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"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] dev null> wrote in message
news:48976fd4$1@news.povray.org...
> St. wrote:
>> Ooh... I'm right at the bottom of this long thread!
>
> Yah - I'm on top. ;-)
>
> [How often do I get to say that??]
Heh, you know that patience is a virtue, right? ;)
And you do know that when you're 56 years old with 2+ kids with their own
children, (your grand-children), you won't... won't... remember me typing
the above... ?
<sniff - the internet is bad>
~Steve~
>
> --
> http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
> http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:48977221$1@news.povray.org...
>>> Today, anybody with sufficient technical bent can easily sit down with a
>>> computer and cut CDs of their music, or burn DVDs of their graphics and
>>> animations. It's not even expensive any more.
>>>
>>> We are truly living in the future, my friends...
>>
>> Yep, and even possible serious gamemakers can do it for free*. I've
>> got to say that CryTek's CryEngine2/(Sandbox2) is fantastic!
>
> I have absolutely no idea how to do that.
Getting Crysis = free editor. Play around in the editor and listen to
what the 15 year olds (ha, and older!) ;) have to teach on the forums. OR,
you have FarCry installed, yes? Well, CryEngine1 is available with that
game. Look on your disc for SandBox1 and have a play! Just mess around with
it for fun! Here's my first vid (Crysis) on YT:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjaxyfTW3UY
This shows how slow my comp is, but man, it was fun! About 180 Korean
trucks falling from the sky... blissfull destressing. :)
>
> I see a bunch of guys used the Source engine to build a game called
> Dystopia. It's set in a dystopian future and features gameplay that
> alternates between the real world and a Tron-like "cyberspace". It's a
> slightly naff game, but far better than anything I could have built!
>
> More recently another group of people used Source to build a very
> different game called Insurgency. This is your hyper-realistic US Marines
> vs Iraqi insurgents battlefield game. And when I say hyper-realistic,
> there is no crosshair on the screen. You walk at about 1.5 MPH. It's
> almost impossible to know what's going on. And as soon as you get near a
> combat zone, you instantly drop dead due to a single sniper bullet. (In
> other words, it is absolutely no fun at all, just like a real war.)
Oh, trust me, it is just like a real war (in a game experience at
least). I said to my son only last night, "What would you do if you were
ordered to go to the front line to save your country?" He said, "I'd fight".
I then said that he'll be killed fairly soon. No comment from him, and a
despondant face to match. Me? Stuff the war. I'd be around the back sniping
them if possible. I know for a fact that I wouldn't adhere to war 'rules'
whatever I might do. I'd do my best though for my country of course.
>
> Yet another group of people are working on a complete conversion of the
> original Halflife game. (Although the initial artwork - which impressive -
> deviates too far from the original for my liking.)
>
> I have absolutely no idea how in the game of God any of this is possible.
> But people have done it, so it *must* be possible...
Yes, it's true, people have done it, including myself. I'm about a month
away from publishing my first Crysis level, (the first in a series of three,
hopefully), and even though I've published many PoV-Ray images to the world,
it's scaring the crap out of me to upload my map. Really.O-O
~Steve~
> --
> http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
> http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I have absolutely no idea how in the game of God any of this is
> possible. But people have done it, so it *must* be possible...
The one I appreciated most was Thief 2X, a full 15-level (or so) new
game, with new story, characters, weapons, loot, levels, etc for the
engine in Thief 2. All done as a free fan mission.
Doubly impressive if you know how hard Thief's editor sucks.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
Ever notice how people in a zombie movie never already know how to
kill zombies? Ask 100 random people in America how to kill someone
who has reanimated from the dead in a secret viral weapons lab,
and how many do you think already know you need a head-shot?
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>> I have absolutely no idea how to do that.
>
> Getting Crysis = free editor.
Getting the Source SDK = free download. I've even downloaded it. And
several similar things like it for other games. (Most notably, there was
a thing called Quake Object Oriented Level Editor or "QOOLE".)
What can I say? I just can't figure out how to produce anything
worthwhile. :-(
> Oh, trust me, it is just like a real war (in a game experience at
> least). I said to my son only last night, "What would you do if you were
> ordered to go to the front line to save your country?" He said, "I'd fight".
