The problem is the editors choosing articles submitted by the site. It definitely doesn't give a good message.
Would you prefer it if the stories were submitted by those same editors, but anonymously?
It sounds like there's going to be some interesting news revealed, anyway - subscribers to the offline, dead-tree CGW have learned a lot more already, it would appear. And for a change, I won't have to buy some crappy games magazine or look for dodgy scans for the information...;-)
I have practically downloaded every free mod available for HL2. So far they all feel very beta-ish. Plan of Attack, Garry's physics mod, strider mod, you name it... it seems like the HL1 mods were much more fun.
Well, if you look at the first year of single-player maps for the original Half-Life, for example, there wasn't a huge amount of quality content appearing. A couple of classics, such as USS Darkstar and ETC, but even they seem somewhat lightweight when played now.
Half-Life 2 is undoubtedly a great modding platform, but everyone's been very busy figuring out how it all goes together. Until recently, the documentation was a bit lacking (it ranged from a little being great to the majority being non-existent) but fortunately the Valve Developer Wiki has changed the situation tremendously.
I've been learning single-player Half-Life mapping since about late January - I assumed it would be easy (the software is superficially similar to the original Half-Life) but some months later I'm only now feeling proficient enough to consider releasing the map I've been working on (less cryptic version!)...
The best part of a year for around 45 minutes of gameplay? It's hard work!
Of course, the second map's going to be far easier, and I suspect Valve themselves are finding something similar now they've learned how to operate their Source engine...
Along the same lines... why does the tools palate have to have a menu at the top of it? That should be located in a central place as well, like the document's menu bar.
What do you do when there's no document open?
The tools window is The GIMP. Its (few) menus are operations which do not act on any currently opened document. Conversely, a document window's menu actions act on that particular document.
If The GIMP's interface annoys you so much, try using vi, Windows Media Player 10 (WHO STOLE THE MENU?), Blender, Softimage XSI, whatever...
I've been using The GIMP for about seven years now (it's the reason I originally became interested in Linux). It's quite possibly my favourite program ever, and until recently I would have agreed that the lack of a Windows-style MDI was most definitely a good thing.
It's brilliant with virtual desktops. It's great with multiple monitors. The interface works really well with KDE's window manager; it works really well with X11.app on my iBook.
Of course, I then recently installed in on Windows, having until then never used it on that platform. Setup was gloriously smooth - but actually using The GIMP alongside other programs proved distinctly awkward, thanks to the horrible window management in, erm, Windows.
I'm really not sure what a correct, elegant solution would be. I loathe the usual Windows container-window MDI, and I do realise that GTK has very little, if any support for writing applications in such a manner, but I do wonder how the situation could be improved for Windows users. A default setup with all the tools and palettes in one tall window on the left of the screen, and some code to grab the 'Maximise' button on image windows so that they expand to fit the space not occupied by the tools window?
Likewise, the 'Minimise' button on the tools window could minimise all windows belonging to The GIMP - perhaps a bit of a hack, but it could help. The GIMP's definitely not a Windows program, and many aspects of the interface's design make perfect sense when you realise it's the same interface for all platforms, but Windows is (unfortunately) an important platform, so some concessions may have to be made...
i don't know how the 'know your roots' t-shirt is ironic.
I'm sure NTK used to sell a far more suitable T-shirt for such events, courtesy of the foul-mouthed UK Resistance. Imagine the following, in huge white monospaced lettering on a black shirt:
10 PRINT "RETRO GAMES ARE SHIT" 20 GOTO 10
I'd be amazed if the wearer were to escape alive...;-]
Same with telephone calls. My girlfriend thought I was mad when I just hung up on someone trying to sell me double glazing.
Don't forget that the principle can also be used in reverse! If I get a call from someone trying to sell me something, I'll get them talking, then quietly put the phone on the desk and leave them to it. A few minutes later I'll quietly hang up...
In a car, it's a very direct conversion, the chemical energy in gas is turned into mechanical energy that moves the car. It's a fairly efficient process, over all.
Heading kind of off-topic, but not really. Read up on heat engines. Even if a petrol engine was in fact a maximum-efficiency, thought-experiment-only Carnot engine, with the temperature range available you might get 30% efficiency at a theoretical best.
