Jake

I had confused it with their Labyrinth game, which started out as a text adventure then gets art when you leave the real world and enter the labyrinth.

Maybe in this thread. In the poll it just said "The '80s."

It was always Idle Vice. Idle Weiss would be too many steps removed. I think we thought "Idle Vice" was funny for the Miami Vice name substitution, and then doubly good because whenever anyone says it out loud someone says "wait did you just say Edelweiss?"

Idle Thumbs 173: Ridonkulous Rift I heard that social justice war has changed But I'd always heard social justice war never changes In the end it doesn't matter anyway Because this is the dawning of a brand new day Where it doesn't matter what you've heard Cause I'm the social justice wizard Things Discussed: Alien: Isolation (Oculus Rift), Invisible Inc., Donkey Kong Country Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

The thing people seem to ignore about motion capture is that you're motion capturing ACTING. So you still have to spend the time casting, rehearsing, and directing the actor that you would otherwise spend animating them. It means you can't cast for voice alone, you have to cast actors who can act (in an isolated face capture box) at a nuanced and true-to-the-character degree that's better than your animators or cinematic direction team can produce on top of a good voice performance alone. (Note: there are very few actors who can do that.) Other points: - A good voice actor can often lay down more than one line a minute, which is valuable as hell in a game with a script that is thousands of lines long even for a couple hours of gameplay. This means a team can get all the lines for the main characters recorded, trimmed, and into the games language database within days of the script being complete, which is of immense value On an episodic schedule, and very hard-to-impossible to achieve with other methods. - The previsualization phase has to be WAY longer and cannot overlap with main production, if mocap is involved, because once you mocap something, that is basically your final motion data unless you do a lot of ripping apart, reconstructing, retargeting work to fix something you don't like. - If your characters face designs have a stylized look and pull exaggerated comic book or cartoon like expressions to convey emotion simply (as they do in WD), real human face capture often ends up looking creepy and unnatural when applied to those face models, and have to be touched up or re animated by hand anyway. I think motion capture -- especially face capture -- for a cast of 15, for a bi-monthly 90-120 minute video game is just an untenable solution. Referring to those processes as automatic or as some magic bullet is assuming that just "recording a human doing something" is all that is involved, when the part that takes up all the time is actually conceiving and getting the performance right, regardless of your production pipeline. (And that has to be coupled with the reality of your budget, schedule, team size, etc.)

(I never said Curtain was a good book. I don't think it is from what I've been told -- I haven't read it -- but I enjoyed the TV adaptation.)

We'll be getting more into what people look like soon on the blog, for that reason! But yeah, if you look at the man-made objects in the tower, and even the rock shapes, everything is a bit more geometrically shaped, carved/planed out, simplified, and maybe even a little more squat, than real life. For whatever it's worth, in my experience it comes together well and fits when you're actually playing the game; hopefully showing more of everything will help present the whole experience in a way that a teaser trailer doesn't.

An "anti-[person] hate-game" sounds like hate speech, and would probably be taken down by most services regardless of it being involved in a conversation about "SJW"s. (Also a private service like itch.io deciding to not host a game is not actually censorship, but that admittedly gets a little complicated when you start getting into near monopolistic platforms with one content gatekeeper like the App Store.)

Yes, point to a game a "SJW" has censored. I mean hell, point to a game anyone has censored (besides the German or Australian governments).

Haha this is a good highlight to walk away with. Approved.

Seems like they will still support them.

Eh? Where?

Idle Thumbs 170: Esophagus Sarcophagus A weekend of non-stop sci-fi movies accidentally begets an episode filled with the first person corridors of today and yesterday, and the gross things they're made of. Plus: Chris encounters the Necrodancer and Jake plays PC games from his couch for the first time. Things Discussed: Xibalba, Doom, Toxikk, Unreal Tournament (2014), Crypt of the Necrodancer, Steam Home Streaming, Alien Quadrilogy Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

You can't say the sexism in Game of Thrones is historically accurate when it takes place on the continent of Westeros which has a huge thousand foot high wall to keep out glowing white ice people, and its people live in fear of the return of dragons (which is an actually historically motivated fear for them as their king used to rule from a throne room filled with dragon skulls). If GoT was an actual history that covered actual medieval monarchies and political underpinnings that would have more weight to me, but since it's all made up it seems a little unsound for it to take that content for granted, and entirely unsound for its audience to do so. Make what you want of the content but I don't think ducking behind "it's historical" is on the table in a story about dragons and magical assassins.

I have a pretty similar opinion to that of the author and thought that article did a good job of summarizing most of it. I think that article going up last night is why a bunch of film/non-games geek culture people (Joss Whedon, Rian Johnson, Nail Gaiman etc) posted tweets of support for Feminist Frequency this morning.

Like the social justice that plagues our times, the fart sound can never be truly silenced.

Idle Thumbs 171: The Curious Case of the Rhode Island Reader In life, and in the games we played this week, time continues to advance whether you want it to or not. Move forward, look back, or stand still, the inexorable march to the end continues unabated. So when you click on that dead body in the trunk, for God's sake seize the opportunity and do something interesting. Things Discussed: Divinity: Original Sin, Ωracle, Gods Will Be Watching, The Last Express, Three Fourths Home, The Often-Ending Story, Minecraft, Geometry Wars, Half-Life 3 Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

happy to help.......

It was made when our forum thread was created years ago https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/7067-mein-thumbcraft—idlet-dedicated-minecraft-server/

It's a sliding scale for sure. Some parts of firewatch look just like the drawing, but pretty often you have to take liberties to make it work as a 3D space that actually makes sense, and is fun to explore on top of that. The goal is always to capture the feeling of the concept art, though, as the mood it conveys is the most important part.

It was a mech game by ambrosia, the team that made EV. Oh it was "Avara." I don't remember anyone playing it, but now that I remember escape velocity I remember that game had a pretty big community!

Was Escape Velocity the game that you could make levels for by creating vector PICT files?

Streaming the recording as it happens is something we've talked about a lot. Maybe eventually!

Man it seems like continuing to lock up modern default lighting behind the pay gate would be a huge misstep, now that they're competing with Unreal and Crytek and the like on price at this point. Default Unity lighting feels a decade old now.

I would like everyone who accepts direct payment on a patronage model (patreon, Kickstarter, etc) divulge all the ways they make money off of the content that is funded, because it feels like they owe that to the people who pay them, purely from an ethical standpoint, but I don't have hopes for that to be the case. Like, I know nobody is obligated to do anything in those models, but it feels ethically sound to inform all of your sources of capital about your other sources, even if they aren't all equal, aren't all investors or whatever else. (I'm not arguing against taking investment money or advertising of any particular kind on a Kickstarted or patreon funded endeavor, just wishing that disclosure of such acts and intentions would be more common and considered standard ethical practice.)