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Nyarlathotep

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Posts posted by Nyarlathotep

  1. Yeah, but how smart are they? How's their path-finding? I suspect that they're not very good at routing based on where they can climb or jump. Routing for wall-climbing should be fairly easy, as it's essentially vertical floor with obstacles, but I'm not seeing how they could handle jumping in the general case--or for that matter, mantling. They could be using special AI flags to mark jumping, rather than relying on good path-finding or preprocessing.

  2. Read my first coment, read your reply, then read my third coment. That SHOULD clear things out.

    Clearly NOT, as you using the wrong terms to describe whatever the hell it is you're talking about and not enough detail to infer what it is. Read it again, and tell me where you describe in detail what the hell you're talking about.

     

    I think that, for me, growing up playing first-person games where there was never any kind of visible player shadow at all (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Half-Life and so on), seeing my character's shadow tends to be a little unnerving. The same goes for body awareness. It actually feels less immersive to me.

    That's funny. I grew up on those same games. I remember having exactly the same attitude about using the mouse to look around. It was just so unnatural.

     

    Done well, full body awareness is one those things were you go back the old style and wonder how you ever managed. The problem is that so very few do it well enough to write home about.

  3. Self-shadowing is already on everything that doesn't look like crap with it on. If by "self-shadowing", you mean the player's shadow, it is available but unsupported.

     

    Edit: You can try it out in Thief's Den with "seta g_showPlayerShadow 1" in the console (remove the quotes). You can bring the console down with ctrl+alt+` or just ` in Linux (the tilde "~" key).

  4. Which LoZ did you play, anyway? (I don't remember the story well)

    I was speaking of OoT, but I've since played Majora's Mask, Twilight Princess and some of Wind Waker.

     

    OoT was released 10 years ago, so if you were a kid 10 years ago, and I assume you played OoT several years ago, you can't have been more than a mid-teenager.

    I typically use kid to mean anyone who is not an adult, but in this case I actually did mean pre-teen (albeit only just).

     

    I wouldn't go so far as to saying that any of the Zelda games have "adult themes". They're fundamentally simple games targeted toward younger gamers, and the themes are no more mature than any 1990's animated Disney flick.

    With the exceptions of Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess, I agree with you. The point I was trying to make was that my imagination read those adult themes into the game. Very, very few games inspire me the way the Legend of Zelda series does. That reason alone is enough for me to hold the series in highest prestige.

     

    I attribute part of OoT's ability to send my imagination into overdrive to the somewhat bare-bones presentation of the plot. By providing very little, I was able to read into it more, turning a short story into a virtual novel. (As a side note, I think that Peter Molyneux was actually trying to do this deliberately with Fable.)

  5. OoT was released when I was a kid, but I didn't play any of the Legend of Zelda series until adulthood. The only encounter I had with LoZ before then was Super Smash Brothers; I hadn't even heard of the series. What hooked me to the series was how it set my imagination on overdrive. It wasn't just a fairytale anymore. There was tragedy. There was romance.* It had adult themes that were hampered by the technology of the day. It wasn't just a child's story; there was actually something to it.

     

    *Knowing that Sheik was a woman probably significantly affected my perception of the game. Speeches about "friendship" became a teenaged girl wanting what she cannot have (Link is supposed to think she is a man, and romantic relations gets in the way of that) instead of the sappy, childish Aesops that it would have seemed otherwise. This is where voice acting would have helped significantly. An adult would recognize Sheik as crossdressing, but a child would still take those friendship speeches at face value, even if they noticed that she was actually female.

  6. Wouldn't mind watching all the cutscenes in order sometime, just to fill the gaps in my gaming pop culture knowledge, but I wouldn't want to try playing it again.

    My ex-girlfriend filled me in on the rest of the plot, along with most of the plot of FFX 1 & 2. Why are so many women obsessed with Final Fantasy?

  7. Between those and the mind-numbingly horrible gameplay (yes I went there - FF7 is mostly cutscenes and battles, and the random battles were extremely tedious), I didn't play very far.

    I got to the end of the first disc on PC before I quit. I'd liked the story enough to trudge through that far, but by the time I had to insert disc two, the monotony had caught up to me and I couldn't bear to press on.

  8. but telling a lovestory basso's brother and the flower girl from the sector 7 slums as they go to slay a magic wielding eviloverlord destined to destroy offmiddleearth doesn't exactly belong in a thief mission

    If I ever see an FM full of long-haired bishounen wielding unrealistically oversized weaponry and trying to destroy the planet, I think I will go an hero myself. I couldn't stomach a retelling of the nth iteration of a fantasy that proclaims itself to be the last.

  9. That's true. I'm merely pointing out the fact that with hard work, the job of a GM can be virtually duplicated. In terms of plot progression, GMs really only have an advantage in adjusting for sequence breaking. Their stories (with fairly rare exception) are still preplanned to a very large degree, and much of the dynamic adjustments they provide can be duplicated with careful pre-planning (and branching). I'd argue that except for the best GMs, games are actually better in providing the backdrop world for you to freely wander in (like Oblivion or Assassin's Creed).

