Jayel

shbazjinkens: The better way to emulate mirroring effect in a scanline renderer is to flip the camera based on the surface's normal and render the environment from the flipped camera's view, and project it from the original camera to the surface. So it does not consume extra memory, although it takes an extra pass (and possibly a few clipping operation). But it's still a lot more efficient than raytracing. In fact, with non-realtime scanline renderer, it's more memory efficient because you don't need to cache the entire scene for trace calls. and the result is indistinguishable from raytracing. An added bonus is that you can preprocess reflection map before you project it, so blurred reflection, distorted reflection, etc are all easy. (with raytracing, however, you need multisampling ala Monte Carlo, so unless you can write a really good biased ray distribution function, you end up with days of rendering time) Only thing scanline can't do is self-reflection. Wet/shiny surfaces are emulated by making them reflect more light?? what are you talking about? Are you familiar with bidirectional reflectance functions? it's used for both raytracing and scanline rendering model. In fact, under the same lighting setup, a scanline renderer should end up with the exact same image as the raytracer. All you need to calculate physically accurate specularity are: 1 surface normal 2 light direction vector 3 (and shadow map, if you want to be as accurate as possible) Not only it's easy as hell to do it in scanline, it's being done with today's games -now that pixel shaders are being more and more common. And I think you have the definition of Fresnel wrong. Fresnel refers to how much light gets absorbed into a surface and how much of it gets reflected based on SURFACE NORML. So for example, your car seem to reflect more light when viewed from its surface's grazing angle, but not so when you're directly looking at it. And no, fresnel effect does not consume a lot of cpu usage. I've seen it done in real time many times. Head to ATI or Nvidia's developers corner and take a look at some demos. As for refraction, well, like you said there's no way to do it in scanline. But there are many good ways to fake it.

Apart from a few lucasarts adventure games, I never played through a game more than once. Never. I heard Blade Runner has 715 endings, but I only saw one. Not that I wouldn't like to see all the endings and poke every nook and crany to see all that a game has to offer... I just can't find the time. I assume it's the case with a lot of gamers. I don't mind "different experience from gamer to gamer" thing games like Deus Ex have going on, but it seems like waste of money for me to pay 50 bucks for a game that I won't even see 1/10th the content. Hmmm....

2010 (the movie) has its moments. Feels like a cheap cash-in though. and it tries to explain itself too much. and some of the explanation is ridiculous and belittles 2001. I agree. Too much missing content! And the fact that music has to stop for spoken dialogues...

And Duke Nukem Forever is gonna kick FEAR's ass!!! DNF > FEAR > HL2 > DOOM3

maybe the reason why i hate cel shading so much is because I never liked line art. I like everything to be defined in terms of light and shadow. when lines form contours of objects, I get insulted for some reason. an attitude i need to change.

I've only seen its screenshots and haven't seen it in play. I love the scenery. None of the game seems cel shaded (just cartoony textures) except the characters. and I don't like how the characters are drawn. It would've been much better if they used the same style rendering for the characters as the backdrop. In my opinion, of course.

I absolutely hate cel shading. Biggest gain you get from 3D is that youget illusion of depth, but cel shading sortof nullifies it. what's the point? I can't think of one instance where a game's visual benefited from cel shading. maybe except Viewtiful Joe. (but only because it suited its comicbook style narrative) I think the third Dragon's Lair game had nice cel shading for the characters - many people even seem to think that they're pre-rendered, but they didn't fit well into normally rendered backgrounds.

Oh man, half-life 2 is nothing compared to this! I like everything about this game

God, I need a life

They need to hire animators with proper classical animation training...

It's from Monolith, so there's no way in hell this game could possibly be bad. Nice graphics too. I'm much more eager to play this game than, say, Half-life 2 or Doom 3.

Kudos to them. Although I don't know what they were trying to prove. To my knowledge realtime raytracing was always possible (in fact I had several demos a few years ago) but there's very little incentive to use it because you can't take advantage of the 3d accelerator and you can achieve pretty much any effect with regular scanline rendering.

There were no smooth scrolling arcade games back in 1990?? Man, a lot has changed in the last 14 years.

I'm (or was) playing THIEF: the Dark Project. I'm at 3rd mission - the tomb raid one I liked the first two missions very much, but the increasing zombie-to-human ratio is disturbing. What gives????? I thought this was supposed to be First-Person-Sneaker. It's more like First-Person-Kill-Zombies-With-HolyWater-Arrows-And-Run-Like-Hell-When-You're-All-Out.

Anachronox can be found pretty cheap these days. I saw it on sale for 10 dollars, still in its original box. Of course I paid 6 times that, but it was worth every cent. I think I saw Giants: Citizen Kabuto in a jewel case. X-Wing Alliance is a must if you're a fan of Star Wars or action-flight sims. So is Descent Freespace 1/2 Commandos 2. I got Fallout 1/2 in dual jewelcase, which was very cheap, but I haven't played the games yet, so I don't yet know if they're worth getting or not. (althrough from what i heard they're excellent) and oh yeah, Dark Forces 2!!! It may have outdated graphics and crappy AI, but still has the bestest level designs ever in any FPS.

I just got to play this game for about an hour or so... man it sucks. poor AI (bad guys can't aim anything, and headcrabs can't even jump). so-so graphics. very poor and unimaginative level design. piss-poor performance for its graphics (it's like a highschool student or a philosophy major did optimizations). BUT 11 + 1/2 stars for effort!!!

I hear that those who accuse others having bad forum names, are trying to cover their insecurity of having bad forum names themselves.

1. none. damn school. But the games on my "must finish" list are: 1. Baldur's Gate 2 (this may take 10 years) 2. NWN expansion, Shadows of Undrentide 3. Arcanum 4. Simpsons Hit & Run 5. 007 Everything or Nothing 6. Silent Hill 2 7. Fallout 1 & 2 8. Icewind Dale 2 9. Freedom Fighters (haven't even opened the box) 10. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance In this exact order. and that's it. once I'm done with all these I'll start buying new games.

Ooooo I like the art in this one.

So Ion Storm so far published 2 poor games (dominion and daikatana) 2 good games (invisible war and thief 3) 2 amazing games (deus ex and anachronox) nice track record

I just finished Blue shift. I was hoping to see some new creatures, or maybe one or two badass boss battles, but instead I'm greeted with annoyingly easy to kill aliens and human grunts (and 98.3923% of them being headcrabs hidden around the corners). Still enjoyed it though. I havent played a single player fps in a looong time...

Oh yeah, great level design. but compared to those in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, they're crap.

I'm playing through Blue Shift for the first time. I'm in this chapter called power struggle or something. I played through the original and Opposing force when they were released, but I never bothered with Blue shift until now. And $#%%!!! what's the matter with Gearbox?? they must've ran out of ideas or something, because those headcrabs are around EVERY DAMN CORNER!!! and I hate cheap "BOO!" scares.

As far as I can tell, Canada has no tradition

Psychonauts has the best art direction in a video game ever. I mean ever.