What's truly funny and insightful about this quote/comment is that Fight Club is not a very violent movie at all (and was very thoroughly mis-marketed as a result). FC is a funny, dark comedy, and what little real violence it has is truly repulsive. If anything, it's a movie with a very anti-violence message.
is perhaps the most consistently interesting and impressive feat of popular boardgame design I have had the pleasure to play, and gets big bonus points for following the source novel content and incorporating it into the game mechanics.
The following are movie quotes from the movie Brazil, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the country. The movie is named after the theme song.
Sam: I only know you got the wrong man. Jack: Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the *right* man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?
Sam Lowry: Excuse me, Dawson, can you put me through to Mr. Helpmann's office? Dawson: I'm afraid I can't sir. You have to go through the proper channels. Sam Lowry: And you can't tell me what the proper channels are, because that's classified information? Dawson: I'm glad to see the Ministry's continuing its tradition of recruiting the brightest and best, sir. Sam Lowry: Thank you, Dawson.
Sam Lowry: My name's Lowry. Sam Lowry. I've been told to report to Mr. Warrenn. Porter (Information Retrieval): Thirtieth floor, sir. You're expected. Sam Lowry: Um...don't you want to search me? Porter: No sir. Sam Lowry: Do you want to see my ID? Porter: No need, sir. Sam Lowry: But I could be anybody. Porter: No you couldn't sir. This is Information Retrieval.
Jack Lint: This is information retrieval not information dispersal.
Lime (clueless idiot): Computers are my forte!
Mr. Helpmann (regarding unstoppable terrorism): Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seem to have forgotten good old-fashioned virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game...
Sam Lowry: Sorry, I'm a bit of a stickler for paperwork. Where would we be if we didn't follow the correct procedures?
>Would you say Valve uses old-school modability vs. graphics-hype-tour-04?
I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything of the sort.
>Innovation in engine tech, good. Innovation in gameplay, bad.
I didn't say D3 was original, but HL2 innovation in gameplay? Don't make me laugh. Engine tech only matters if your game is playable and fun. Valve's "innovative gameplay" is a one-shot throwaway game, and a licensed physics engine, so they MUST have mods to make it viable. End of story.
>>There are no games using "real-time radiosity," period. Radiosity (or more generally, global illumination), almost by definiton, is too slow for real-time.`
>Not really...
Yes, really.
Pre-computed means NOT realtime. PRT is all about making objects LOOK like they're in a radiosity environment, when it's mostly statically pre-mapped, leaving just a couple paramaters to evaluate in hardware (namely, the view vector and object positions).
If you looked at these, you would see that the objects are nicely lit, but the environments do not receive any light bounces from them. Funny that.
> There are discussions of real time GI in an engine by Yann L. Unfortunatly, no one has seen that engine in action (other than a few scattered screen shots).
Gee, a message board post from several years ago claims the impossible and fails to deliver. What did I miss?
>"Precomputed Radiance Transfer (aka "Realtime Radiosity") support, allowing for Real-Time Subsurface Scattering and Soft Shadowing."
This is 100% marketing BS.
Yes, you can approximate many radiosity-like effects, and subsurface scattering, with PRT, and use multi-sample shadowing hardware. No, it is not "real-time radiosity," has nothing to do with it, and, as usual, is a limited approximation with clever fakery.
Ray tracing can easily approximate local GI behavior though, and real-time raytracing techniques are becoming more powerful. It's been said that graphics hardware will eventually converge to become raytracers, or something very close to that effect.
> The credibilty comment was in response to >>iD knows exactly what they're doing. Valve apparently can not compete in the brainpower department.
When a game is technically deficient, I chalk it up to stupid developers.
>Just because Valve choses to focus on different aspects of the game hardly limits their brainpower.
I was not commenting on the gameplay or design aspects.
>HL2 is one of the most enjoyable games I've played, and I've played a lot.
And I've probably played more than you. I can see north of 250 games from where I'm sitting. I'm not exactly biast, but feel free to call me cynical.
