Thrik

Have you tried clicking 'Unfollow this topic' in the top right of the thread? Just noticed that myself today.

I noticed the other day that when I wrote something like this: Check this out (it's great): It comes out like this: Because the smilie code is: ):

Yeah I'm unimpressed by the direction patches are taking the game. I haven't actually played it since the Brute patch because I've been too busy, but apparently the latest one added like 27 new weapons (albeit variations) which just seems like absolute craziness to me — Tribes was always a deep and complex game, but never this much. It's in danger of becoming downright inaccessible, which is a shame as the initial final release was really good (I must have put 100+ hours into it). That said, maybe these new weapon variations work really well. As I say, I haven't tried them. It's not like Tribes 2 wasn't messed around with significantly after release too, so it could be fine. I'll find time to play it again soon.

Not going to get into this too much because I'm far from an expert, but when I was researching cameras I wanted around the end of last year I settled upon the Sony DSC-HX9V because it had the picture-taking quality I was looking for (supposedly excellent image stabilisation) along with really good video capabilities (1080p @ 50FPS, not many others did that at the time), for a surprisingly good price. The problem I saw with many of the higher-end cameras is they presume a lot more from you as a photographer, kind of like jumping straight into full-blown Photoshop when all you really need is a bit of Elements. This camera on the other hand had a more user-friendly approach and just generally seemed great for someone who's never owned a properly good camera before. I was also pretty blown away by some of the videos people put on Vimeo while testing it (taking its affordability into serious consideration) : A Day at the Beach The Harbour The market's probably changed a bit by now though (although that only likely means an already excellent camera is even cheaper), and I never ended up buying it because I conveniently got made redundant literally weeks after selecting it and getting ready to buy it. Edit: Looks like the DSC-HX20V is its main 2012 replacement, upping the zoom from 16X to 20X (pretty much ridiculous for such a compact cam, ignore the top pic though as that's digital zoom). There's a DSC-HX10V too, but that's actually not quite as good as the 9 based on a quick scan of a review as it loses the 1080p and uses 1080i instead.

Splendid, I see summer has truly kicked off in the UK so I thought I'd update with my latest view:

It's certainly a lot more complicated than it used to be, but it's dealt with by people only working on relatively small parts of a game rather than building an entire level by themselves like they did in the 90s. You'd be amazed by what budding artists and designers can come up with by themselves though, even if it does take them a huge amount of time — spending endless evenings figuring these things out is just what you do when you're passionate about something. That said, the core way of producing things isn't that different. Artists mostly go about things in the same way they always did (albeit with more user-friendly tools speeding many things up and allowing for their vision to be more accurately realised), and programmers have always had it pretty hard as they've forever trying to push hardware to its limits while balancing highly-sophisticated systems. I don't think there's anything to worry about, more people are getting into game development than ever from what I can see.

Yeah, don't get me wrong MegaTextures is wonderful but there's no excuse for the UE4 demo looking quite as ropey as it does. It is after all just a tech demo though, so I'm sure we'll see some absolutely splendid stuff coming from actual games. As for CryEngine, one of their guys said it's limited to one bounce right now for performance reasons but I see no reason that couldn't be ramped up significantly for the next generation — plus as you say, Crytek are unlikely to have been twiddling their thumbs since the last demos. Yay, graphical advancement is getting exciting again. Longer shelf lives on consoles and console-orientated development has slowed things down so much.

I don't think MegaTextures is critical for having smoothly blending surfaces and stuff like that, the only real visible difference it makes from a player perspective is the lack of repetition when it comes to textures. The actual blending is more down to the artists and what the engine's texturing facilities are like in general — for example in CryEngine it's always been possible to paint textures and smooth things together beautifully. In fact CryEngine can already do global illumination and live changes to the code too (We all remember the same code running simultaneously on 360 and PS3, right?). I'm really looking forward to seeing how Crytek up the game with their next major release.

What a load of crap. MS should be ashamed of itself for letting this kind of thing happen.

The existence of this film makes me smile. [media=]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHDQHVkYq4g[/media] I hope we see the iconic 90s game characters given a decent amount of screentime rather than passing cameos, but whatever — it's Robotnik (Eggman), a bunch of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat characters, Bowser, zombies, the Pac Man ghosts, parodies of modern warfare heroes and more in the cinema! Countless parts of my childhood are giggling with glee.

Wow, what an excellent interpretation. Great to know it'll never exist!

I think anything remotely related to games or gaming belongs in the other forum, which a game engine or any kind of game middleware definitely falls under IMO. But that's me, who for years ignored Idle Banter and directly bookmarked the gaming forum so who knows how many threads I've missed.

For what it's worth I really enjoyed Up, but I will say it's not the most straightforward of films. I'm not even sure why I liked it as it's really hard to think of single things I appreciated, but as an overall tale it hooked me with its killer intro and kept its hold on my until the very end. It was overall kind of depressing as I don't think things could have gone much worse, right down to the couple's idol turning out to be a psychopath after the awesomeness of finding him. I dunno, I really liked it. But back to the topic at hand, the info about the film suggests the licensed characters won't just be appearing in cameo form and will be reasonably involved in the story, so hopefully that will be the case. I'm not entirely hot about such great characters only being used for a single scene or so, so I'm hoping they won't sell us short like that.

It's actually not a Pixar film (although these days just about every CGI film looks like a Pixar film), but part of Disney's 'core' film series. After a dismal 2000s for Disney I was actually really pleasantly surprised by The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, as they hit that perfectly bittersweet note that all the classics did and the visuals in Tangled were particularly good due to the way they blended CGI and traditional art principles. If it weren't for those I'd have little faith in this being worthwhile.

Look at this guy. Look at him.

There's a default in your profile somewhere I believe. Edit: http://www.idlethumb...a=notifications

Hahaha. Splendid.

You can change your content stuff by clicking your name up top and going to 'Content I Follow' — there's an edit button on the right that lets you mass edit them. Or you can just click here to go there right now: http://www.idlethumb...rch&do=followed

?

The long Watch Dogs video looks incredible, definitely going to be one of the next big IPs I think. The Last of Us also looks superb, I love the depth and absolute brutality to each encounter — as well as the hints at you not necessarily being a 'good guy' like in most games.

Notch: too rich.

Seems fine to me. I would suggest raising the thumbnail size in your options though, ideally small and medium-size images should be appearing at full size. One quirk I noticed is the advanced Flash uploader isn't enabled unless you toggle it. Not sure if this is a IP.Board quirk or a configuration issue.

That looks even less comfortable than the dining chair I'm using. I'd like to invest in a nice new computer chair, but as you can see from my earlier photo I don't have that much room — so I'd like comfort combined with compactness. Any particularly good chairs for this kind of thing or shall I just do my usual trawl through Staples?

Splendid! I would love to live next to water — the sound of it totally soothes me. Here's mine, not the greatest of city views but because my entire wall is pretty much a gigantic window it still looks really nice at night when everything's lit up.

I would just like to say that I almost dropped my phone out my eighth-storey window a moment ago taking a photo for this thread. Pics later!