Jayel

I want fast save/loads for action games. If it takes 20 seconds to quickload a game, then it's not quickload. Look at American McGee's Alice for a well implemented quickload system. It takes fraction of a second to load a game if you're already on that level.

well yeah it really depends on what kind of games you're mkaing. Me, I only try to create RPG games. When you have a clear vision of the game youre making with tried and true gameplay (eg ad&d rulesets), then it'd advantageous to plan everything out before you go into actual production, but on the other hand you're trying something unique and new, you'd damn better create a prototype and make sure what you're creating is FUN before you spend a lot of time on architectural plans. SiN: I didn't stop coding games, really. I'm too busy with school to focus on any game programming at the moment. I did a bunch back in highschool though. As a matter of fact, " only programmed two games in my life" is not an accurate statement, because I've programmed dozens if you count all the miserable attempts and pathetic failures.

Oh yeah... you're right. I only programmed two games in my life and it shows.

While I beliefve that a game should be thoroughly designed on paper before any coding is done, I can see how you could develop a 3D engine and build a game around it later and get away with it... A lot of the framework for a 3D engine can be reused and modified to suit your game's needs. for example resource handling, rendering pipeline, script interpreter etc should be more or less independent of what type of game you're making.

I doubt most games these days have such elaborate design documents relating to story and characters. I can imagine Doom3 design document being 200 pages of technobabble and 3 sentences about the plot.

Doom deathmatches were so much fun. Quakeworld did it better, but I have fonder memories of Doom.

Dogman's right. If you know Direct3D, you pretty much know OpenGL (they're very similar apart from syntax), and if you know OpenGL, you pretty much know the APIs Gamecube and PS2 provide. frankly I don't really much care if it becomes multi-platform, seeing as how I already own xbox!! although it'dbe nice to have a pc version in case my xbox dies on me

STarting september, I'll be a device driver programmer at ATI. Be nice to me, or I shall crash all your computers! muwahaha

Thanks you guys Well, that's not my department I'll mostly be doing monitor signal input/output stuff. (I won't know the exact details until I start working) But I'll certainly look into it if it comes across. I suspect the job won't be that much fun. Mostly likely bug fixing already existing drivers. Still, it's ATI, so I should shut up.

Oh yeah, I loved GK3 demo as well. The vibe it gave off was positively creepy. You should definitely finish the game. Survey shows that 82.6432% of GK fans find the ending awesome.

damn internet connection... got disconnected before message submited... what did I write? Oh yes, I play as many demos as possible, but not for the games I'm going to buy.

100mb!!! hot damn. who needs gmail.

HOW???? for the love of all that is good and law-abiding, please tell me!!! I can't study!!!

Thank you for all your help guys. I turned off my computer and studied very hard for full 2hours and did pretty well on the exam. I love happy endings. especially when it's me who ends up happy.

I'm an utter and complete failure for this particular course. In fact, I'm getting the score of (no kidding) 0%. So I'd say I don't even need an anti-pep-rally - considering that I already know that I'm a failure. I don't understand anything. I have "WTF" written on the bottom of every page of my course notes. arrrgh stupid mathematics. Had I spent 20 minutes every day studying for this course, I wouldn't be in this mess. There was a Cure to Procrastination Seminar in my school, but I was too lazy and didn't bother to go. And the midterm exam is in less than 10 hours. And I need sleep. damnit all to hell.

This is, like, the best use of physics in a game ever! I'd gladly pay for a game like this! Oh wait, I wouldn't. But still damn good, I must say.

Jebus, PSP is HUGE!!! It would choke and strangle me if I tried to wear it on my neck. I'm guessing that by the time DS and PSP come out, GBA SP's price will drop further. Then I'll buy taht instead.

Mine would be to give npcs some scheduled daily tasks. Like in some Ultima games or Gothic games. Make them actually interact with the world, instead of standing around like idiots as in Deus Ex 2

Once I accidentally stepped on a live mouse and killed it. It felt squish and slippery and weird. okay so it's not really a funny story.

XENUs??? Gees I didn't know Scientology had its own game. anything it takes to corrupt the minds of the young, eh? edit: wtf? did i say "corrupt the minds of the young"?

well, yeah, it does take more effort. In ray tracing it's pretty straightfoward. In scanline rendering you need to treat it as a "special case" Well actually I don't know who Fresnel is. It's generally used to describe what I described, but damned if I know its origin. Subsurface scatter is related, but not the same. Subsurface scatter is more associated with how the luminance of the overall object is affected due to internal light scatter (for translucent objects like human skin or milk). and fresnel is more commonly associated with reflection. It's funny we have all these different theories with different names that describe behaviour of the same entity (light rays).

Jones in the fast lane! ah that brings back a lot of memories. Classic games that haven't been mentioned yet: Star Control 2 X-Com Test Drive 3 Wing Commander series X-Wing series (including Tie Fighter) and... er.... ANOTHER WORLD!!!11 yes that will do nicely.

But what about NOLF? it's sequel wasn't as good, but the original was such a masterpiece and won several game of the year awards! It's my all time favourite FPS!!! I have half a mind to play through it again, for nostalgia's sake.

There are too many games these days with titles like that. Good and Evil. Beyond Good and Evil. Dark and Light. Black and White. Etc.

*Sigh* It seems clear to me that you have no real 3d programming experience. You probably picked up all you know about 3d from modelling/animation packages like Blender or 3D studio. Not that there's anything wrong with it. I hope you don't take my reply as a spiteful comeback - the purpose of this post is to inform, not argue. well here we go Extra pass does not cut your FPS in half. It could, if you're not careful, but it typically doesn't. There are ways to limit what you're rendering for the reflection pass. Plus, CPU has nothing to do with it, since it's handled by the GPU. Allaround, it's a much better alternative than raytracing. You think raytracing is better than scanline because you are probably not aware of what scanline renderers are capable of. Take Pixar's animated movies for example. They're 99% scanline rendered, and they only used raytracing for a very select scenes that needed accurate refraction and reflection. Raytracing has its uses, but I would certainly not say that it's better than a scanline renderer. No, specular mapping, combined with normal mapping, AND realistically distorted reflection, etc is all possible in real time scanline renderers, and it's no more difficult than adding these features to a raytracer (although the raytracer woudln't run in realtime). It's been possible since the days of pixel shaders. Heck, you can even add fake refraction underneath. look at Half-Life 2's water and stained glass effect. The only reason you don't see it a lot in games is because most game developers are lazy idiots. Or too concerned about performance. well, no I don't think you know what it is. Your original post implies that any mixture of surface colour and reflected image is fresnel. It's not. Fresnel is not a function, but rather an idea, a concept that the mixture of reflection and colour is NOT uniform across objects that have multiple layers (to use the car example again, its surface would consist of 3 layres: metal, paint, and wax coating). Actually even that's not a 100% accurate description... the fact the word "reflection" is included in my description is merely a side effect. It has more to do with how light rays react around the boundaries of two media with different refractive index. It does NOT slow down rendering. If it does, then that renderer has some serious flaws. It uses the same simplified mathematics whether it's realtime or not. In fact, here's a code that works: colour = reflection - abs(dot(n,i)) * (reflection + surface_colour); where n and i are normalized normal and incident vectors. See? only one line of code. If it slows down your renderer, then your renderer needs serious help. Of course if you want to control the falloff curve, then you need to introduce a new variable into the equation, but it shouldn't slow the renderr down at all. I hope you find it all informative.