>Doom3 had it's moments, but it honestly wasn't as entertaining.
If you want to talk entertainment, FWIW, that's more or less how I felt about HL2. Some fun moments, lots of boring linear railroading, way too easy, crap for story, and very very bad pacing. D3 had great backstory (imagine that), constant adrenaline pumping action, and graphics that made a difference in the gameplay.
Despite the hype and marketing, I believe D3 is the more significant game. HL2 has a case of Halo-itis, where a basically good but unoriginal game is hailed as great and groundbreaking by a lot of fans who never played the liberally-quoted source material.
I'm not saying HL2 wasn't any fun, just that it's high visibility tends to lend it more credit than it has earned.
>>IIRC, The studder has to do with the audio driver sound mixer choking when starved during texture uploads to video memory. The best fix is to turn down sound detail.
>Or turn down the texture level. Either way, it's a matter of adjusting your settings correctly.
No, it isn't. The problem is that this is NOT a basic performance problem, it's an audio resource contention issue, and it's specific to certain system configurations. The impact of stuttering can lessened by turning down some settings, but it can happen even on the beefiest possible hardware.
From the Steam News page: "Fixed sound stuttering problems caused by thread contention in sound system." Note that lots of people are still having issues with this.
If you didn't have this issue, either your sound drivers actually work (gasp!), or your card or drivers lack the capability, and report this to HL2, which then mixes normally in software (possibly using DirectX). Either way, your setup is not experiencing the stuttering. It has nothing to do with basic performance.
Turning down the sound detail improves performance not because it's less CPU intensive, but because it lessens the load on the broken driver mixing / sound system thead contention / whatever.
At the very least, the default settings HL2 recommends for your box should not be so disfunctional (thus the "lack of brainpower" remark).
>>>In other words: no real-time lighting, just PRT, faked dynamic lights (which EVERY other game does) and projective shadows.
>>Whoa there trigger. There is real-time lighting. It just isn't universal and unified like Doom3.
>My point was that the "radiosity lighting" that Valve claims Source does is NOT the dynamic lighting in the game.
I should clarify this (to the best of my knowledge, mostly via the gdalgorithms mailing list). The precomputed radiosity is a static lighting environment for moving characters and objects. This accounts for the dynamic look of the lighting on characters in motion, essentially faking global illumination at interactive rates. Moving lights, however, are standard dynamic lighting + standard projective texture shadows. This is why lights in HL2 were not breakable, and dynamic objects are not self shadowing.
To contast, D3 has 100% dynamic direct lighting, and globally applied stencil-volume shadows, thus the unified shading model.
Obviously, preference non-withstanding, which is "better" depends on the desired game environment, and HL2 and D3 went in different directions there. One of them was innovative (though a lot of titles mimiced D3's stencil volume shadows and beat it to market, I don't know that any others yet have a unified shading model), and one was not (we've had PRT lightmaps forever, HL2's are just envmaps instead), but had great art content regardless.
>>The HDR rendering isn't enabled in HL2. It's seen only in an engine demo movie.
HDR is also not the same thing as just rendering using high-precision buffers (128bpp), which again is trivial given hardware support. I don't know what they claim to have done in your demo movie.
>>This should probably read "pre-computed radiance transfer." It's pre-baked radiosity, cooked as a variant on spherical harmonic lightmap encoding.
>Whereas Doom3 has no radiosity at all. No line of site to the light source, no light. Pitch black. Levels were very carefully designed to make this flaw less obvious.
This so-called "flaw" highlights a very prominent design decision: you can not play with the gamma to make the dark areas visible. Adding an ambient lighting term is absolutely trivial. Removing ambient lighting altogether for the game's conceptual integrity is what's impressive. This also coincides with the much debated flashlight-or-weapon system, again, obviously a design decision, as implementing weapon+flashlight is trivial (the first D3 mod made AFAIK).
>>In other words: no real-time lighting, just PRT, faked dynamic lights (which EVERY other game does) and projective shadows.
