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fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Digirat posted:

Flowerchild is the arthmoor of minecraft in terms of asserting his vision for the game is superior to the developer's, except instead of ~lore~, his vision is about the mechanics of some nerd poo poo lego game

Which is doubly funny because let's be honest, like 50% of the mechanics in Minecraft were done at random, and back when he was big in modding it was closer to 90% done at random.

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fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
Well the main thing is a lot of those CRT filter mods you have around out there are terrible stuff, made by people who apparently think CRT = 1965 color TV that's about to catch fire, is violently flickering, 1/3 of the total screen is taken up by "scanlines" and which bulges 2 feet out in the center of the screen.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Shoehead posted:

To get even further down that rabbit hole I think it was only males who couldn't be Bi, for reasons?? Oh and also women were never EVER straight

The guy who made the game "learned" this from extensive research. Which was probably just watching a lot of porn.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Prokhor Zakharov posted:

Correction; he claims to have invented the idea for digital distribution

Cause that's very legally actionable you see

That's pretty great, considering there was like, 20 years of prior art, even for specifically video games, even if he came up with it in the 90s.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Yardbomb posted:

I mean it kind of did in this case. They were willing to change it once people brought it up to them, but they didn't actually understand the deal at first and were just going off of I think it was statistics from like okcupid.


Lol nah man, I'm pretty sure he got his "statistics" from bad video game sex mods considering what he implemented.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
Sorry you're mad about talking about dumb sex mods in the dumb sex mod thread?

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
The proper thing to do is to announce from the start that player contributions will only be shown if the player turns on an option like Fallout New Vegas' Wild Wasteland trait (the one that activates a bunch more internet jokes and stuff to show up).

That way whatever weird idiots with too much money want is still in the game, but the regular player doesn't have to see that stuff in a normal playthrough.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
Those lawsuits for making fun of a bad product are hilarious enough for real games. Doing it over your mod being mocked is just downright ludicrous.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

But literally, they did hella post-processing on, around, and up the rear end.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Wamdoodle posted:

I think the worst offender are the 3d models of the monsters :barf:

Hmm, I'm not seeing enough lovely engine effects. Needs to be more like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3r_M6_e30

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

The Cheshire Cat posted:

I imagine that if someone suggests to them that they should just write a story WITHOUT rape in it their response is basically just



Or worse, they think that their standard response of "but it's not realistic if there's no rape!" makes sense in their story that also has dragons, magic, and every woman with breasts the size of the entire rest of their body.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Bieeardo posted:

A friend had this program that would take a text file, and shrink and tile individual pages so you could fit four or more to a sheet. Thing was amazing for printing FAQs without going through an enormous amount of paper.

You sure he didn't just have Microsoft Word? Cuz its print menu has let you do that since the last version on Windows 3.1 I think, and definitely Word 95/97. Used it all the time as a kid, you could go up to like 16 pages per page for the really long stuff and it was still somewhat readable. :v:

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
When I think of that kidn of design, I think of lovely gun and armor mods for existing games, really.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Gah, that metal mesh stuff they use looks like it was rendered seperately at like 640x480 then stretched onto the higher res rest of the gun.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Yardbomb posted:

Go gently caress yourself, what a massive shithead thing to say.

Why don't you cry to your guns about it, nerd. Preferably one of the really badly textured ones.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

marshmallow creep posted:

On my phone, but... What, dare I ask, is evening happening in the groin region?

Oh that's the Crotch Lighting mod, surely. Perfect complement to your halos.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Martha Stewart Undying posted:

....Where do they clamp-on?

Anywhere you want, for a price.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Cythereal posted:

This kind of stuff is why Fallout's bored me to tears for the last several outings. They're still retreading the same setting and the same ideas, and not doing anything really new or imaginative with it. I know what the Fallout setting is, what it looks like, what the factions are like, and what the story's going to be like. Show me something new with it all, please.

Fallout Tactics is sitting right there for you to play, then.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
I mean I thought part of the story in Fallout 3/NV/4 was that there was also a specific trend of 50s revivalism going on at the time just before the war happened that had been going on for some time, which made things more 50s just before all the bombs dropped.


Young Freud posted:


Considering that one of the elements of Bethesda's Fallout series is listening to the radio, you think you'd hear transmissions from other parts of the continent, if not the globe, especially at night thanks to the skywave effect and there being no one to regulate broadcast power. A station in the NCR broadcasting at 50 kiloWatts (which was the broadcast power of WLW Cincinatti, the first station to hit the max allowed for AM stations) could be clearly listened to as far as Colorado. Still using WLW as an example of 50kW, they could be heard by 38 states after sundown and once got a call in 1985 to their overnight host from Hawaii. I mean, the NCR wouldn't be above throwing even a megawatt power source behind a radio station and drowning out Three-Dog in the Capitol Wastes, just to get the word out there's a new stable force out there.


