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A Look At the Tools Used To Make Metal Gear Solid 4
Soft Image is running a detailed story about the making of Metal Gear Solid 4. They explain the game's development cycle, from the art direction to the animation of characters to the building of models and textures.
"In terms of bones used for constructing the bodies of characters, about 21 joint bones were used that contained animation data and were activated through these data. But many auxiliary bones were also used to supplement movements such as the twisting of knees, elbows, legs and arms. These were not activated by animation data. Rather, they were linked to the values of the basic joints that were activated by animation. ... They also used a tool to automatically generate the rig for controlling eyeball movement and the muscles around the eyes. Because the area around the eyes is also controlled using both shapes and bones, when the eyeball locator is moved, the muscles move smoothly just like they do for the mouth. Further, even if the shape is edited to redefine the eye edges, it does not spoil the blinking or brow furrow expressions at all."
"Games: A Look At the Tools Used To Make Metal Gear Solid 4"
Ah! Coming to a Blender's feature list...
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
They had to include that ugly fag vamp.
Imagine how much cooler episodes II and III would have been if they killed off Jar-Jar.
... actually making the gameplay any fun at all. Who cares about perfect eyeball movement in a game that will bore you to death?
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sig sig sputnik
Available here.
P0rn games?
How about Quincy, ME - from your TV to your XBox?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Never played the games, never been near a console game.
I had a friend once explain that the "metal gear solid" is a reference to one of the characters, someone called "Solid Snake" and the fighting robot suit called "metal gear". Apparently theres also someone named "Liquid Snake".
What I've always wondered is... are these names some kind of wierd Japanese toilet humor?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I for one am interested in the piece on how they made the game and can't wait until the price on PS3s falls into the range I am comfortable with so I can purchase and play what is probably the best series of games bar none.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
After the steaming pile of shit that DMC4 and GTA4 turned out to be due to being downgraded to support the gimped 360 with its wimpy graphics hardware and smaller than last gen 7gigabyte DVD drive it scary to think what would have happend to Kojima's masterpiece if he was forced to downgrade MGS4 in the same way.
It is amazing to see what game developers can accomplish when they aren't faced with the nightmare of writing games for the 360.
OMG! Can we touch you???
We all want to be as cool as you!
I thought it was a biography of Hideo Kojima.
What they needed was a movie camera.
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
... easily done that on MS paint
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
I rather feel artificially full after eating Chinese food with MSG than be left mentally empty after playing MGS. Who sits around watching every muscle in the players. Does that make a game more realistic? Spend more time on making a fully animated environment. I want to see flies bugging me once in a while. How about a bird that can be blown to bits (feathers showering down) because it's sitting on a fence and I can do it without PETA coming after me? Put in the occassional bee stinging one of the fellow players on the butt for entertainment value. That will make it more real that an eye twitch.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
I know Microsoft isn't in the same league as Sony in designing console hardware. The first Xbox was just a bunch of very expensive to manufacture desktop PC parts thrown into a big ugly black box and the second Xbox is universally regarded as the worst console in the history of gaming.
However, the utterly braindead EDRAM design that is only large enough for 480p framebuffers is just inexplicable. It's a giant fuck you to game developers who are faced with having their game be filled with jaggies due to 720p buffers having no space left over in the 10megs of EDRAM for AA buffers or waste time, effort, and performance writing a tile based renderer just for the damn 360 just to get something that should be just a switch. Idiots.
Hopefully the rumors are true that Microsoft is throwing in the towel in the console market and returning to focus completely on the PC gaming market.
Am on the only on ROFLing at the Altair Snake?
For those that have yet to finish it, please take a moment for me to spoil it for you!
* Snake doesn't die at the end
* Big Boss lives and dies at the end
* Eva dies
* Inbetween Chapters 3 & 4 you play the start of Metal Gear Solid 1
* Everything you do plays right into Liquid's agenda
* The patriots are dead, replaced by AI's
* Zero lives, as a vegtable, Big Boss kills him at the end
* Big Boss and Snake make peace before Big Boss dies
There I just saved you $60 and 10 hours, now go do something useful with your time like checking out Goatse!
http://goatse.cz/
You nerds love it!
"I dont see"
They're called Fanboy Goggles. They were invented by Dreamcast fans way back in 1999/2000.
