a high-res pic from the video.

According to all the info I've seen (not much) it would have taken about 29 seconds for the sound to reach the camera after the explosion took place. The video itself is apparently of the first test of a nuclear artillery shell. 

He's implying that the sound is fake, and injected by some modern George Lucas for "effect", much the same way that Fox shows like America's Most Thrilling Police Car Chases always have inexplicably clear and distinct tire-screeching and car-smashing sounds. 

many nuke test documentaries have fake sounds 

I can imagine the stern voice on a documentary talking about the explosive destructive capabilities of a thermal-nuclear mortar if it were detonated in a city of 3 million people while the clip shows artillery firing missiles into a crowded city, then when the huge mushroom cloud blooms there's dog-toy squeaky sounds. 

yeah I hate those fake sounds. Well, what can one expect...

There is also a time gap in the nuclear cannon video, at least the one I have.
Funny how you can see the sounding rocket contrails in the light of the explosion. 

So they put out some q4 dm shots already:
http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=907560#
looks surprisingly quackey. 

The case, hurrah!
http://zombie.planetdoom.gamespy.com/shots/quake4/quake4.jpg

Actual levels
http://zombie.planetdoom.gamespy.com/shots/quake4/frag1.jpg
http://zombie.planetdoom.gamespy.com/shots/quake4/frag2.jpg

http://zombie.planetdoom.gamespy.com/shots/quake4/edge1.jpg
http://zombie.planetdoom.gamespy.com/shots/quake4/edge2.jpg

http://zombie.planetdoom.gamespy.com/shots/quake4/sandstorm.jpg
http://zombie.planetdoom.gamespy.com/shots/quake4/sandstorm2.jpg

http://zombie.planetdoom.gamespy.com/shots/quake4/blood1.jpg
http://zombie.planetdoom.gamespy.com/shots/quake4/blood2.jpg

Also thanks Zombie for the pics! Or at least putting the pics up. Or whatever he did with them. 

but that looks absolutely average. 

Awww, come on, you know you missed me. Ok, not you (you know who you are).

But seriously, any new maps out there that I should get? Consider me 7 months out of the loop. 

too boxy, somewhat UT-ish (weaps and lowpoly maps with ramps)
and I dont like the texture choice (esp color)

so far q4 looks disappointing, but I will try it anyway 

Those shots look like low-poly uninspired versions of HH3 maps. 

RAMPS?!

You can't be serious. 

Q4 has SO many bugs... its shit. for instance, no bunnyhopping -- wtf? thanks lun ;o 

I'd order it straight from australia if I had a comp that would run it... 

Inertia: chess on yahoo anytime? 

sure sounds delightful

but, yahoo kind of has buggy stuff that sometimes crashes my browser -- we shall see. 

heh 

 

Scampie probably has a lot on his plate (I just hope it isnt any problems backhome as New England is getting drenched at this time) so, I'm going to go ahead and put a link up for my speed map for the sm107 cramped theme event. If anyone else participated wants there map up as well just e-mail me alanr643_at_msn.com. My site is craptastic, but for a small community it should not be a problem.

http://www.geocities.com/alanr643

Theme: cramped, Aramagon Tech
Monsters: 47
Secrets: 3
BuildTime 4 hours -- two of which dealt with a stupid bug. 

is that ANOTHER version of 'The Edge' in those Q4 screenshots?

Jesus. 

Problem with the silver key door but no problem because there is a handy clipping error nearby ;-) 

Wow. Another miss for me. The silver key icon is a button that triggers the door. Thanks for giving it a spin. 

yeah, q4 has edge(ish) and q3dm17(ish)

Edge is good map, beaten to death, but still 

http://www.livejournal.com/users/speeds_tf 

So, is it any good?

Can't say I've been literally sat in a puddle of my own piss whilst waiting for it, but the reviews/comments are starting to come in, and after ignoring all the trolling and reviews by idiots (PC Gamer) it sounds promising.

The comments on Bluesnews seem fairly reasonable. I like what I'm hearing about the impression that there is a war going on. As long as it's not a really fake impression of a war that dissipates after 5 minutes of play when you realise the AI is shit, and that all your squadmates are blundering idiots you can safely label as cannon fodder, and that only you can really make a difference to the outcome of the game... (sorry, couldn't help it after I played the CoD2 demo recently).

No idea when/if I'll be able to pick up a copy of Q4 here in Japan, and as PC games seem to be kinda expensive, not sure if I will.

Anyway, hurry up and post your verdicts, because I am eager to hear what people think about it.

I am especially keen to hear what you Raven guys think of it. I don't care if your opinions are biased, I just want to know which aspects of the game you are most fond of.

Lun, did you do MP or SP stuff? 

Too busy playing the thing to comment fully right now, but lots of Strogg attacking you at once = good.

Looks better than the screenshots do it justice, but that's the d3 engine for you.

Runs a lot more slowly than d3 though, a quick r_showlightcount reveals why. Nicely bright lit environments but at a cost. :) 

Truly LOL inducing. 

Runs a lot more slowly than d3 though

i got 20~fps in d3, so i should get, what, 5 now? 

As far as I can tell there isn't much in the game that would need better hardware than d3, it's just that there are a lot more lights and much largers action filled areas.

It should be said that q4 (and d3 for that matter) aren't really playable at all on my computer at the moment...I got myself a 6600gt to tide me over until a new computer a few days ago, and I can't get it to run properly. Damn things are slideshows. :( 

(Sandstorm) of a MP map above has some Lun signature brush style in it, but that is just an ill informed guess. 

FABLE

Anyone tried this?? Lionhead RPG game, first on consoles now on the PC...

Any good?? Comments?? Any obvious cock-ups?? 

was decent. the much vaunted 'choose your path' is exagerated naturally.

also, it appears to be rather buggy and crashes often. which is more annoying because you can't truly save. that might vary depending on hardware however.

still though, good story, and was quite a bit of fun. 

Cheers.

GFX / Controls / Playability okay??

Anyone got any other views?? 

If find that it runs as good if not faster than Doom3, nothing I've seen thus far suggests to me that it runs markedly slower.

As for the game...well...I'll wait till I'm finished, My first impressions of singleplayer however went something like this,

"Well Raven have really screwed the pooch with Quake4"

Multiplayer is a blast, perhaps if you don't like Quake3 (seek medical advice) you may not like it. 

I guess runs as good if not faster than Doom3 could be a little ambiguous.

It runs as smooth as on both my machines, everything maxed, except for the "Ultra" settings, which are supposedly for 512mb vid cards.

P4 3.4GHz LGA 775
2gig DDR 400
6800 Ultra
Audigy 2 ZS
etc

P4 3.2GHz Prescot
2gig DDR 400
6800 Ultra
Audigy 2 ZS
etc 

Fable: fucking loved it on the XBox - prolly my fave XBox game actually. I've spent about 50 hours in it, but sadly completed the main quest in only 14 hours. Cool thing is you can continue playing after that to finish any side quests and just continue dicking around in the world (and there's a lot of cool stuff to do - I'm slowly trying to aquire every building in Albion, by hanging around at night all dodgy like and waiting for the owners to come home and tuck themselves in bed, before I sneak in and murder them in their sleep >:{} ) I understand The Lost Chapters adds in a fair chunk of new content, so that should beef it up a bit.

I don't really know how well it would carry over to the PC though (the combat seems rather geared up for consoles), so I'll probably wait until TLC comes out on XBox (annoying that they couldn't tie it in with the PC release). 

right, i never played fable on xbox, so i hadn't realised, but yeah, after playing, i found out that there is indeed a decent amount added.

as for controls, well, i found it uncomfortable during the entire game, and i guess that's because of what kinn was saying-- that it was designed to be controlled via game pad. however, it does actually work out alright, just a bit to aclimatize at the start.

also, the ability to continue playing at the end is a nice plus, because i too did what kinn is talking about. just goofing around, killing stuff, etc. fun like morrowind. :)

i think the best thing fable has going for it, is that even though it's very non linear, the main quest is ALWAYS clearly marked, so if you get bored doing side quests, you can jump back into the main quest right away. 

ZOMG PHAITS BACK WITH TINFOIL HAT CONSPIRACIES!!!1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/18/AR2005101801663.html]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/18/AR2005101801663.html

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn't. The pages coming out of your color printer may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down if you ever cross the U.S. government.

Last year, an article in PC World magazine pointed out that printouts from many color laser printers contained yellow dots scattered across the page, viewable only with a special kind of flashlight. The article quoted a senior researcher at Xerox Corp. as saying the dots contain information useful to law-enforcement authorities, a secret digital "license tag" for tracking down criminals. 

Not really news worthy or anything...Mindcrime was hassling me to fix my website and make the maps available again...so I decided the map wagon thing sucked ass, and I should have fixed it ages ago, but I suck and am lazy...anyhow its all fixed now. No more flash or any shite like that.

no new maps or anything though... 

u rok 

Ice cubes needed. 

I was just thinking the other day, I wonder how Elek is doing? Not to mention Bailey...

Good to see you're still around! 

http://www.planetquake.com/quake4/mp/maps.shtml 

Look crap. Generic industrial bollox. Nothing remotely inspiring there.

And you can see in one screenshot there is bouncing items. I bet the whole experience will be even shitter than Q3A, hell the maps actually look less interesting.

Thankfully I'm not going to be playing MP. 

Welcome back!

Did you know that windows has a backdoor for cia Linux doesn't have this since you can compile it yourself. That article you linked to was removed already. And I bet they are reading func too!

Take care!

(The printer thing... that's why you have to clip newspaper headlines and glue them onto a paper to combine your message. Be sure to not breathe and use disposable gloves... and don't do it at home.) 

No I'm not worried about any printers, since I don't do any illegal activities with it i.e. counterfeiting. But it was interesting nonetheless. 

any amusing google, if you're interested. 

AN amusing google.

Bah. 

Let's not go mentioning that dog of Elek which has stolen my name again. ;) 

i have 100... mail me. 

is there any place to d/l these texture anymore? the one for fileplanet ( http://dl.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?bighouse/lun3dm3tex.zip ) doesn't work :( and i searched on google and found nothing. 

[Kona] and Elek both post here within a week... it's like it's 2002 all over again :) 

 

Have you had any luck with Lun3dm3tex.zip?
I have it, but have nowhere to upload it to. It's a bit over 14mb, I could split it and Email it to you in 2 attachments?, or if you had somewhere that I could upload it to? 

(Sandstorm) of a MP map above has some Lun signature brush style in it, but that is just an ill informed guess.

It's also wrong. ;) Although out of all the people who've theorized I did that map, you're the first one to cite a reason other than "it has sand in it."


Necros, I'll upload that zip for you tonight. 

thanks lun :) will save me and vorelord some trouble, and they're nice textures that should be up somewhere at least.

cheers ^_^ 

is it up yet? :o

:P 

is what caught my attention there more than the theme. 

"Well Raven have really screwed the pooch with Quake4"

Wtf does that mean? Is that an American saying? It makes no sense to me whatsoever. Why would fucking a dog make any difference to the outcome of game creation? Are you implying that Raven is full of dog lovers? Does it mean the game is good, or bad?