Admittedly it's a few years since I did any thermodynamics, and an internal combustion engine definitely isn't an ideal heat engine, but electric motors are already much, much more efficient - the theoretical maximum for those is 100% efficiency for a start...
As for HL3 on xbox, I'm not sure what to make of that picture. If I'm squinting properly it looks like the entry above Halflife 3 reads Id Quake/Doom, which means what?
... And they're in a box which appears to be labelled 'Game Engines'.
The Half-Life 2 engine is called Source. If this crappy presentation had any real input from Valve, wouldn't the Half-Life 3 engine name be given (e.g. 'Source 2' or whatever)?
It's highly likely that a Half-Life 3 would be ported to at least one console, like with the first two games, but a successful PC game developer chucking away modders, its Steam distribution platform, audience etc.? Hmm...
The crater sides themselves seem pretty severe and pretty deep, I'd think driving (at least the current rovers) down would be a VERY long shot.
The latitude could be a problem too, albeit for a different reason - it's thought the ice is there because there's so little sunlight getting to the crater's floor.
This hypothetical rover had better have an RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator), 'cause solar panels defintely aren't going to work too well...:-]
It's getting the light in the gameworld to behave dynamically and realistically and to interact with those textures realistically that is the hard part and requires serious programming skills.
That might be the case for more 'general-purpose' textures being used in a game such as a first-person shooter, but I imagine that a texture of, say, the side of a fire-station in a driving game is likely to be used in one place only - on the side of a fire-station.
Since it's photo-sourced, most of the 'correct' lighting will effectively be present in the texture already, such as slight shadows under window ledges and so on. You could probably stick unlit, unshaded textured polygons straight into the game and it could look pretty good anyway - anything else is just a bonus. I imagine the final lighting model is pretty simplistic, and the only complicated things will be stuff like street-lights, car headlights and similar for a 'night' version of the city...
I think the main technical problems in such an approach are taking all the photos to begin with, and having enough temporary storage space to keep everything handy. An uncompressed, 1024-square 32-bit RGBA texture weighs in at a hefty 4MB, 1MB when compressed with DXT5 - it's all going to add up!
With regard to 'strong' voices - it does indeed sound like the engine has that feature, and it's just missing from the models:
The emphasis track scales the intensity of phonemes during playback. For certain phonemes, you may want to author a "weak" and "strong" version and add these to the "phonemes_weak" and "phonemes_strong" expression class files. Note that Valve did not actually use this feature in shipping HL2 (but in theory, it should work).
That particular debate incited hundreds of messages on HL2 boards. It enraged so many developers, players, and server administrators, all at once, that Valve was forced to reverse the decision.
I hadn't actually heard about this situation before your post, so I wasn't aware of the level of impact on third-party CS:S mods. But I do still sympathise with Valve people to a degree, especially after reading up on it a bit more - it seems someone got rid of an unused (by Valve) function from CS:Source, and was a bit surprised to discover that many other people were depending upon its presence.
Highly annoying if you're one of those people, but I don't think the highly confrontational nature of typical gaming communities really helps in issues like this. Like the upcoming Day of Defeat port to Source - initially there was bitching about some screenshots with rather modest graphical changes over the original, and then when the release was delayed for a massive art pass over everything? Cue yet more bitching about promised release dates.
Basically, they're screwed whatever they do, and any mistakes or short-tempered comments by employees are taken as massive slights against, well, everybody...
An apparently unused function was removed. It broke a lot of third-party mods. It was put back again. If this 'enrages people' or makes your 'blood boil', I think you're all taking it a bit too seriously...:-)
The screenshot in question was this one: [snip]
What, the one with the previously unseen Combine soldier variant? That's no standard HL2 screenshot!;-)
a) realtime radiosity is very hard to render (in realtime) and Carmac insisted that every light should be fully dynamic and cast fully dynamic (realtime) stencil shadows.
I think the Doom 3 engine route is definitely more 'elegant' than many other engines (it seems all content has normal maps, specular maps and so on and is rendered using the same pathways, and all lights are treated the same - correct me if I'm wrong!) but that apparent elegance doesn't really compete too well against the hacky, everything's-a-special-case engines from various other developers.