>Whoa there trigger. There is real-time lighting. It just isn't universal and unified like Doom3.
My point was that the "radiosity lighting" that Valve claims Source does is NOT the dynamic lighting in the game.
>>There is also no real HDR (high dynamic range) rendering in Source, just the same clever faking everyone else has.
>The HDR rendering isn't enabled in HL2. It's seen only in an engine demo movie. Far Cry is the only game I'm aware of that has HDR currently.
That's brilliant, the game that demonstrates the long bullet-list of engine features does not include them all.
>I've played a fair amount. It runs just fine for me. Everyone I've talked to with stutter/chugging problems has had their settings TOO HIGH for their equipment. They think they don't, but the fact that it stutters (where mine doesn't) says otherwise.
IIRC, The studder has to do with the audio driver sound mixer choking when starved during texture uploads to video memory. The best fix is to turn down sound detail. This is so laughably bad I don't know where to begin. Video driver quality is driven by very high competition, but sound drivers are almost universally total crap. Every serious game developer knows this, and virtually every game (excepting now-unnecessary 3d audio hardware support) does all audio mixing in software (not difficult or expensive), and then just fills audio-out buffers.
You'll recall that iD was blackmailed by Creative into supporting EAX by way of stencil-shadow patents. Obviously their preference was to compute all audio and mixing in software.
Quote: "The Source Engine's main lighting system is real-time radiosity lighting."
There are no games using "real-time radiosity," period. Radiosity (or more generally, global illumination), almost by definiton, is too slow for real-time.
This should probably read "pre-computed radiance transfer." It's pre-baked radiosity, cooked as a variant on spherical harmonic lightmap encoding. In other words: no real-time lighting, just PRT, faked dynamic lights (which EVERY other game does) and projective shadows. There is also no real HDR (high dynamic range) rendering in Source, just the same clever faking everyone else has.
This stuff is old hat. Relatively speaking, Source is not technically advanced at all. The only place it consistently (purportedly) wins is the content tools.
The big point that is NOT mentioned in the article is performance. Anyone who has played a lot of HL2 and CS:S can tell you that Source is just sloppy, on any hardware configuration. It is prone to periodic chugging, studders, fps drops from particle effects and physics lag online, etc.
D3, comparatively is just tight. The unified surface shading model (lighting and stencil shadows) rocks, and iD knows exactly what they're doing. Valve apparently can not compete in the brainpower department.
Game-wise, I personally preferred Doom 3 to Half-Life 2, old school playability vs. hype-tour-04, but that has nothing to do with the technical content.
Valve can only hope to win by being the preferred mod platform. Their SDK uses tested and proven, centuries old, Elaborate Puppet Theater(TM) technology, so naturally everyone adores them for maintaining the traditional status-quo. Hooray for Valve.
Thief 3 purportedly uses the same Unreal-derived engine as Deus Ex 2 (with extra light/shadow and Havok physics goodies).
Hopefully this will mean it is map and mod-friendly like most Unreal engine games.
This is, arguably, a more important engine feature than raw rendering capabilities and performance are these days, at least in terms of a title's longevity. Witness Half-Life for example.
Stealth games are slow because the deliberate pacing leads to very high tension situations. Tension is important, because it gives the player a vested interest in the outcome of their planning, and the higher the tension, the more important the outcome of their actions. This makes the player's observation and planning at least as important as their active execution. The danger of discovery and combat in Thief makes it's stealth very high stakes.
If you want more action and less planning, I'd recommend the Tenchu: Stealth Assassin series - where only line of sight contributes to stealth. Tenchu characters are practically Batman (auto-coiling grapple gun included) with Ninja gear. Played very well, a Tenchu game can be practically nonstop running 1-hit stealth kills, but it takes a lot of practice.
Hitman 2 & 3 are also great, if you like elaborately planned right-under-their-noses disguise, environment, and gadget oriented stealth killing. They also gives you the option to go full-guns-blazing if you are discovered.
Stealth games aren't for everyone, so if you just want action, play an action game already.