EXPLAIN!

"So far it's AWESOME!" or "So far it's SHIT!" would have been much more easily understood. 

'screwed the pooch' just means 'they fucked up badly'.

and i'm not even american! o.0

ps: i don't know if i agree with that statement, btw, since i haven't played it yet. 

was in that post you quoted above, though I got the geist of it. 

It was my initial (misguided)impression of the game. Check the Quake4 discussion thread, Quake4 Rocks!! 

I met a Middle Easterner last week, who greeted me with a 'howdy'. I frowned, and told him nobody says howdy outside of cowboy movies. 

Well Raven have really screwed the pooch with Quake4

Disclaimer
no animals were harmed in the making of Quake4 

I am looking for good, modern engine ports for Mac OS X. I am currently using the Fruitz Of Dojo port, but was wondering if there are any other. Could anyone please point me to some URLs? Thanks! 

posted this the other day, in case you missed it.

I have posted a new darkplaces beta which includes mac binaries. (agl+coreaudio and dedicated server, could not get sdl version to build on my friend's mac, libstdc++ linking problems - SDL for Mac OSX is C++)

I do not have a machine to test the agl binary on, good luck. 

Great, thanks for the info. 

but I'm away from the computer *I* can test on for a couple of weeks, I'd be interested in knowing how you get on with it :) 

MoALTz: considering what has been said here the perfect food for this channel would be a bacon and cheese pizza 

I didn't get it because of your comments on how great the (Q3 again, oh... super) multiplayer is. I wasn't sure if somehow screwed the pooch was used in a positive way. We have "the dogs bollocks" in the UK, to say how great something is, but I don't see anything remotely great about a dogs bollocks. My bollocks are great, but I don't go around asking dogs if I can examine their magnificent testicles. 

Anyone know any? VERC is not updated that often, although the tuts seem ok if I ever need them. How about review sites? Are there any half decent HL2/CSS/HL2DM custom maps aside from the ones we already know about (overflow, the contest winners, metastasis etc.) I am mainly interested in map visuals, since I the HL2 gameplay seems to have gotten a little bit stale :( 

Seems SP is down, I need to bitchslap godaddy, should be able to get the site back up sometime this week. Sorry if this causes you guys any problems :( 

Seems it's just the domain that isn't pointing towards the servers anymore (as I could access my site for a while after it happened cause my dns wasn't updated yet). Domaine wasn't paid for maybe? I'm pretty sure you can still access the sites with the right ip. 

Snarkpit. That's pretty much it. There are really no good custom CS:S maps.

http://ascendancy.us.to/dmoriginal/index.html is a pretty good site for quality HL2DM maps 

There are nice levels there ! Thanks for the link. 

I'll check out the link, cheers for that. 

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~fischmt/ascendancy/dmoriginal/ss/dm_carousel-1.jpg
Ugly how it's so angular at places.
I haven't played hl2, but what I've seen in video, some places like the railroad tracks were very angular / pointy / faceted / youknow. Is there really no easy way around this? q1 tech leftover? Lazy mappins? 

Missing out two obvious levels IMHO. 

This is what bugs me the most about Source, all the arches etc are usually choppy brushes unless a model is used(seldom), the engine doesn't have patches. 

which is the other one that is missing?

HL2 looks decent because it has good art, but the engine isn't really anything special. There are a few nice effects, like the water, and the lighting is nice, but most of the detail is contained in props. If you take out the props in Hammer (hide them) you can see a shell which is no more complex than a HL1 map - possibly less so.

I was looking at parts of Highway 17 earlier, and if you stop to look at the actual brush geometry, it's shit. There is so little detail used. Thankfully, this is masked fairly well by the textures, lighting and abundance of props.

I will try and make a HL2 dm map, but I don't know whether I will enjoy doing it because of the reliance on props for details. 

Unfortunately (?), you better get used to mapping like that, because that's definately the direction mapping has been taking in the past couple of years. Take a look at UT2004, most maps have like 50-100 brushes TOTAL with all the rest being meshes. 

soon, mappers will be nothing but boxmap makers! :o 

is it up yet? :o

:P

shit, no. uh ... let me write myself ten emails at home. I just went through a drive reformat so I'm still catching up :) 

soon, mappers will be nothing but boxmap makers! :o

Either that or they'll have to make all their stuff in Max in the first place ^_~ 

http://www.stupid.com/stat/NLST.html 

Necros, I don't appear to have lun3dm3tex.zip anymore. I could pile a bunch of stuff in a new zip for you but I dunno if I want to introduce two different files to the internet.

Headthump/Hrimfaxi/Hooever said they had it: could you send me a list of what files are in the zip? 

I had most of your stuff on my old machine, but it's gone the way of all things. Perhaps,
www.planethalflife.com/wadfather would have the textures? 

atm i'm using the textures right out of lun3dm3 to test out some stuff. i didn't know it would be such a problem or i wouldn't have asked until i was sure. i'll get in touch with (vorelord? i'm too lazy to search back o.o) later if it works out.
cheers, and thanks anyway :) 

That show was a certifiable example of how the "more is more" concept works. I might have had enough if it had lasted about 2 hours longer. 

I can split it in 2, and upload it to 2 different sites, both of which only allow me 10MB. I will Email you with the url's, once done. Wont be for another 2 hrs from the time of this post though. It will be everything from the original zip, unaltered. 

It's certainly a far cry from making stuff in max, that's for sure. Modelling in a proper 3d package is teh awesome - but I don't like having to make bits in a 3dpackage like max, then import as props into a stupid boxroom level.

The problem with making levels in a proper 3d package is texturing... it takes a huge amount of time when you have a hundred thousand polys or more that require individual texture alignment. You can do boxmapping etc. but a lot of detail comes through proper application of correctly fitting textures, rather than a generic tileable metal texture or something.

Then again... look at the texturing on some of HL2s props... You really don't notice shit texturing in game with good lighting masking it.

The tools at the previous company I worked for had a pretty awesome set of texturing tools though, so I did all the texturing in Max. Making the textures was the biggest pain in the arse though, since we level guys would get given 2-4 weeks to texture a level (make 30-40 high res textures AND apply them... yeah, right - and you expect it to look good?) and the character guys would get a week to make ONE texture for their fucking characters. How do the producers get these fucking figures?

Ugh, and I hate those games where the map editor is basically a terrain modeller that makes up and down wobbly hills, with no overhangs or anything, and then you just put props in. That's shit if you ask me. I really hope that is not the way things go. 

I did all the texturing in our in-house tools, and all the modelling in max. 

"I did all the texturing in our in-house tools, and all the modelling in wax." 

as a mapper, you were expected to make your own textures? :S is this a common practice among companies for mapping? 

Ah, fuckit, I'll just zip a bunch of stuff up for you. You want photoshop files too or just the tgas? 

if it's not too much trouble, yeah, it would be cool to have the photoshop files to work with.

what i'm basically trying to do is try to build some normal maps for them for d3, but i'm not sure it will work very well since all the textures have shadows painted on them already... that's why i don't want to bother anyone since i might not follow through on this thing after all. unless you have only diffuse versions of the textures, that would be pretty wicked... ^_^ 

barrel.jpg
barrelglow.jpg
bubbles.jpg
ceilwhite1.jpg
ceilwhite1fx.jpg
concrete0.jpg
concrete0dark.jpg
dmetsupport1.tga
floor1.jpg
floor1stripe.jpg
floor2.jpg
floor2stripe.jpg
hhgtg.tga
lite1.jpg
lite1fx.jpg
llight5.jpg
llight5blend.jpg
lun3dm3tex.shader
lun3dm3tex.txt
metglu.tga
metpan_caution.tga
metpan_caution2.tga
metpan_lite1.tga
metpan_lite1fx.jpg
metpan1.tga
metpan1r.tga
metpan2.tga
metpan3.tga
metpan4.tga
metpan5.tga
q1comp2.jpg
q1comp3.jpg
q1comp4.jpg
q1comp4glow.jpg
q1comp5.jpg
q1comp6.tga
q1comp6bfx.jpg
q1comp6fx.jpg
q1comp6fx3.jpg
q1comp6fx4.jpg
q1comp6fx5.jpg
q1comp6fx6.jpg
q1comp6fx7.jpg
q1comp6scroll.jpg
q1comp7.jpg
sky1.jpg
sky2.jpg
stair1.jpg
star1.jpg
star2.jpg
star3.jpg
star4.jpg
star5.jpg
star5b.jpg
star6.jpg
starb1.jpg
starb2a.tga
starb3.jpg
starc.jpg
stard.jpg
telefloor.tga
telefloorfx.jpg
telewallfx.jpg
telewallhigh.tga
telewalllow.tga
than_button1.jpg
than_button1fx.jpg
than_button2.jpg
than_button2fx.jpg
than_buttonsides.jpg
xpiplun1a.tga
zoot1.jpg
zoot2.jpg

FOLDERS

<extras>
ick_star1.psd
rust_floor1.psd
rust_floor2.psd
rust_metal1.psd
rust_star1.psd
tech_floor1.psd
tech_floor2.psd
tech_metal1.psd
tech_star1.psd

<models>
<mapobjects>
<lun3dm3barrel>
barrel.md3
barrel.ms3d
barrel.qc
barrel2.md3
barrel2.ms3d
barrel2.qc

<psd>
floor1.psd
floor2.psd
metal1.psd
metal2.psd
panbase1.psd
panbase2.psd
star1.psd
support1.psd
telefloor.psd
telewall.psd

Necros, I uploaded evereything except for what is contained in the "extras" folder, the .psd's, sent you an Email with the link, was going to up the extras folder after you down'd the first part. If you want to download from lunarun when he up's, that's cool, just let me know so I can take the stuff down. As long as you end up with what your after, thats the main thing. 

thanks vorelord! ^_^

the psds are the ones i'm most interested in. highlights and such are all on seperate layers so making a diffuse map is actually possible. u/l the second part whenever you have the chance. ^_^ 

I think it's fairly common. Some places expect it, some don't. I think the larger companies are more likely to have dedicated texture artists.

Some of the textures I had to make myself, and some were made by someone else... the textured version of my level ended up looking pretty shit. I'll be using untextured max renders touched up in PS for pics in my cv :) 

Done, you should have mail with the link 

I doubt it, it probably depends on your job title/role though. Most of us here are both level designers and level builders, however, in the industry that role may be split rather than combined.

If you were hired as a level designer, its highly unlikely you'd be asked to do textures (surely most level guys aren't up to the task anyways?).

Also if you're hired specifically as a level designer, you may find yourself in a position where you're expected to do pure design stuff and may not get to do any of the actual level construction - depending on the game, tools, staffing etc.

If you're hired as a level builder, it is more likely you'd be asked to do textures, as this role is essentially that of an artist (assuming you're taking direction from a game designer or level designer, and not making your own stuff).

However, this role is more like a '3D artist' and many companies will have specific 2D art guys to do the textures and stuff. So its possible you'd be asked to do textures, but still not guaranteed.

