Jake

I actually pointed at his chair which was squeaking a lot due to him shuffling around while recording, and he misinterpreted it as me trying to touch his arm, which caused massive insanity and failure for a minute. I think it's at the end of episode 3 or 4?

There's definitely a balance between letting someone talk, and not missing the chance to bring up something new which would otherwise pass by forever (or just taking the chance to shit on someone), and I think we'll probably get better and better at this as time goes by. For instance, this week, I actually let Nick actually talk instead of ask him a bunch of confusing questions and accidentally try to touch him, or whatever it was I did in the past.

Day of Defeat: Source had some impressive 3D skyboxes... they weren't trying to convey the same large scale scope as that one, but as toblix suggested, it's probably some very cunning texturing and normal mapping. That's a great thing about 3D which isn't always easy to think about -- scale is more or less irrelevant. You could be showing an action figure's face close up, or you could be showing Mount Rushmore, but all that's really relevant when you get down to it is how many polygons you're drawing on screen and how much texture data is streaming through memory.

Wow that LBP level... can't wait to check it out tomorrow.

It's usually referred to as "motion graphics," actually. When I hear "kinetic typography," the first thing that comes to mind is that video someone did which consisted solely of a reworking the "Ezekiel 9:17" speech from Pulp Fiction into a bunch of sliding animated type, but I guess the phrase could be applied more generally if you wanted. One of the guys who worked on the Stranger than Fiction title sequences is now at Telltale, though he's doing in-game choreography, not motion graphics, but hey.

They're clearly using the same Source engine "cinematic post processing effects" that Valve use in all of their trailers. The exposure control, camera fluidity, and extra layer of motion blur are all things that Source, to my knowledge, doesn't do in real-time right now, but are available for non-realtime playback (eg for video projects). You can see these effects all over the place in the TF2 trailers and the L4D opening cutscene, but they're not in game to the same degree.

If you ever see Steve in person, I'm told he'll respond to "Hey, 'Scoops!" yelled in his direction.

It's really a shame that there isn't some sort of internal capture / replay feature in LittleBigPlanet, ala EA's amazing site for Skate, or the Halo 3 replay stuff.

I'm having a Half Life fanboy explosion watching that trailer. Some parts of it still look very rough, but the presentation and (what's show of) the clean-up and delivery of HL1's biggest moments look spot-on. Pretty sweet.

Cleaner copy of Panic Room's title sequence: http://www.artofthetitle.com/2008/03/26/panic-room-2002/ As someone pointed out in the comments there (and as you probably were doing just by association), the Panic Room opening titles are sort of thematically similar to the classic North by Northwest ones. -- Since we're talking about this stuff a lot, here's a quick opening sequence I did for Strong Bad episode 4, during an all nighter one Sunday night a couple months back. It pales in comparison to anything else being discussed in this thread, but was fun to make. --- Now let's explode and rape that with an actual amazing thing -- the closing credits to Iron Man. (Be sure to watch the HD version.) There's what the Tron sequel won't look like, but should -- an old Vectrex system colliding with a self aware out of control AutoCAD, accidentally shot on film and equipment stolen from a 70s porno studio and then left under a couch for 20 years.

(For the record I closed this thread, due to it going wholly retarded. It was in part my doing by exacerbating the situation, but the thread had already outlived its welcome.)

If you love title sequences and professional motion graphics work (especially if you love its history and watching some amazing past work, as much as the new stuff), you need to check out the blog the Art of the Title Sequence. They have very crisp full opening and closing title sequences from a ton of great films (and occasionally television and other media), as well as occasional analysis and sometimes Q&As with the designers responsible. It's one of my favorite blogs. I realize I'm drifting waaay away from "kinetic graphics in games," here, but this excellent throwback to 80s title graphics, in music video form, is fairly amazing. Anyway... games!

"The in crowd"? Blah. I hope he didn't leave, because I don't think anything said was meant personally. The Thumb forums can be tough. Folks like to spew out pretty extreme posts so full of vitriol, hyperbole, and expletives that on most boards they would be considered rhetorical, flame bait, or both. Of course, as we all know, that's just many people's horrible, attention-seeking, emotionally stunted way of having an "intellectual debate" around here. A fine line, but it's present nontheless. But on the other hand, if I said I was leaving but had second thoughts, came back and saw that high-school-cheerleader-clique / high-school-art-club-pretentious bullshit about "beginning to become part of the in-crowd," I would probably wish that the whole forum community would die in a gas leak... or at least, it would be the exact opposite of a compelling reason to come back to this place.

http://powazek.com/posts/1451 No offense man, but what the fuck? Educate yourself please, before making in(s)ane comparisons between Guitar Hero and Fahrenheit. Even if there are some similarities in the mechanics of pressing a colored button when that color lights up on screen, the play experiences are universes apart.

Whenever www.tigsource.com comes back up, an excellent place to start would be their "50 Great Indie Games" article. While it may not be everyone's exact definition (because that's what lists like that are supposed to be???), it is a generally great list of games which are worth checking out.