> I then said that he'll be killed fairly soon. No comment from him, and a
> despondant face to match. Me? Stuff the war. I'd be around the back sniping
> them if possible. I know for a fact that I wouldn't adhere to war 'rules'
> whatever I might do. I'd do my best though for my country of course.
I know some people who have really been snipers. As in, they've killed
actual people during an actual war.
They don't talk about it much...
>> I have absolutely no idea how in the game of God any of this is possible.
>> But people have done it, so it *must* be possible...
>
> Yes, it's true, people have done it, including myself. I'm about a month
> away from publishing my first Crysis level, (the first in a series of three,
> hopefully), and even though I've published many PoV-Ray images to the world,
> it's scaring the crap out of me to upload my map. Really.O-O
Yeah, but... throwing together a new map is one thing, but building an
entire new game... where do you get all the texture data from? Where do
you get all the sounds from? How to you design weapons? How do you
construct an AI engine? How do you do all of this with a few people in
their spare time?? It boggles the mind...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible wrote:
> It all sounds a bit silly today. We tak such things for granted.
>
> We are truly living in the future, my friends...
When you think about it, it's kind of like the industrial revolution...
The industrial revolution transformed the way mankind lives and works.
It altered the economy forever. Fortunes were made and lives were
ruined, and the world has never been the same since. You can argue about
whether all these changes were for good or ill, but none can deny that
society was transformed. Things which would hitherto have been
considered impossible because quite ordinary.
But nobody really even thinks about the industrial revolution now.
Because it's *happened*. It's *over*. We're *here* now.
I guess it's the same with the digital entertainment revolution - nobody
really thinks about it any more because it's old news now.
Heh, I'm old enough to remember actual green screens. Computers that
tried to play "music" by making beeps. Images that were a mass of
multicoloured square blocks. The idea of a computer *so powerful* that
it could show pictures that looked almost photographic seemed
mind-blowing and futuristic.
Today, it's a mundane reality. Sure, you can now play a movie on your
computer as well as on your TV. And how is that really different? It
turns out that once you get over what a neat idea it is, the reality
isn't so different to VHS.
Actually, at the weekend I was reading an article in Amiga Format. This
was the April 1994 issue, and they're talking in hushed tones about a
visionary new technology dubbed "Full Motion Video" (FMV).
The article goes on to explain that since it's now possible to store
computer data on a CD (something they call a "CD-ROM"), in theory you
could be able to store a computer animation on there. And since the
Amiga can produce near-photographic image quality... hey, what if you
could put a *movie* onto a CD??
Ah, but there's a catch. One frame of high-quality video takes up about
1 MB of space - and you need 25 of them for a single second of video.
That gives us a transfer rate of 25 MB/s, which *wildly* exceeds what
any known CD drive is capable of.
(By my arithmetic, a CD gives you 10 MB/min, so 60x faster would be 10
MB/s, and another 2.5x faster would be 25 MB/s. So we need a drive that
spins at 180x normal speed. IIRC, normal CD speed is 500 RPM, so that's
90,000 RPM. The *centrifuge* in our lab doesn't spin that fast. Hell, my
*car* doesn't rev that high! The disk would surely shatter due to the
extreme centrefugal forces...)
But there's a bigger problem than transfer speed: 650 MB / 25 MB/s = 26
seconds of video (!!!), without any sound. Who the hell is going to
bother putting together a high-end system so they can play 26 *seconds*
of video on their computer?
It is crystal clear at this point that the storage requirements *must*
be reduced. The data has to be compressed somehow. But as soon as you do
that, the difficulty is finding a way of compressing the data so that it
can still be UNcompressed fast enough for realtime playback. This is a
serious problem.
Apparently Phillips has come up with a new device called the CD-I, which
usees the "white book standard". This basically means you take your
movie, downsample it to half resolution (so it's roughly 400x300
pixels), and then encode it using a newly-developed system known as
"MPEG". You then put this on a CD-ROM.
Trouble is, the latest high-end Amigas had MPEG decoding software, but
would only manage maybe 3-4 FPS at low resolutions. This is clearly
insufficient for FMV! But then there was the Amiga CD32.
