Comments - J-Dude

I still don't understand the art design of this mod. Yeah, I know it's dead, but it bugs me so much.

It looks like the coder came up with the idea of the mod, but outsourced the art-side of the mod to someone who had never heard of Tremors before. The earlier sketches look more on-par with the films, though achieve none of the finer details and look incredibly stylized. Then further down we get sketches of two-legged creatures with sails and stuff. It LITERALLY looked like someone vaguely described a Shrieker to an artist, and the artist made something along the lines of the description.

I just never got it. Half of me wants to say it was to avoid copyright issues with Universal or Stampede Entertainment, and yet plenty of posts concerning the mod mention Chang's Market, Burt Gummer and all three incarnations of the Graboid species by name. I don't think you can pull a "Bid For Power" style turnaround on a mod to avoid copyright without changing EVERYTHING, so in the end I'm still so confused about what went on with this mod when it was alive.

Ah well.

The good news is, people hoping for Tremors content, unadulterated and accessible in the Source Engine can head over to Facepunch.com and hit up the modelling section. I've been working to turn the Tremors creatures into workable NPC's, with everything at this point finished aside from coding, weapons, gibs and Burt Gummer himself. And when all that's been finished, I'm making a "GM_Perfection", and map of Perfection Valley to be made with as much accuracy to the original film as possible, including plenty of custom models. I've already got the infamous Water Tower in-game :-)

I'm sorry, but this is destined for failure. I hate to break it, but the guys in charge of this have no idea what they're doing.

Maybe they can map, I can see okay mapping going on. But the models are terrible. Why are there so many geometry errors in the walls of the test chamber? That isn't normal, that isn't good.

Why am I seeing the results of mesh/turbo smooth in an in-game object? Because I shouldn't. That crowbar looks terrible, and the bits of the anti-mass spectrometer are similarly awful. Smoothing like that is amateurish at best, and NEVER, EVER belongs in a game-engine. No, not even Crysis. Smoothing a mesh is unnecessary for anything but a character, and even THEN, only for a CGI-movie, so the smoothing can produce a fleshy effect that is desirable.

Hard-surface objects should be modeled by hand, detail by detail. What I'm seeing in this mod is laziness and ineptitude. There's maybe one "okay" mapper here who thinks he can also model, but don't say I told you so whenever he decides to try a character. If you EVER see a character out of this mod, it's going to look awful.

Mark my words: This mod will never get off the ground. It's too ambitious and the people involved have too little talent, let alone skill.

I assure you, it is NOT my computer. If it were my computer, then other Source mods wouldn't be working either, nor most Valve games, all of which work more than perfectly. Deductive reasoning tells me if this only happens with Korsakovia, then logically Korsakovia must be the problem.

I'll forgive this if it is still as a result of the recent Source Engine issues and my computer configuration differs from the makers and thus means more problems, but that is hardly any fault of mine.

In the meantime I've watched the remainder of the game I had missed (barely five minutes) on Youtube and am compiling my own review of the game. For some reason I'd thought it was longer, or at least included more content. I could've sworn gameplay videos and reviews featured a type of enemy that was essentially a lens flare...maybe I'm thinking of some other mod...

No, you ******* fool, my machine is awesome. Wolfdale 8400 dual core processor, Windows 7, GeForce 8800GT graphics card and 8 Gigabytes of DDR2 mother-whoring RAM. This machine was hand built by me to perform massive fluid dynamics simulations for HD 3D animations which it does quite well, on top of being able to handle Crysis at highest non-hacked settings without so much as a hiccup in the frame-rate.

So, put bluntly, if MY computer is crashing, it's as a result of YOUR software.

Also, the main point I can't get past is the "finallevel" where I open a door which attempts to autosave, crashing the game every time and corrupting every save file of that level so I have to start the level from the beginning, only for the same thing to happen once I reach that stupid door.

Forgive my harshness, I tend to take it as a personal insult when people suggest my machine is the problem, as if to say I knew nothing about computers, let alone that I'd custom-built mine from carefully chosen parts.

Hey, I think somebody visited the tour of Universal Studios X]

Pretty certain I've seen the set-building in the field on the Studio grounds which looks an awful lot like this...

Aha!

Oh, I knew it, somehow I knew it. I knew I couldn't have been crazy when I wondered where all the spectacular detail and solid work ethic had gone for the illustrious Crysis JP mod. All this time I hadn't realized "The Lost World Returns" had been the super-mod I had witnessed before, not this dime-store knockoff. I knew that fakey yellow-eyed TRex on THIS mod couldn't have been the one that I'd been flabergasted to find renderable in a game.

Well then, sorry for wasting your time stating my commentary on the status of your second-fiddle Jurassic Park mod.

And so, the true Gods shall live on, while the pretenders descend into permanent production Hell like so many before them ^_^

Oh, so I'm allowed pessimism about a mod with grand ambition, a fixed release date, and all too familiar signs of decay, but I'm just not allowed to voice them?

By all means, I'm not hoping for the mod to have broken down, I really hope this meets all our fantastic expectations, but I've been involved in more than one grand plan that slowly unraveled, broke down and copped out, and things like a long-dead forum are definitely a sign.

It's always possible that the forums were simply never that popular and that the dev team have merely been operating outside of it and being really hush-hush, but this team has had the tendency of letting the public in on a lot of the work. Most of the screenshots have been based on WIP, or heavy WIP, with very little follow-up. And maybe only releasing alpha-stage content is just what they do, and they want to surprise us all when the mod releases, but it's not often that you see this happen.

I just can't shake the feeling that by giving themselves such a stringent release date rather than a broad one, or none at all, they're either going to overshoot and need to delay, or boot a release out the door to keep their promises and (hopefully) plan on releasing a patch afterward to tighten it all up the way they'd hoped. The only way I can see it all being the way they want it to be by the release date is for their team to be far more disciplined and scheduled than I can reasonably expect from a mod made during the free hours of some people who undoubtedly have school, work, or both to contend with.

But as it's now December 1st 2009, I suppose we'll see how it all shapes up by the day's end.

I'm going to be pretty surprised if this ACTUALLY gets released on Dec. 1st, this Tuesday. The forums for this mod are a desolate waste, and the signs of unraveling are errant. If they even have a functioning mod by their promised date, I'll be surprised, but I'm half expecting lots of bugs and some bad animation from the dinos.

Maybe I'm being more cynical than I ought to be, but realizing how close it is from a would-be release makes it seem too good to be true given their forums mostly have last postings set between last April to last July. The signs are bad, and I can only hope a lot more has been going on internally than I think.

No, you are utterly, utterly wrong. The designs on each and every one of the creatures is something entirely different from any incarnation of any creature from the films or series.

What in the Hell...? Okay, I'm a big Tremors fan, I've been making Tremors models to be used as npc's in GarrysMod...and, I don't know WHAT is in your ZBrush renderings and concept art, but those are NOT Graboids and Shriekers :\