sheridan

Yes.

Not even a surprise, red and green are color compliments. Did you think the christmas color scheme was an accident? :)

No, there isn't. There are sometimes people that break the rules either because they don't understand them or because they are lazy, and neither of those things are necessarily the fault of the rules in question. The distinction here is important because if you actually come to the point where you expect people not to follow the rules you've set in place, then you're just going to start tumbling down the slippery slope of overly defensive programming, which is just inexcusably bad design. Maybe. Every game is different. It's essentially impossible to say for sure unless somebody can dive into the game's source code or decompile the byte code in the cartridge to figure it out for themselves. That is fascinating! Maybe the code stuffed inside VIEWINFO and HIGHBLIT was meant to act as a sort of lightweight collection of video drivers for the game?

That sorta implies this method is just inferior to sweeping volumes altogether. It's not really. Depending upon the circumstances, the simpler method can perform better than the more complicated method, and it's also much simpler to implement as well, so there are real benefits to using it as long as nobody breaks it with "high velocity" objects. You may notice in at least some of the alphas the ability to slide down non-orthogonal walls was completely non-existent. It feels more like moving against a series of very small squares than bumping into a smooth and contiguous line, and you can get stuck easily if you "run against the grain" so to speak. I'm pretty sure this is what john was talking about when he mentioned using polar coordinates to test collision against lines in his doom source readme too, which actually was a very dumb decision as he pointed out himself. At the very least, he could have simply treated entities as circles and tested for collisions against lines in his BLOCKMAP with tangents like build did. It wouldn't have solved the problem with high velocity objects clipping through certain obstacles but at least it would've fixed wall running and the generally sticky feeling you get when bumping into anything but orthogonal walls.

I actually find this very surprising. My limited understanding is that doom uses a lazy kind of collision detection which only checks for obstacles at an object's destination, rather than sweeping a line or volume through the path necessary to get there. Hence bugs like this: http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Mancubus_fireball_clipping So if anything I'd imagine the collision would work better at a higher framerate, since the objects are moving far less every frame. If that's the case, maybe the basic algorithm isn't at fault and the variables used for the job simply didn't have enough precision or something. I don't know. y shearing is a very intuitive hack. I'd be surprised if raven were the ones to "discover" it first. Carmack likely just rejected it in the end since it produced a far more flawed projection than he could really stomach. Also this is a complete tangent, but are you guys familiar with that feature in one of the alphas that basically drops your viewpoint to the ground? Some people have called that a "prone" feature WIP, but I think that's extremely improbable. I think it's far more likely that Carmack put that function in to test that he was producing a proper floor projection, because I can speak from experience when I say that that is actually extremely tricky to get right when you're using two entirely different algorithms to draw wall columns compared to floor spans like doom does. All you have to do is be off a little bit and suddenly the edges of the floor don't meet the walls at the correct spot all the time, and it can drive you crazy making sure it just looks right in every situation.

That is a good point! They probably did this because most testers didn't realize the potency of the weapon right away, and forcing them to use it would demonstrate just how devastating it can be.

Anybody who's ever gotten the assault rifle in system shock 2 has found that it outclasses the pistol in every way. On top of allowing you to switch to a fully automatic mode (very helpful against rumblers and the occasional swarm of hybrids) it also has an enormous magazine (72 rounds after modifications) and a 25% default damage boost over the pistol. Not that I'm saying the pistol is a bad weapon, because in general it is certainly extremely versatile. Still, I think the fact that the assault rifle can be loaded with anti-personnel and armor piercing rounds makes it probably the best weapon in the entire game, since you can adapt it to almost every situation imaginable. Only at the very end of the game when you have to fight shodan and her cyborg assassins in cyberspace does something like the EMP rifle become really useful to have.

Not if you do a little preprocessing to transform the sprites into wire meshes based on averages of color and such. :D

In Natural Selection 2 the pistol is very much a backup weapon since you basically have to place every shot perfectly to kill something with it, but it's still saved me from dying on numerous occasions and it's a far better option than melee in a pinch. The magnum is extremely accurate and works great at long ranges. You just have to be a good shot.

Indie development takes at least as much work, there's no "easy mode" in the game's industry. People often look at indie games and go "oh they went the pixelly route, they must not have put that much work into it." WRONG. If your game is not going to be impressive graphically it must be impressive mechanically. This is what a lot of indie games strive to be, and that's why you see a number of super ugly indie games with 90+ ratings on metacritic or whatever. That's not just the popular opinion of a bunch of 12 year olds, the games are actually just that damn good (which, if you haven't realized, isn't something anybody can just "do"). And you're fooling yourself if you believe Skywind is not basically triple-AAA quality. The people on that team have been working on their project for years and have put an enormous amount of effort into it. All it takes is a bare minimum of research to realize the scope of their work, including all the tons of brand new assets they've had to create, the voice acting, the concept art, and all the miles and miles of mountains, cliffs, and cities they sculpted completely from scratch. It's a crapton of work and it takes more than a basic level of skill to pull off.

My dad loves this guy. He's one of the best guitarists I've ever seen, bar none.

It doesn't - hence the fact that you'll want to bolster every other area you can imagine to make yourself more useful and valuable, not just as a "level designer" but as a game designer too. Regardless of the tools you use, if your skill set basically boils down to throwing brushes, prefabs, and set pieces around in an editor, you are not going to last long at any studio, period.