Its entirely the responsibility of 3rd party developers and publishers to support that stuff, as it should be. Also, a lot of that inline patching stuff is surely related to Valve developing Steam, Steamworks, and the Source Engine, all of which are built very well to work harmoniously in tandem. I wouldn't expect third party developers to build that sort of streaming patch support into their games, but if you as a developer update your game and the folks from Steam hear about it, they do contact you to try and get ahold of it. There's nothing forcing the developer/publisher's hand there in any way, though, so I can hardly see why you'd blame Steam. If they started putting stringent requirements on how Steam games were patched and maintained, 3rd party developers would either force them to go back on their word, or walk. One reason PC development remains viable is that it isn't plastered in weeks or months of extra development time to make sure your game works as part of a unified "experience," as has always been the case on consoles and is increasing in complexity as time goes by (with only some systems also scaling up their spuport and API infrastructure along with their requirements). I don't know if that's a good or bad thing -- there is a TON to be said in favor of the cleanliness of the 360 and XBLA user experiences, which are pretty much an amazing anomaly in the world of games -- but unless the enforcer of that standard is really willing to front the effort and code to create that sort of situation to a huge degree (as in, to a degree that it actually makes it easier and quicker on your project to use that sort of system than to not use it), I don't think PC developers would ever get on board.

I think you're trying too hard with this whole thing, is all. There's far too few double-embossed gold gradients and water droplets for it to be NASCAR, too. So, points lost there.

Why does this link to ThunderPeel's profile? Failure.

Unlock full magic for 1200 Microsoft Points.

I imagine it would be preferable to get your entry in by the weekend after this coming one, but Chris seems to have a neverending supply of promotional crap to give away, so you never know.

It can't hurt can it? jakeoftomorrow

90%!! I can see being annoyed at the non-games content (TV, themes, etc), and I can see you being ideologically opposed to DLC, but I would hardly call that 90% of the marketplace, with the huge amount of XBLA and Originals titles, and the sure-to-grow-quickly XNA section. Maybe 50% of it is a scam . I forgot about the "Spotlight" and "Events" screens in the new menu system, which I do wish I could turn off. I was happy to see the "hide this!" option on the welcome page, and then disappointed that I couldn't turn off other screens I had no interest in. Hah. Like pressing the "horn" button in GTA 1 and 2, when you weren't in a car.

As a relatively new 360 owner who never really got used to the old (really overcrowded and haphazard feeling, in my opinion) blade system, I'm loving the new Xbox UI. I like that all of the downloadable and streaming content has finally been spread out and given room to breathe, instead of trying to wedge it all into the "marketplace" blade. "Platform exclusives" may be dead in the traditional sense with this console generation, but good online content and a great online experience are a true platform exclusive of the 360. PSN is slowly catching up, but in my opinion the 360 is still unmatched from both a user experience and a development standpoint. You can tell that with the original 360 UI, and even with the modifications they made over time to try and make the marketplace work, the original blade interface was clearly designed before anyone could anticipate how successful XBLA, Xbox Originals, downloadable video, and DLC would be. By the end, that one blade felt so hilariously lopsided in its importance relative to the other blades, it was kind of ridiculous. Good to see them spreading that love around and putting more online content front and center where people can see it, without having to dig two tiers into the marketplace blade. Also it was great to see how not-hidden the XNA content was. I should probably play some of it! I'm loving having Netflix streaming built in as well. If they somehow go insane and add support for hulu.com (unlikely given how MS seems to enjoy selling me single overpriced TV episodes instead of running them for free, ad supported) I could probably pitch half of the stuff connected to my TV and not miss it. The avatars are nothing special, and their tendency to try and only allow you to "look good" (as in, stylishly dressed, all facial features well proportioned and positioned, etc) instead of "look real" (in the style of Miis, which let you mush your facial features around in so many potentially real and idealistically unappealing ways) is disappointing to me... But, in the grand scheme of everything else going on in the NXE stuff -- the hugely improved focus in online content, a spotlight for indie and community generated content with XNA and better XBLA presentation, netflix streaming, loading games onto the hard disk, overall more expansion-friendly UI which will hopefully alleviate shit like the horribly cramped marketplace blade in the future -- the relative lameness of avatars isn't that big a deal. It's the most superficial and most easily ignored facet of the whole thing. My one complaint about the whole thing, I think, is the new "half a screen-width per friend" friends list ... pretty weak. I wouldn't surprise me if they offered an alternative view mode in the near future, though, given that the friends presentation is at the top of so many peoples' list of issues with the new UI. Slashdot called, it wants your comment back. Sheesh. You're actually deleting anyone on your friends list who uses an avatar? Glad I'm not your friend! Were you making the little "nuh uh uh, don't go there" triple snap of your fingers while deleting each of them, for offending you with their avatar?

Scott C also maintains a blog and updates regularly http://scott-c.blogspot.com/

Go for it!