But Fallout world also has all kinds of weird technology and poo poo being blown up. There could be all sorts of pre-war hardened broadcasting towers or other such things that swamp out signals between regions. Or some sort of issues actually sourcing the necessary components for high-wattage AM and shortwave radio broadcasts, especially in a "transistors and solid state never really took off" setting - the tubes we still use to this day for some of those stations are some gnarly things to manufacture and keep running.

Like here's some of the 5 foot total height vacuum tubes that the transmitter equipment at WLW Cincinnati used up until the 80s in active service, and into the early 2000s for emergency backup service:


Those very tubes might have been in use for that 1985 broadcast that reached Hawaii, but they'd have a hell of a time getting remanufactured after a bomb wipes out Cincinnati and only the residents of Vault 345: This Time They're Required To Die Their Hair Pink come out into the Cinci wastes to rebuild.

Also those big metal things they're installed in include a complex water cooling system so the tubes don't explode from the heat, and I think they had more attached when in active service condition?

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
It's not really surprising that the first things they're releasing are the things that were simple to make or projects that were already mostly complete as free mods to be honest.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Guy Mann posted:

Most of the backlash against the original paid mods attempt was because people were taking their existing mods and locking them behind a paywall and causing all sorts of drama and technical issues, as dumb as paying real money for skins is so long as it is it's own separate thing like this then it'll be easy to ignore.

It's not going to stay skins, more in-depth stuff will be coming over time. But if the system Bethesda announced for how projects proceed in the Creators program back a few months ago is true, full on Mods stuff is going to take a lot longer to get approved than a simple skin or new model will.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Max Wilco posted:


Why is it impossible for Bethesda to just hire people who make good mods and then pay them to create content for their games?

It's not? They've already done that? But don't expect that poo poo to release any time soon if you believe what they claimed in the announcement materials.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

bebaloorpabopalo posted:

You could probably make an argument it was simpler in the 80s after the arcade/console market crashed and a lot of the scene was one-person or small teams making games for 8-bit home computers. Games were obviously much less complicated then, and the harder part was distribution or marketing. Now games are more complicated but there are a lot more resources and frameworks to build on, and distribution and marketing are cheaper/easier than ever. The barrier now is just the pure saturation of garbage, it's harder to get noticed unless you pass a barrier of quality that is probably higher than it should be, but was constructed because the deluge of crap is not worth wading through.

Nah that's bull though. Actually making a good game was still quite difficult, you just had some regions of the world where you could earn a few thousand bucks getting your terrible broken game shoved on cassette tapes for idiot kids to pay way too much for. And there was so so much garbage that people just pretended it was actually just Real Game Difficulty and it was super difficult to find good games because a) reviewer stockholm syndrome that bad games were actually real good b) reviewers being straight up paid off and c) even if you had access to real reviews and stuff, you'd probably not have access to the good games because cassette distro issues were crazy.

Basically like the European home computer scene was the equivalent of all the spam partially working games that get poo poo onto Steam every hour.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Bieeardo posted:

I came across a post by a furry who apparently lived out of long-term rental hotel rooms or something. He was out of money, needed help to keep himself from being kicked out, not an unusual story... until someone turned it into an intervention.

This second person revealed that Mr. Brokeass was broke because he is constantly commissioning art of his character(s). People have given him money in the past, and it's gone straight to eBay or Furbid, and basically all that he owns are a few changes of clothes and half a dozen suitcases packed to the gills with the art that he'd bought over the years.

Well hey at least the money was going to a good place in the end.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

RareAcumen posted:

What was that video that showcased something weird about how DOOM was put together? Like how you can have hallways sitting on the same spot and go into completely different rooms?

You're thinking of Marathon probably, which is a whole different game, and has several official levels throughout the game that use the effect heavily to create mazes.

There is a separate thing with Doom that was recently discovered that can be used to create the effect of looking in on a room that looks much larger than it should:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwjeu1C2-Ok
When it was found two years ago the effect only worked on the original Doom executables and engines that seek to perfectly recreate it while running on modern computers, like Chocolate Doom or Mocha Doom, but you can try out the original prrof of concept wad here: http://www.doomworld.com/linguica/hax/portal3.wad

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
The various improved source ports of Doom added intentional portal effects many years back, so WADs meant for those engines like ZDoom have bee using them for a while. The interesting thing with this portal effect here is that it turned out to be working all the way back to like 1993 in the original program. Although most people who stumbled across it when making maps would probably have not wanted the effect and just "fixed it"

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

RareAcumen posted:

Was Dust an Elysian tail full of that in any way? All I remember was it ostensibly not being 100% finsihed when it was released and people screaming DEVIANTART at how it looked.

