Comments - Six_Ways

Diffusion would help a lot - as well as specularity, the shadow your arm throws is distracting. The footage is also fairly overexposed at the moment, although diffusion would mitigate that somewhat.

Looks interesting. However, one thing you should change immediately, before you go any further - don't call it the gravytank! For english speakers, it's a ridiculous name! Gravy is a sauce for meat dishes. A simple re-spelling would probably be fine; for instance gravitank, gravi-tank or gravtank.

Re: the video - NOW it's obvious! Huge improvement.

I'm sure as you say the difference becomes more obvious in motion, but those pics really do look almost identical... the problem is that they're from different angles with different light directions, so you can't see whether the normals are more accurate and you can't see whether the facial area is distorted. I suspect you know exactly what you're looking for, but many of us can't tell the difference! But the benefits of skeletal animation are obvious.

Ztormi was just making a joke man... no need to take yourself so seriously.

Sounds like an interesting concept! Art style looks cool too.

You may have missed the point. Have you seen the Experimental Gameplay Project site?

Actually, recoil affects everything - it's due to Newton's third law. As the gauss rifle exerts a force on the projectile through magnetic fields, the projectile exerts the exact same force back on the rifle. In fact as it happens it's much easier to make an explosively propelled weapon recoil-less since the explosive doesn't need to act 'against' the weapon itself (you could make the barrel open at the back), whereas it's the gauss rifle itself which propels the slug.

You'd be surprised. I'm in a 2-man team and SVN helps a helluva lot. If you're working on a project as part of a team it's definitely worth looking into.

This is incredible! I can't believe the attention to detail.... the dashboard, the smoke, the ice, the flames carrying on in the right trajectory after the car's gone, the car coming back, the car model itself.... amazing.

Ummm...

Idsoftware.com
Idsoftware.com

Plus, I'm not sure why you've included quakewars as a separate engine... it's just the latest version of the doom 3 / idtech4 engine. So.... there's exactly the right number.

Not that much in what useful sense? According to 82% of steam users, 4Gb is that much.

I don't think anything on UE3 ever has.

According to Udk.com it's all in there. Pretty impressive.

You've also got to consider that this is not a true engine license; it's more like a "standalone mod" license. I'm not knocking this at all, it's great news, but it needs to be made clear that this is not anything like what you get when you pay the $1m license fee. All you have (which is admittedly a helluva lot!) is UnrealScript and all the tools; you have no control over the engine or source code.

And of course as you mention there is a potentially severe limitation in the long run in what financial control you have over your product. Not to be too cynical, but one potential aim of this could be to get lots of indie games running on UE3 to encourage the ones which end up commercially successful to buy the engine proper rather than port it.

It's also worth noting that there are a lot of cheaper or free or open source engines out there which, at the indie level of content quality (no offense intended, this applies to me too; I'm talking about resources not ability), would serve just as well. You don't really need the world's most advanced shader engine without the world's best crack team of paid-up texture artists to make art which makes full use of it.

I'm not saying I don't think this is good new by the way, it definitely is!

I'm pretty sure it's 3D - look at the specular highlights on the teeth. They would look really out of place if it was just a 2D image and didn't change with lighting.

Yeah, the announcer voice is great but I'd beef up the bass or low mids a bit and chop off the breathiness at the end personally.

Parallax mapping is seriously overrated. There's virtually no point in using it.

Compared to normal mapping, it's significantly more expensive and in 90% of cases looks either indistinguishable or much worse due to the 'watery' effect it generates with certain types of texture.

More advanced techniques such as Relief mapping and Cone Step mapping are more expensive than parallax but look incredible. So just say no to parallax. If you're prepared to pay the performance cost, do it properly and use a technique which actually works.

Looks great, but is 13k per character plus all those passes really feasible? Your AO shader for instance looks pretty accurate so I imagine that's doing a lot of sampling. I'm not criticising or anything, I realise you've thought all of this out, I'm just interested how you're dealing with such complexity?

I've just in the last few days got back into Carmageddon 2 and that was my first thought on seeing this trailer! Hope this is as good as it looks!

Quad core does have its uses; I do a lot of rendering for instance so it's not always just an ego trip.

Sorry to nitpick, but possibilities, not possibility's!

Yeah, TF2 hasn't got many more than that and it's kind of a strength. What's the point of having 10 maps when people only end up playing 5? Make 5 amazing maps rather than 10 average ones.

Nice one guys! It's fantastic that some of the mainstream industry can recognise great mods when they appear.

Ace, loving the sense of humour - especially the jellyfish!

Not so sure about the concept myself; the vertical idea needs some thought to work well.

As it is, the player is always at a big disadvantage to enemies - enemies can get a good shot at the player long before the player can get a good shot at the enemies.

At the moment, the only reason it's possible for the player to win easily is because the enemies are so weak, in damage, health and intelligence. Easy enemies like this aren't satisfying to kill, but if you increase any of their attributes to make it satisfying it's going to become impossible for the player.

Besides this, gameplay will get fairly tedious quite fast without some change in the game dynamic.

On the other hand, if you can improve the vertical dynamic into something workable, this could end up very original.

Actually it's used on Quake Wars, not Doom 3, but regardless, PCs have a lot more memory and processing power available to make sure such a technique looks good. There's also a lot of streaming involved to allow an extremely large texture map, which is not the case here (so detail will be a lot lower). It may or may not work scaled down to the PSP. Looks promising so far though!

Not yet, just hopefully before Christmas.

Possibly stuff like a 'surprise success' award for mods that appeared from nowhere and did really well? That would probably have to be released only.

The drones spawn randomly on pathnodes, and the number spawned depends upon the size of the map so there may well be more than one of each type. Because of this, when you die you lose your drone since you're likely to be able to pick one up again relatively easily.

Different models may happen; at this point we want to concentrate on gameplay and balancing, and then possibly add more graphical content later.