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oDDity

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Everything posted by oDDity

  1. Story does become a lot more important in FMs though. By the time you've played the OMs several times and a lot of FMs, the gameworld and gameplay has become so repetitive and boring that all you're left with to spice it up is the individual story/plot of the FM.
  2. I wonder if we'll get videos admitting how and why they fucked up the Thief franchise as well. He's basically telling it how it is there as regards DX2 "If you're taking 20 million of someone's money then you owe to them to sell out and cater to the generic gamer population, if you do anything high brow or innovative, they simply won't understand it" We all know that already of course, but it nice to hear them admitting it.
  3. We did have the mirror-on-stick idea at one point for checking round corners. Did that ever get developed?
  4. Yeah, if I look at my favourite games, such as Baldur's Gate, Gothic and Thief, they all have one thing in common, which is a well constructed evocative gameworld which seems alive and real. It's a place I wanted to be. The plots in all of those games were average unrealistic nonsense, but that's fine, because the immediate plot in any game is just a mechanism for instigating gameplay. Examples of badly constructed, dead, unimmersive gameworlds are Morrowind/Oblivion, and any shooter ever made.
  5. Creating a great world and atmosphere certainly does not depend on good graphics. Thief is the perfect example of that. A technically poor graphics engine even for that time, but what they did with that technology was great. TDS graphics were technically far superior, but the result was pathetic. I insist the story does not matter at all. You could have written any arbitrary story into the Thief 1 and 2 packages and it would have worked just as well. It's the initial setup of the gameworld that makes the difference, the backstory or backdrop if you like, not the immediate plot.
  6. The story is irrelevant. I have never found myself immersed in a game story, and as I've contended before, it's impossible. Games are simply not a good medium for intricate storytelling. What is important to some degree is the setting and how successfully it's portrayed. That's where Thief scores highly. The plots themselves were the same generic, predictable, unrealistic nonsense of the sort that all games and action movies are made of, but the gritty, atmospheric setting was very successfully portrayed from every aspect, and the gameplay was unique and innovative enough to make the whole thing feel new. That's why TDS failed. The gameworld felt like a cartoon joke, the gameplay was by then no longer new, and the plot was the same old nonsense.
  7. None of the tools should be 'free'. Ideally, they should all have some risk attached to them. You should have to think about it before blithely using them.
  8. It could just be a mechanical eye/camera the thief has attached to a transparent helium balloon though, and he can adjust the length of the string when he wants to look down on things, and it could have a little fan attached for x and z movement. That technology is all available in the Dark Mod universe, so this can all be done from within the game as another tool for the thief, rather than it being an external game mechanic.
  9. I don't know if you can just select areas of the mesh in blender where you need the most detail and just subdivide that part, but that's what you can do in the pro sculpting apps. It means you don't have to divide the whole mesh up just to put a bit of detail on the hair. In mudbox, on my system I can handle 3 million smoothly, and in zbrush which is 2.5d ratehr than 3d, I can get 20 million quite smoothly. Also in these apps is the ability to hide parts of the mesh except the bit you are working on, which also increases performance.
  10. Lol, well, I've just sculpted all 13 figures in Da Vinci's Last Supper in the last 3 weeks, none of them are more than 250,000 polys, and these all had to be lined up perfectly with the painting as well, as well as fitting in 3 animals sculpts for another project, so the better you become, the more quickly you can work, yes. The trick is understanding the structure of the head, so you don't even need reference, and don't make any mistakes. What makes novices take a long time is constantly having to adjust and correct their mistakes as they go, and tweak and tweak and do some more tweaking. A professional just nails it straight away and calls it done. You can see they are quite detailed for 200k each, so there's no way you need even that many just for that head you showed. Maybe you should try a warez copy of mudbox or zbrush, because I haven't seen any good sculpts coming out of blender.
  11. The detail on that head can't be more than a few hundred k anyway. You only need millions for a detailed full body. I can't remember how long that took, it's too long ago, but a few hours I'd imagine. I just had a male base template which I would tweaak out and then add some clothing on top. It's just a poly model so there's no real detail on it.
  12. A week to do that? No, more like 30 minutes by the look of it, though I haven't used blender sculpting tools. Maybe they're shit. To do the finer details I assume you simply divide the model to a higher resolution and make the brush size smaller, unless blender sculpting is completely different from zbrush or mudbox.
  13. It looks a bit ancient and simplistic for a Builder statue. It's more like a 3000 year old pagan/celtic statue.
  14. There are two kinds of people in game development, those who care about quality, and those who care about money. The money guys always win in the end, because they are in control, and because of the simple fact that too many people want to make a living in what is considered by some a kewl job (game development) even if that means producing cheap trash and tossing any principals they may have in the bin. Even the few people with integrity who decide to take a stand and leave don't make any difference, because they are immediately replaced with some more lackeys on their little career curves. That is why the industry is, and has been, on a huge downward spiral, and will continue in that direction until it can't get any worse and something has to be done. There may be a few good guys left out there still fighting their corner, but they can't win. Publishers want to employ yes-men in game studios, not radicals.
  15. It's more to do with the fact that I don't expect anyone to be geeky enough to fill those detail in on their profile. I certainly not, but you obviously are. I'm surprised you haven't told us what you 10 favourite songs are.
  16. What age are you anyway, I always thought you were 30-ish, so you must have been late to college.
  17. oDDity