I reckon a prime example of the latter design is the Far Cry engine. When I played it, I got the sense of it almost being multiple engines glued together in a not-particularly-seamless manner. It was ideal for the game, however - I don't think there's any indoors, dynamic-shadows engine that could render miles-across desert islands (and vice versa), for instance.
Unfortunately, the 'elegant' route doesn't necessarily look all that great if stuff like radiosity has to be left out. Some weird hybrid using pre-calculated lightmaps for ambient lighting and dynamic, stencil lights for characters could look pretty cool and have the performance benefits you mentioned, but is it 'clean' enough?...
Tens of thousands of people every day on their office LANs. It's not generating any new revenue for Id, but Id is still the king by far if you're counting numbers of current players.
Interesting question imo, since Valve been spouting off how they've build the Source Engine themselves, yet, when the alpha-code-leak happened, various people found entries from the Quake-C code inside (either commented out, or still in use):
I'm fairly sure that it's QuakeC (or a derivative) that's extensively used in Half-Life and Half-Life 2's model animation system. It seems a bit coincidental that they'd choose the '.QC' extension for a simple, compiled-to-bytecode scripting language...
From the point of view of a mapper like myself, the Source engine has many design ideas in common with the original Quake engine, but they've been extended so far that it's a near-complete rewrite. I imagine the only aspects left unchanged, if any, weren't worth changing anyway.
The game does not require you use the latest drivers.
It is merely recommended you upgrade drivers when you try to play with older ones.
It's definitely just a recommendation - it's got options like 'Go to manufacturer's driver website', 'Continue anyway' and a checkbox along the lines of 'Don't tell me again'.
I've found it quite handy. Unlike some people, I don't check the Nvidia website on a daily basis for new software - and if a manufacturer's driver update hosed someone's machine, it's hardly Valve's fault...
Read the hlcoders mailing list sometime. You'll hear Valve employees like Alfred Reynolds say that mod developers are "hackers holding Valve hostages", with regards to trivial things like printing to the screen. I'm not kidding.
Way to 'quote' out of context. Here's the original email:
That is part of the leaf code of the mod, not an exported API. Assuming that CS:S uses the same code that we ship in the SDK is wrong (because they won't match). Injecting network messages and assuming the same implementation in a binary you don't control is not going to work. We have provided a stable, consistent (across all mods) API for plugins to message users. We have already added new functionality to this interface at the request of plugin authors, a quick email discussion with us and I am sure we can find a middle ground. Also note that plugins already use the exported API for HL2MP (and other 3rd party mods I suspect).
We are not going to be held hostage to 3rd party programmers using triggering out of date and unused game code that isn't part of a published API (i.e part of an exported interface function).
OH NOES!!!1 THEY'RE BEING EVIL BY CHANGING UNDOCUMENTED, UNUSED, NON-EXPORTED LOW-LEVEL FUNCTIONS!
Also, with regards to the expansion... they've released one screenshot, and an onlooker realized it was actually a screenshot from HL2 Single Player.
Anyone know why this would be? For artistic purposes? I don't play first person shooters, so I don't really understand why someone would want this...
The section they're referring to is presumably the long scripted sequence near then end when Gordon has been captured - I imagine the low field-of-view was mainly so the player could actually see the characters' faces.
A FOV of 90 degrees, while supposedly 'standard' amongst first-person shooters, will make things look horrendously mangled. One problem in the original Half-Life for modders was that first-person weapons models would basically look awful unless they had some perspective-breaking distortion applied to them. A chunky-looking shotgun could otherwise look like a pea-shooter and so on.
To counteract this in HL2, the weapons models are rendered with a FOV of 54 degrees, apparently - this is meant to be roughly how things should appear if you treat the monitor as a true 'window' into a 3D world, given a typical screen size and seating position. The 75 degrees for the full view is presumably a compromise between peripheral vision and realism, and it's definitely something I appreciated in the game...
Biologically speaking it's not much different from a chicken.
And biologically speaking, you're not much different from a goat.
