All Posts by frumbert

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Originally posted by Tron420
meh, i just wanna gank people and take all their stuff.

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Bah, you don't want that in a game - you can do that IRL.

I thought the day night cycles in Crysis were pretty and the atmospherics were all very bling bling but then I saw a butterfly casting beams of shadow through the atmosphere and it ruined it all for me. All that realism tossed away by one tiny little bug ...

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Originally posted by daveospice
The problem is there's a huge market full of people with lots of time on their hands who are completely computer illiterate, I work for a travel company and teaching people to use expedia.com is like pulling teeth. People just don't understand simple things a lot of us take for granted. Companies are realizing this, and just like your classes in college... are toning things down to fit the retards, since they make up 90% of the population.

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But this is a good thing. Someone will realise it and bring something for the remaining 10%. Everyone else won't get it, and we in that bracket get to prance about being elitist bigots. If they can't understand that their monitors aren't broken (they're just not turned on) then at least it stops them from trolling these forums :)

meh, only if it's free

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Originally posted by DAS1337

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Originally posted by jonaylward

You never, ever, ever get twice the performance when you have SLI enabled - and that's a truism going all the way back to the very first Voodoo cards - yet, you *do* have twice the cost. SLI/Crossfire is not a very good means of increasing your performance from a 'bang for the buck' perspective.
I just upgraded to an 8800GT this week, and even Don't-Mind-Me-I'm-Just-Here-To-Cripple-Your-Machine Crysis plays at 30-40 FPS with goodies turned on.
Get the 8800GT, and put the other $200 you saved toward building a Terrabyte-sized RAID, that way you'll have plenty of room for those 4GB-sized FRAPS movies you're going to want to take...and you *are* going to want to take them - trust me.

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No sane person with the casual mindset will ever need a TB of space. I could download music all day for a month and still not fill that much room. I've had a 150g HD for the last 6 years and just recently upgraded to a 150g WD Raptor X. I have rarely even used more than 100gigs of that space.

Now if we're talking about bang for the buck, then your typical PC user will be wasting a pretty nice chunk of cash in unused storage. If you're gaming, you would be ill-advised to clutter your HD with loads of garbage only to significantly decrease your performance over the long haul. I'd buy a second GPU 100 times out of 100 over doubling even what I have now, which would put me at 300gigs. That's just my opinion, but if you're a gamer.. isn't video performance a bit more important than telling your friends that you have more storage than you'll even need in your life?

FRAPS? If all you're doing all day is watching your fraps, you need to get out more.

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Oh, I don't know. I've been of the casual mindset for quite a while and I've managed to collect quite a bit of stuff over the decades. (What do you mean by "Delete"?). It's all here. Games. Programs. Old bits of music or movie clips or stuff I downloaded from the net (or BBS's - yes, there's some downloads from before the net in here too). If you never throw anything away it's amazing how much stuff you can accumulate over time. I've only got about 100GB free at the moment - the other 1.4TB is pretty much taken. Might be getting to the time for another 500 GB drive, I think.

Right now, I'm not putting my money down on any thing. See that list of released games on the left? I've tinkered with most of those and they all have their gems but also their flaws. Is this where I'm suppose to put my wish list of things in a game? May as well. I feel like a rant anyway.

