teh_saccade

Image upload limitations of 500kb per post - couldn't find a way around it without making them all too small to see... sorry about that. // (also it's using outdated flash plugin and enabling it each time means the post is blanked in FF my end). ---- // (It's impossible to edit the posts into one with all the pictures, due to aforementioned 500kb limit.) In retrospect - It would've been better to make a page on a public blog and put it all there with a link. I'll do that if ever there's a long answer that no-one will read, next time, rather than steamroll. It's a bad habit of mine to try and make every conversation as interesting as possible for myself, when there's no-one listening or to interject or ask questions like at the uni or on a job. Thin line between passionate and painful, I guess... Please feel free to remove the posts (and my old mapping thread in editor's guild) if you would like.

Happy Birthday, Thief - thanks for all the years of entertainment! Still have the box. I miss the days of innovation over franchise. It was also Left 4 Dead's 10th birthday two weeks ago. That went by without fanfare. Also mine last week, which even I forgot about. Just think - 80% of the USA play computer games regularly. Half of them are not old enough to have been born when Thief came out. We are lucky to have witnessed, on our CRT's and 386 DX's, the birth of a game that still receives as much love as Santa. Thanks for the tip about the ttlg contest! // also - what is this thief 4 you talk of? I don't believe it exists - I thought it was a dishonored clone with a character named Garrett, who didn't have magical powers of the same kind. I wonder when Deus Ex came out... Might have to install that again...

They want me to pay for this, but then let me preview it and download it by right-clicking, save image? Even the hi-res versions are over-sharped.

yay, unlimited nested objects - DR could do with something like that. Seems like there's a lot of improvements for scene and movie rendering, but only a few interface changes for modelling for games. I like the full-on dark mode. DR could do with something like that. It can be painful to use sometimes, from a dimly lit cave.

Buy a massive new TV and console to play Red Dead 2 for xmas and new year's and then take it back for a full refund..? That is generous...

ps, idk if that's supposed to be water in the cracks of that image or not, but it looks naff cos it's way bright and looks like artefacting.

There's a bunch of stuff and that's about that. That's my good deed for the day and I'm going home to play Shogun 2.

The techniques are not only limited to texturing

If you can't find the exact thing you are looking for - there might be an alternative.

Pretty much everyone carries a camera phone, so there's no reason to not take interesting pictures for level design ideas.

Say you need a particular texture, as you are looking for. Getting away from the desk can mean a nice day out and ice-cream for everyone while exploring some ruins, old building and chatting up the intern. These kind of photos will be useful for your wharf, because you not only snag the textures from the area, but also have a reference from which to construct the area:

Being obsessive about taking photos wherever you find something interesting is a good habit - count the textures, possible to be cut and skewed, and modelling ideas in this photo (but also the textures and features have been photographed flat): For example, the texture of the wall: or some chopped-up wood, for a wood pile in a shed or something: That one might be more difficult to tile, and would require additional textures for the sides and top - which means making a mesh and having to mess around aligning it - which is gonna be a pain to do. So a woodpile like this would more likely be made up of the main texture on a plane, surrounded by individual cylinders, that have a front and back face, plus a wrap for the sides. Doing this means that the object appears to be a big stack of wood, but it isn't a bunch of individual pieces - it's probably only a few dozen instead of hundreds of objects and different textures.

If a texture is going to be applied to a warped mesh or some primative that isn't flat - it can have the dodgy bits covered up by other textures or objects, which is a handy trick for if looks a bit naff. To break the recursion, different trees and grass textures have been used. The borders of the rocks have been overlayed with a simple grass-transition texture, to hide the fact that it looks crap at the edges and no-one wants to make a special rock texture for every type of rock to transition to every type of grass.

Those dumb selfies that girls want to take can also contain useful stuff that might be cut-n-paste into a blended pattern. Texturing software will make it tesselate / tile and it can then used as a repeating texture. Everyone's got a bunch of dumb selfies that some girl took at one point.

This photo contains shapes I can use for the flagstone surrounds, that I can lift and texture as part of my main input: Using threshold in PS to grab the shapes (10 seconds) - I can auto-trace the paths (20 seconds) and then simply copy-rotate it around my main motif in AI (2 seconds) before subtly altering each shape so that the surround appears less recursive (2 minutes).