When the original Thief came out (back in 98/99?), I spent a good 6 hours or so at it one afternoon, only to finish when I realized I was starving and everyone had left our dorm for dinner. I had just quit the game and was sitting in the dark, gathering my appetite to head for the cafeteria, when another student walked by in the hallway, scuffing their feet and whistling.
I froze. Then I realized I couldn't find my blackjack. I was, in fact, sitting in my dorm room, and no longer playing Thief. That was a very weird realization, and somewhat of a dissappointment, because that noisy student sure had it coming.
If there's a single shortest path from A to B, then determining it is a graph theory problem. There is nothing AI-related about it.
How NPCs use the possible paths is where game AI applies. The article mentions steering, which is in the ballpark here.
The reason graphics can continually improve, while AI is very iffy, is that we know what it is game graphics should be approximating. There is no similar target for AI, as there is very little knowledge of how intelligence actually works.
The "G-Rated" restriction cuts out almost everything that attempts to model the Real World, seeing as it includes procreation and death by nature. Thank goodness the children can be protected from education about real world problems [note: this is sarcasm].
SimCity is obviously a good candidate (though you may need to disable the in-game disasters, depending on how strict you want to be).
Tropico would run a very close second in my book, excepting that you're a dicatator and can issue some serious edicts (including arrest, the death penalty, contraception bans, heretic branding, and religious inquisition). If anything, it's more educational than SimCity, for these very reasons.
Civ and the like are basically out. This is unfortunate, as Galactic Civilizations is great, and offers ethical choices similar to those in Tropico (though less direct, they're mostly of the "what do you do with the locals where you're colonizing" variety, as well as intergalactic warfare).
It has always struck me as absurd that the name of the game is "Civilization", while the object of the game is Conquest.
Capitalism and its kin can offer some very good business/economic simulations. Railroad Tycoon is a great game (and since v3 is out now, v2 should be dirt cheap - it's the one I have). Some of the other "XYZ Tycoon" games may also apply, but I haven't played them.
Some flight sims, sports, and puzzle games may also be appropriate.
The Stair Dismount game is a great educational physics sim, but it's a little bit violent. Likewise, Carmageddon 2 has imbued me with a healthy terror of automobiles.
The item forging system forced you to repeatedly save and load inventories from treasure chests in the forge shops in order to process the huge amounts of loot you'd acquire.
Basic VS protocol was to carry 3 main weapons at all times, each developing strengths against 2 classes of enemy creatures. It was not convenient to swap weapons via the menu system to play to their strengths and maximize their advancement every time you fought a different kind of enemy.
Fixing these things would allow VS to play to it's real strengths, and really benefit from the multiple playthrough features, without requiring inhuman patience.
If they updated the engine (cleaner renderer, and streaming room loading in the background), added a primary-weapon-designation and menu-free quick-select, and allowed the player a suitably huge inventory (even if only fully accessable in forges), I'd buy Vagrant Story again for the PS2 in a second.
Or you could pick up a copy of Tropico, the strategy game that lets you be the dictator-for-life of a small carribean island nation. I played the heck out of Tropico.
There's also the great Woody Allen flick "Bananas" in which he becomes a banana republic dictator.
Furthermore, you could even build computers out of them: cpu's, memory, and even displays. Space elevators are nifty, but nanotube computers are the application I'm most interested in. Google for it.
Slashdot Mirror
What's truly funny and insightful about this quote/comment is that Fight Club is not a very violent movie at all (and was very thoroughly mis-marketed as a result). FC is a funny, dark comedy, and what little real violence it has is truly repulsive. If anything, it's a movie with a very anti-violence message.
is perhaps the most consistently interesting and impressive feat of popular boardgame design I have had the pleasure to play, and gets big bonus points for following the source novel content and incorporating it into the game mechanics.
The following are movie quotes from the movie Brazil, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the country. The movie is named after the theme song.
Sam: I only know you got the wrong man.
Jack: Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the *right* man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?
Sam Lowry: Excuse me, Dawson, can you put me through to Mr. Helpmann's office?