Parrots are remarkably intelligent, social animals with abilities seemingly far beyond the amount of grey matter they actually possess. I gather that the Alex experiment has been to see where the limits actually are - I'm not convinced by this 'zero' thing, but the bird's definitely learned counting beyond the level of a mere parlour trick...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is the editors choosing articles submitted by the site. It definitely doesn't give a good message.
;-)
Would you prefer it if the stories were submitted by those same editors, but anonymously?
It sounds like there's going to be some interesting news revealed, anyway - subscribers to the offline, dead-tree CGW have learned a lot more already, it would appear. And for a change, I won't have to buy some crappy games magazine or look for dodgy scans for the information...
I have practically downloaded every free mod available for HL2. So far they all feel very beta-ish. Plan of Attack, Garry's physics mod, strider mod, you name it... it seems like the HL1 mods were much more fun.
Well, if you look at the first year of single-player maps for the original Half-Life, for example, there wasn't a huge amount of quality content appearing. A couple of classics, such as USS Darkstar and ETC, but even they seem somewhat lightweight when played now.
Half-Life 2 is undoubtedly a great modding platform, but everyone's been very busy figuring out how it all goes together. Until recently, the documentation was a bit lacking (it ranged from a little being great to the majority being non-existent) but fortunately the Valve Developer Wiki has changed the situation tremendously.
I've been learning single-player Half-Life mapping since about late January - I assumed it would be easy (the software is superficially similar to the original Half-Life) but some months later I'm only now feeling proficient enough to consider releasing the map I've been working on (less cryptic version!)...
The best part of a year for around 45 minutes of gameplay? It's hard work!
Of course, the second map's going to be far easier, and I suspect Valve themselves are finding something similar now they've learned how to operate their Source engine...
Along the same lines... why does the tools palate have to have a menu at the top of it? That should be located in a central place as well, like the document's menu bar.
What do you do when there's no document open?
The tools window is The GIMP. Its (few) menus are operations which do not act on any currently opened document. Conversely, a document window's menu actions act on that particular document.
If The GIMP's interface annoys you so much, try using vi, Windows Media Player 10 (WHO STOLE THE MENU?), Blender, Softimage XSI, whatever...
I've been using The GIMP for about seven years now (it's the reason I originally became interested in Linux). It's quite possibly my favourite program ever, and until recently I would have agreed that the lack of a Windows-style MDI was most definitely a good thing.
It's brilliant with virtual desktops. It's great with multiple monitors. The interface works really well with KDE's window manager; it works really well with X11.app on my iBook.
Of course, I then recently installed in on Windows, having until then never used it on that platform. Setup was gloriously smooth - but actually using The GIMP alongside other programs proved distinctly awkward, thanks to the horrible window management in, erm, Windows.
I'm really not sure what a correct, elegant solution would be. I loathe the usual Windows container-window MDI, and I do realise that GTK has very little, if any support for writing applications in such a manner, but I do wonder how the situation could be improved for Windows users. A default setup with all the tools and palettes in one tall window on the left of the screen, and some code to grab the 'Maximise' button on image windows so that they expand to fit the space not occupied by the tools window?
Likewise, the 'Minimise' button on the tools window could minimise all windows belonging to The GIMP - perhaps a bit of a hack, but it could help. The GIMP's definitely not a Windows program, and many aspects of the interface's design make perfect sense when you realise it's the same interface for all platforms, but Windows is (unfortunately) an important platform, so some concessions may have to be made...
I presume the 'redundant' moderation was because you actually typed 'PIN numbers'.
;-)
...
Redundancy, geddit? Geddit?
I'm truly sorry...
1. Halo is a sequel to Matathon 2, not the same game as Marathon.
So which one is Marathon Infinity a sequel to?
i don't know how the 'know your roots' t-shirt is ironic.
;-]
I'm sure NTK used to sell a far more suitable T-shirt for such events, courtesy of the foul-mouthed UK Resistance. Imagine the following, in huge white monospaced lettering on a black shirt:
10 PRINT "RETRO GAMES ARE SHIT"
20 GOTO 10
I'd be amazed if the wearer were to escape alive...
Same with telephone calls. My girlfriend thought I was mad when I just hung up on someone trying to sell me double glazing.