Of course, it all depends on the company and the other staff you have available. But I can definitely tell you that I have rarely, if ever, seen either a level design or level building job advertised that listed texture creation ability as a requirement or a task. 

than speaks the truth!
texturing in 3ds is ... uhh
and modelling to the tex size is not really possible, cause the grid is usless (otherwise you could just boxmap and assign right mat IDs)
etc etc

Also, really odd to hear you had no dedicated texture artist 

i got the second part, so feel free to take it down. :)

one thing that was missing (i guess it wasn't in the original zip file) are the q1comp line of textures in PSD format. :(
but the others are all there, so yayness. ^_^ 

No, they must not have been there, or at least not in what I originally dl'd, thats all the contents unaltered (except for the fact that I split it). 

Thought I would post this... Doom3world and Quake4world is having a Quake 4 Mapping Competition which starts on November 1st and ends December 31st 2005.

A lot more info about it can be found here:
http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=13044 

Just finished this one up, and I gotta say it was quite a cool little diversion. I thought the level was really well done, although short, and it was probably the perfect setting to show of HDR and the "retina-adjusting" effect.

It did run a bit slow in spots on my 3ghz, 1.5GB RAM, 9800PRO 128MB, but mostly in heavy combat situations, so that's forgivable I guess. The church looks nothing short of stunning, and everything else looks very good. I was hoping it would be a little longer, but it is definitely immersive, and a nice "new tech" demo. 

Yeah, for what it was, it was nice. I wasn't particularly impressed with the HDR -- the movies they made of the level was far better looking ;D But at tleast they included some tasty materials I can use for maps, and it was fun while it lasted. 

Once more this proves what a crock of shit the whole Steam set-up is. I go to the Steam page news item, I can't see any link to download it. I open Steam, I see it as a "Not Yet Released" item, but I can't see any way to download it. I suppose if I started HL2 casually wanting to play something else, I'd be forced to negotiate with some download bollox THEN when I might not want to.

"Steam - fucking around with conventional, functional game downloads, and removing and interfering with player choice"

GG you fucking cocks. 

maybe you remember - these guys had posted on func

quake-based game for hand-helds

http://www.bobbeetec.com/meat.php

pics are rather un-pretty, and there is rubicon-tex in one screenie
As I can see they didnt bother teaming up with mappers/artists/modellers 

seems it's compression from the music world as applied to the visual world.

Overcomes some limitations of the display devices, namely lcds with low dynamic range I guess.

You could get a same kinf of effect in q1 by playing with a good crt in a dark room with max contrast.

I really wonder why it's taking so long for them to apply frame blending for low-hz screens so one can play at 120 fps with a 60hz screen but so it still looks smooth. A la gl_motionblur by FTE. Or then of course 4d-rendering (with the time being the fourth dimension) so that moving points become lines etc so you can customize rendering perfectly to the refresh rate and fool the eye to make it completely smooth.

I guess they are too hurried making copies of each other's techs, or just don't understand what it feels like to play with really high fps (you never really wanna go back to the crappy slideshow). 

http://www.livejournal.com/users/speeds_tf/ 

Have you tried Call of Cthulhu for XBox? Pretty cool, I have been rather afraid and I haven't even encountered any monsters(almost) yet :D Played it for about an hour and then the shit FROZE on me, they have these forced-view things sometimes when you go into a room, so you notice some valuable detail or the like. It did one of those and then it froze like that and I couldn't move or look around, waited for about a minute and a half but nothing happened, I could go into the menu and everything. It was looking at something fairly creep as well, it was not nice! Anyway, except for the console fps controls it looks like a really nice game. Recommend everyone try it when it comes out for PC in the beginning of spring unless it should come to suffer from Console-Itis. 

Thanks - I shall begin reconstructing the zip for permanent upload ... sometime. 

I remember this being mentioned a while back, guess its coming out now?

http://www.gamespot.com/6136426?part=rss&tag=gs_reviews&subj=6136426

Of course, for most of us this is almost entirely useless, though its worth noting that the review suggests that you can run any mod you please with this version of the game.

Naturally, the reality may be a different story as you're going to be bound by the limitations of the phone (storage, memory, processing power etc) so I doubt ALL maps and mods would work.

Someone on another page pointed out that you could use this as a portable demo player though - so you could possibly watch your QDQ or whatever on the way to work or what have you.

Another marginally useful thing (I guess) is that you could maybe use it as a way to test your maps and stuff on 'low end' hardware, if you don't have some shitty old PC lying around. 

I'm gonna play Marcher on my Samsung. Like my normal tower was able to run it without problems, let alone my phone. 

Here is your chance, they are looking for you...

http://www.idsoftware.com/ 

Mobile Quake: Cancer Edition 

My dad died of cancer when I was 6!!!

(just kidding, he died of Amyloidosis) 

I still utterly loathe the use of mobiles for any reason other than an emergency communication tool, but I'm thinking Doom would make a better port, especially as you wouldn't have to worry about the pesky looking-up-and-down thing. Maybe they already have Doom, I dunno. 

Give the boss monsters a new attack that sends a message to the mobile's emitter for an extra big microwave pulse, you know, the sort you can feel right in your temples. Rumble pads Move over! 

Glad to hear from someone who likes the game. I was reading a few opinions from the release date and they weren't too good. I guess now the game has been available for a short while people have had a better chance to appreciate it.

I've been looking forward to it (the pc version) for a long time, as it sounds like it should be really immersive and spooky.

I'll probably have to grab a copy soon then! 

still though, i'm glad to hear that people are liking it. :) 

there are some legal questions about this mobile quake ... and there is m already mobile doom for windows mobile and simbian and btw im writing this from my phone sitting in the pub ;) 

get drunk already and calm down, bitch 

Everclear and loli! Hurrah! 

 

Is this newsworthy?

http://zombie.planetdoom.gamespy.com/dapa.htm 

Map releases aren't newsworthy here.
Kidding. 

I like the color scheme, and the oppressive, towering structures. Will need to download this and run through it once I get home, maybe even try a duel. 

I can't find any, but I want them. Any ideas? 

Ask Zombie. He's on #terrafusion on quakenet.net , when he's awake. 

cause i don't know much about all this stuff, but:

is it legal to use a recorded version of some quake music in d3? 

I would think that the answer is NO, unless you can obtain a written permission from Trent Reznor, which doesn't sound very likely. 

:\ 

small clips of music, like the NIN riffs used in Zeroister are considered Fair Usuage. So the answer is, it depends. 

i mean, it would be a fair amount of the music, not just a couple of seconds.

i was hoping because they were both iD games that it would maybe be ok, but it's not that big a deal in the end. 

sup everyone 

you came looking for me in irc, but i was afk -- whats up? 

I remember a few years back when the Generations mod for Quake 3 had to basically be restarted because id let them know there would be legal hassles.

The general summary was that while id didn't really have any problem with limited use of parts from one game in another paying homage or the like, the publishers looked at it differently. And since the publishers own the distribution rights ultimately it was their call. :( 

http://phait-accompli.com/crap/d3cinema/

[i]This is my 2nd Doom 3 Cinema pack. I'm gonna do a couple more probably. These are just from the demo as of now, and are 1600 x 1200. I've added a little film grain this time around. My favorite is d3-cinema_4.jpg, because Doom 3 engine's lighting really set it up - I didn't have to do much other than a little contrast emphasis on the fireball and imp, and the depth-of-field.[/i]

Yeah, Doom 3 isn't so hot now maybe. But hey I'm bored, and it's Halloween. 

I have UBB syndrome and forgot to use func italics. 

http://red.planetarena.org/ 

3 new map reviews at my site:

1. the Masque of the Red Death
2. Castle of the Dark Ages
3. Nightjourney [6 map episode].

heres to many more map reviews. =) 

Minerva: Metastasis
got raging review so might be worth playing
(I didnt try it)

http://tenfourmaps.telefragged.com/php/review.php?gameid=hl2&levid=MinMetastasis 

u're like a bit late
http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=37303


still, i'ts great map. 

http://phait-accompli.com/crap/d3cinema/

D3_cinema_2_b.zip, rest of the thumbnails there. 

gibberish spam nonsense... who fucking knows. 

more nonsense. 

Shambler is in good mood today :D 

OK, so I broke down and got myself a GameCube. This is my first console since the SEGA MegaDrive/Genesis so I am quite excited. For the price of 55 euro I got myself a Gamecube with 2 controllers, 251 slot memory card, NFSU2 and Tony Hawk's Underground which was simple too good of a deal to pass. I am now looking for some game suggestions. So far, these games are on my "must get" list:

Metroid Prime 1 & 2, Resident Evil 0 & 4, Ikaruga, Tales of Symphonia, Baten Kaitos, POP: Sands of Time and POP: Warrior Within, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, Viewtiful Joe (and maybe 2).

From this list you can gather what kind of my taste for GC games is, but I am wondering if this list is missing any good titles? I am not interested in the Mario/LuigiP/Pikmin/Pokemon games. 

View certain areas/screenshots from quake4 in a panoramic 360 degree view. (left click, move to view manually)

http://vrway.com/vr_q4/ 

you need quick time installed 

I don't recommend Tales of Symphonia, except if you can get it for really cheap... It's an ok game I guess, but just very average, Baten Kaitos definatly looks more interesting (haven't tried it yet though, TV blew up). Oh, and get Zelda Windwaker you bastid. =) 

Look into Killer 7, too. I haven't played much of it, but it's very trippy. 

Eternal Darkness
Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes 

Mario Sunshine is good if you don't mind it not being as good as the other big Mario platform titles. Lots of really beautiful touches, only marginally spoiled by the dodgy camera, slightly twitchy controls at times, and stupid and pointless continue system.

F-Zero GX owns, but gets a bit too hard later on - in particular unlocking the arcade tracks and completing the story mode are a near impossibility unless you are the don of futuristic racing games.

How about a Monkey Ball title? A good idea if you expect to have mates around to play games.

Hmm, I don't really remember any games I had that haven't been listed. I would say that MGS isn't to all tastes. I wanted to love it, but it bored and frustrated the fuck out of me. Viewtiful Joe was pretty awesome at first, but I got a bit bored after a while, and it's pretty hard unless you play on the embarassing 'kids' mode. Hmm, there was Billy Hatcher, which was fun (I actually 100%ed it) but very quirky and not to the taste of everyone. Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat looks like fun. 

If you just want to play something in the style of Viewtiful Joe and aren't attached to the story or anything, you might want to get Viewtiful Joe 2 first, since I think it's supposed to be balanced better. Then if you really like it you can get VF1, and you'll be properly prepared for the challenge. 

I just tried the Classic Doom mod. I enjoyed it more than Doom 3 itself. It's quite an update - although it certainly could be expanded upon layout wise, but then where do you compromise... 

That was supposed to go here
http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=23795&start=275 

I've just purchased Metroid Prime and spent a few hours playing it. IT WAS RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME! I was/am a huge fan of Super Metroid and never got a chance to properly play MP beyond the first level before this. I can't believe this console only has a 405 Mhz CPU, because MP definately looks way better than some computer games ment for CPUs 200-300% faster. 