No, but the spoilers contain how to make one. If you want to know how to make one yourself - I've outlined the process of how to make something such as in your image (plus the other replies will demonstrate how to get the wharf, plus the value of going outside and taking photos, rather than relying on the internet) in the spoilers and other replies.

There's some interesting research on boredom in game design. It can be analogised to a combat mission. Spend 12 hours pretending you're not scared, another 12 being very bored, perhaps another 24 on the ground sitting doing nothing - then the part that lasts 2 minutes feels like 2 years. Our perception of time can be altered in so many ways - some games need boredom to make the action interesting. Music can form a big part of that, especially since it augments our response to a situation. One reason some gamer might end up with a massive backlog of games is because they get bored very easily with hi-octane, repetitive action (unless it's a routine for them or they're lucky to not form habitual dopamine tolerance), yet another gamer will happily play a train driving game for several years and never feel "bored" with the "boring bits" where they just sit back and tick along. I know one fella who did just that with a train sim for most of his college life, and he's now been a train driver in Belgium for several years. After the Falklands/Maldives, I got to have a go in one of the flight simulator things as my old man was transferred to training Tornado pilots - it was basically a computer game designed to familiarise people with the real life kit, so they didn't smash millions in training and machine by pushing the wrong button. Guiding a SAM missile was basically using a trackball to keep a cursor (laser pointer) on a moving target within a limited field of view - software does that now, better than humans. The US military use Xbox controllers, pretty much, to operate drones. Bohemia's stuff has been used in the past as a training tool, also. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3833369/ Life is boring, most of the time - else we wouldn't have excitement. But engineering a virtual experience to alter someone's state of mind and perception of space/time/reality is an interesting topic. Games (and other entertainment media) are a fascinating way to train/teach or manipulate people into ways of thinking/behaving. One job, when WoW came out - an advertising agency's head tech was big into it (and would play every night, sometimes from the office due to the better machines). Dropping off the mail every day and becoming friendly to the point bringing in cups of coffee and hanging out a bit, hoping it would mean he'd go take a leak so as to be left alone in the room - found out about the WoW playing and started to do that. Being "schooled" in how to play WoW by the guy. One night, asks if it's possible to log in and do something with his character as he's out. Turns out it was the same password as his admin login. Co-op gaming built a level of trust with someone that was not possible to create in real life. Turned out there was about 3.4gb of Kirsten Dunst pictures (along with all the non-disclosure agreement stuff that everyone was working on for VW) on the servers when examining the system, cos the friendly mail guy gets in early and security don't question it at weekends - the tape backups were locked up in a safe, so they were impossible to get at - but the system's security ended up being compromised because of playing a game with someone and doing them a favour one time. Those kinds of things aren't very nice, pretending to be friends - but it's a function. For some people - that's also a game, from which they get their achievement dopamine and level up. Time passes very quickly, listening to the sound of a server-room. Some of the ambient noises in hiding places in games such as Thief or TDM or other stealth games - they help speed up perception of time through an induced white-noise hypnosis, while waiting for the guard to return. A reason why someone coughing in a library or an annoying, constant sniff by a co-worker in a quiet office can become a major irritation - it breaks the flow of time by introducing a disctracting event. In stealth games, that's a good thing - to hear the approaching footsteps and the door open again, after waiting in a corner for 4 minutes for a guard to pass on their patrol. (I think you've got to be a bit different in the head to go that deep into stuff). That's a good example, with the HL2 section.

1. That was my sense of humour. Not everyone gets it, but it fills my time until I can join my family. 2. There isn't a "nominate physics issues" thread. Those are models that could do with a little attention, in my humble opinion. Graphics vs Gameplay. Who gives a toss what I think, anyway?

I've speed run the game today in a little over 5 minutes, because it's more fun in sandbox and messing around in freeplay after the story is done. Also, it's pretty old Unity and, looking at how it's built - they've done a good job, but there's some bugs and glitches that will never be fixed without remaking the whole thing in a newer version of Unity, plus another year or so of play-testing to figure out all the logic errors. The AI is "bespoke" copy/pasta. There's a lot of stuff in the game that isn't implemented. Idk if it isn't cut out because it's required inheritence or if it's an oversight. Decompiling it, it seems that you hack out whole chunks and it doesn't change anything. Steam just put a check in to see if the game's registered to an account for Unity SP games. Unity's not a great platform, but it's accessible and you can copy-paste a game together. It's a good job, but it's gonna be one of those things that's either gonna be a few years before it's done - or a potential classic that's abandoned, like Clandestine where the studio got its cash to fund their next game, or the dev's get bored of working on it, like a thousand kickstarters, or get rich and pat themselves on the back and get a new Islington apartment and a 6 month holiday, returning to say they're letting people have access to the source to fix the bugs if they want *cough madruga cough*. Most people put in about 8-12 hours before moving on. Instead of ModDB and Greenlight - we now get rushed to "just good enough" full-price games that are still going to be getting patches for years or remastered in a decade. The only game I bought this year and I've stuck in thirty or fourty hours playing it through a few times. Will probably still be on the machine for a long time.