Don't forget that the principle can also be used in reverse! If I get a call from someone trying to sell me something, I'll get them talking, then quietly put the phone on the desk and leave them to it. A few minutes later I'll quietly hang up...
In a car, it's a very direct conversion, the chemical energy in gas is turned into mechanical energy that moves the car. It's a fairly efficient process, over all.
Heading kind of off-topic, but not really. Read up on heat engines. Even if a petrol engine was in fact a maximum-efficiency, thought-experiment-only Carnot engine, with the temperature range available you might get 30% efficiency at a theoretical best.
Admittedly it's a few years since I did any thermodynamics, and an internal combustion engine definitely isn't an ideal heat engine, but electric motors are already much, much more efficient - the theoretical maximum for those is 100% efficiency for a start...
... And whatever happened to air-breathing rockets?
Although what NASA needs now is some tried-and-tested, reliable and simple launcher rather than some extremely difficult blue-sky research, of course.
As for HL3 on xbox, I'm not sure what to make of that picture. If I'm squinting properly it looks like the entry above Halflife 3 reads Id Quake/Doom, which means what?
... And they're in a box which appears to be labelled 'Game Engines'.
The Half-Life 2 engine is called Source. If this crappy presentation had any real input from Valve, wouldn't the Half-Life 3 engine name be given (e.g. 'Source 2' or whatever)?
... And Valve would throw away all its modders?
It's highly likely that a Half-Life 3 would be ported to at least one console, like with the first two games, but a successful PC game developer chucking away modders, its Steam distribution platform, audience etc.? Hmm...
The crater sides themselves seem pretty severe and pretty deep, I'd think driving (at least the current rovers) down would be a VERY long shot.
:-]
The latitude could be a problem too, albeit for a different reason - it's thought the ice is there because there's so little sunlight getting to the crater's floor.
This hypothetical rover had better have an RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator), 'cause solar panels defintely aren't going to work too well...
Quick, can someone post a current weather report for Hell, please?
...
;-)
Here you go - apparently it's cold and rainy there today, but improving by next week.
Oh, hang on, you said Hell? Surely the two are synonymous?
It's getting the light in the gameworld to behave dynamically and realistically and to interact with those textures realistically that is the hard part and requires serious programming skills.
That might be the case for more 'general-purpose' textures being used in a game such as a first-person shooter, but I imagine that a texture of, say, the side of a fire-station in a driving game is likely to be used in one place only - on the side of a fire-station.
Since it's photo-sourced, most of the 'correct' lighting will effectively be present in the texture already, such as slight shadows under window ledges and so on. You could probably stick unlit, unshaded textured polygons straight into the game and it could look pretty good anyway - anything else is just a bonus. I imagine the final lighting model is pretty simplistic, and the only complicated things will be stuff like street-lights, car headlights and similar for a 'night' version of the city...
I think the main technical problems in such an approach are taking all the photos to begin with, and having enough temporary storage space to keep everything handy. An uncompressed, 1024-square 32-bit RGBA texture weighs in at a hefty 4MB, 1MB when compressed with DXT5 - it's all going to add up!
That particular debate incited hundreds of messages on HL2 boards. It enraged so many developers, players, and server administrators, all at once, that Valve was forced to reverse the decision.
:-)
;-)
I hadn't actually heard about this situation before your post, so I wasn't aware of the level of impact on third-party CS:S mods. But I do still sympathise with Valve people to a degree, especially after reading up on it a bit more - it seems someone got rid of an unused (by Valve) function from CS:Source, and was a bit surprised to discover that many other people were depending upon its presence.
Highly annoying if you're one of those people, but I don't think the highly confrontational nature of typical gaming communities really helps in issues like this. Like the upcoming Day of Defeat port to Source - initially there was bitching about some screenshots with rather modest graphical changes over the original, and then when the release was delayed for a massive art pass over everything? Cue yet more bitching about promised release dates.
Basically, they're screwed whatever they do, and any mistakes or short-tempered comments by employees are taken as massive slights against, well, everybody...
An apparently unused function was removed. It broke a lot of third-party mods. It was put back again. If this 'enrages people' or makes your 'blood boil', I think you're all taking it a bit too seriously...