For those that don't know, the Amiga CD32 is an Amiga 1200 with a CD-ROM
drive, built in the shape of a games console. (There's no keyboard or
mouse, for example.)
Most of the games released for it were actually just Amiga 1200 games
with a CD soundtrack added. But a small few actually took advantage of
the awesome storage capabilities of a CD-ROM. (Remember, previously
games came on 720 KB floppy disks!)
In this same issue of AmigaFormat, I read an issue for a game called
"Microcosm". Due to some sci-fi plot that isn't actually that
interesting, you get put inside a space ship, miniturised, and injected
into somebody's body to fight off a hord of robits inside the guy. In
other words, basically you fly down organic-looking tunnels shooting things.
I don't have the magazine in front of me now, but the final summary read
something like
"This may not be the most playable game ever, but it doesn't even
matter. This game is the future. And it's here right now. GET IT!"
The best screenshot I can find is this:
http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/screenshots/full/microcosm_(cd32)_20.png
The graphics were comparatively realistic. Certainly little like this
had been seen before. Most games were either cartoonish platforms, or a
few were very slow, jerky 3D things with giant polygons, point lights
and no surface texturing. *This* looked almost real.
(In solomn truth, it's actually just a 2D game with a prerendered 3D
background loop playing behind it. But it *looks* impressive. And it's
only possible to fit that much animation data in due to the cavernous
space on a CD-ROM.)
It was also intercut with smooth video sequences:
http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/screenshots/full/microcosm_(cd32)_03.png
Certainly it's nothing compared to what we have today, but back then
seeing bits of jerky motion on a *computer* was astonishing.
Anyway, getting back to FMV... There was a [very expensive] card for the
Amiga CD32 that allows it to play any White Book compliant CD movie.
Phillips were apparently very surprised when they found out about this.
But they seemed pleased. "I think anybody who does with producing a
proprietry format has the wrong idea. We need a common format to
stimulate adoption."
(Anybody who remembers the HD-DVD/BluRay feasco surely cannot doubt
these words!)
custom MPEG decoder hardware. The magazine mentions how "it takes many
months of running time on the latest supercomputers to convert video to
MPEG format". But, "amazingly", it makes the data fit onto a CD and play
back even within a CD's limited transfer rate.
The article is of course liberally decorated with screenshots from an
Amiga playing various movies. I've never heard of CD-I or the White Book
standard, but apparently quite a number of titles were actually released
for it.
The pictures don't actually look bad at all. If anything, the only real
problem is the very low spatial resolution. They all look kinda fuzzy
and out of focus, and very pixelish. (Remembe, this is 400x300 pixel
resolution!) But the *colour* seems completely perfect. There is no
*hint* of the MPEG artifacts you often see at high compression ratios.
When did DVDs come out? I don't actually know the answer to that, but it
seems like comparatively recently. To think that the Amiga was already
*doing* this stuff, for real, way back in 1994 seems quite impressive to
me. Not that it apparently got very far...
How are things different today? Well today we have DVDs, which are just
like CDs except with significantly more storage capacity. That means you
don't have to downsample the video to make it fit on a disk.
But more importantly, today a cheap PC can decode MPEG completely in
software, and the CPU is *idling* during this task. It's *easy*! And I
think that's the key thing. The computer power necessary for realtime
video decompression is now commonly available, which is why you can go
machine for that price! EVER!
(I guess all those complicated robotic parts for spooling the tape and
so forth were just inherantly expensive to make. A DVD player just needs
a few motors, a laser, and a computer with some software. It's quite
easy really...)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:48980a4a$1@news.povray.org...
>>> I have absolutely no idea how to do that.
>>
>> Getting Crysis = free editor.
>
> Getting the Source SDK = free download. I've even downloaded it.
Yes, I've got it too, but don't use it. You only need the SDK if you want
to produce a 'mod' - i.e., provide a new weapon, or game strategy, etc. But,
you still need the disc to see and play your level, right?
You've got FarCry, so try it some time with their editor. ;)
Get some of those FatBoys and Trigens out and have a war with loads of
grunts! :)
And
> several similar things like it for other games. (Most notably, there was a
> thing called Quake Object Oriented Level Editor or "QOOLE".)
Never heard of that, although I knew there was an editor.