1. Cyberpunk: It's body modification, brain modofication, projecting the mind into virtual space and hacking it up. I want a game where I can be an up and coming cowboy, hired by the yakuza to mine data from the corporates. I want to be able to leave my body and take over the cyberbrain of someone else and whang their soon-to-be-corpse into oncoming traffic. I want to need to sit on the face of a data warehouse and ease my way through its ice, using every hacking technique my skill level has access to. I want to be able to hack my own skill level to see if I can sneak in an upgrade before the server crashes me out. I want it to be dirty, skungy, permanent night, with dollar-a-night hookers and drugged up street trash and nanobot health injections and brain tanks sold on every street corner.
2. Steampunk: Who needs electricity when you can do it all with valves and hot, hot steam. Burn it up, blast it out. Computers mean huge factories of complex machinery. Flywheels and chains and ropes and pulleys and lots and lots of effort. Hard, hot, wet, dirty. That's how I like it. Coal fired, steam powered weaponry? Yeah baby.
3. Sci fi means it's got science, but it's made up, not something out of Pyhsics Review Weekly. And who confused sci fi with time travel? We haven't left this earth yet, we haven't explored space or other worlds. Just because it's sci fi doesn't mean it's the future. Any why is it that only space ships have tractor beams? Why can't tractors have tractor beams? Why can't you tie people up with laser beams? Why can't you use a freeze ray effectively against photon torpedos? What would happen if you had a cannon that fired black holes at your enemy? Why can't you freeze clouds?
4. I want to be able to battle down the streets of New York or Amsterdam or Melbourne and have them look like those places. I want to tread the streets that I know from real life and recognise places or know where to go becuase I've actually been there. And then find it's full of hellish monsters, cool magic shops, murderous cut-throat pirates, or mysterious green crystals you feel compelled to spend many hours mining.
5. I like creative fantasy but not any resembling something Tolkein would think up. It's just so blah. I like some of the crazy stuff those Japanese and Koreans dream up. It's not all orcs and dragons and tudor townships full of blank eyed country folk. Swords with guns in them. Crazy hot chicks who fight with their hair. Things with the front of a lion, the back of a gorilla and the middle of a tokyo-destroying super-robot. Blobs of goo that fight back. Humongously massively giant mega monsters that fire neutron bombs from their eyes but are powered by emo school kids. Woo!
6. I'm into the surreal. I'd love a game with monkeys who use spatulas to pry bees nests out of coconut trees. Where it rains frogs. Where fish fly in schools in the air and vampire bats herd buffalo using laser beams out their beaks. You, the player, evolved from under the toenails of the gods (literally) and, mainly to get away from the smell, set about not discovering fire or the wheel but creating a line of habedashery with designs based on the colour of underbellies of dolphins. I want it wierd, wonderful and completely stupefying at every turn. There is nothing at all like this.
7. A rockin social creative place where it's all lovey dovey and nobody really dies - well, not horribly anyway. Messily and in humerous ways, but not horribly with blood and bits. But where to level up you need to beat the other guy in a nitro-fulled 10,000,000 volt rock and roll electric guitar war (if you're in the rockstar class) or a mega powerful ultra-choc pastry bake off against your opponent (if you're in a chef class) or a no-rules, gruelling two hour tango to the death. Fighting doesn't have to involve hitting stuff. I'm so so sick of hitting stuff.
8. I'd like to have to start young and live to be older. And when my character dies, the consciousness and skills and worlds goods all transfer over into a new, young character who has to live and grow through it all again. The chance for a change - a new face, new hair, a new name, a new race or gender or base skill. You die, you get to choose again, and you get to carry some (not all) of what you used to be across to the new character. The older you get, the better the player is at not dying. Respect your elders? Nah, but handy to have them along when you and the other kids go out for a good slaying.

Well, I'm hungry. Comments, flames, bizarre misquotings all welcome!

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Originally posted by jzuska

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Originally posted by altairzq

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Originally posted by jzuska

To the OP:
Nope, nobody cares about graphics. Gameplay and story is what drives an MMORPG.

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Talk for yourself, I care about graphics among other things.

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Really? Graphics are #1 on your list?
Over gameplay and player population.
So if you're the only guy playing and it takes a machine worth more than your home to play, that makes you content? Really? I dont believe you.

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Don't you know if the graphics suck then the rest of the game must suck. Look at THQ games on the PS3 or XBOX - They've concentrated hard on the graphics and none at all on interesting gameplay in any game ever and they still sell. Graphics sell a game.

That said, I still fire up Horizons every now and then (which, yes, is still alive somehow). Those graphics suck eggs but the people who still play are there for the community and pretty much nothing else. To reiterate my first point though: this game *isn't* selling.

My first multiplayer environment was a text adventure called cave, which was on my school BBC micro network. It was probably based off collosal cave, but it had multiplayer elements such as two people having to be in the room at the same time in order to operate pressure switches and so on - it enforced teamwork. Now that I think of it it was probably a sneaky educational game/tool.

UO was my first graphical MMO

i came
i played
i stopped
i went away

i came back
... and it was all still the same

Just wanted to say hi

Why simulate a black hole when we can just make one?

Wow, wouldn't it be great to have a game exactly like I imagined everything to be. It would bo sooo fun to play. Perhaps what I should do is write a book on how to make such a game.

Obviously I'd need to be able to write - well that's ok because my posts on most forums sometimes take up over three paragraphs, and I have my own blog - a sure sign of journalistic abilities - so that means I'm qualified. Now, I've read many (more than four) of the hundreds of books on games already out there, so I know they practically write themselves. All I need is an intro by some buy mentioned in Game Develop magazine one time, a colour section towards the back showing renders of teapots and jet fighters, and a section at the back telling you [the readers] where to look on the net for actual information you might really use, such as sealed behind the commerciual sections of gamasutra. Also, practically done and done.

Now that that is sorted, I'll need to flesh out the structure I'm going to use. That, too, is obvious. I'll base it off my own experience of games.

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Chapter 1: Crates
Chapter 2: Toilets
Chapter 3: Rusty Metal Pipes
Chapter 4: Tunnels and Sewers
Chapter 5: Abandoned Buildings
Chapter 6: The phrase "Post Apocalyptic"

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Oops, I seem to be building the ultimate first person shooter. I better add some chapters that a strategy game would use. I don't know that much about it, so I'll google for a while and just pop in the things that get the highest results.