The screenshot in question was this one: [snip]
What, the one with the previously unseen Combine soldier variant? That's no standard HL2 screenshot!
a) realtime radiosity is very hard to render (in realtime) and Carmac insisted that every light should be fully dynamic and cast fully dynamic (realtime) stencil shadows.
...
I think the Doom 3 engine route is definitely more 'elegant' than many other engines (it seems all content has normal maps, specular maps and so on and is rendered using the same pathways, and all lights are treated the same - correct me if I'm wrong!) but that apparent elegance doesn't really compete too well against the hacky, everything's-a-special-case engines from various other developers.
I reckon a prime example of the latter design is the Far Cry engine. When I played it, I got the sense of it almost being multiple engines glued together in a not-particularly-seamless manner. It was ideal for the game, however - I don't think there's any indoors, dynamic-shadows engine that could render miles-across desert islands (and vice versa), for instance.
Unfortunately, the 'elegant' route doesn't necessarily look all that great if stuff like radiosity has to be left out. Some weird hybrid using pre-calculated lightmaps for ambient lighting and dynamic, stencil lights for characters could look pretty cool and have the performance benefits you mentioned, but is it 'clean' enough?
Tens of thousands of people every day on their office LANs. It's not generating any new revenue for Id, but Id is still the king by far if you're counting numbers of current players.
Meanwhile, in the non-LAN world...
Interesting question imo, since Valve been spouting off how they've build the Source Engine themselves, yet, when the alpha-code-leak happened, various people found entries from the Quake-C code inside (either commented out, or still in use) :
I'm fairly sure that it's QuakeC (or a derivative) that's extensively used in Half-Life and Half-Life 2's model animation system. It seems a bit coincidental that they'd choose the '.QC' extension for a simple, compiled-to-bytecode scripting language...
From the point of view of a mapper like myself, the Source engine has many design ideas in common with the original Quake engine, but they've been extended so far that it's a near-complete rewrite. I imagine the only aspects left unchanged, if any, weren't worth changing anyway.
The game does not require you use the latest drivers.
It is merely recommended you upgrade drivers when you try to play with older ones.
It's definitely just a recommendation - it's got options like 'Go to manufacturer's driver website', 'Continue anyway' and a checkbox along the lines of 'Don't tell me again'.
I've found it quite handy. Unlike some people, I don't check the Nvidia website on a daily basis for new software - and if a manufacturer's driver update hosed someone's machine, it's hardly Valve's fault...
Way to 'quote' out of context. Here's the original email:
OH NOES!!!1 THEY'RE BEING EVIL BY CHANGING UNDOCUMENTED, UNUSED, NON-EXPORTED LOW-LEVEL FUNCTIONS!
Also, with regards to the expansion... they've released one screenshot, and an onlooker realized it was actually a screenshot from HL2 Single Player.
Hmm. Presumably I've been imagining things...
Anyone know why this would be? For artistic purposes? I don't play first person shooters, so I don't really understand why someone would want this...
The section they're referring to is presumably the long scripted sequence near then end when Gordon has been captured - I imagine the low field-of-view was mainly so the player could actually see the characters' faces.
A FOV of 90 degrees, while supposedly 'standard' amongst first-person shooters, will make things look horrendously mangled. One problem in the original Half-Life for modders was that first-person weapons models would basically look awful unless they had some perspective-breaking distortion applied to them. A chunky-looking shotgun could otherwise look like a pea-shooter and so on.
To counteract this in HL2, the weapons models are rendered with a FOV of 54 degrees, apparently - this is meant to be roughly how things should appear if you treat the monitor as a true 'window' into a 3D world, given a typical screen size and seating position. The 75 degrees for the full view is presumably a compromise between peripheral vision and realism, and it's definitely something I appreciated in the game...
Biologically speaking it's not much different from a chicken.
And biologically speaking, you're not much different from a goat.
Parrots are remarkably intelligent, social animals with abilities seemingly far beyond the amount of grey matter they actually possess. I gather that the Alex experiment has been to see where the limits actually are - I'm not convinced by this 'zero' thing, but the bird's definitely learned counting beyond the level of a mere parlour trick...
When will NASA finally start investigating the chances of having am impropability drive?
;-)
I believe they've described the construction of such a device as being 'virtually impossible'...