Dawson: I'm afraid I can't sir. You have to go through the proper channels.
Sam Lowry: And you can't tell me what the proper channels are, because that's classified information?
Dawson: I'm glad to see the Ministry's continuing its tradition of recruiting the brightest and best, sir.
Sam Lowry: Thank you, Dawson.
Sam Lowry: My name's Lowry. Sam Lowry. I've been told to report to Mr. Warrenn.
Porter (Information Retrieval): Thirtieth floor, sir. You're expected.
Sam Lowry: Um...don't you want to search me?
Porter: No sir.
Sam Lowry: Do you want to see my ID?
Porter: No need, sir.
Sam Lowry: But I could be anybody.
Porter: No you couldn't sir. This is Information Retrieval.
Jack Lint: This is information retrieval not information dispersal.
Lime (clueless idiot): Computers are my forte!
Mr. Helpmann (regarding unstoppable terrorism): Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seem to have forgotten good old-fashioned virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game...
Sam Lowry: Sorry, I'm a bit of a stickler for paperwork. Where would we be if we didn't follow the correct procedures?
>Would you say Valve uses old-school modability vs. graphics-hype-tour-04?
I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything of the sort.
>Innovation in engine tech, good. Innovation in gameplay, bad.
I didn't say D3 was original, but HL2 innovation in gameplay? Don't make me laugh. Engine tech only matters if your game is playable and fun. Valve's "innovative gameplay" is a one-shot throwaway game, and a licensed physics engine, so they MUST have mods to make it viable. End of story.
>>There are no games using "real-time radiosity," period. Radiosity (or more generally, global illumination), almost by definiton, is too slow for real-time.`
>Not really...
Yes, really.
Pre-computed means NOT realtime. PRT is all about making objects LOOK like they're in a radiosity environment, when it's mostly statically pre-mapped, leaving just a couple paramaters to evaluate in hardware (namely, the view vector and object positions).
If you looked at these, you would see that the objects are nicely lit, but the environments do not receive any light bounces from them. Funny that.
> There are discussions of real time GI in an engine by Yann L. Unfortunatly, no one has seen that engine in action (other than a few scattered screen shots).
Gee, a message board post from several years ago claims the impossible and fails to deliver. What did I miss?
>"Precomputed Radiance Transfer (aka "Realtime Radiosity") support, allowing for Real-Time Subsurface Scattering and Soft Shadowing."
This is 100% marketing BS.
Yes, you can approximate many radiosity-like effects, and subsurface scattering, with PRT, and use multi-sample shadowing hardware. No, it is not "real-time radiosity," has nothing to do with it, and, as usual, is a limited approximation with clever fakery.
Ray tracing can easily approximate local GI behavior though, and real-time raytracing techniques are becoming more powerful. It's been said that graphics hardware will eventually converge to become raytracers, or something very close to that effect.
> The credibilty comment was in response to
>>iD knows exactly what they're doing. Valve apparently can not compete in the brainpower department.
When a game is technically deficient, I chalk it up to stupid developers.
>Just because Valve choses to focus on different aspects of the game hardly limits their brainpower.
I was not commenting on the gameplay or design aspects.
>HL2 is one of the most enjoyable games I've played, and I've played a lot.
And I've probably played more than you. I can see north of 250 games from where I'm sitting. I'm not exactly biast, but feel free to call me cynical.
>Doom3 had it's moments, but it honestly wasn't as entertaining.
If you want to talk entertainment, FWIW, that's more or less how I felt about HL2. Some fun moments, lots of boring linear railroading, way too easy, crap for story, and very very bad pacing. D3 had great backstory (imagine that), constant adrenaline pumping action, and graphics that made a difference in the gameplay.
Despite the hype and marketing, I believe D3 is the more significant game. HL2 has a case of Halo-itis, where a basically good but unoriginal game is hailed as great and groundbreaking by a lot of fans who never played the liberally-quoted source material.
I'm not saying HL2 wasn't any fun, just that it's high visibility tends to lend it more credit than it has earned.