What do you mean, only 405 mhz... thats a pretty damn beefy cpu for a games system (GC is the most powerful system around at the moment, if I'm not wrong).

You have to remember that the system is built for games... and you can talk directly to the hardware (I assume, note that I don't really know much about GC).

PC gaming? One word: WINDOWS. You're automatically at least 200-300% slower just by virtue of the fact that you have to get through windows to talk to the hardware. You also have to support a variety of hardware, so some performance may be sacrificed for the sake of compatibility.

Besides which, the actual clock speed of the CPU isn't the only factor of course, you have to consider the CPU architecture and stuff. Why is an Athlon64 CPU at 2.0ghz faster than an AthlonXP CPU at 2.0ghz? 

The more versatile you want your system the more complex it becomes, which slows it down and adds a lot of things necessary for that versatility which means drag on your system. I think the GC is the most powerful of the big 3 right now, it definitely has the best graphics I've seen on any of the systems (Xbox is too grainy whenever I see it, GC is nice and clean.)

I'm gonna wait until GC is like $20 before I buy it. 

You are wrong actually. XBOX is using a 733 mhz CPU. When it comes to the current generation of consoles, PS2 has the weakest hardware, XBOX has the fastest and GC falls in-between. 

there's a game shop at the bus station where I walk by each day and they have big screens showing console games and demos all the time... they have driving and fight games and whatnot. They look really crap compared to pc stuff because the framerate is horribly low. That is most visible when stuff is moving quickly. Driving games suffer most from this. I don't know if it's the limitation of tv technology or the console hw/sw developers' choice. 

Has anyone noticed that WHATEVER the spec of their pc, windows never seems to run any faster. Since Win 95, Windows has always been about the same speed on my various pcs. p200 64mb (win95/98), athlon 700 512mb(win 98), athlonxp 1800 256mb (win 98/2k), intel fancy 2ghz laptop 512mb (win xp).

Obviously if I tried running all the stuff I run on my current pc on my first system, it would just fall on its arse, but the general speed of windows just seems constant.

Windows 95 - shit. Windows 98 - better, but shit, Windows 2k - a lot better, but still shit, Windows XP - not really noticebly better than 2k, but looks a bit prettier and gets more support. Still shit.

Grr, I wish they didn't have such a fucking huge monopoly, then maybe they would try and do something about Windows being shit.

I bet Linux, BeOS and all the others are just as shit. 

I mean Windows never FEELS like its running any faster. I still get long pauses when opening simple apps like windows explorer from time to time, there are still huge bugs with displaying folders (like when you delete one and it stays there, then you click on it and Windows says that it has been deleted and does nothing about it. refresh doesn't clear it either. WTF) and trying to connect to a network that isn't avilable pretty much hangs explorer for 5 minutes (at least it doesn't take windows with it these days).

Basically it's still a piece of shit. The improvements that have been made between the various verions feel so small to me. God knows how much money I have spent on this crap, but requisite software. It sucks. 

their graphical user interfaces are a bit slower... and don't even start about the mac, even the mouse lags there! 

Hi, resident Mac zealot (not) chiming in.

and don't even start about the mac, even the mouse lags there!

I think OS X is a bit over-the-top in the GUI but not so much. If you're witnessing mouse lag I'm guessing the comp is running OS X with less than optimal RAM. OS X 10.2.8 runs quite fine on 256 MB for me, but when several apps are open, CPU priority* gets fuzzy and things start to take longer. Haven't really experienced mouse problems, though.

*I've read of a UNIX command that will improve this by dedicating the CPU to whichever particular app is in focus, being used - rather than it tailoring to all the crap in the background unnecessarily. 

i partly disagree.
windows95 was good at the time. innovative and much better than 3.1.
windows98 was shit, indeed. always. nevertheless i used it for a long time (yeah, i know....).
now, they are just antiques that shouldn't be installed on any computer any more.
xp was the first operation system that i felt more or less comfortable with (once it was configured correctly) and compared to the others it really is (feels) faster imho.
i know what you mean, though, and i think the problem is not the os itself - at least not solely - but the additional software. hardware is constantly improved, operation systems can handle more and more stuff at once, so the software companies release programs that are hardly optimised for speed. good examples are the norton tools - they eat ressources like crazy and still don't offer better service than other programs.
and, naturally, the more of that non-optimised software runs simultaneously the slower everything becomes.

i think it's still a long way to an ultimately satisfying computer experience concerning the problems you mentioned... 

In my opinion, there is no question that XP was/is a significant improvement over previous windows builds. 

how is xp better than 2k?
except maybe more security patches and better compatibility
differences in gui are just annoying

lies about win not getting better/faster
win runs really faster on more ram and better hdd
It was serious improvemnt going from 5400 to 7200 rpm hdd and going from 48 to 192 ram etc

Now the only slowdowns(pauses actually) there are left - when a programm spins up dvd/cd
and thats all, I dont feel like anything is not fast enough in the normal system work
(ofcourse it gets slow if you are doing whatever task that operates huge data chunks and takes 100% CPU)

Need to note, that I almost dont use windows-included software
win commander (now total commander) for any filemanagement, Opera for inet etc
and Im not running any extra progs in background
than seems to be on crack btw :) 

it's not the windows versions don't work faster, they do, which in turn lets you do more stuff at the same time.

ie: Have mozilla, msn, doomedit and photoshop on atm, and listening to music.

i remember in win 3.1 just listening to music would slow down the machine by about half.

also, re: pauses for explorer windows to open, i think that's usually attributed to your HDD being in standby mode and not spinning, so windows has to wait for the HDD to start going again before it can find files. 

NT was more stable than 9X. 2K was more compatible than NT. XP isn't really any different from 2K, as far as i can tell. So to me, 2K was the peak. 

I agree that all software, ever, sucks.

I'm not being sarcastic. 

I agree that all software, ever, sucks.

Even Fitzquake?

BTW, curious - have you tinkered with implementing screenshots-named-after-maps yet? 

You can't say "in windows 3.1 half of the processor went to music listening". The mp3 has to be decoded, and that takes a certain amount of mathematical calculations that just have to be made. Older, slower computers had less resources to allocate from so they had to use a more significant percentage of them.

Both the hardware and the software changes, it's not easy to directly compare stuff.

I use linux often at school. It's pretty good when someone else does the computer support for it. Too bad the firefox middleclick is bugged in it and whatnot and the gui doesn't have (don't know whose fault this is) some of the finesses of windows like a usable graphical file manager or programs really opening when you double-click a file... I always have to do a lot of the stuff myself at the command prompt... And the middle-click copy-paste annoys the hell out of me because i can't paint an url in irssi, then paint the current url in firefox to erase it, and when i paste, it turns out it copied the current window's url when i painted it... gahh. :)
The x windows window handling is ok, in some ways it's easier to handle multiple open windows than in windows(where I always maximize everything). And stuff like emacs, pico, pine, tin and irssi are pretty good programs. Mplayer, xv, gimp work too. I wish firefox for linux had less bugs - or then they're slow to update for some reason or the other.

I use win2k at home. I don't like all the new "easy to use but gets in the way" thing of XP. win2k looks just like win98 which is ok, but is actually stabler and you can kill programs etc. 

did you ever get my email ?

sent ot the email addy in your func profile 

If you could include these lines in the sm110 announcement:

'Also available for download are a pair of maps from the lost episode, sm108, by Bambuz and Neg!ke.

http://www.quaddicted.com/filebase/sm108_neg!ke.zip

http://www.quaddicted.com/filebase/sm108_bam.zip

---moderator---
done...

You could save me a lot of trouble. Thank you. 

any1 knows progs for easy ripping sound from dvd and adding it to avi(divx/xvid)

w/o avi video re-encoding

something like gordian knot, that would take care of all 

I am in a desperate need of a new monitor since my old 17" CRT is dying a slow and painful death and I figured I'd make the jump onto the LCD bandwagon and get myself a 17" LCD. I have a rather limited budget, so price is a very important factor. What brands/models would you suggest? What kind of things should I pay close attention to (besides the responce time)? 

forget the lcd and buy a big used sony trinitron. They're quality work and cheap!

The picture is pretty good. (Not as sharp as lcd but the contrast and color are better)
You get pretty high refresh rates.
It's overall better for games than lcd, and better in map editing because of the bigger size. 

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=168#more-168 

"Hufu." Awesome. 

dont buy used, unless you plan to throw it away in ~2 years

and u know yourself about ugly scaling of lcd
so with money shortage you might be better looking at 19" crt 

http://www.deceiveguild.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=562&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 

Thanks for that one. 

Nice, lol. 

<3 teh dell 2001fp :)
They make good ones in smaller dimensions too, but I'm not sure if they are all the uber-ultrasharp high-response caliber as the 2001fp and on 

I should play more Guild Wars

^__^ 

Some new content recently iirc.

BTW, speaking of not speaking about on-topic topics: If anyone is planning on hosting some sort of Winter-ish map collective/pack thingie (I'm staring at Bl1tz O_O)I'd like to participate, but I don't get out of school until rather late (19th of December) so please try and take that into consideration when planning deadlines and stuff. Just a precaution so I'm not left out in the cold (AHHAHAHAHAHA I"M FUCKING FUNNY.) Thx. 

I do like the idea of another map pack, but we did winter last year, and it went really well, so I don't know how well we'd be able to top the same theme, or if people would be interested.

Something else perhaps? Also, I may end up having next to no free time soon, so I might not be the best to organize such a thing.

You say you're not getting out until the 19th, so maybe we should do a New Year's theme...some thoughts:

-Chinese/Asian architecture theme, since they are most associated with celebrating New Year's

-"New" architectural themes. For example, architecture not typically executed in QSP maps (abstract, 'real world', organic, etc.)

-"New" weapons or code (Quoth, LunSP1, etc.)

If anyone else has ideas, feel free to contribute. Also, I think no brush limitation this time, so we can do some bigger/longer maps. January 1st - Mid/Early March should be enough time. 

pack would be good. But dont limit it to knave textures please. Any theme as long as it incorporates quoth features. Using tgas like necros' marble might be a good idea for more freedom. 

not enough knave maps! 

Just to clarify, Quoth is not at all intended to be knave-only; far from it. It was only doing Chapters as a submitted-map event that it made sense to have a single texture theme, with different interpretations. Since Chapters, the quantity of knave has gone up rather sharply :P
Naturally, no mapper is restricted to what kind of map they can make with Quoth - that's the point. 

BUT I STILL CAN'T GET IT TO WORK WITH RADIANT FLABSLCHTHULHUFTHAAGNASDASD Otherwise I would jump on that like a well-lubed RPG.No limits with any tex set, as long as it included a func_rotate + at least 3 Gugs or some such non-sense.

