Wellingtoncrab

I've got one cooking but it's a long way out.

Love your work so looking forward to whatever you got coming next whenever and wherever that may be!

Honestly it was pretty crazy the quality of missions we got last time, but I would give participants a lot more time. Perhaps announce a contest before the end of the year with intent to build up missions for the theoretical 2.12 release in early 2024 - or sticking with the horror theme for fall of 2023.

It’s kind of looking like there may not be a T1/T2 contest in that time block and large projects like The Black Parade seem to be tying up late this year/early next year so it might good as far as the overall “fms” release windows.

This kind of establishes an on/off year rhythm for contests but who knows how long something like that would persist.

Yeah I didn't find the multiplayer invasion element particularly interesting and disabled it after the first few hours.

The concept of "immersive sim" is so soft I am not about to criticize anyone for "not" making one and I have a broad interest in the types of games I play.

Fundamentally you saw them as "trying something different" and really enjoyed it, which is great. I didn't see it as "trying something different" really at all as I think I have been consistent in saying it feels very similar to their past games, but comes off as diluted and incoherent instead of refined or expanded. So I would not characterize my criticism of as such.

I also would reiterate I still thought it was "not bad".

I don’t think anything in Peter’s comment implies worry over financial success of Arkane because of the performance of the finished game, but whatever actually precipitated the development of the game itself. You know - ie when it actually would have mattered to the end result.

Clearly the game was made to reuse concepts, mechanics and assets from their prior games as well as wring as much out of the assets created by reusing the environments within the game itself.

I don’t have an issue with that personally. It worked pretty darn well in Prey: Mooncrash actually. While there is some creative opportunity afforded there that Deathloop does attempt to leverage - the result is in my opinion a not bad, but unremarkable and familiar feeling game that struggles to occupy any lasting real estate in my memory banks

By all accounts it seems to have worked as the game received much better reviews and sounds like has seen more of an acceptable financial return than Prey or Dishonored 2 - some the greatest games ever made that weren’t so lucky. It is kind of a bizarre thing about making games at that level is there is so little viable tolerance for failure that it seems like over and over again we lose massively talented studios to market whimsy.

In that context it is hard not to be a little disappointed that an underwhelming thing is likely going to be seen as the way forward, but it is certainly preferable to collapse. Hopefully the situation with Microsoft gives them some security and having things like gamepass to provide a net and huge already bought in player base gives them space to do something more risky/interesting.

I agree pretty much with Peter. It’s not that it is bad, but it never feels like it is working particularly well either and I honestly felt disinterested through a lot of my playthrough. At the time I said it was least my favorite Arkane game - I might give it another go someday but I still feel that way.

I could nit pick a lot that would result in a wall of text but for example the relationships between loops, the “big idea” of the game, feels largely prescribed and while it tries to convey a lot of dynamism in the set dressing between time changes - while you’re in them they feel rather static. Your path through the game is more or less following the in game spreadsheet.

Contrast this to Prey: Mooncrash, which I don’t think is a exaggeration to say is (pretty much) the same studio executing on almost every idea in Deathloop but better, and there are huge ramifications between runs in a loop - once you come to understand these you are constantly making decisions in loops to influence following ones. There is some layout/hazard randomization as well, something which I did not notice at all in Deathloop.

Redfall also looks iffy to me, but I will give anything the studio does a shot. 

Could be it was on the forums in a different context - but I specifically remember this In technical_questions. I recall as there were some interesting links as follow up on inverting normal channels to possibly achieve the effect.

I wouldn’t characterize it as a complaint, but asking about a solution for authoring these types of materials was recently brought up on the discord server.

Yeah here is her sister - she was always a chonking beef slab:

I don’t know my Guinea pigs were pretty darn cute.

It did admittedly take me longer than that - the current iteration of Iris was started in late 2019!  As far as the earlier attempts … well lets not talk about those.

What is absolutely true is that my mission would never have seen the light of day without a lot of help and patience from those very volunteer developers!

Special shout out to our VERY EXCLUSIVE discord server/cult - “The Esoteric Order of Dragofer” for all the support/human sacrifices over the years.

We should probably skip the guild and immediately splinter into factions.

The “Tabans” - squalid and chaotic pests who worship the the “Tabster” and the righteous “Spacerites” - rigid puritans who follow the path and virtues of “The Master Indenter”.

Well I hope this is a fruitful path to you. For now I will be bug testing the "ignore user" feature on the forum.

I imagine your workflow on a depreciated version of windows and ancient version of gimp - to the point you have to beg people on an Internet forum to render a .DDS for you must be very efficient. 

Since we’re all very open to criticism here: despite reams of words scrawled onto this forum as if it were the walls of your padded cell, from what I have seen you have a long way to go before you have contributed anything of substantial value beyond minor bug reports. The screen shots of your mission are looking incredibly uninteresting so far - you clearly have a lot a work ahead of you so maybe get to it.

You might find the community members you are constantly (and in my opinion meritlessly in terms of proportion and tone) criticizing can help you as much as you like to think you are helping them with your “critiques”. 

Which typically read somewhere between pedantic nuisances with a sense of urgency cranked to 11 and a syphilitic fever dream. That is the problem. Would it have been so hard to say “Hey I noticed this problem with the skin definitions, where do I submit a bug report? BTW I have development experience and would be happy to address some of the fixes.” If you desire is to be helpful, then be helpful.

If that sounds defensive, it is because it is. We lowly mappers owe the very community members and mod you are intent on nitpicking to the point it is constant layer of white noise in this forum a great debt, in that as imperfect as it is and we all are, we never would have come close to finishing our own messy work without them. And it is messy. That will always mean a great deal more to me personally then whether it’s “spaces or tabs” under the hood, but to each their own.

Ah I see, apologies - it read at first like a continuation from the VL section as that was the last header - I thought each image was intended to show off a VL example from each contest mission. Apologies for the nitpicking.

Sorry - wasn’t trying to get the shot on the top of the post or anything! Just for the mission specific VL showcase shots figured you could use that instead of having to use a disclaimer - not to disclaim the disclaimer any further but I am quite certain Moving Day does use volumetric lighting effects for fireplaces and such - though correct me if I am wrong @Jedi_Wannabe

I did put an Iris VL example up on the discord if it is helpful, but feel free to use whatever you think is best for demonstrating the feature!

Small detail - but the screenshot from Iris in the VL section does not showcase an actual VL light, but one which is faked via a particle effect