>>IIRC, The studder has to do with the audio driver sound mixer choking when starved during texture uploads to video memory. The best fix is to turn down sound detail.
>Or turn down the texture level. Either way, it's a matter of adjusting your settings correctly.
No, it isn't. The problem is that this is NOT a basic performance problem, it's an audio resource contention issue, and it's specific to certain system configurations. The impact of stuttering can lessened by turning down some settings, but it can happen even on the beefiest possible hardware.
From the Steam News page: "Fixed sound stuttering problems caused by thread contention in sound system." Note that lots of people are still having issues with this.
If you didn't have this issue, either your sound drivers actually work (gasp!), or your card or drivers lack the capability, and report this to HL2, which then mixes normally in software (possibly using DirectX). Either way, your setup is not experiencing the stuttering. It has nothing to do with basic performance.
Turning down the sound detail improves performance not because it's less CPU intensive, but because it lessens the load on the broken driver mixing / sound system thead contention / whatever.
At the very least, the default settings HL2 recommends for your box should not be so disfunctional (thus the "lack of brainpower" remark).
>>>In other words: no real-time lighting, just PRT, faked dynamic lights (which EVERY other game does) and projective shadows.
>>Whoa there trigger. There is real-time lighting. It just isn't universal and unified like Doom3.
>My point was that the "radiosity lighting" that Valve claims Source does is NOT the dynamic lighting in the game.
I should clarify this (to the best of my knowledge, mostly via the gdalgorithms mailing list). The precomputed radiosity is a static lighting environment for moving characters and objects. This accounts for the dynamic look of the lighting on characters in motion, essentially faking global illumination at interactive rates. Moving lights, however, are standard dynamic lighting + standard projective texture shadows. This is why lights in HL2 were not breakable, and dynamic objects are not self shadowing.
To contast, D3 has 100% dynamic direct lighting, and globally applied stencil-volume shadows, thus the unified shading model.
Obviously, preference non-withstanding, which is "better" depends on the desired game environment, and HL2 and D3 went in different directions there. One of them was innovative (though a lot of titles mimiced D3's stencil volume shadows and beat it to market, I don't know that any others yet have a unified shading model), and one was not (we've had PRT lightmaps forever, HL2's are just envmaps instead), but had great art content regardless.
>>The HDR rendering isn't enabled in HL2. It's seen only in an engine demo movie.
HDR is also not the same thing as just rendering using high-precision buffers (128bpp), which again is trivial given hardware support. I don't know what they claim to have done in your demo movie.
>>This should probably read "pre-computed radiance transfer." It's pre-baked radiosity, cooked as a variant on spherical harmonic lightmap encoding.
2 8/ 1529222
>Whereas Doom3 has no radiosity at all. No line of site to the light source, no light. Pitch black. Levels were very carefully designed to make this flaw less obvious.
This so-called "flaw" highlights a very prominent design decision: you can not play with the gamma to make the dark areas visible. Adding an ambient lighting term is absolutely trivial. Removing ambient lighting altogether for the game's conceptual integrity is what's impressive. This also coincides with the much debated flashlight-or-weapon system, again, obviously a design decision, as implementing weapon+flashlight is trivial (the first D3 mod made AFAIK).
>>In other words: no real-time lighting, just PRT, faked dynamic lights (which EVERY other game does) and projective shadows.
>Whoa there trigger. There is real-time lighting. It just isn't universal and unified like Doom3.
My point was that the "radiosity lighting" that Valve claims Source does is NOT the dynamic lighting in the game.
>>There is also no real HDR (high dynamic range) rendering in Source, just the same clever faking everyone else has.
>The HDR rendering isn't enabled in HL2. It's seen only in an engine demo movie. Far Cry is the only game I'm aware of that has HDR currently.
That's brilliant, the game that demonstrates the long bullet-list of engine features does not include them all.