BTW: Kell/necros, are you taking any ideas for supplemental .pak releases for Quoth or are you pretty much decided on what's gonna be released? I got some monster sketches I'd like turned into something. 

i don't want to speak for kell, as this is very much a team effort, but for the immediate future, i think we have most of the stuff already planned out, at least in terms of concept and direction.

while we're doing this for others, we're also doing this for us-- we want to make monsters we'd like to use in our own maps. if you want to send concept art to us, that's cool, and i'm all for checking it out, but i can't say that we'll use (or even like) anything with any certainty. we're kind of picky about the content we choose to explore, and we're definatly not meant to be a 'request' mod.

also, we're kind of taking a break atm, so it's not like we're actively working on quoth right now to get started (assuming we liked and wanted to use) on anything that was sent to us.

regarding getting the def file to work with gtk,
1. have you talked to spog or any of the radiant guys? they are definatly the ones they talk to abou this kind of stuff (i believe that's how you figured it out originally)
2. you could also try manually setting classname values for the time being, until you get it fully sorted out by keeping the def files on hand and just checking quickly on key names.
i'm really sorry we couldn't help you directly, but neither of us has ever seen this type of problem before.

cheers :) 

eventually doing custom content to such extent that one wouldn't need id1 or the old texes at all - so that a standalone game could be released for free. Or under some licence or something.

(fitz client, knave tex, only your new custom monsters, only the hammer and the plasma gun ( :o ) and some new replacement sounds for hurt, jump, monster legacy sounds. Hud graphics and new healthpak etc graphics)

Then just add a new player model mvdsv,fuh/ez, a few dm maps (knave/free tex again) and jteams and it's go for qw too :) 

i like fiends. :( 

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/crossplatform.ars


interesting article, if you care 

phew, after almost two months (?) my new telephone/internet connection is finally up. it really sucked not to have proper access 24/7, though i imagined it to be harder.
but now, it seems, my daily fix of func_ is guaranteed again... :) 

but one thing doesn't make sense:
if it's the arts, maps, models and gamecode that suck up most of the money, and core coding costs only a little, it should cost just a fraction of the game development to port / recode the thing to another platform. 

...and having that in mind the tech is using 'lowest spec in mind' and not being optimised for any platform exclusively, thus not fully utilizing its potential. In the result we would have crossplatform titles that look about the same everywhere. Well that's what that article is about.

But we will see how it works in reality. 

maybe you could have other cheap five minute tricks, like have worse average framerate and take off a few monsters from the maps in those ports where there isn't enough oomph in the hardware / core code. Or getting really ugly, downscale textures / whatever surface maps you have, to half. 

http://www.doomrpg.com/
doom1 tech style. by john carmack.


Spoiler:
they seem to have wolfenstein's german shepherds there too! 

it seems it's closer to wolf3d.. 

looks more like dragon warrior to me. 

Since I quit, I've been redoing my webby, including spending money on it.
http://www.breakthinktank.com
I should've told you a month ago, but I forgot. 

Did the programmers let you sleep anything or did they slip into/out of their leatherpants as soon as they were alone eiht you? 

quit what?

site design could be, eh, improved alot
its not very appealing 

 

...ludicrous & subversive, but then I've always been a fan :) 

 

...aye 

This is funny... she plays alot, from GTA to Doom 3 to Psychonauts.

http://media.putfile.com/granny-gamer 

Rofl. Crazy thing is, i'd bet most of us are gonna be playing games at that age :} (and I bet games will look rather good in the year 2050 too). 

but we'll be stuck playing quake and other retro games for nastalgia 

I'll be 80 and playing FPS's and I'll feel like a cool old dude. But I don't think that's anything new. I'm sure elders these days are into things that we consider boring but for their day are cool. 

Racism 

Like, travelling the world and happily spending their money?
Or feeling sick all the time and taking care of whatever left of their health 

O_O 

good quake2 DM maps .map files
(for educationla purpose ofcourse)
I recall Kanaeda and some1 else had made .maps available? 

construction methods? 

I made some availabe - not sure if you can learn anything from those though: http://rem.fov120.com/rem/ 

Just bought 1000 bottles (yes, 1k) of Pepsi. A single bottle is 1,5 liters, which means that I have, in my house, right now, 1,5 cubic meters of soda. And, let me tell you, thousand bottles take up more space than you'd think.

So, anyone need a drink? 

You're aiming for the Sony VAIO, right? 

Especially when there's TDR promo material about
http://www.m5.icoke.com/movies/M5_Europe.zip

BTW shoutouts to the hoez in #TF:
Shambler: Calm down/Fuck off
Pope: Love on
Vondur: Calm down/Go map
Blitz/inertia/voodoochopwdjaks/the rest: Shut up, fuck off, calm down. (In any order)

-love, Sweden. 

vigil: you're sick bitch.

czg: get back to irc, i miss you. 

pix 

what's your addy? Or bring some to herttoniemi. mail me at elaintarha org. 

did you get my reply email ?

same address as the one I sent the earlier one to. 

Regular or MAX? 

Mine are here:

http://www.celephais.net/files/ 

uh, maybe. i'm on vacation. be patient :P 

cool, just checking 

Bambuz: I live in Espoo, so arrange some transportation here, and we'll sort you out at 0,8 EUR a bottle.

Friction: Regular, drinking Max should be punishable by flogging, possibly death.

Gibbie: Coming... 

dunno if anyone's seen these already or not, i tend not to keep up with q4 stuff very much

http://members.lycos.nl/theone1337/quake4%20concept%20art/ 

ps necros those were published over 2 years ago 

quite detailed models... I don't know if they look remotely that good in-game. 

Nice find, Necros. Very sweet indeed. 

RECURSIVE ERROR: There was a SQL error. GG nmetskiunme 

"AN SQL error" sounds better.

But that's just me.

And I got this error a few times in the past month. 

In your navigator you should find a "reload" icon... just clic on it... oh oh oh ... it's magic, the correct window appears !!!
Problem solved... ;P 

well, I pronouce it "sequel" so "a SQL error" sounds fine to me. 

So I finally got myself a new monitor. For the past year or so my old monitor had been dying on me, it made mapping pretty much impossible because the gamma was FUBARed, everything looked blue/green. Switching desktop resolution from 1024x768 @ 85 Hz (17" crt) to 1600x1200 @ 92 Hz (19" crt) was quite a nice jump. Mapping with Radiant has now reached a new kind of awesomeness :) 

I always said 'skwul'. Which sounds sort of like it's some kind of amphibious squid creature, probably found in the sinister swampy wastelands beyond the N'gath mountains of the sinister southern continent, along with the deadly carnivorous megafluke, and the breethian mangrove badger.

But I digress. The point is, saying SQL 'Es Queue El' is for squares. Big fat greasy squares with spots and pudden-basin haircuts. 

why not write it as sql? (Not capitals.) I hate acronyms anyway so we can make it a proper word.

Starting here! Let the func lead the way!

(Nobody knows anyway where it comes from? Superior Query Language?)
(It's an american convention to make everything into stupid acronyms blaa blaa whatever ok)

Anyway, thanks metl for the board so we can contemplate on these important issues here. 

Also:

PCMCIA := People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms 

PCMCIA acronym is really good !!! 

In case the title was too long, this post is formally asking if anyone is planning a winter map pack, and if so to formally let me know. If not, I will take it upon myself to organize something over the coming weeks for Christmas/New Year, probably Quothian in origin. So yar, let me know what's up with that stuff. 

 

nature-themed contest? 

http://www.3dgamersedge.com/

Doom3 HL2 Q2 etc 

I just sent you an email ;) I hope it will help you .. 

It's been years and years since I've looked at either of my quake2 maps, so I loaded them both up this evening. Very wild experience, let me tell you - brings back unusual things.

Gridiron had this megahealth stuck up on a rafter, and I hazily recalled that there was a hidden passage beneath the nearby lift that would lead you around and out. I was right, and I crawled through the narrow opening to find:

http://www.lunaran.com/pics/lunq2dm1crates.jpg

I lol'ed. I mean, how did I think they would have gotten in there? 

Crawling through the narrow opening just like you.

Sheesh, crates camping the MH, whatever next! 

What sort of newbie map doesn't contain rampant abuse of crates though? :) 

i forgot how bad quake2's built-in brightness/gamma control was. yuck. 

http://arkhytas.blogspot.com/ 

our server has 146 females and 627 nigerians registered for sex in your zip code tonight with a small amount of money up front to help bribe local officials this high quality aviator watch can be yours RECURSIVE ERROR: There was a SQL error. 

RECURSIVE ERROR: There was a SQL error. 

If that is legitimate spam that is possibly the best spam ever. 

classifiable to males/females? 

Or even the best func post ever. 

It doesn't even pimp a website to visit... 

I highly doubt a spam bot would be able to pick out the "cheese" icon for its post? 

Did anyone say it was spambot spam? 

whyyyyyyyy is fuuuuuuuunc so slooooooww agaaaaaaain

uuhhhhhhhhhhnf




also, it was clearly a cheesebot. 

http://img368.imageshack.us/img368/3286/quakeweed3pm.jpg
http://img364.imageshack.us/img364/7497/quakestation6ff.jpg 

* MADFOX'D * 

Yes, Scampie is a fucking piece of fag fucking shit. He's run away at least four people from #tf because people can't stand him. He's just upset his parents didn't pay attention to him and he likes the authority. You shouldn't leave func because of him though, here he's just another llama since he gave up mod status. Frankly, I dunno why people put up with his shit anyway. 

by closing the funny thread 

Tastes the best. 

Is right.

Best thread for a long time and he had to close it -_- 

go create some cool threads 

don't care about him, everybody knows he's an asshole, at least most of the time. He ran spawnpoint.org you know? 

[16:01] <Trinca> scampwork o filho fa puta
[16:01] <Trinca> scampwork o filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> son of a bitch
[16:01] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:01] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:02] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:02] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:02] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:02] <MoALTz> stop spamming
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <bear> Trinca, calm down
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:02] <Trinca> same as filho da puta
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <MoALTz> you have lost all support you had (if any) now
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <inertia> yeah trinca shush
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Vondur> Trinca, calm down bitch
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:02] <Trinca> assshole
[16:03] <Trinca> assshole
[16:03] <Trinca> assshole
[16:03] <Trinca> assshole
[16:03] <Trinca> assshole
[16:03] <Trinca> assshole
[16:03] <Vondur> Trinca, stfu moron
[16:03] <Trinca> assshole
[16:03] * Trinca was kicked by SmallPileofGibs (Trinca) 

 

In the very near future, 'spawnpoint' will be returning... but as Leveldesign.org.

I sadly lost the Spawnpoint.org domain, so instead, I am going to go with planB, which is change SP into Leveldesign.org. This means all links to the site should be changed to reflect this, and all the logins that my hostees use should change from @spawnpoint to @leveldesign and all that.

I'll let you know, should be a day or two. Thanks for all your patience guys. 

 

UROK.

Partly for bringing SP back....but mostly for quoting Trinca ;).

Keep IRC drama on #tf, I say! 

WTF, my excitement got the better of me...

Keep IRC drama on Func, I say! 

That's pretty cool. I assumed you had left the community for good (despite working in the industry at a company famed for FPS titles) and had just decided to ignore spawnpoint because it presumably costs money to maintain.