Exactly, the point is that modern level design is a highly visual field and to work in the industry proper you need to have more than just knowledge of good layouts and design principals to be a success. You have to be a fucking good artist too, or at least a programmer who can implement all the mechanics for a game experience. I mean, if you think triple AAA devs will pay you a salary to crank out minecraft tier stuff or click together caves with Skyrim's creation kit you are pretty much of out of your mind. But yeah Katamori, if you force yourself to work hard and learn the necessary skills, I have no doubt you could apply yourself to making some cool shit some day :) all you need is the gumption to get started.

The russian word for sex is "пол", a word which it shares with Serbian, Finnish and several other related languages. "секс" is merely the russian way of spelling the english word, which is pervasive enough to have entered numerous other languages as well. For example, in German, "sex haben" is a partially adopted phrase that means "to have sex"... not that they don't have their own words for sex too ("Geschlechtsverkehr", literally sexual intercourse. Yeah, german is just wordy, hence their appreciation for english slang) SO, it's likely geo just confused his story a bit. The travelling russian who was familiar with the word "sex" mistook phrases involving the word "six" to be about sex. But the russian word for sex is still not really "секс", and the russian word for six is definitely not "sex" (nor does it sound like it) source: I know german and linguistics is my hobby. Also google.

It looks okay, but in my opinion you should consider using a palette with somewhat bolder colors. As it stands things look pretty drab, and as intentional as that may be, I frankly find it to be a rather tired aesthetic that way too many shooter games fall back on in an attempt to look "dreary." Like even in Doom's palette you'll notice they included plenty of bright colors, like the emerald used for doomguy, energy balls and various powerups, that huge range of blue that they use to highlight all kinds of stuff (but that people rarely appreciate), plus all of those really bright reds, pinks, and other fleshy tones that make several of the game's monsters pop out really nicely. Of course, they also have the drab greens, browns, and grays too, but those look much much better when they're mixed with all the aforementioned colors too. Here's another demonstration of good and bad palette choices in games. I'm sharing this partly because it's entertaining but also because it's highly informative, so watch it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aip2aIt0ROM&feature=youtu.be&t=6m48s

Wolfenstein's renderer doesn't actually shade the walls at all. Adrian Carmack instead had to manually produce "bright" and "dark" variations for each wall texture, which were then applied in alternating fashion to each side of the wall cubes (so the north and south sides of a wall would use the "bright" textures, and the west and east sides would use the "dark" textures). In a few cases id took advantage of this to produce walls which looked drastically different on each side. source: I hacked wolfenstein a lot ten years ago and distinctly remember that this was a thing.

How dumb do you have to be to believe light actually dims to nothing after travelling just a few meters, eesh. But yeah, doom definitely looks better with it anyway, if only because it forces some shading on what are otherwise very flat and pixellated surfaces.

Hey Kaiser & company, Today I finished my playthrough of Strife: Veteran Edition. Admirable work across the board; this port is very robust and polished, though I have a couple minor complaints or bug reports to give about it anyway. 1. Aiming up or down without autoaim is very bad - shots fired never land on target. It seems my weapon is only aiming at a fraction of the camera's pitch. Very noticeable with projectile weapons (ie rockets) although it affects hitscan weapons like the machinegun too. 2. There's a small visual glitch that occurs with the lightmaps on sectors with moving floors/ceilings. The shadows mapped to the walls will stretch up and down as the wall's height grows or diminishes. Example pics: A platform somewhere in the factory. Nearing the top, you can see the shadow has stretched from being very vertical to being decidedly horizontal. More stretching. Gone. In still pictures the glitch doesn't look so bad, but in motion it looks very weird. Maybe to fix this you could lock the shadowmap on the wall and remove shadow mapping on sectors tagged to move as elevators/doors? That would make things way more visually consistent imo. 3. Although I played the whole campaign through and got the good ending, when I closed the game after winning I realized that I was still missing the achievements "Silence is Golden" and "Lending a Hand" which is somewhat preposterous given that I would've had to fulfill the conditions for both achievements by the time I won the game. Still, as I mentioned before you guys did good work on this rerelease and you should be proud of what you've done. At the very least, you got me to give Strife a full and proper play through, which may be an accomplishment in and of itself, heh... Not that the game is bad (I enjoyed it), but it does wear on after a while, probably as a consequence of its rather mazy levels and subdued run and gun gameplay, like Hexen.

The version without the pixel darkening looks fucking awesome, I'd love to see that as an optional version of the effect in a sourceport or two.

I grant that the laughter sound effect could be useful but frankly I would find it surprising if anyone found the actual character memorable enough to stick in something of their own creation.

I'm pretty sure the sigil that appears in various cutscenes and boxart pieces is just a symbol and not the actual artifact.

Your point being?

Games like blood and doom didn't deal with z-fighting issues because they didn't use a zbuffer to clip surfaces before drawing them, they would just sort planes as indivisible units and paint them one on top of the other. "pixel shaders" have in their most basic form been around for pretty much forever. I don't know if anyone has drawn any hard lines on when they started becoming prevalent in modern pipelines, though afaik they only started being really recognized as their own distinct part of the job about 10 to 15 years ago when gpu manufacturers actually started facilitating their development. Some doom sourceports do use shaders, ie gzdoom (for optional lighting), but the reason most don't is simply because they don't need to.

If you strictly want to be a professional level designer, forget about going to college. Just forget it. Also, you seriously do need to learn to make quality levels with toolkits that were not made for 20 year old games. Stuff like this: this image is over 3MB, don't display it inline http://i1.wp.com/blog.digitaltutors.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Reflections1.jpeg?w=800 https://forums.unrealengine.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1030&d=1397992482 If you can, also try to pick up other game related skills on the side. Stuff like textures, game programming, etc. Anything to build your skill set and make yourself useful. That's what you need to concentrate on. Good luck...