  10. Sure, games like Go, Chess, and Dominoes are all modern inventions.

     

    Yes, but now you're getting into a completely different area - having a real person controlling things in real time.

    It's a pretty useless entertainment medium if it requires that you have a very knowledgeable person there, putting a lot of effort into giving you a good time

    That's not unlocking the potential of the gaming medium at all, since in the end, it means little if you do table top or computer simulation, the good stuff that matters is coming from the GM and other players.

    My point was that GMs demonstrate that it's possible to tell a story and still give players the freedom of choice, not that it's a trivial matter to do so.

  11. Figures. Was it any fun?

     

    The full potential of the gaming medium had not been realised yet, and will not be for another 10-15 years.

    The one crucial element needed to achieve that true ongoing dynamic experience that games are perfectly, and uniquely, suited for, is exceptionally good AI. Basically human-like AI that can be interacted with in real time, on the fly, much as we might chat on IRC.

    No argument there.

     

    In such a game, there would be no plot, no quests, no linear storytelling, but it's the AI's interaction with each other that create dynamic content in which things happen that the player can get involved in, much like reality.

    I would agree with you were it not for the existence of tabletop roleplaying games. While, yes, poorer GM's will tend to railroad characters on their plots, good GM's can present a story without stepping on the players' toes. Players will want to follow the story; they just want to go off-roading occasionally.

  12. I disagree. Many of the best movies don't explain everything to the audience; they have to work it out on their own from the clues given.

     

    In games, it becomes even more difficult to tell the story overtly, but this is not a flaw. It's the laziness of developers that results in most of the lock-in. Some things, like dialogue trees, are the consequences of an inability to simulate intelligence. But other things, like linear level design, are the result of insipid designers.

  13. The only advantage of the source engine is the HDR-rendering I think. On that thought, I wonder why nobody ever introduced proper HDR to Doom 3. I mean, they also implemented relief-mapping, so why not HDR. I guess it's impossible, because I only saw a few fake-HDR mods for Doom 3 which use the bloom and some other things, but nothing special.

    For the same reason that no implements shadow-mapping or lightmapping: that would require a rewrite of the renderer itself. To be more specific, true HDR requires floating point color values to be used throughout the render pipe. I'd have to do a bit of research to identify whatever else missing from D3E that is necessary for HDR, but I'm pretty sure that HDR requires deferred rendering for good performance.

  14. Ha! You're joking right? All the Star Wars plots were cheap, predictable, good guys win, space opera, mass market trash.

    That's why I said it was above average for Star Wars. I never claimed that Star Wars had great plot.

     

    Anyway, give me a list of games where the story isn't a silly, unbelievable ripping yarn, and I'll give you all my money.

    I could make mention of games with excellent story, but they all make use of some sci-fi or fantastic element. I could mention Planescape Torment, for example, but that is high fantasy, and therefore "unbelievable." While I'm aware that games without any fantastic elements ought to exist, the most likely category of games to be such I am completely unfamiliar with (visual novels/eroge).

     

    Simply put, games lend themselves well to transporting you outside of your norms. Nobody wants to play a video game about a fat slob who does nothing but play WoW (although, ironically, a god game about said fatty could be fun diversion--think Flash game). If the settings (any sci-fi, fantasy) or situations (Rainbow 6, Splinter Cell) aren't at least somewhat unrealistic, then the goals of the characters/the characters themselves are unrealistic (Hentai). Even the bard himself knew this; every one of his stories features something unusual, and often his characters bear little resemblance to his audience (kings, princesses, psychos, et al).

     

    I'll admit that few games with good story exist, but that is not inherent in the medium. Rather, it is inherent in how storytelling is approached in general. You see it in the games industry, in Hollywood, even in literature. Don't be original; just rip off whatever the fuck is in style this second.

  15. Worse. I'm going to have to complain about a game instead of oDDity. (By the way, I just checked outside; it is indeed raining fire.)

     

    I found KoTOR to be an excellent example of why I think standards have lowered in RPGs. I found it to be exceedingly linear, short, and bereft of meaningful choices. You were stuck playing Lawful Good or Chaotic Stupid, with only small variations between. Where's my chance to play as a complete bastard and make people suffer? I want to break their minds, not engage in wanton (and generally counterproductive) slaughter!

     

    Having said that, I will still say that it was quite a good game. I was not much of a fan of the combat system, but I will admit that it was about as good of a translation of D&D mechanics into a real-time environment that you can get. While the story itself was merely an above-average (for Star Wars) story, it was very well presented (the dialogue, while limited in options, was excellent). Despite that, I don't think it stands up to the same high standards of Balder's Gate, Fallout and Planescape Torment.

  16. We did some messing around with that stuff (I remember in particular Fidcal trying a lot of different tricks), but to no avail. Really, the only way we're going to get heavy rain to run well is to do it in a shader. The particle system is surprisingly taxing.

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