How come spawnpoint has been taken, yet the more obvious leveldesign hadn't? That seems a bit odd. Having said that, spawnpoint sounds cooler and more underground :)

btw, I don't mind irc drama on func either, especially as I can't log into irc from Asia, because asia-pacific ips are blocked by quakenet, or whatever host you were using a couple of months ago. 

can be found at
http://www.breakthinktank.com/cgi-bin/btt.pl?toybox/ass

A good four hours of it. You might like to tear out your lugholes before listening. 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/Quak.jpg 

spawnpoint only went down because the domain expired, and I had to wait to attempt to retke it. it was sniped from underneth me, and I'm not going to pay mucho buckos just to recover it from a domain squatter bastard. 

Damn, if Scampie won't pay me the $5000 to get spawnpoint.org back now where will I get this weeks crack money? :( 

...suckin' dick at the truckstop. 

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! 

I used to have to ride past a public toilet frequently used by truckers when I cycled to work in the mornings. It was out in the middle of nowhere but by a busy road. There were almost always trucks parked there at all times of the day and night.

The cycle path ran around the back of the toilets, and there were no lights there. It was pretty dark, but there was still a bit of light getting round from the front.

Bizzarely I always noticed people loitering around the back of the toilets at night. Because of this I tried to ride around on the front path, but sometimes I couldn't because some retarded truck driving goon would park his truck up on the pavement, blocking my way.

At the back of the toilet building there was a small hole in the wall. I could tell it was there because there was a little bit of lighting shining through from inside the toilets. I assumed the hole was for a power cable for the guy that usually sold fried breakfast foodstuff to the truckers in the morning.

One night (of several) I was cycling home and was forced to use the cycle path around the back of the loos because lots of stupid people had parked their cars on the path around the front. As I was cycling around the back of the toilets, I see the outlines of two guys fucking.

What the hell? Tron? Was that you?

Anway, I mentioned this to someone at work, and they thought it was funny and all. I also mentioned the hole in the wall, and they told me that it was probably a "glory hole". Upon asking, they told me that this was for guys to stick their cocks through and someone would give them a bj, or wank them off.

Seriously, all these grown men... don' they have better places to do this sort of thing than around the back of a public toilet? It's not like the foot/cycle path wasn't fairly busy either. I suspect a few other people must have witnessed some horrible things. I knew of a few old people who would walk their dogs round there.

Tron, since you know so much about this, perhaps you could shed some light.


By the way, even if it was a man fucking a woman, I would still have been disgusted. If it was two attractive lesbians dressed in bondage with a spotlight illuminating them for my entertainment, I probably wouldn't have minded, however. 

Just in case anyone wants to meet up with Tron and discuss level design, or pay him to suck your cock, this particular toilet is located on the A40 from the Headington/Barton roundabout side of Oxford on the section that goes toward Forest Hill/Wheatley. 

An entertaining mix of psychoses, mapping knowledge, and the occasional educational bit of sexual perversion. Kickass.

The word for today is "stinkwink".

The quasi-sexual procedure of a man sticking his index finger into his partner's rectum and then proceeding to poke him or her in the eye with the contaminated finger.

e.g. Kelly developed a sty in her right eye from the stinkwink Jones gave her last night.

You're welcome. 

I think that might be the funniest story I've ever read on Qboard/Qmap/Func.

Also, what grown man doesn't know what a glory hole is. 

Possibly a heterosexual man? 

both pjw's and than's post enlightened me to new terms, whether I wanted to know them is another thing :) 

omg I'm scarred for life
we need a smut warning icon so we can skip over the nasty posts ;) 

Hey, no gloryholes here.

I'm a blindfold man. 

the A40 from the Headington/Barton roundabout side of Oxford on the section that goes toward Forest Hill/Wheatley

Your country has better names for things than ours. Except forest hill, we have thousands of those. 

Our country has names like that for pretty much everywhere. Some of them are annoyingly eccentric. Chuckley Knowe. Hunter's Tryst. Dent. Milton Keynes. Giving someone directions in the UK is like trying to assemble an engineering textbook from only shakespearean sonnets. 

Chipping Sodbury's the best. 

I SWEAR that I saw a town called Gaylord on a map of America in geography class when I was at school 7 or 8 years ago. I think it was in the South.

Anyway, there must be more places in the states with such stupid names.

You are right that English town names are pretty prime though :) 

There's a town called 'Gayhead' 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=13741

A couple of screenies from a upcoming d3 sp project by Hexum entitled "Quake Shamblers Castle" 

Looks interesting... Particularly the come back of medieval environment in Doom3... 

THAT LOOKS DAMN SWEET

Might even have to reinstall D3 for that

played q4 demo, it's shit

Is anyone going to release any Q1SP maps over the holidays? It's been a while... 

Let me know where... :) 

...to a curry house called Gaylord's. It wasn't America though. Rather nice food too.

Tron, that actually looks pretty neat. Hope he can pull a proper map off in that style. 

He has released previous maps though and I have good hopes of seeing this released. 

Wasn't the last QuakeCon held in Gaylord?? 

No....it was just packed full of gaylords.... 

Leveldesign.org is up!

All those who had spawnpoint hosting, you are now back in action! just change anything 'spawnpoint.org' into 'leveldesign.org' and life should be peachy! 

 

There's a small community (I don't think it's actually an incorporated town) here in the state of North Carolina called "Lizard Lick." Fittingly enough, Nintendo debuted Yoshi's Story there.

Of course, there are also a few other unusual places, such as Romance, Alabama; Frog Level, North Carolina (not a town, more like a crossroads); and perhaps the most incongruous of all, Intercourse, Alabama. 

Thanks. 

that's brilliant! ^_^

is that a q1 axe? :P 

but there is also a quakeworld mod in development for q4. I guess that isn't quite as interesting as q1sp style Doom3 map though.

I was thinking about making some high poly versions of Q1 monsters to put in my portfolio. I seem to be able to crank out character mesh quite quickly from the test character that I was doing yesterday, and I think making a detailed Ogre, Enforcer or Shambler would be lots of fun.

Then I got thinking about how prime Q4 could have been were it a remake of Q1. Still, I haven't played it yet, and I loved Q2 anyway, so I will probably like it anyway. 

Thanks a lot for the "reincarnation" of spawnpoint.org web domain into leveldesign.org !
However, yesterday night, I tried to download Kell's knave texture set, and the link was broken (Error 404).. Most of the download links seems to be broken by the way... When do you think all these broken links will be restored ? 

goods9261@celephais.net 

th5886@celephais.net 

our
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: urdher, but it was gran hey was more
bcc: charleslegbe@aol.com

56eabcb6019b9a36d5462ff247cebe52
. 

iv1580@celephais.net 

iv1580@celephais.net 

warning: previous 5 posts were news submissions 

You should have approved them! Quality news items! 

they1405@celephais.net 

[nt] 

Yay, go for it! But expect heavy and harsh critics if the models are not "faithful" ;) 

Re previous posts on placenames...

Dave Van Ronk wrote and recorded a song made up entirely of place names in New York state, no other words, just place names. It sounds real cute. 

Whenever Kell fixes them. :) 

You forgot the town of Bumpass, Virginia. 

OK, I will check the website next week.. thanks ;) 

Scampie forgot to mention his hometown of SmallCock, Maine. Oh well, good thing I reminded you all! 

I don't know if this is actually the case, but it's probably simply a case of changing the url from http://www.spawnpoint.org/site/file.ext to http://www.leveldesign.org/site/file.ext, since the file urls in the html won't have updated with the domain change. Should be no problem for you to get the files you want this way until the site authors can be bothered to fix their broken links. 

so you said you'll be organizing a turtlemap event or some contest at the end of this year, right? elaborate. 

Except if the site authers use relative paths for internal links. http://rpg.leveldesign.org/ didn't need any changes, AFAIK. 

d3 uses skyboxes, but it looked like q4 used the cylindrical sky thingy (like PK)... is it possible to do that in d3? 

Like D3:RoE did.
You can either make your map for RoE, or you can rip the code into your own dll and make the map as a mod. (Not too hard. Even I managed to do it.)
Vanilla D3 has no support for it, unless they included it in the last patch. Which I don't think they did. 

Did I some time ago write a longass post about portal skies and how you can make them look like hl2 skies if you include a script that each frame checks the player position and repositions the sky camera relative to some sky position? Did I specifically mention that you need to play around with the movement scale?

Because I'm hella certain I was just about to make such a post. 

i don't remember, but i tend to skip over such technical things anyway. :P a lot of d3 coding and scripting stuff is still a mystery to me. o.o 

I may not have been paying attention to D3 editing stuff at the time though.

Vanilla D3 doesn't use portal skies, however someone emailed Todd from id and he said that it would be fine someone including features from RoE in a normal D3 map such as portal skies. 

In response to a question I asked him at d3w, Hexum says that all q1 weapons and powerups and ingame and working, and he is looking for someone to help with converting more of the enemies across.

Than: if you were thinking of making highpoly versions of the Quake bad guys maybe you should give him a buzz. :)

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=13741 

i had considered offering to help do some monster conversions, but then i remember exactly how busy i am right now. >_< 

actual front page!

http://www.leveldesign.org 

Not to be a total cock, but could you please lowercase my nick?

Love
-czg


PS: I am so gay. 

yay! yay!

yay! 

It may be worth checking if Ogro/Francois-Xavier Delmotte is still on the net and if he'd be willing/able to give you some of his Q1 monster hi-poly meshes and their skins.

I don't have an Doom3world account and won't get one but maybe you want to tell them that Ogro lost his work files unfortunately. I asked him a while ago. 

I don't remember you making such a post but I remember reading about someone who had done the same thing in d3 on d3w and had some problems with making it work without problems when moving inbetween standing and crouching positions or whatever. 

 

might be old hat for some, but still this rox0rs so much when being in the right mood ;)
http://www.infinitewheel.com/dubselector.html 

http://achewood.com/index.php?date=12092005
Today is a Fuck You Friday, so fuck you! 

Did you get any "anal troubles" these last days ? You seem to be very focused on fucking every people today... doh ! 

dubselekta rox groovy shit there ! 

And I haven't been able to tell Shambler to go fuck himself on IRC.

Fuck you. 

s.t.f.u. moron. 

Shut the fuck up Saturday begins! 

You win the prize!

('Tis cheese) 

Job #1:
A company that has existed for 8 years and is known to pay some of the best wages in the industry. They have a great product that sells like hotcakes. The boss is known to be very sctrict, but fair. If I took this offer, I would be a normal "grunt" (making a high salary though).

Job #2:
A company that is relatively new and is founded by my ex-boss from an older job I had. They have a similar product to offer, although it is slightly inferior. The boss is a person I know very well and get along with. If I took this offer I would be making less then I would be at Job #1, but I wouldn't be doing pure grunt saleswork, I would also be doing management and training of other salespeople (which always looks good on a CV).

Job #1 pays about 20-25% better than Job #2. When I asked the boss of Job #1 about future promotion possibilities: he answered "it's possible but there are no open supervisor positions right now and I can't promise you anything", which is basically saying nothing.

I have to make my decision on Monday. 

#2 

okay, again:

1)Do you want to be a grunt when you're 40?

