On 9-6-2012 5:47, Darren New wrote:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8
>
> Amazing the level of visual computation people are achieving these days
> in real time.
>

It looks great. The downside of having so much detail and so much 
flexibility is that for a reasonable world someone has to provide that 
detail.
On the one hand: think of what Thomas de Groot could do with this for 
his Gancaloon. On the other hand, he'll need to put in a lot of detail 
in every place that might be visited, not just the ones he makes a 
closeup for. That will mean many years of work. There will be no way to 
justify that expense. Unless someone is going to shoot a holywood 
blockbuster in his town.



-- 
tip: do not run in an unknown place when it is too dark to see the 
floor, unless you prefer to not use uppercase.

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On 6/9/2012 11:35 PM, andrel wrote:
> On 9-6-2012 5:47, Darren New wrote:
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8
>>
>> Amazing the level of visual computation people are achieving these days
>> in real time.
>>
>
> It looks great. The downside of having so much detail and so much
> flexibility is that for a reasonable world someone has to provide that
> detail.
> On the one hand: think of what Thomas de Groot could do with this for
> his Gancaloon. On the other hand, he'll need to put in a lot of detail
> in every place that might be visited, not just the ones he makes a
> closeup for. That will mean many years of work. There will be no way to
> justify that expense. Unless someone is going to shoot a holywood
> blockbuster in his town.
>
>
>
The next step in 3D is going to have to be auto-blending of stock 
elements, so that you limit the level of detail the designer needs to 
do, to make the game. Sort of Grebling, on steroids. lol

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andrel <byt### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> On 9-6-2012 5:47, Darren New wrote:
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8
> >
> > Amazing the level of visual computation people are achieving these days
> > in real time.
> >
>
> It looks great. The downside of having so much detail and so much
> flexibility is that for a reasonable world someone has to provide that
> detail.
> On the one hand: think of what Thomas de Groot could do with this for
> his Gancaloon. On the other hand, he'll need to put in a lot of detail
> in every place that might be visited, not just the ones he makes a
> closeup for. That will mean many years of work. There will be no way to
> justify that expense. Unless someone is going to shoot a holywood
> blockbuster in his town.

I see you have not been playing games lately.  The amount of detail these days
that goes into what amounts to be essentially background scenery is staggering
in games like Assassin's Creed.  Though I agree procedural grebling with stock
models should be a must.

And to me personally hollywood was surpassed back in 1998 with Metal Gear Solid
and Half-Life.  It's a far older media than Roger Ebert himself...

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On 11-6-2012 17:13, nemesis wrote:
> andrel<byt### [at] gmailcom>  wrote:
>> On 9-6-2012 5:47, Darren New wrote:
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8
>>>
>>> Amazing the level of visual computation people are achieving these days
>>> in real time.
>>>
>>
>> It looks great. The downside of having so much detail and so much
>> flexibility is that for a reasonable world someone has to provide that
>> detail.
>> On the one hand: think of what Thomas de Groot could do with this for
>> his Gancaloon. On the other hand, he'll need to put in a lot of detail
>> in every place that might be visited, not just the ones he makes a
>> closeup for. That will mean many years of work. There will be no way to
>> justify that expense. Unless someone is going to shoot a holywood
>> blockbuster in his town.
>
> I see you have not been playing games lately.  The amount of detail these days
> that goes into what amounts to be essentially background scenery is staggering
> in games like Assassin's Creed.  Though I agree procedural grebling with stock
> models should be a must.

I don't play, but I have seen enough to know they do. So that was not 
the point. The point was that you need a large team and a large amount 
of money just to build a game using such an engine. (And that is without 
a story or gameplay yet.)
If such an engine is stable enough for a significant time you might get 
communities to develop something together. Giving the current evolution 
speed I am not sure if this engine will be useable by any other than a 
few major player in the games industry. But I'll ask my games students 
what they think about it when I see them after the summer holidays.

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On 6/8/2012 10:47 PM, Darren New wrote:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8
>
> Amazing the level of visual computation people are achieving these days
> in real time.

There is much more processing power under the hood of that machine than 
I have when I'm rendering, and there are clearly a number of tricks in 
play to replace long, expensive visual computations with down-and-dirty 
calculations that deliver acceptable results.  I doubt, for instance, 
that the glow and shadow effects in the smoke involved more than a few 
dozen particles at most.  The shadow cast by the smoke isn't something 
we can see with much clarity, so it just needs to move in a way that 
agrees with the motion of the smoke.  And so on.

The amount of pre-calculation going on here is probably much larger than 
the fellow in the video has let on; it is the ability to do *that* 
quickly that has made it possible for the editor to display the WYSIWYG 
results.

Those who remember editing .WAD files for DOOM may remember the step 
during saves where the BSP tree had to be calculated.  This took some 
time for larger maps.  Now that desktop machines run three hundred times 
faster, these intermediate calculations aren't as noticeable.

It looks like making a good story and good game play are going to be the 
remaining challenges going forward.

Regards,
John

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On 6/12/2012 5:13, John VanSickle wrote:
> It looks like making a good story and good game play are going to be the
> remaining challenges going forward.

They've always been the challenge. Heck, the original Deus Ex was more fun 
and had more twists to the plot than the new one, even tho it looked like 
crap by today's standards. And I haven't found a sneaky game that's anywhere 
as good as Thief.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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On Sat, 16 Jun 2012 09:35:02 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 6/12/2012 5:13, John VanSickle wrote:
>> It looks like making a good story and good game play are going to be
>> the remaining challenges going forward.
> 
> They've always been the challenge. Heck, the original Deus Ex was more
> fun and had more twists to the plot than the new one, even tho it looked
> like crap by today's standards. And I haven't found a sneaky game that's
> anywhere as good as Thief.