Looks like scaling ought to be able to fixed using the monitor's setup menu: https://www.kitguru.net/peripherals/james-morris/samsung-cf791-34in-quantum-dot-curved-monitor/3/ Looked at a lot of software config stuff, but said nothing about the hardware setup - and it looks pretty irritating interface for that monitor. 110-degree FOV will mean you get the same view as any 16:9 res, scaled to 21:9, but might stretch prevent the GUIs stretch. Another option is to run the game in a window, clip the border off with borderstripper (http://winborderstrip.sourceforge.net/) and alt+enter it, same as stretching out other old games from the last millenium. Might get some letterboxing, might not. Idk - only purpose I can see in having a super-widescreen monitor is to be able to have 2 "fullscreen" applications running at the same time on the same screen. Like Photoshop and Lightroom or bitmap2material, Illustrator and Aftereffects and Premiere- so you can just drag between them and still have all the space to be able to work effectively, or stick it on its side and be able to read a bunch of dll or notepad++ (or a long forum thread on a monitor) without scrolling. Have you still got the receipt..?

Your chosen resolution isn't listed as being any of the possilble non-standard resolutions supported by the game: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Resolutions Also the aspect ratio is incorrect: Size = 3440 x 1440 = 4.95 megapixels Aspect ratio = 2.39 (not 2.38, as previously stated - perhaps that's the problem..? I'm a [film] photographer - I know my aspects - go check it using an aspect ratio calculator, if it's not right still) Otherwise, stick it to the closest known supported (3360x1200- 2.8) and scale by aspect using the monitor or your graphics card software. It says that it's scaled by native and the hud is stretched, so it might be better to not scale it and put up with the letterboxing. If it's not the 0.01 aspect ratio error, then the workaround would be to use closest known supported and scale it using your hardware. // I'm glad i never bought that curved super-widescreen monitor. For one - it means, if you're not in the right place, you're going to see straight lines as curves, which is no good for graphics work and also - discovering that only a few games supported that resolution and the crap to get them to do so - it wasn't worth the £4k for a headache. (plus it wouldn't fit on my desk without moving the printers and scanners and inbox and ashtray and collection of lighters and oil pastels and used tissues stuffed in empty pot noodle cups [that have also been used as ashtrays]).

In terms of game models 1. Lara croft... nah. I think all candlesticks needs a tweak, because they can be used as a doorstops to stop patrols, lock rooms and are often plentiful in a level - unlike boxes or moveable chairs, which allow for the same thing, but also for getting out of bounds or bypassing that locked fence and walking over the roof to find a way the FM maker never considered - I've noticed that there are often less chairs and moveable boxes and bails of stuff in newer FMs. Which is a shame, as they're great for dropping on people or luring everyone into a room and then putting a single box in the doorway, or a candlestick against the door...

1. Hillary Clinton (no explanation needed) 2. Justin Beiber (or any teen idol, such as Miley Cyrus or Brittney Spears) 3. J-Lo (or any pop music icon or tv/movie celebrity, but particularly Jennyvonzewesternbloc) 4. Tess Munster or Blaire White... that's a tough call... I'll say "all social media pundits with a conviction". 5. Everyone involved with the Kardashian's (because they disgust me) These are the worst role models for anyone to have, IMHO.

Oh, you've changed the defs for the intro. Maybe that's it. Personally, I hate watching videos when I could be reading something. All these tutorial videos... I'd rather have a book.

That's kinda weird - you might be right. Probably over my head. Have you considered ripping the intro video and simply including it as part of your own intro video, leading to your button briefing (if you can figure that), and resetting your other defs (after backing them up)..? It'd be easier to force the intro video played if it was part of your briefing. .