[quote]Chapter 7: A* Pathfinding
Chapter 8: Tile Sets for you "next-gen" CGA graphics
Chapter 9: Camera Zoom: An ants eye view
Chapter 10: Building a great title screen
Chapter 11: The 80/20 Rule: 80% pre-rendered sequences...
Chapter 12: AI, Game Play, Graphics, Persistence, Difficulty, Sound, Etc[quote]

Ok, RPG's now and MMOG's. Shouldn't be too hard! I've played many and seen what people complain about on fan sites the developers don't even know about, so obviously I'll mention those in the order of prioroty they should be implemented:

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Chapter 13: Changing your characters hair colour
Chapter 14: Setting up a realistic physics simlulation of a cloak
Chapter 15: Shaders for Swords, Staves, Knives, Shields and Lances
Chapter 16: All dragons breathe fire: a guide to fire colour
Chapter 17: Trolls, Greifers and Hard-core RPGers: An experiential guide
Chapter 18: Crafting: an easy implenetation of a player driven economy
Chapter 19: Please make the wood-wolves near Haggendhur easier

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19 chapters already? HeftY book, and I haven't even gotten to the game engine yet. Better put that in.

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Chapter 20: Engine, Physics, Network, Server, System Requirements, Story

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There. Here would be a good spot to put those colour plates of teapots and perhaps a capture of the first level of Doom 1. Ooh, it's getting big. I might not be able to finish this book before lunchtime, so I had better wrap it up with the really important stuff: Information about the companies who will be queueing up to buy your game once it is done.

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Chapter 20: Electronic Arts: "Purchase Everyone"
Chapter 21: THQ: Game play is for losers, graphics is where it's at.
Chapter 22: Indie software: To pay or crack? That is the question.
Chapter 23: Mobile games: Remember the 80's? Nor does your target market.
Chapter 24: A preview of book 2 in the series
Chapter 25: A preview of book 3 in the series

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There we go. Wow, that was a lot of hard work. I suppose I should go get myself a cup of coffee and fire up my open source editor (making sure I switch off the spell checker, of course). I'll have to mention that I used an open source editor as well, as it will give me more credability with the people thick enough to buy this book when it hits the shelves.

Off to work, then!

Well it quite nice to know such requests are being read and thought about. I look forward to your results!

I'm lonely. Someone cheer me up.

Maybe it's my eyes. Maybe it's my glasses. But I find it HARD to read light text on a dark background. This web site has always been a light text on dark background site, and in the last skin a year or two ago I had made myself a special stylesheet and tool for injecting it when I'm browsing this site. That of course was several system rebuilds ago...

There's a thing you can do to specify alternate stylesheets that turn up in the firefox Page Style menu (under View). Please, it would be much appreciated for people like me if you could provide a stylesheet with an alternate colour scheme that has a LIGHT background and DARK text. Most people would see this one: blue's, blacks. It's all very cool. But we could then choose to switch to a different colour scheme to stop our eyes watering.

Thanks :-)

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Originally posted by Scottc
If you use an MMORPG maker, please die, thank you. Please be very very offended if you have used an MMORPG maker and are proud of your creation in which you spent very little time on, because I personally hate you for being proud of something that one should be ashamed of.

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Like all "game makers" they allow people who are artistically creative but who are not programmers (since 75% of programmers have the artistic capacity of a wet paper towel). These people are still willing to try a hand at being expressive and creative in the form of 3d games. If they seek a career in mmorpg development, then tools such as realmcrafter can let them experience the depth of skills they will need in order to proceed. For other people, just the act of being creative is enough.

Now, back to work on my MMORPG world creator...

I had an account for exactly 2 years, from the day it was released until the day I realised my account was still being billed (which was about 3 months after I had quit). Never looked back, but I know people who still "play".

musing. but a new idea once every few months would be something too.

depends on the engine. In one 3d engine I'm trying which can use heightmaps for terrains it's entirely up to the programmer to decide. You can scale the terrain to be the size of a small country with a single 512px object, but it all comes down to the level of detail you want in your landscape. Think of it in vertexes. If each pixel in the original heightmap represents a single vertex in the terrain heightmap, then the resulting terrain object will also only have 512 (or 511) vertexes. If you scale the mesh to be a "typical" landscape size with mountains in the distance, then there may be quite a large gap between each vertex, which may also limit how much detail you can add to the polys in your material and lighting passes. But you might also decide that each pixel could represent several vertexes, and use pixel averaging to calculate the vertex positions. You can more vertexes but you lose the control on the exact positioning of those vertexes.

There's also the issue that a typical heightmap can represent only 256 levels of "height" (using a typical greyscale heightmap). You may need more height or depth than can be represented in only 256 levels. There are heightmap formats available in RGB which give you 16777216 possible levels, but most software for generating height maps don't support this format, and it's much harder to visualise.

I use a paged terrain system, where small chunks of a more massive terrain object are loaded. These chunks may only be represented by 256px square elements, but in total represent a 32768px square image (a bit like the way google maps only loads a small area at a time). I need to do this in my simulations (tens of kilometre representation at metre or sub-metre accuracy), and I often use L3DT (the pro version), which splits up terrains for me. Such a program might be worth exploring for you (there's a free version) in order to get your head around the way heightmaps work.