>I've played a fair amount. It runs just fine for me. Everyone I've talked to with stutter/chugging problems has had their settings TOO HIGH for their equipment. They think they don't, but the fact that it stutters (where mine doesn't) says otherwise.
IIRC, The studder has to do with the audio driver sound mixer choking when starved during texture uploads to video memory. The best fix is to turn down sound detail. This is so laughably bad I don't know where to begin. Video driver quality is driven by very high competition, but sound drivers are almost universally total crap. Every serious game developer knows this, and virtually every game (excepting now-unnecessary 3d audio hardware support) does all audio mixing in software (not difficult or expensive), and then just fills audio-out buffers.
You'll recall that iD was blackmailed by Creative into supporting EAX by way of stencil-shadow patents. Obviously their preference was to compute all audio and mixing in software.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/
>>Valve apparently can not compete in the brainpower department.
>Credibility? Gone.
Incredulity? Rising.
>It's understandable to have a personal preference, but try not to let it upset you so much when someone disagrees.
I stated my preference, and Valve's hype is not upsetting, just sad, especially when people buy it wholesale.
I RTFA, and this guy is clueless.
Quote: "The Source Engine's main lighting system is real-time radiosity lighting."
There are no games using "real-time radiosity," period. Radiosity (or more generally, global illumination), almost by definiton, is too slow for real-time.
This should probably read "pre-computed radiance transfer." It's pre-baked radiosity, cooked as a variant on spherical harmonic lightmap encoding. In other words: no real-time lighting, just PRT, faked dynamic lights (which EVERY other game does) and projective shadows. There is also no real HDR (high dynamic range) rendering in Source, just the same clever faking everyone else has.
This stuff is old hat. Relatively speaking, Source is not technically advanced at all. The only place it consistently (purportedly) wins is the content tools.
The big point that is NOT mentioned in the article is performance. Anyone who has played a lot of HL2 and CS:S can tell you that Source is just sloppy, on any hardware configuration. It is prone to periodic chugging, studders, fps drops from particle effects and physics lag online, etc.
D3, comparatively is just tight. The unified surface shading model (lighting and stencil shadows) rocks, and iD knows exactly what they're doing. Valve apparently can not compete in the brainpower department.
Game-wise, I personally preferred Doom 3 to Half-Life 2, old school playability vs. hype-tour-04, but that has nothing to do with the technical content.
Valve can only hope to win by being the preferred mod platform. Their SDK uses tested and proven, centuries old, Elaborate Puppet Theater(TM) technology, so naturally everyone adores them for maintaining the traditional status-quo. Hooray for Valve.
I was an '@' for halloween this year.
A custom embroidered t-shirt was all it took.
This is the right idea. iirc, Valve highered bittorrent's creator, and this is one of the major reasons that Steam sucks so much less than it used to.
Pot? Kettle calling. Black, black I say! Black!
Geeks play Go. Nuff said.
Also good social that I've been playing: Cosmic Enconter, Game of Thrones, Settlers of Catan, and Citadels.
If you have a PS2 handy, Culdcept is an interesting Monopoly / MTG mix, and you can play 4-players with a multitap or hot-seat.
Thief 3 purportedly uses the same Unreal-derived engine as Deus Ex 2 (with extra light/shadow and Havok physics goodies).
Hopefully this will mean it is map and mod-friendly like most Unreal engine games.
This is, arguably, a more important engine feature than raw rendering capabilities and performance are these days, at least in terms of a title's longevity. Witness Half-Life for example.
Stealth games are slow because the deliberate pacing leads to very high tension situations. Tension is important, because it gives the player a vested interest in the outcome of their planning, and the higher the tension, the more important the outcome of their actions. This makes the player's observation and planning at least as important as their active execution. The danger of discovery and combat in Thief makes it's stealth very high stakes.
If you want more action and less planning, I'd recommend the Tenchu: Stealth Assassin series - where only line of sight contributes to stealth. Tenchu characters are practically Batman (auto-coiling grapple gun included) with Ninja gear. Played very well, a Tenchu game can be practically nonstop running 1-hit stealth kills, but it takes a lot of practice.