    Thief 4

    6, yes, but just wait till he's 9 or 10. My nephews love games like GTA, Halo and MGS. I know you're going to say that they shouldn't be allowed to have those 18 rated games, but that's not the point here. The point is whether those games contain the sort of material that is appealing to children (once they reach a certian age of course, I'm not talking about babies or toddlers) and the answer is yes, because those are exactly the sort of games my nephews and their friends choose to play. They also play driving games, but only so they can go mental and smash cars up and run people over etc.
  18. I like the elements of realism, and I've advocated them in the past for TDM, but MGS is still just a shooter. I like to see those elements of realism, but in a complex, intelligent and compelling game (that will never be made)
  19. oDDity

    Thief 4

    Making a game technically difficult does not stop it from being dumb trash. It's simply inevitable, since the sort of autistics who are addicted to these games become so good at them, they have to be made more and more technically demanding. It's still just dumb pretend-to-kill-stuff rubbish though.
  20. The 8800GTS can't be that much slower than the GTX, and the Crysis demo ran smoothly for me. Then again, I have 4 processors as well, which crysis uses.
  21. IF you are going to install windows XP with the sata drive you will either need a floppy drive or you will have to integrate the sata drivers onto the XP CD. At least I think so, though maybe that's only if you want to do a RAID setup on the sata drives, but I don't think windows xp install will recognise sata drives. I recently installed XP 64bit on my second partition and had to make my own XP CD with the drivers on it.
  22. I'd say get two smaller WD 10k raptors and set up a RAID 0. You get much better read write performance. 7200 is pretty lame, and an unnecessary choke point. With two 10k's in RAID you don't quite get 20k speed, but you certainly get more than 15k, which is at least twice as fast as the disk you're going to buy.
  23. They have to be there, dynamically changing it, so it's no longer a story but a live event. That was my point. There's a big difference between a pre-planned story, and something that is dynamically changing as you interact with it. (and let's distinguish between pre-planned 'dynamic' stories which go a certa in way depending on your actions, those are not true dynamic 'anything can happen' events, they are still hardcoded)
  24. Of course, and that's why the vast majority of people for the vast majority of human evolution didn't play any games when they became adults. And any qualified anthropologist will tell you that they all did indeed die of sadness in the end. You are genuinely a little bit retarded. That's not meant as an insult, I'm just stating an apparent medical fact.
  25. 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.
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