Dust was more filled with exactly the sort of story/voice acting you'd get in a more serious cartoon for like early teens in the mid-90s. Albeit with more time spent on the art.

Or maybe like, an animated movie of the same time period that wasn't from Disney but was almost up to Disney standards but aimed to be a bit more edgy by dropping in more jokes for the parents in the audience.

It's like really fun to play and the voice acting/story is only a little bit infuriating, and you can just mash through 99% of it.

fishmech fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Oct 31, 2017

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

m2pt5 posted:

Really, people believed that? After the SimCity "can't be played offline" bullshit?

SimCity 201whatever it was is unplayable in all forms, so it's definitely unplayable offline.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
The whole "Better Than Wolves" name, of course, was because the modder was so pissed Minecraft would dare add in tamable animals before, iirc, new flower mechanics or something minor like that. Hence that his mod that did various random things was better than the wolves.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Cup Runneth Over posted:

That shouldn't matter unless the game is CHANGING THINGS IN THE SAVE FILE WHILE IT IS READING FROM IT

Minecraft has had many different save behaviors over time. The first few were Notch creations so yeah they did some dumb poo poo

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

The Big Word posted:

iirc Pokemon Red/Green had all its text hardcoded and localising those games meant having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

Well Red and Green also had worse graphics, lower quality sound, and even more bugs in general. They needed a lot of work done regardless and probably should have gotten that before being published... but who knew it'd become one of the most popular media franchises of all time and get the sort of attention it receives?

That said Red and Blue are absolutely not games rewritten from scratch compared to Red and Green. Most of the original logic and engine is still there, just improved.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Kikas posted:

I am the inexplicable toaster on the passenger seat.


How else are you going to strafe?

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Orv posted:

It's weird how close this sounds to the actual thing because of old PC audio tech.

All of the devices use contain "voice coil" actuators for movements of the parts. Voice coils, as the name probably implies to you, are also widely used for moving the speaker cone on speakers that use the cone-type style.

Because of the very high similarity, if you dump an audio signal into a "voice coil" style actuator as commonly used for hard drives, floppy drives, scanners, and plotters/printers, it will actually play a sound and usually the motions activated will follow that sound. But even when it doesn't properly activate motions, the other parts of the drive will usually resonate and amplify the sound, with different sized elements in the devices tending to be best for certain frequencies.

So what he's doing with these is he's actually playing the real music through them. And he's carefully choosing to cut certain devices in and out and selectively mix the track a bit differently to achieve effects with visible moving parts. Plus they use a bunch of drives at once for increased volume, they're not all that loud on their own.


There's a bunch of guides out there for how you can build such things yourself with spare old drives and some soldering/test equipment to hand, like this one: http://afrotechmods.com/tutorials/2015/06/25/hard-drive-speakers/

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

DicktheCat posted:

Page back, but what the hell is up with the toaster? Why a toaster?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI7tWd7B3iI

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Kavak posted:

Deep down, I can understand why Half-Life 3 never materialized. Catch lightning in a bottle again with even higher expectations when there're easier and profitable routes available? I'd shy away from that as well. I'll never understand why Episode 3 died on the vine, though. They had an outline, concept art, they could've brought the story to an end of sorts, and they just canned it quietly.

Yeah and I mean like... the episodes are only supposed to be a few hpurs of content, and to not really boost the engine or anything too much. Even releasing it this late, it would still be acceptable for it to jus tuse only rhe sort of improvements that other games have added to the source engine.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Tumblr of scotch posted:

Not just girls with freaking enormous dicks. Girls with freaking enormous dicks who still also have vaginas.

Whether this is true or not is a matter of extremely extensive and heated debate among terrible sex modders.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

LORD OF BOOTY posted:

... :psyduck: that must be an impressively goddamn ugly game

Eh, no? It's a game from 2006 after all.

This is what it looks like while playing:


Just looks completely generic "mid-2000s game not being run on very high settings".

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Orv posted:

Look man, megatextures revolutionized the gaming industry, you're just too small to see it.

DOOM (2016), Wolfenstein The New Order/The Old Blood/The New Colossus, The Evil Within 1 and 2 and Dishonored 2 all use megatextures.

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Orv posted:

And for the end user there is pretty much no difference.

In the same way that for the end user, most engine aspects make no difference they can tell, yeah.

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fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Diabetes Forecast posted:

Jesus, I can't believe anyone would still remember IcyCalm these days. Is he STILL trying to scam people out of thousands despite having been found out countless times?
E: Wow culture.VG is his website! Why the gently caress is he writing in a weird third person way?

Common scammer/self-aggrandizing tactic - write about yourself in the third person, and those who aren't paying close attention might take it as somebody else endorsing your views.

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