Hitman 2 & 3 are also great, if you like elaborately planned right-under-their-noses disguise, environment, and gadget oriented stealth killing. They also gives you the option to go full-guns-blazing if you are discovered.
Stealth games aren't for everyone, so if you just want action, play an action game already.
When the original Thief came out (back in 98/99?), I spent a good 6 hours or so at it one afternoon, only to finish when I realized I was starving and everyone had left our dorm for dinner. I had just quit the game and was sitting in the dark, gathering my appetite to head for the cafeteria, when another student walked by in the hallway, scuffing their feet and whistling.
I froze. Then I realized I couldn't find my blackjack. I was, in fact, sitting in my dorm room, and no longer playing Thief. That was a very weird realization, and somewhat of a dissappointment, because that noisy student sure had it coming.
I can't wait for Thief 3.
If there's a single shortest path from A to B, then determining it is a graph theory problem. There is nothing AI-related about it.
How NPCs use the possible paths is where game AI applies. The article mentions steering, which is in the ballpark here.
The reason graphics can continually improve, while AI is very iffy, is that we know what it is game graphics should be approximating. There is no similar target for AI, as there is very little knowledge of how intelligence actually works.
The "G-Rated" restriction cuts out almost everything that attempts to model the Real World, seeing as it includes procreation and death by nature. Thank goodness the children can be protected from education about real world problems [note: this is sarcasm].
SimCity is obviously a good candidate (though you may need to disable the in-game disasters, depending on how strict you want to be).
Tropico would run a very close second in my book, excepting that you're a dicatator and can issue some serious edicts (including arrest, the death penalty, contraception bans, heretic branding, and religious inquisition). If anything, it's more educational than SimCity, for these very reasons.
Civ and the like are basically out. This is unfortunate, as Galactic Civilizations is great, and offers ethical choices similar to those in Tropico (though less direct, they're mostly of the "what do you do with the locals where you're colonizing" variety, as well as intergalactic warfare).
It has always struck me as absurd that the name of the game is "Civilization", while the object of the game is Conquest.
Capitalism and its kin can offer some very good business/economic simulations. Railroad Tycoon is a great game (and since v3 is out now, v2 should be dirt cheap - it's the one I have). Some of the other "XYZ Tycoon" games may also apply, but I haven't played them.
Some flight sims, sports, and puzzle games may also be appropriate.
The Stair Dismount game is a great educational physics sim, but it's a little bit violent. Likewise, Carmageddon 2 has imbued me with a healthy terror of automobiles.
except for the interface issues mentioned.
The item forging system forced you to repeatedly save and load inventories from treasure chests in the forge shops in order to process the huge amounts of loot you'd acquire.
Basic VS protocol was to carry 3 main weapons at all times, each developing strengths against 2 classes of enemy creatures. It was not convenient to swap weapons via the menu system to play to their strengths and maximize their advancement every time you fought a different kind of enemy.
Fixing these things would allow VS to play to it's real strengths, and really benefit from the multiple playthrough features, without requiring inhuman patience.
If they updated the engine (cleaner renderer, and streaming room loading in the background), added a primary-weapon-designation and menu-free quick-select, and allowed the player a suitably huge inventory (even if only fully accessable in forges), I'd buy Vagrant Story again for the PS2 in a second.
If you don't know what NS is, try googling for reviews (as their website has been temporarily replaced with a download page).
http://natural-selection.org/
> where the worlds most ecconomically prosperous country exports almost nothing phisical
IIRC, the USA's largest export industry is weapons.
The second largest is videogames.
Exactally. Welcome to the PC game market reality.
Or you could pick up a copy of Tropico, the strategy game that lets you be the dictator-for-life of a small carribean island nation. I played the heck out of Tropico.
There's also the great Woody Allen flick "Bananas" in which he becomes a banana republic dictator.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Furthermore, you could even build computers out of them: cpu's, memory, and even displays. Space elevators are nifty, but nanotube computers are the application I'm most interested in. Google for it.