2)If the new company goes down, what will you do?
Maybe it's still easy to get a job after that. Maybe not, I don't know. 

http://img484.imageshack.us/my.php?image=dm2a4eg.jpg

from
http://www.besmella-quake.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=225 

http://www.q4w.org/

The whole idea is to have a game really fast, where movements can make the decision in a fight, and not only aiming. Where controlling a specific zone is really important, with precious items. A game where base weapons are not almost equals to the bigger ones. A game offering best of both world weapons, without making one too much powerful in a defensive situation.

We offer anticipation weapons and hitscan weapons, and they hurt a lot. They'll hurt you bad. It's about domination, it's not really newbie friendly, because spawnfrags are back.

Controlling the game is really important, a situation can turnover very quickly. No minimum time for respawn and a maximum of 2", respawn at 100/0 with only a MG with not much ammunitions... you'll learn how to win the hard way.

They're looking for coders, modders and mappers.

REJECTED! Beta releases are not news (particularly not ones that p1mp themselves with "Of course, brightskins are in standard"). Post it in the Jobs And Mappers Wanted thread. 

 

You should've at least lied about your age, because now nobody will take you seriously. 

it's all the rest that says "come and join the project of 0,000001% possibility!".

If you want serious people to join you on any project you need to show that the people already involved have anything to offer before you can expext others to jump aboard. 

Bear says it all. 

Fifteen years old and not too much time on your hands?

A mapper with not too much time on your hands?

About the same as everyone here! 

 

HumanSubhuman admit it. You're the one who's been searching for "tony hawk 3 cd crack" on quotes.fov.120 

HumanSubhuman admit it. You're the one who's been searching for "tony hawk 3 cd crack" on quotes.fov120.com 

Blitz admit it. You're the one who's been posting HumanSubhuman admit it. You're the one who's been searching for "tony hawk 3 cd crack" on quotes.fov120.com twice. In a row! 

megaman admit it. You're the one who's been posting Blitz admit it. You're the one who's been posting HumanSubhuman admit it. You're the one who's been searching for "tony hawk 3 cd crack" on quotes.fov120.com twice. In a row! just now! 

megaman admit it. You're the one who's been posting megaman admit it. You're the one who's been posting Blitz admit it. You're the one who's been posting HumanSubhuman admit it. You're the one who's been searching for "tony hawk 3 cd crack" on quotes.fov120.com twice. In a row! just now! again, dumb ass! 

also, i just read q4w website and i think those guys will be the new arqons of q4. just that they problably are dumb like shit and just inherited his attitude because it's sooo cool.

fuck them. hard. where's czg? 

czg is THE fucking man on Func_ :) 

Fuck you 

Is there something like distance blur in fitzquake? Can it be changed by a variable? I have the impression that things that I can see clearly with for example joequake-gl are already blured in fitzquake.
Also, can I choose the size of screen captures made in fitzquake? 

screenshots always have the same size as the resolution you set for the game.
don't know about the blur thing. gl_farclip maybe? 

though isn't there a variable sshot_format that can be set to tga png or jpg, no? 

Is there something like distance blur in fitzquake? Can it be changed by a variable? I have the impression that things that I can see clearly with for example joequake-gl are already blured in fitzquake.

No, this shouldn't be the case. I wonder if it's a difference in FSAA settings or texture filter modes or resolution or something. Try posting some screenshots so we can compare the difference (don't use jpeg for this, obviously.)

screenshots always have the same size as the resolution you set for the game.

Correct.

though isn't there a variable sshot_format that can be set to tga png or jpg, no?

No, that's one of those "good idea but I haven't done it yet" features. 

fucked up the tags on my own messageboard! 

With quality coding skills like that I guess we can understand where all these errors keep coming from. ;) 

I say hi

how about you? 

 

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=7453 

[This was a double post -metlslime] 

http://www.quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14701
http://www.quake2evolved.com/blurforum/showthread.php?s=58cad49c9b4b09b2a36b0a32900c273d&threadid=2107&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

I knew that Kiltron was a prick, but this... 

you first started spamming game forums with this in the beginning of this year, but obviously haven't learned one tiny bit from the replies...
if you expect anyone to help or anwer in a least positive way, give information about your mod - ideas, concepts, possibly screenshots, and so on. do you really think anyone would bother sending you an email to get those (just to likely have to learn that it sucks)?
and if you don't have much time on your hand, forget it anyway! proper maps take ages to build, mods even longer, and creating a whole game with hobby designers can only be done if they have a shitload of spare time and furthermore a lot of enthusiasm and commitment.
(this has all been said already dozens of times)

you're not the first one to come up with something like that in the very same way like you did - and you sure won't be the last, but all have in common that they won't get positive reactions from whatever communities.
so bleh, why the fuck am i even writing all this?!
get something done, and if it's only an outline and post it in the jobs&mappers wanted thread, or - better - use the source engine and ask in the appropriate forums, because it's way more 1337 and brings forth much more fruitless material that longs to be included in your awesome game for sure... 

LOL there is some serious beef going on there.

I like how when Kiltron posts some explanation on the Q3W forums, the immediate replies are stuff like...

"Fuck off you cunt.."

"This guys a dumbass"

"KILL YOURSELF LOSER"

"What a little bitch"

"i hope you die in a fucking fire"

"what a complete twat failure you are"

LOL.

Fuck knows what's going on. Those lawyer emails make 419 scams look genuine. The whole thing smells of bollocks to me. Kiltron has come across as a weirdo in the past... 

when will Killtron reveal his plans to launch his own console? Seems like hte next logical step. 

Go enjoy a wallpaper or 4 I made, Duke, Doom, Blood, Half-Life

http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=1004834&page=0&vc=#Post1004834 

Nice work indeed... Doom and HL wallpapers are so far the bests IMHO... BTW, my taste goes more to HL in fact...
Merry christmas to you as well ;) 

I went with Blood. The Duke is 2nd best, but that bloody hand print with the the voodoo doll was too awesome. Yes, awesome works indeed. 

Pretty stylish, I like that you had a concept behind them.

If you'd done a Quake one I would have had it ;) 

Considered it, but I just couldn't visualise a Quake marine having a desk... Quake is so medieval-time-warp to me. 

those are nice
please be creative with quake wallpaper :D 

it's coarse and medieval-base-thingy.
maybe a basemetal greenyellowbrown ink bottle with thick walls and a feather pen inside, on a wooden table.. some old book and a glowing crystal ball.
And the axe hanging somewhere.

Ok, maybe not. :p 

Rusty slab of table with metal grate in the Quake symbol where blood drains down, a chain across the top, and a Hello Kitty plush doll in the corner. 

http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=57427

Fuckin sweet. How's you like to give up your Nyarlothotep on that, inert??? :) 

http://tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121305E 

... or blood soaked altar? It could have a few small bones scattered round the edges, and maybe a candle. The Quake symbol would be smeared out of the blood. Axe somewhere would be good too. Or Quake Guy's helmet. 

the helmet! What would the guy look like without it? It's like the kiss guys without masks or the phantom of the opera. What kind of hair (if any) does he have?
Intriguing.

And it must include wizmet. 

...well done! I'm using Doom, but only until you give us the Quake alter described by Text_Fish :)

I loved the coherence! 

Make a contract revoked wallpaper, with the contract on a wooden table. Splatter it with blood and general grime, make the signature in blood glow and have a few candles melted themselves to the table, also some shotgun shells and nails can be spread out across it. 

when will Killtron reveal his plans to launch his own console? Seems like hte next logical step.

careful, he'll sue you for slander 

I wrote an article on the above here:
http://jkohli.blogspot.com/2005/12/entertainment-of-violence.html

I decided not to post as a discussion thread because we have discussion nazis. 

func_msgboard is mentioned in this months Pc Powerplay in the MODLIFE section. Talks about that thread we had where there was all the fighting between coders and mapps. :) 

Links and/or scans please! 

:-p 

 

I'll scan it up later, it's not very long but it was just interesting to see that thread mentioned. 

Anyone here, by chance, happen to have my old ICQ number in their contact list? I'd like to ressurect it to keep work messaging and friends separate. 

Is this related to you complaining in chat that id know your im number? :) 

I mailed it to you in case you didn't want it public. 

Cybear, who takes home a properly capitalized name worth over seven million euros. 

I noticed a post on Shacknews regarding what Infinity War, Makers of CoD are doing now. I thought briefly about CoD3 and then posted a short rant about the portrayal of war in videogames. I re-read it after posting and realised that as I probably won't get anything but fanboys telling me how awesome CoD is, I thought I should pop it up here for quick discussion.

If they end up making a CoD 3 (haha, like they won't - it's guaranteed to make $$$) I really hope they don't just make the same game again with new locations and a few tweaks. I really hope that someone will take the WW2 FPS game and approach it with more maturity. I want a developer that gets rid of this stupid good vs bad shit and tries to show what war is really like from both sides, and adds real personality to the soldiers, rather than just throwing cannon fodder at the enemy AI to make it look like you are fighting in a war. What I would like to see most is that GERMAN SOLDIERS WERE NOT ALL FUCKING NAZIS. For Gods sake, how hard can it be to at least let the players empathize with them and show that they were having just as shitty a time as the allies.

I am not German (British actually) but ffs, why do we have to have such a stupid black and white portrayal of soldiers in a war. Obviously, it's not just CoD that does this, but we are often trying to say that games can compete on an intellectual level with literature and film, yet our war games feel like fucking Independance Day. Sure, if you are setting your game in a fantasy wolrd it's fine to have the good guys all good and the bad guys all bad (not that you have to, of course), but in a supposedly realistic portrayal of the greatest war in history, where millions upon millions lost their lives, you might at least try to show that it's not just some fucking goon running through a few towns shooting nazis and saving mankind.

Rant over.

Does anyone else think that it's time all these fucking stupid ass WW2 fps games stopped, and someone got some balls and tried to make a much more mature war game? The closest thing I have seen FPS-wise is Vietcong, although it's still pretty much shooting "GOOOOOOKS!" all the time. 

it's never going to happen.

and vietcong sort of worked as coop, not as sp which is primarily what cod is. 

it's never going to happen.

and vietcong sort of worked as coop, not as sp which is primarily what cod is. 

Why is it impossible that a developer will, at some point in the future, possibly in the next five years, create a WW2 FPS that is fun, yet at the same time doesn't glorify war or misrepresent those involved? You might not think it can happen, but I believe it will happen at some point.

This is one thing that drives me nuts. Sure, CoD might be fun, and the developer/publisher might claim that it is an authentic and realistic portrayal of war. However, they can't even begin to give their audience an idea of what war is like - it's almost like like saying love is all hugs and kisses. Fucking bullshit. I'm sick of it, and won't be buying any war games that claim to be realistic unless they start to address this problem.

Wolfenstein is fine, of course - it's fantasy, and doesn't pretend to be realistic or state that level x is an accurate representation of the spot where some glider landed. The glider might be in the right place, but I'm sure all those funnels and clip brushes weren't there in 1944.

By the way, no, I don't think that I know what war is like from watching a few war films, but the majority of films based on WW2 at least show the suffering of the people fighting the war, the civilians, and to some extent... the naz... sorry, Germans. 

