bistromathics

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Posts posted by bistromathics

  1. Posted

    FF stories are all indulgent bullshit; if you're looking to the story to delineate the franchise's entries, you're doing it wrong. It's the mechanics and the systems that make each game unique and I'm looking forward to seeing what they end up doing with XIII.

  12. Posted · Edited by bistromathics

    UnrealScript is hardly a beast. It's quite easy to learn, specially when you know a bit of Java or C#. The most difficult part is to understand now, in general, the game framework of the UnrealEngine works.

    That is the part that is a beast. The unrealwiki is a good source of information, but often times things are outdated or unclear. The best way I found to learn the framework is just tracing code back through the javadoc-esque (minus the documentation) pages that are out there.

    My CSC senior design project was making a UT2K4 TC mod with a team of 5 CSC students and 2 industrial design students. It took a serious amount of work and our final game - while functional - was quite unenjoyable. As Nachimir said, the biggest problem of all was that we had no producer or manager of any sort (nor any prior experience with Unreal).

    EDIT: Wow...I was looking for a link to the javadoc-esque things I mentioned. Found http://uncodex.elmuerte.com/!

  13. Posted

    I played and appreciated what Half-Life 1 did design-wise wayyy after it was released, even though I'd owned it for years. I pretty much exclusively played source mods for a good while or so; things like 'The Specialists' and 'Natural Selection' and even 'Dragon Mod Z' (I was young :sad:) were really awesome and had totally never-before-seen mechanics. I bought HL2 expecting glorious things from the mod community, but as the engine became more complex, development time took longer and fan-support for projects became so small that it was hard to find any people playing some of the cooler looking mods.

    Dystopia is still my favorite and most-played mod for HL2. It was actually officially released on steam a couple months ago.

    And Remo, you are way off base saying how easy it is to make something in Unreal. Sure it is easy to carve out a map composed of square rooms (or maybe now you build them in instead of carving out), but actually making a level that has any value is very complicated. It is the difference between cutting out someone's head in photoshop and making stuff like this. Even with that, you have only made a level - an environment in which you can only do the things available in Unreal Tournament. Implementing your own ideas requires delving into UnrealScript, which is an entirely different beast. It is also worth mentioning, that there is very very little official documentation for this codebase made available to modders.

    Good podcast, though.

    [emphasis added for sake of visibility, not outrage]

  16. Posted

    Or kill them in half a dozen other ways.

    It's nice that there are half-a-dozen ways to complete a mission. It's just frustrating and a massive blow to suspension of disbelief when the game logic doesn't allow me to do it in half-a-dozen other ways.

    It's an inherent problem with this style of game, and Hitman: Blood Money holds a magnifying glass up to its own seams a bit too much for my liking.

  17. Posted

    In the third mission, you are told you need to assassinate an opera singer and his "friend (winky winky)" who, in their spare time, run a child molestation ring. The level setup is that the friend is in a balcony seat in an opera theater watching the singer practice. The hint you are given is that the singer is rehearsing a scene in which he is fake-shot by another performer. These guys take a break on a loop and go to their dressing rooms. There's a guard outside the singer's room.

    I hid in the extra's dressing room (the guy that does the fake-shooting) to case the scene. During a break, he comes in, leaves the prop gun, then goes to the bathroom. This seemed like an adventure-game-style clue. But without the rigid limitations of an adventure game, figuring out what to do with the clue was an irritating mess. Also, if you fuck up, its gg (unless you want to guns-blaze your way out which I did not).

    I picked up the prop gun and tried to see if i could put real bullets in it. I couldn't.

    I tried taking the prop gun and replacing it with my real gun. Obviously in reality the actor would know the guns were different, but I didn't know how robust the system was. Turns out it was not very robust at all. Taking away the prop gun put the AI in a state where they would never return to the rehearsal. Awesome.

    I thought maybe I could kill the actor, disguise myself as him, and then shoot the singer during the performance. The dressing room was a small, 1-room w/ mirror and glamor lights setup (I was hiding in the closet). I couldn't sneak up on him b/c of the mirror. Keep in mind the 'alert' in this game is ridiculous. If you alert one guy, even if you take him out immediately, other people come for you.

    I was trained earlier that making a room dark will make it so people can't see you. So my plan was to make it dark, so that the guy wouldn't immediately see me in the mirror. I switched off the overhead lights, then systematically shot out all the glamor-lights around the dressing-room mirror...only to find out that these lightbulbs - despite being destructible - were just decoration. In reality, the room was being lit by an invisible lighting volume that I could not switch off.

    At this point I was too irritated by trying to figure out the game's systems to continue. 6.333/10

  18. Posted

    I picked up Hitman: Blood Money based on some of the things Steve Gaynor said about it (e.g., favorite game of all time). I sometimes like where he comes from in discussions, so I believed his opinion would be worth some salt. It was worth very little, if any, salt.

    Blood Money is....well I'm not sure what the specific genre would be called - I suppose stealth - but basically a game where you are given a choose-your-own-adventure-style set of options to perform a given task. The biggest hurdle for any game like this is that it need's to remain consistent in what it will or will not allow in order to maintain the illusion. Blood Money's system is so bad at telegraphing what you can and can't do, it makes the missions incredibly frustrating.

    note: i had a long-winded example, but it was too lengthy and poorly written and since this is an internet messageboard i will just state my opinion and click 'submit a new thread'.

  22. Posted

    I'm just a bit surprised that I had never heard of this group before. Hadn't the vgrazzi followed Wright to the secluded shack filled with robots and life-sized, batman-suit-wearing Michael Jackson statues at some point in the last 8 years? What weird things, besides a Cytek-licensed TV pilot, did the Stupid Fun Club work on. God damn it, journalists - journalize!

  23. Posted

    Cool.

    Is it? Is it? As hard-nosed investigative journalists (past or present), have you guys, or anybody you know, seen anything that had come out of this 'Stupid Fun Club'? Was M.Y. Robot worth watching? This spin-off studio may be neat, but it may also lead to nothing but disappointment.