I was wondering how the new Deus Ex was - saw it's out on the PS3, and 
now that I've played through MW3, I'm looking for something else once we 
have some spare cash again.

Jim

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On 6/16/2012 14:51, Jim Henderson wrote:
> I was wondering how the new Deus Ex was - saw it's out on the PS3, and
> now that I've played through MW3, I'm looking for something else once we
> have some spare cash again.

It's fun. Very replayable. I went the whole game the first time thinking 
that augments were very limited because I didn't know some of your energy 
slowly grows back, so I used mostly weapons.

It has the same problem as 90% of the sneaky games out there, in that the 
difficulty level doesn't really go up. It's way, way easier to be sneaky 
than to fight through it.

Plus, of course, as usual in such games nowadays, there are (like) three 
ways to accomplish a goal, but each is really obvious. You can fight in thru 
the front door, or sneak around the back, or climb up on the roof and avoid 
the bad guys altogether. That sort of thing.  In Thief, for example, I never 
got the feeling "well, there must be a way to go in thru here, because it's 
a game." I.e., the level design seemed rather game-ish, unlike (say) the 
original Deus Ex. So far I've found an air vent with no purpose but to 
connect Meeting Room 2 with the men's room, a corridor full of stored boxes 
and paperwork with no doors at all (you have to break through the wall to 
get into it), and all the guards manage to patrol *right* to the edge where 
if they took another step, they could actually look around the corner and 
see you hiding there in wait.

Some of it is pretty funny. The music the in-game radios play is the music 
from the original Deus Ex, for example, and the names of bosses in Deus Ex 
show up as grunt-level workers in emails in this one, and you meet as kids 
some of the people JC Denton interacts with as adults, since it's set a 
couple decades earlier. Some of the dialog is amusing as well, especially 
between the cyber-security guy and the physical security guy.

There's attempts to make your decisions have consequences, but most people 
you interact with that come back to haunt you make relatively little 
difference. There is one or two characters where for most of the game you're 
going "Is this guy part of the conspiracy? Or is he just a really bad voice 
actor?"

I'm slowly working my way through it on pacificst mode, meaning you don't 
kill anyone and indeed try not to get seen at all. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTOxcWR1y6E (Maybe a teeny spoiler in there, 
in the sense that you see where one of the boss fights takes place, but you 
know that well in advance story-wise.)

Maybe some time I'll go thru and see how many people I can kill on the way 
too. :-)

I good, solid, enjoyable game with lots of different ways to play it. But 
maybe my standards are too high, because it seems pretty average, with 
average level design, average visuals, average gameplay, etc. Bioshock was 
much prettier, Batman was much cooler, etc.

Having been through it and seen what all the weapons are, the upgrades, how 
the augs get used, it's somewhat easier the second time. I can say "No, I 
don't need to horde that ammo, as I will never use that gun anyway." Stuff 
like that.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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That said, the weapons are pretty normal. The powerful stuff has little ammo 
and takes up a lot of space in your inventory, and vice versa. The aug 
upgrade system is interesting and well done, and even has some in-game 
justification as to why XP gives you more abilities. There's no melee weapon 
except your instant-takedown augmented punch (or stab), which takes time or 
resources to recharge, so yah, basically, no melee weapon. Hacking is very 
nicely done (note that hacking a red node gives you all the rewards at once, 
which was poorly explained in the tutorials). Third-person sneak mode is 
well done too. Lots of the conversations you overhear are rather grin-worthy.

If you're willing to spend the time, you can up your resources tremendously. 
For example, you can go thru the entire level, mug everyone (police, gang 
members, etc), sell all the weapons to the arms dealers, and come out of the 
first open-world level with like 20x as much cash as if you just play 
through it like a normal person, simply by running back and forth dozens of 
times across the city with your arms full. But given the only thing to spend 
cash on is a little bit of XP and a little bit of other weapons and ammo, 
you wind up with way, way more cash than you can spend.

It has the typical "everyone calms down 30 seconds after seeing you murder 
someone" trope, and the "don't mind me, I'm just cracking your wall safe 
while you're sitting there watching TV" trope. Also, the "why does a 
newspaper reporter keep a frag grenade in her desk drawer" trope and a "why 
does the commando SWAT team member carry a revolver with two shells in the 
cylinder and one more bullet in his pocket" trope.

Definitely read all the emails at Sarif HQ and piece together what's going 
on there. It's quite amusing.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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On Sat, 16 Jun 2012 17:12:47 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 6/16/2012 14:51, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> I was wondering how the new Deus Ex was - saw it's out on the PS3, and
>> now that I've played through MW3, I'm looking for something else once
>> we have some spare cash again.
> 
> It's fun. Very replayable. I went the whole game the first time thinking
> that augments were very limited because I didn't know some of your
> energy slowly grows back, so I used mostly weapons.

Cool, replay value is a positive thing.

> It has the same problem as 90% of the sneaky games out there, in that
> the difficulty level doesn't really go up. It's way, way easier to be
> sneaky than to fight through it.

Interesting.  I think I'd enjoy that, I find in MW2 and MW3 I prefer the 
stealth missions.

> I good, solid, enjoyable game with lots of different ways to play it.
> But maybe my standards are too high, because it seems pretty average,
> with average level design, average visuals, average gameplay, etc.
> Bioshock was much prettier, Batman was much cooler, etc.
> 
> Having been through it and seen what all the weapons are, the upgrades,
> how the augs get used, it's somewhat easier the second time. I can say
> "No, I don't need to horde that ammo, as I will never use that gun
> anyway." Stuff like that.

Fantastic, thanks for the review, definitely on my list.

Jim

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