Loiosh

Phaedrus' Street Crew
  • Content count

    16
  • Joined

  • Last visited

About Loiosh

  • Rank
    The Holiest Priest
  • Birthday 11/01/1979

Contact Methods

  • AIM
    LoioshDwaggie

Converted

  • Biography
    "He has a way with words that even a blind man could experience a rainbow in all its joyus glory."
  • Location
    Dallas, Texas
  • Interests
    World of WarCraft, video games, Star Craft
  • Occupation
    IT
  • Favorite Games
    Ico, WoW
  1. http://www.cdaction.pl/news-7673/john-carmack-opowiada-o-rage---pol-godziny-goracego-materialu-prosto-ze-studia-id-software.html Carmack gave one of his excellent presentation / rambling sessions for CD-Action. It's a good primer on the Rage engine and includes some nice highlights. Pt 1: Discussion of Megatexturing and the reasons behind it. Cost of stamping tools. Pt 2: Pros and Cons of baked-in lighting for MT. Discussion of iD Tech 5 other features (slightly). iD Tech ramp-up time for designers and artists. PS3 vs Xbox technical concerns. iD Tech 6 direction. Pt 3: Further iD Tech 6 direction discussion... and my favorite part. This is relevant to Idle fans as ~ 2 mins in he discusses the mod community and specifically hits on a point the Thumbs made a few weeks ago. Discussion of the next generation of consoles, Sony intentions and downloadable content. Future of graphic technology. Engine nerds, rejoice. What I love most about Carmack is, unlike a lot of other engine designers, he always sounds so excited and hopeful for the future. He makes me feel like the future is just going to be even more awesome.
  2. Collective you, not personal you
  3. From Wikipedia: "X-Wing's main advance is that it features a fully 3-D engine for the flight combat simulation instead of the bitmaps and sprites of the earlier titles."
  4. Hehe. TF2 was in the pipe for a long, long time. I remember when they first demo'd the IK (inverse-kinematics) animation system with the guy tossing a grenade into a tank and then getting blown off his feet. It makes me sad to think that the first game to end up with a good IK solution took nearly a decade to launch (GTA4 using the Euphoria middleware). As for this week's show: You were wrong about XvT being the first '3d engine' of the Star Wars sims. X-Wing was fully 3d using actual polygonal models. In Tie Fighter they introduced Gouraud shading and for X-Wing: Alliance they added TnL. It was Wing Commander that used sprite-based ships up until WC 3 I believe.
  5. Forza Motorsport 3

    It's about time the Forza team focused on the graphics. Say what you will about GT, it looks absolutely stunning. I'm glad to see them working on that since they have the fundamentals down for the physics systems.
  6. Oh, I forgot to add LoLs about the HoN community. Yikes. Those people are -so- bad I'm not purchasing the game when it launches. I haven't played the beta in a few days because people won't give you the chance to learn or help at all. Almost -always- in betas I have found the community to be helpful and polite. Grand Prix Legends, WoW, Champions Online, Matrix: O, SW: G all of them have had outstanding beta communities. This is the first time I've ever decided not to buy a game based purely upon its community.
  7. Best game credit roll/sequence

    Far too true. HL1 while having the greatest intro, had one of the worst endings. It wasn't so much Xen and the complete change in context (Thief 1 had the same issue.. Zombies? WTF), but you could -feel- the developer exhaustion in latter levels. The scripted events were gone and that fantastic pacing was gone. I remember the exterior portion being highly disappointing as it just didn't feel organized or intense. I noticed they fixed travel pacing in the HL2 expansions with any long travel requiring combat (ship vs Helicopter, for example) to keep you involved and moving forward.
  8. Best game credit roll/sequence

