Zeether posted:

We should do multi on Red Faction 1 at some point. That would be awesome.

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

Huh, weird, I must have remembered it incorrectly then. Still, at 8.8 MB, it took like 90 minutes to download...which, for my young self, might have felt like 8 hours. There WAS a demo on AOL that I remember taking all night to download. And then, later, the Unreal Tournament '99 mods that were each 4-6 hours. Basically, dial-up was a terrible, terrible thing.

haveblue posted:

Any game that has vertical look and explosive weapons has jumping

RyokoTK posted:

Probably when it stops feeling so forced. To me, gravity gun mechanics feel kinda unnatural in games that aren't heavily puzzle-dependent (like HL2 kinda was). It feels like using status effects in an RPG: why take two steps to kill an enemy (pick up item, throw item) when I could do it in one (just shoot them with a normal gun)? So games with gravity guns have to kinda contrive situations to make the player use them, and that's where it feels forced to me. So a game like Doom ROE or Timesplitters 3, that are all about shooting mans, has no real need for a gravity gun and it just feels unnatural.

eta: I guess a game like Bioshock did it pretty well, making Telekinesis a plasmid that you were never really required to use. It's powerful and cool, but after the one bit where you're forced to use it in Medical Pavilion, the game never calls attention to it again. It was just one tool in a wide arsenal of overall useless plasmids. (Actually Telekinesis is really really strong but whatever.)

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

Speaking of, I've always thought that there shouldn't be a dead end in that map. That door in the room with the armour should either open to a room connecting back through to one of the big side rooms, or should somehow lead back to the back stairwell, behind the bathroom. There's a CS:GO map that sort of does this, but of course, the shortcut is poorly thought out and is barren, devoid of any set dressing that helps sell people on the location / setting.

Fishmech posted:

Zaphod42 posted:

Careful though. You can't compare a demoscene video to a game directly.

Demoscene videos are insanely efficient. Everything is hand-optimized for the scene, and the scenes themselves are specifically chosen as things that will look good while being easy to pull off. A ton of poo poo is faked, because it has to be. You can control the flow of things exactly, nothing changes from execution to execution, so you can measure and test and push everything to its absolute limits. Each part of the scene can be mostly completely unloaded after its done, and then you do some other explicit single task.

Games meanwhile have to be fairly inefficient by design. Lots of times you're not even using up the full graphics budget. Lets say there's 20 enemies around, but the player could run into a room with 40 enemies. Those 20 enemies have to look shittier because of the times when you run into 40 enemies, even if that only happens rarely. You could try to have multiple versions and swap between them when large numbers of enemies show up, but then now you've gotta have both versions loaded into memory at the same time, introducing its own performance challenges. Everything's a tradeoff and there's no magic solution because ultimately the player has control in real time. You can be smart and design a game that has limitations that don't feel like limitations, but its hard.

Comparing a demoscene and a game is apples and oranges, like comparing pre-rendered graphics to raster graphics.

EvilGenius posted:

Came back to ask this. I learned about voxels on a 3D graphics unit at uni, and always thought of them in the context of medical scans, where you need to be able to convey the volume of an object for slicing and diving inside the image.

I've always wondered what it would be like to apply this to games, but voxel use seems to be limited to terrain generation, and even then in some cases just to form the basis of a mesh (as you pointed out). Imagine a game where everything has volume, and what the implications for collision detection and physics would be. No more worlds made out of shiny cardboard cut outs. No more cameras passing through characters and scenery. Everything would be destroyable and malleable.

JackMackerel posted:

Hey, Hideous Destructor fans, Somagu on the ZDooM forums made a group for HD co-op. It's surprisingly not laggy as poo poo. on chat if you want a round.

Jblade posted:

He's helping bug testing of Episode 2 and already picked out a bunch of stuff I missed I can't really stress test my own stuff because I subconsciously don't try things I know won't work.

Kazvall posted:

Am I the only goon who really loves Heretic? To be more specific: Hexen is poo poo compared to Heretic.