2000:
"from what I have seen, so far it seems the Dreamcast could handle it"
2008:
"from what I have seen, so far it seems the 360 could handle it"
"They dont bother compressing, I suspect most of that data filling up the Blu Ray is just raw uncompressed data, it's just being lazy."
You're a pathetic idiot.
It's almost three years into the 360's disastrous life and the 'graphical showpiece' for the 360 isn't some amazing first party title, it's a game running on the fucking outdated Unreal Engine 3.
What's even more pathetic about the absurdly underpowered 360 graphics hardware is even running the Doom 3 era UE3 engine Epic still had to limit the number of objects/enemies onscreen to usually just a few and confine the player to tiny corridors and rooms and even outside the background draw distance is absurdly tiny with everything beyond the immediate foreground blurred out with a vaseline type filter.
Hell, the 360's botched graphics hardware couldn't even handle the unified lighting model Doom 3 had three to four years ago.
Epic Fail.
Softimage is actually one word. Just a note from a random CG artist.
For those that have yet to finish it, please take a moment for me to spoil it for you!
* Snake doesn't die at the end
* Big Boss lives and dies at the end
* Eva dies
* Inbetween Chapters 3 & 4 you play the start of Metal Gear Solid 1
* Everything you do plays right into Liquid's agenda
* The patriots are dead, replaced by AI's
* Zero lives, as a vegtable, Big Boss kills him at the end
* Big Boss and Snake make peace before Big Boss dies
There I just saved you $60 and 10 hours, now go do something useful with your time like checking out Goatse! http://goatse.cz/ You nerds love it!
A way to get around the repeat comment thing? Quote it!
* Snake doesn't die at the end
* Big Boss lives and dies at the end
* Eva dies
* Inbetween Chapters 3 & 4 you play the start of Metal Gear Solid 1
* Everything you do plays right into Liquid's agenda
* The patriots are dead, replaced by AI's
* Zero lives, as a vegtable, Big Boss kills him at the end
* Big Boss and Snake make peace before Big Boss dies
* Ocelot's body is controlled by Liquid until half way through the final boss fight where Ocelot returns
* You take control of Metal Gear REX to take out Metal Gear RAY
* Liquid re-establishes Outer Heaven and renames it "Outer Haven"
* Chapter 4 takes place on Shadow Moses Island
There I saved everyone $60 and saved everyone 10 hours, thats 10 more hours you dont have to be away from Goatse
http://goatse.cz/ [goatse.cz]
Because you nerds love it!
...so it should be obvious it was made by tools :P
to require three different accounts to play online.
In all seriousness, what the fuck?
I have my playstation account. Cool, but that isn't good enough. I sign into my playstation account and now I have to sign into a konami account? Uh, ok. That's great, I guess they wanted something that the playstation account couldn't provide.
Ok, all set, wait a third account? A gamer account? Uh, ok.
Yeah, I played MGS4 online one time and decided not to bother again. Three login screens was too much for a mediocre game. Oh, and you can only have one character, but for the low low price of $10 you can customize a second!
A fascinating article, but it focuses too much on graphics and ignores the true point of the game series.
What software was used to write and manage revisions of the voice script? How was voice recorded, processed and stored?
=)
The creator later acknowledged that he got the "Snake" name and look of the character from Snake Plissken (in the movie Escape From New York).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But many auxiliary bones were also used to supplement movements such as the twisting of knees, elbows, legs and arms. These were not activated by animation data. Rather, they were linked to the values of the basic joints that were activated by animation.
We are doing something similar in MK vs DC Universe. Our Superheroes, Villians, and Kombatants have muscles that flex and move based on the position of other joints. This is done in Maya through "Set Driven Keys" and implemented in the game through a custom-runtime. It cuts down on the animation data required for an extremely large skeleton and it looks much more natural (biceps flex when arm bends). It's a win in both the memory footprint and visuals.
The cost comes with processing time and developer time for the implementation. The Maya rule set is in rotation angles and linear offsets. There is a conversion cost for going back and forth between the angular coordinate systems of quaternion (stored), matrix (render), and Euler (muscle system) spaces. There are weird Euler Angle rules for dealing with issues like singularities and major axis inversion make it a bit of a pain to implement if you store your data as (compressed) quaternions.
But the NES Metal Gear was still more challenging and fun.
Wow... what a wonderful way to market Softimage! I'll put it in an article on /.! No one will ever catch that!