>
> What can I say? I just can't figure out how to produce anything
> worthwhile. :-(
Ah, well, I thought exactly the same. Then I played, and played and
played with the editor and just came up with 'anything' that works. Gave it
a name, and that was my eventual year long project.
> Me? Stuff the war. I'd be around the back sniping
>> them if possible. I know for a fact that I wouldn't adhere to war 'rules'
>> whatever I might do. I'd do my best though for my country of course.
>
> I know some people who have really been snipers. As in, they've killed
> actual people during an actual war.
Lol at me ranting. ;) I don't know what I'd be like really, all I know
is that I wouldn't be on that front line to get shot at, (who the f*** would
in their right mind!) I admire snipers, they have a tough job to do. I have
no idea what it's like to be a real sniper, but boy, these games do come
close I think. If you're playing Crysis, when you're slightly out of range
from the enemy sniper and he gets close with his shot by a few inches, you
can hear the whizz of that bullet pass your ear, (and see it via the trail),
now imagine that in real life!
>
> They don't talk about it much...
No, and I wouldn't either. It's a hard thing to do.
>
>>> I have absolutely no idea how in the game of God any of this is
>>> possible. But people have done it, so it *must* be possible...
>>
>> Yes, it's true, people have done it, including myself. I'm about a
>> month away from publishing my first Crysis level, (the first in a series
>> of three, hopefully), and even though I've published many PoV-Ray images
>> to the world, it's scaring the crap out of me to upload my map.
>> Really.O-O
>
> Yeah, but... throwing together a new map is one thing, but building an
> entire new game... where do you get all the texture data from? Where do
> you get all the sounds from? How to you design weapons? How do you
> construct an AI engine? How do you do all of this with a few people in
> their spare time?? It boggles the mind...
There are some clever kids out there, (and older guys), that's for
sure. AI engine? No idea. (Well, programming, obviously, but what, and how,
I wouldn't know). Textures? PS. Weapons (and everything else for a 'new'
game) - a modelling program.
Simple as that. ;) But you don't really need to do any of that for
your first map in Crysis, it's all there and configurable in the editor.
Takes some playing with to get right, but it works. I've tested my map loads
now, but I still need to get the saves in the right positions and get the
ending right.
Btw, this is me DE-STRESSING in Crysis. 180(ish) Korean trucks falling to
the ground:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zjaxyfTW3UY
Notice how slow it is on my 6600GT. ;) I'll do a daytime version
soon... ;)
~Steve~
>
> --
> http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
> http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible wrote:
> Yeah, but... throwing together a new map is one thing, but building an
> entire new game... where do you get all the texture data from? Where do
> you get all the sounds from? How to you design weapons? How do you
> construct an AI engine? How do you do all of this with a few people in
> their spare time?? It boggles the mind...
Minus the AI engine, that sounds like building a POV-Ray scene. And people
do it in their spare time.
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"Nicolas Alvarez" <nic### [at] gmailcom> wrote in message
news:489a6bf8@news.povray.org...
> Invisible wrote:
>> Yeah, but... throwing together a new map is one thing, but building an
>> entire new game... where do you get all the texture data from? Where do
>> you get all the sounds from? How to you design weapons? How do you
>> construct an AI engine? How do you do all of this with a few people in
>> their spare time?? It boggles the mind...
>
> Minus the AI engine, that sounds like building a POV-Ray scene. And people
> do it in their spare time.
Yes, just an hour or two here and there, and maybe a full weekend if
you're inclined, and a year later you've got yourself a map. (In my case
that is. Some of these young guys can produce professional maps in like - a
couple of months or less!)
~Steve~
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> stbenge wrote:
>> Thank goodness for the open-source movement!
>
> Yeah - I'm still puzzled by all that. The Amiga had a strong "shareware"
> scene, but I'm puzzled by this sudden new craze of giving away
> fully-supported commercial-grade software (sometimes that *was*
> commercial!) for free. It suddenly seems to be the "trendy" thing to do,
> and I'm not really sure how that happened.
It makes sense when your primary source of revenue comes from service
contracts. Give away the thing you're servicing / supporting, and
suddenly you've a lot more potential customers.
...Chambers
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St. wrote:
> <sniff - the internet is bad>
But it's also good for lots of things!
...Chambers
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