Moe

I think ppl are bored of Minecraft clones

Yet Castlestory's kickstarter went off charts...


And please everyone, stop using "voxel game" as a definition of a minecraft-like gameplay. This is definitely not what the word is meant to describe.

Indeed, if i remember correctly Delta Force is also a voxel game (It had very impressive terrain for its time as well)
http://i1-games.soft...lta-Force_2.jpg

Not even close to minecraft

Outcast 2 was another Voxel based game - also very looking.

I wouldn't worry about people growing old of voxel based free-form shooters (or the like).  Heck, people are still more than happy to play 2D side scrollers...

Is it just me, or is it looking rather green?

A few things to check:
- Is the texture being loaded in as part of a model?  If so, is the material for the model set to use some sort of coloring?
- Are you setting any other render states that could be affecting the color of the model?

Just out of curiosity, what exactly are you doing with said XML?

(Just remember... XML is like violence.  If it doesn't work, you just aren't using enough of it...)

It sounds to me like a really good way to frustrate the player.  A lot of the appeal for those older arcade games was the difficulty though - if it wasn't difficult, it probably wouldn't have brought in as much money as an arcade game.  Is there some previous power-up that could help you get past that point in the game?  Have other people beat the game on that difficulty level?

so it seems to require unnecessarily complicated constructs and boilerplate code to accomplish simple tasks

I had a boss once, who measured lines-of-code-per-hour as an indicator of performance...

"Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs." - Bill Gates

joelbennett.wordpress.com

So, so proud.

In related news, being behind the scenes, I get to see things before they're visible to the community, and, well... puberty has started. This may get bumpy.

Whoa, it's Dave!  Long time no see!

I liked that splash page...

If I remember correctly, wasn't there also a link to Flipcode on that same page?  I sort of remember there being three things linked to from that page.

Man I'm getting old

Makes you wonder what other historic events didn't happen exactly as they were reported.

related: the movie "Troy"... actually a documentary. fun fact.

Sort of like my  favourite documentary - Star Wars.

Not bad.  I've just been listening to the sound track for The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, and this seems to fit in fairly closely.  Just a thought on the Cold Fusion track - try making the pauses at the beginning progressively shorter.  I'd think that if I heard that in a game I'd be a bit worried that the audio was tripping out.

When I think of immersion, I think of setting up a likely setting and a set of rules to which a game universe and everything in it must obey.  If something greatly exceeds or breaks the rules of the universe, it breaks immersion.  Thinking about the answers to your questions, one game that came to mind (but I didn't put down) was Just Cause 2.  The game itself is ludicrously absurd in what it lets you do - parachute onto moving vehicles by grappling them with a hook thing, then jump from vehicle to vehicle or jump out of a vehicle flying off a cliff and then pulling a parachute.  The thing is, the game world, or the universe in question, sets those sort of rules right at the beginning, and doesn't necessarily break them.  Because such wild things are allowed in the game, it doesn't break immersion when you do even crazier things (like riding on the wing of an aircraft, or jump out of a flying helicopter, grapple, it, and then get back into it and keep flying it.  

To me, immersion is all about establishing a set of rules, and having both players and the computer obey those rules.  This also comes into play with things like environmental/level design and art direction.  If something is believable, it will make sense in accordance with the rules of the game world.  When you are attempting to mimic real world, and you have a crate inside a room that is larger than any entrance to a room, it breaks immersion.  If you had previously established it in your game world that stationary objects can teleport around, then it could perhaps make sense.

Along with sunandshadow, appealing to all the senses (or as many as physically possible) helps.  Force feedback, decent audio, and believable graphics (note - that's believable, not necessarily realistic) all help to establish the universe in which the game is set.  Trespasser - still one of my favourite games does an incredible job with the audio.  Being on a tropical island, you hear various birds chirping, and sounds like a booming shotgun would echo off the mountain walls of a valley.  The pawing, snorting velociraptors made it really feel like they were after you (despite the AI actually being that smart).  Had the dinosaurs been able to walk through walls (which sometimes happened due to glitchy physics), it broke the immersion.  So did the ability to lift things that looked incredibly heavy objects, with a broken in-game hand mechanic that defied the physical laws set elsewhere in the universe.

Agreed... I have tried this myself and saw very little IQ improvements. Maybe it would matter more if you were zoomed in on a surface? I have no idea, but I am guessing that it would.

True enough, but with most games, how often do you have time to sit there and zoom in on something?  Most of the time you are busy fighting aliens/nazis/zombies/soldiers/robots/ninjas.  If a graphical improvement isn't easily noticeable, does it really make that much of a difference?

(I'm just playing the devil's advocate here.  I'm all for having better graphics, but there does eventually come a point where throwing more hardware at the problem doesn't have as great an impact as the art direction).

Something else that hasn't really been mentioned so far in this thread or the article is the law of diminishing returns.  Sure, my graphics card might be 10x more powerful... but what good is that power if it is adding 10x more polygons to a scene that already looks pretty good?

Looking over screenshots of DirectX 11 tessellation in that recent Aliens game, I found it somewhat difficult to distinguish between the lower-res model and the tessellated one.  It's not that we aren't using that extra graphics horsepower - it's that it isn't easily visible.

On the subject of normal mapping: There was a recent presentation done by Crytek about various methods of texture compression (including normals).  For their entire art chain, they are attempting to do 16 bits per channel, including normal maps.  The difference was subtle, but it was there.  Now here's the thing - what's a bigger difference - going from no normal map to an 8-bit normal map or going from an 8-bit normal map to a 16-bit normal map?

Drawing back faces in a scene like that would be pretty trivial, if it was done in 3D.  A lot of the time it is just better to throw things at the graphics card and let it sort things out, rather than worrying about the fine grained details.  I could imagine such optimizations might make sense on low-spec hardware, but that probably isn't the average case.

Here's my deal:
- Active Topics.  I too have had to bookmark http://www.gamedev.n...earch&do=active but it just isn't the same.  It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people that browsed the active topics do not now browse the forums simply because the Active Topics button is missing from the top of every thread view.
- The threads/posts seem bloated with unnecessary colored bars, etc.  I like the simple, clean look that classic GD.Net had
- De-emphasis of the forums.  Maybe it is just me, but it seems like there is now more emphasis on the articles.  The forums is the only real reason I stuck around GD.Net all these many years (of which there have been many!)
- Having to click twice on the editor to get it to work.  Clicking the first time expands it, then you have to click it again to start typing.  Is it possible to ditch the fancy CSS type stuff, and just always have it expanded?
- No more IOTD.  I know we can go to the forum software's maker and complain about this, and I imagine people have.  That still doesn't fix the fact that it isn't there right now.
- No more survey on the front page.  If there was, at least I haven't been able to find it yet.
- Having to click through to see the full GDNet daily
- Bloated space around every heading and every section on the main page.  I know this can be fixed as well, but it just seems like everything is so much... bigger than what it was before.  Again, keep it small, clean, streamlined.

Personally, I've also taken up a few other hobbies that have taken me away from game development (photography and woodworking), so I haven't been spending as much time here.  I'm not going to go away any time soon (heck, I've been here almost since the dawn of GDNet), but still, it'd be nice to see a few of the things back that we are now missing.