scar3crow

Couldn't find this in the topic, in map02 the elevator to the two Arch Viles has a normal door on the inside, but blue key locked on the outside. I can't tell if I'm incidentally sequence breaking here, or if the blue lock being one-sided is to ensure I finish the upcoming fight, since the blue lights are on both sides of the door. This has been great thus far though, thank you for making it :)

Ragnor: DarkPlaces (and possibly others) support using ogg for the cd tracks so you don't need the disc in, just the files in the right place. I typically lurk, but I've been refreshing this thread and his bandcamp page to see when the Quake tracks go up, the Doom PSX score will definitely be part of my Christmas requests.

Didn't see this posted elsewhere in a lazy quick search, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18082-dreams-of-doom-help-gamers-learn.html Interesting short read, the difference between portions of the brain activated during sleep and play between new kids and experienced Doomers was neat.

Exactly, but Infinity Ward has made a business cycle out of developing a new "feature" to band aid an existing poor design decision. The DarkPlaces mod for Quake does a similar thing with ammo, in terms of leaving the unused. Regenerating health was born, for them, out of simultaneous mild mistakes on health pickups, save behavior, and level design. They replaced one of these, which has had compounding results in the other systems, and the game series as a whole. The presence of regenerating health in a game does worry me, just because to me, it is not only a bad mechanic, but an omen of its rippling throughout the other systems.

I'm rather disinterested in Rage as I am not a fan of racing, or desert wasteland environments. The addition of regenerating health does not bode well, as in my personal playing experience, regenerating health rarely aids the gameplay as a whole - it provides assistance to starting players when they are damaged, but it also makes situations far more binary ("Is this situation lethal in a shorter timespan than it would take me to traverse? If it isn't, then I don't need to play it safe, as I can recover without a loss of resources.") Having a gameplay experience where each decision is ultimately binary (and the second option is generally a reload of a save game) does make the entire experience as a whole fairly linear. In Doom, or Quake, or Blood, or any older fps, you evaluate battles based upon a gradient of potential damage, and how it will impact your inventory (ammo, health throughout the level), and thus there is a risk taking via the investment of that inventory. You can make a gutsy move, and hope things play out in your favor (in the elements you cannot impact directly, a battle can go very differently if a chaingunner gets nicked by an Imp fireball) and if they do, splendid - if they don't, you have to reasses your inventory, and thus your investment prospects for future maneuvers. Regenerating health removes the investment and dividends prospect. It is noteworthy that the original Call of Duty does not have regenerating health, but it was added in response to play tests. What did the playtests show? People using up healthpacks when they weren't fully benefitting from them (95% health, grabbing a healthpack), thus reducing their inventory, and combined with overwriting their own saves, they often painted themselves into a corner - a save game with 10% health, and having to brave a clearing with 2 mounted machineguns and a bunch of rifle wielding soldiers. The problem here was a combination of messaging to the player the significance of rationing resources, the potential automation of rationing them (make most health rely on medic NPCs who will only dispense if you can make use of at least 75% of the item), the mappers pacing, and the save system itself. Instead of rectifying those issues, the developers chose to replace the health system entirely with regenerating health, which did resolve a player being at 10% health in this situation, now they could be at 100%, but you also saw an escalation in sheer numbers on the part of the level designer, as they had to do something to make the player feel more threatened, which resulted in those binary situations. Thats what I am not looking forward to in Rage: those binary situations. For the record I've not played Q4, it hasn't interested me, I heard enough non-positive things from individuals whos taste I generally regard well, and that was enough to keep me from investing my time and money into it.

id is no longer such a small company in terms of employees, and they have been expanding. They've already been doing projects like this without cutting into the Rage and Doom4 teams' time, and knowing Carmack, idtech5 is already well established and solid in their pipeline, and thus he is free to take a few hours a week to guide these projects, which are being handled by Mustaine and co.

You know, I never was caught with my flashlight out... Because it was rarely dark enough that I couldn't locate an enemy without it... Powerful enemies always exit the shadows, zombies, well, illuminate with flashlight, put reticle on their very slowly moving head, switch to pistol, fire twice. I rarely felt like I NEEDED the flashlight, but yeah... some form of adhesive... and some guns have clips for lights...

RoE was enjoyable, but far too easy in my opinion. I did not regret my purchase, but it could have been more. I did enjoy the Gravity Gun in it, unlike with HL2, they attempted some semblance of game design by having it become unstable, unable to hold a charge for a period of time so you couldn't just hold onto the heaviest object for a long while. Well chosen in that regard, and hey, id actually coded their physics engine so it didn't feel like a middleware gimmick. The double barreled shotgun is very fun, though it does shorten those close range brawls with hell knights quite significantly... Vulgars were a lot less than I anticipated as monsters... No real complaints, but nothing exceptional. The big badasses, Bruisers I think? They never posed a threat due to their size... Tend to get trapped in areas, at which point I would run past, or make use of my hand grenades which bounce ridiculously... Artifact is fun to play with, and overpowered simply because of the huge quantity of corpses to be found... I never had a reason to not use it, as I knew I would be replenished after the next encounter. Bosses had a very MegaMan feel, which I don't know if I liked or disliked... Final boss was a bit better than Doom3s. I liked it, decent enough as an expansion pack, but like Doom3 it could use some better level design at many points and could stand to be a bit tougher at moments.

Diablo came out in 1998? Maybe that was the German release? Tetris is the ultimate cell phone game, for waiting in line and such.

Fun fact, "that person" was a level designer for QuakeIV, so he does have a pretty good grasp of the Doom3 engine to say the least. However, I'm glad Doom3 didn't look like that, since that is the wrong setting for a mars base. It looks cool, but... no. Iirc he did that level as a portfolio piece, and for that it is good. But I'm glad Doom3 didn't look like that.

baron of hell if youre gonna go toe to toe with something, make it brutal. without the plasm on their hands those creatures could still catch both of your fists and break your hands backwards, pushing up until the point where it breaks your elbow and cracks the bones in your forearm, splintering the muscle fibers in your biceps and triceps, causing the collar bone to snap as the angle adjusts which stab into your neck... you know what, nevermind, i think ill just punch commander keen.

its the one where Peter starts his own tv station and the FCC censors the whole town dunno the number offhand however

well that was a pretty damn quick merger nonetheless, cool to see it there, and a fun montage.

anyone else catch the Stewie Griffin Naked Gun siren montage at the beginning in which one of the "roads" is e1m5 behind the yellow door ? completely bs post, but nonetheless i enjoyed seeing it in there when it wasnt a person "playing it" but stewies head shooting imps

ive heard nothing but bad regarding the q4 ai thus far. and there is one inherent problem to switching engines for a larger audience, not finishing it once again in time, and the fickle audience you were playing to moving onto another game. the hitbox thing sounds like the best reason to me, simply for the speed allowing you to do mods that arent as oriented around slower gameplay.