    I cannot make new threads yet, so I'll leave this here. In addition to best endings I'd like to see what are everyone's favorite starts/intros for a game? Offtopic: Best Installer: C&C 1 Best First 15 Minutes: Half-Life 1 This was such a revolutionary intro for an action game. You started on a normal day for your protagonist doing normal things. When the action started your lab went from a comfortable, fun environment to one of the most horrifying and tense experiences. Every corner became an event and not only did you have no idea what to expect, but the enemies had interesting and varied senses. How many people remember that the bullsquids could only sense sound? (tossing objects could distract them and standing still made you 'invisible'). It was right up until the drop down into the sewer pipe that the introduction magic ended for me and it became a normal (if excellent) shooter. The events were so tight, well scripted and shocking it remains my favorite introduction to this day.
  9. It's interesting that at the time Sierra got so much flack for that that they made a specific point of preventing it in their future King's Quest (VII) title. They specifically designed it so that it would not let you progress if you would get locked into a dead end. It also was one of the first to feature a context-sensitive pointer and eliminate the verb interface which made it one important step on the way to the death of the adventure game genre.
  10. Forza Motorsport 3

    @jneeriem: AI Driving in GT games: That's a problem with the GT AI. The drivers stick to a racing line like glue. You cannot knock them off course easily and they won't give any space for you like real drivers will. It's frustrating. I hear they are working on the AI concrete for GT5. Test Drive: Totally true. That was one of the best games to ever come out and was so much fun. @eclipt1c: AI Cheating in Forza: The AI actually does not cheat in Forza 2. It, in fact, responds exactly to the same physics model that you face. It most likely is out breaking you and following drafts and racing lines better. Interesting note: In Forza they wanted to give the AI a progressive learning ability, but they discovered that not only does the AI pick up some interesting quirks, it learned to play dirty. Taken from before the AI was detuned:http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/766/766507p1.html "Dan Greenawalt: This is by no means normal racing game AI. Drivatar technology is a neural network learning system developed by Microsoft's advanced AI research team in Cambridge, England. Occasionally the Drivatars did things we never expected. At times it felt less like tuning game AI and more like teaching a child. Sometimes they learned good habits and sometimes they learned bad habits. We are addressing their aggression levels. However, there will always be an aspect of character to the Drivatars -- it's built into the system. Therefore, we're adding a system to better communicate Drivatar character to the player by giving them names (even including real-world race car drivers) and different driving tendencies and skill levels. We've also improved the AI's passing behavior. One of the amazing things about our Drivatar technology is that it is a learning AI system. Another notable fact is that our AI does not cheat -- it drives the same cars using same complex physics and tire simulation the player does. " I cannot find the article where they covered the detuning the AI received. But it had to be cut down because it was making unexpected and unfun changes to the gameplay.
  11. Forza Motorsport 3

    iRacing is the child of Papyrus Design Group (a dead racing simulator company that is heavily respected in the computer world). It is one of the more accurate racing sims out there, though Forza 2, 3 and rFactor are better in pure terms of accuracy. Forza and rFactor model clutching, transmissions and weather all of which iRacing does not have at this time. The accuracy of iRacing's tire/suspension system is up in the air at the moment as they are not discussing their custom tire simulation system except to say they developed it on the own and had complete access to all racing spec tires.
  12. Forza Motorsport 3

    Just wanted to come in and correct this. Both games are modeled quite well. With the latest version of GT both Forza 2 (and 3) and GT include independent 4-wheel modeling and suspension. Both handle vertical G-loads; though, as far as I'm aware only Forza handles horizontal g-load of tires and suspension. Also, Forza is the only one where the AI battles with the same model as the player model. GT (up to 4, I don't know about 5) used a simplified model for the AI vehicle physics. For the OP: Forza is a high-fidelity racing simulator. It is nothing like NFS, Project Gotham, Midtown or Burnout. If you enjoy realism Forza is a good console offering.
  13. (IGN.com)

    "Forget what you know about Splinter Cell!" - IGN.com Sadly, that one is real.
  14. A lot of creative people have discovered that backhanded trickery when the audience isn't expecting it normally backfires. Valve had to change Alex's voice and expression so it wouldn't look like she was teasing you, Ocean's 12 was unpopular because of its handling of the plot and the entire 'twist' part of M. Night's stories are now heavily mocked. Designers have to be incredibly careful when they put that stuff in to prevent backlash.
  15. Rise of Flight - WW1 Flight sim

    I hope it's good. With the death of ACES we're facing a sad time in the Flight Simulation world. A lot of people are highly disappointed right now.