You made me pregnant 

Obviously you won't get a game that gives an accurate impression of war, because most of the time war is fucking miserable and I don't want to be made to feel fucking miserable when I'm playing a game. But hell, even leaving the game content alone and adding a drop more maturity to the backstory would leave a better taste in the mouth. 

So true. =(
They should make a war game that is to other war games what the Thin Red Line is to average war films. 

Hopefully we'll get a stronger "indie" game scene when most mainstream game projects becomes gigantic boring dinosaurs that cost a fortune to make. 

and I don't want to be made to feel fucking miserable when I'm playing a game.

Hell yeah, I mean you could just play Q3A or CS and be fucking miserable at a bargain bin price ;) 

Seriously folks, I agree with than and Bal. Sadly even considering paying employees to make a game comparable to Thin Red Line would be an absolute financial disaster for most companies, so we only have some crazy volunteers to look to.

Of course, a game that has at least a fraction of what Thin Red Line offers would probably change the market.

* Lies 

think of it this way.

For every good war film that does what you say, there's 5 crap ones that are just all explosions and loud noise (for every Apocalypse Now, there is a We Were Soldiers, Pearl Harbour etc etc).

So, given the financials behind films and most producers stll lacking the balls to make stuff like that, games are a long way off. 

I can't believe you put We Were Soldiers in the shit category with Pearly Harbour. We Were Soldiers at least had bits from the VC perspective... actually, I think Pearly Harbour did too, but ffs... PEARL FUCKING HARBOUR! BEN FUCKING AFFLECK! FOR FUCKS SAKE.

We were soldiers is not the best film ever by a long shot, but it is not even in the same league as Pearl Harbour.

Back on topic though, why does everyone assume that people are stupid and will be satisfied by game after game of the exact same stupid explosions, the exact same extreme scripted missions, total lack of emotion and claim to authenticity?

Like Vigil said, I think that if someone did release a war game that was more mature than kids playing cowboys and indians in their back yard it could do a lot to change the market and go some way to alter the general perception of games as for children. 

why does everyone assume that people are stupid and will be satisfied by game after game of the exact same stupid explosions, the exact same extreme scripted missions, total lack of emotion and claim to authenticity?

because it's now the exaxt same stupid stuff with better graphics, surround sound and extra cheese! 

Are you still in japan btw? What are you up to now apart from trying to build a portfolio? 

yeah you're right, it's not in the same league but it's still a crap film.

As is Windtalkers, enemy at the gates etc. Actually, out of that bunch I'm probably being a bit harsh on enemy at the gates but it's still a crap movie.

Anyway, in the end, if the game sells well, why would any studio in their right (commercial) mind change what they're doing ?

That's the bottom line. 

it's easy:

Consumers!

Stop buying crap!

And don't complain after you've seen the next pearl harbour / played zombie bash 9. Don't buy IKEA or other crappy chipboard furniture. Don't buy thin 5 euro refugee pizzas made from tomato substitutes. Don't buy stupid latest gadgets like music players, cellphones or computers - they're not must-haves! The dumpsters are already full of that crap that was so must-have only yesterday!

Stop being a ravenous bunch of idiots.

Just say no - beforehand.

Thank you.
 

Now I'll never look at my IKEA custom-molded foot stool the same ever again. 

was the second crappest. An otherwise decent film imho RUINED by the stupid love interest shit that just pissed me off the whole time. 

Cheap, good quality, designer furniture? Oh hell yeah! 

Is the Nazi conquest for Poland in the 21st Century. 

 

Can anyone here (especially CZG) tell me what's wrong with this screenshot?

http://www.saunalahti.fi/dnaumov/bwf-wtf.jpg

It's unedited. 

 

WW2 is so farmed for games these days because it's a conflict in recent memory where the two sides CAN be painted in black and white, which is what many games usually call for RECURSIVE ERROR: There was a SQL error. 

OMG

Teh conspiracy!!

Did you continue to register, or where you too scared?? 

It's a secret hint that I Am Awesome.

As if you needed a hint. 

rofl!
now i'm afraid of czg, that bastard. 

You're a tiresome parrot, regurgitating tired Palahniukian phrases in a tiresome way. 

what is Palahniukian? Google gives some author I've never heard of.
Please add something to the discussion. 

Fight Club and some other overpopular crap I haven't read or watched as a movie. 

http://czg.leveldesign.org/stuff/omgwtf2.jpg 

rather than quietly choosing fonts in photoshop to match this silly picture, you better fuck off to map, bitch 

 

I hope you finish that super crazy map you were working on before you got a games industry job. It looked like it was going to be badger buggering brilliant.

By the way, do you still have that donkey maintenance site? What happened to your old discobadger.tk domain? Did someone buy it and squat on it?

Also, I am cuirious if you are working as a designer, artist or artist/designer at starbreeze. I presume they are working on hardcore next-genstuff, since they seem to be pretty with the times. 

Ogier, an old quake style editor - is still used for levels at starbreeze (available for dl with q1, enclave, riddick and knights of the temple game support). LD:s build levels but most of the entity stuff is done by "game scripters" or whatev 

I guess my previous post just gave you different terms for the same things you mentioned so this time I'll mention that to my knowledge czg's function is as a level designer and not scripter.

czg: since I answered instead of you, you should have some time left for finishing that q1 map during the holidays! 

https://homedrive.home.nl/gimli/publiek/fitz06.jpg
Hell, someone's bats lost ways! 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/fitz06.jpg 

looks pretty good, although it looks like someone took a chunk out of the left side of it's face. ;) 

http://www.poiemadesign.com/wwi/

Does anyone know of any good WW1 shooters? Looking at these colour photos(!) from World War One made me think that a game set in that area could satisfy some of the war gamer crowd while freeing us from fighting Nazis. 

WWII is where it's AT. I don't think the fighting tactics (ie stand around in holes in the ground and let bombs fall on you) employed in WWI would make for very good gameplay (unless the game wildly diverged from WWI, in which case, hey let's make a WWII game, they sell really well right now).

I hope games with nazis never stop!


also, nazis have single-pane windows in their houses. that's why bambuz's great great grandfather enlisted in the Polwiegish army and singlehandedly liberated Polway. 

and only a day's worth of rations! 

He shared what was left with the people of Polway, and it fed every family for forty days and forty nights because of the miraculous bounty of Polweigish rations brought on by the economic savings of the might double-paned Polweigish window. 

fuck! 

Nazi's are no fun if they aren't doing occult/future-tech stuff. Nazi's are also fun because they are the last true evil lately, rather like orcs, but without being smelly and bad looking. 

Hitler was a vegetarian. Nazi Germany had progressive animal and nature protection laws. This is all irrelevant though since Nazi Germany is like Morgoth - totally and purely evil all by itself and without any reasons or dimensions. I understand if people feel like that -they were pretty fucked up and did lots of evil things.

And to Lun: sorry, I was half trying to just help, half just irritating you. :)

Also: The Poles and English don't have double-pane glasses and thus they freeze in the winter or consume big amounts of coal.
Also2: The English don't have cold and hot water mixing to warm water in the same tap, so you either burn or freeze or have to mix it in the sink, which is awkward.
Also3: Norway used to be quite backwards but now they're rich with oil money. They must have doublepanes, and had probably those already way back since it's quite cold there. Czg, Fjoggis or that weight lifting absolutist medical student mapper can fill you on this. 

Did it for neg!ke, but maybe some of you would like to read the Quake shareware review from the Powerplay (german...) too:

http://www.quaddicted.com/stuff/pics/quake/IMG_1533.jpg
http://www.quaddicted.com/stuff/pics/quake/IMG_1534.jpg
http://www.quaddicted.com/stuff/pics/quake/IMG_1537.jpg
http://www.quaddicted.com/stuff/pics/quake/IMG_1541.jpg
http://www.quaddicted.com/stuff/pics/quake/IMG_1544.jpg
http://www.quaddicted.com/stuff/pics/quake/IMG_1547.jpg

It's not meant to be good but readable ;)

Does anyone know if that cover artwork (first link) is available somewhere? 

DECIDED TO POST GREAT ASSES INSTEAD:

william shakespeare DRAMA
bambuz THRILLER
vinyl records TRAGEDY
beyonce knowles THRILLER
eeyore COMEDY
chris steele MUSICAL
jesus christ HORROR/SPLATTER
coca cola inc FOREIGN 

That cover artwork is a shameless plagiarisation of a classic Games Workshop painting. At least the face and pose are.

http://www.fred-katrin.de/warhamm/volume1/jim_burns_dark_angels.jpg 

Before clicking, I can guess the one, a marine sarge in a small squad, can't remember the chapter but would guess dark angels... 

I did actually make that guess before even mousing over the link. I award myself A PRIZE. 

a lifetime's supply of idbase remakes! 

http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2664905?htv=12 

Since you work for a company making a WWII game (albeit not your typical type) you are automatically biased. :) 

That's just it: the whole problem would be solved if there actually were atypical WWII games (or a game) released. Maybe not the whole problem, but at least it could help. 

thanks.
i have read this kind of articles, too, back then. sure, quake was not all that innovative, but it definately was the most important pc game, at least in the field of fps.
what really pissed me off at that time (not in this article) were comparisons to utter crap games, like "uh no auto-map in quake... this was sooo much better in duke nukem" and so on...
but who can blame those jerks, they just didn't know better, playing their dumb interactive movie adventures all the time... :P

anyway, i'm only looking for these "quake is..." advertisements. its pages in your magazine look very good (unlike mine), so you should make it a poster to hang in your rooms - which would be quite natural for someone running a quake site, anyway. ;) 

Since you work for a company making a WWII game (albeit not your typical type) you are automatically biased.

Says who? 

is not exactly one of the "realistic" fps corridor shooters under my crosshairs actually, since there is loads of fun occult stuff in there and it never felt based on WW2 that closely. RTCW seemed a lot more like Indy Jones style Nazi fighting than anything.

If Lun was working on "The Men who are Brothers of the Call of the Medal of Duty who have Valour in Arms 6" then I might say he could have some bias, but ...

...Fucking git! He's working on the next Wolfenstein game ffs. 

He's working on the next Wolfenstein game ffs.

Says who? 

Erm, I suppose I should have said "Raven is working on the next Wolfenstein game ffs."

That Lun is working on the next Wolfenstein was just an assumption, since he was working on the now released Quake 4, and recently another Wolfenstein game, which will presumably use the same (or similar) tech was anounced to be in development at Raven.

I have no idea what Lunaran is working on to be perfectly honest. I suppose you bhave a bunch of other projects going on at Raven that he could be on, or perhaps he was hired as the vending machine repairman.

Sorry. 

Is working on Hexen 3, and not Heretic 3, as he would have us believe. Lun is working on Mageslayer 2. 

then i'm working on quake mp3: resolution of monitor. yay! 

I've got 8GB free webspace for Quaddicted.com now! Bwhaha, and I'm paying only 7 Euro per month :)

What shall I host there? I can't invest much more time but maybe some "file dump"? 

...obviously :D 

Sounds too good to be true. I wouldn't be surprised if you have downtimes and other crap for that price...