Holy hell man, what kind of hosting was that file on? I was getting 850kbs! It was done in like 2 minutes [grin] Freaking awesome man! I love it, it's just incredible. That armored truck seemed to have some bump in it's trunk too [lol]. I was like "ahhh" when the car ran over that lady at the end hehe, totally unexpected. Now I'm sure there's a lot of stuff you haven't gotten around to, but here are some comments:

Skid marks?

When you hit the mail boxes and trash cans, the seem to slide out rather then fly out and up

Is dynamic clothing possible? Too many times have I played gta series and seen people looking the same, wearing the same thing next to each other. It'd be awesome to have each character with unique clothes somehow.

Awesome speaking bubble

Awesome dynamics on the car handling

Excelent quality of graphics, I didn't realize it was good because I'm on a 1280x1024 display and fullscreened the video, so it looked decent, but as soon as I windowed it again, I saw how good it looked.

Excelent shadows

I love that daylight system, it seems so realistic!

Camera system looks fun
Ok that's it for now, keep up the great work man!

Why are you running faster than the cars are driving?

That's an awfully fast fat guy.

Drew thanks for the feedback buddy...I've still got to add skid marks into the game in the next few days, as well as smoke and dust clouds. It's a shame that I've had all that stuff into the game but now I have to re-add it since I re-wrote the graphics engine.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll also look into making some more skins for the player models (more simple color variations at least)...I have a feeling that's an area I'm going to get a lot of flack in (and rightfully so). It's just a matter of me not having the budget to hire the amount of artists I want :-/

Laz - Yea it's a little faster because of the screwed up video frame rate...but still the characters need to slow down big time. That was the first thing I noticed when I watched the video. I'll fix that tommorow.

- Dan

Very impressive! Are you going to add drivers to the cars again? Too bad you didn't enter a shop, I would have loved seeing one from the inside. Were you driving at full speed? It seemed a bit slow even when not compared to the running speed of your character. The car physics were great otherwise!

Wow, nice to see the thing "in action" [grin]

And, as Laz said, that is one stupidly fast guy [lol]

Anyway, definitely a thumbs up - but a few things I noticed whilst watching:

1. The shadow on the ground moves in jumps/steps? Is this an artifact of the timing issues you were talking about?
   
2. Does the camera keep swapping places? or is that just for the purpose of the movie? I found it a little confusing [smile]
   
3. Sense of speed when in the yellow car.. would be a bit nicer to feel like it was moving really fast (when appropriate of course!).
   
4. The pedestrians don't seem to be too scared of the car? shouldn't they be walking/running/jumping out of the way?
   
5. 'Text Message' bubbles appear/disappear quite quickly... might be better if they were visible for longer (again, could be the timing issues you were on about)

(I know they are a little nit-picky/negative, but hopefully they'll be of some use to you!)

All round I'd have to say I'm very impressed - some ambient city noises and that video would be perfect. It's already got that "alive" feel to it with a lot of movement and so on.

One other thing that you might be planning - are the pedestrians likely to be doing anything other than walking? Could add a neat bit of variation to have them talking on a mobile phone / reading a map / taking photos / looking at/for things?

Keep up the excellent work [grin]
Jack

Gaheris - Yup, I'm hoping to have people in cars back in the game today.

jollyjeffers - mmmmm I smell feedback. Nice list of items you got there.

The shadow movement is mostly visible because I'm the changing of the frames per second around after the fact...but the issue is still with my code, in my GameWorldTimeStep function I'm saying:

if(AdvanceWorldTime)
WorldMinutes++;

instead of

WorldMinutes+=TimeStep*WorldTimeScale;

Like a good boy. That causes some jumpyness of the shadow position. The movement you notice is the shadow position jumping a minute at a time (in game world time).

Lol, sorry for the somewhat erratic camera position changing, that was me the whole time. You can swap cameras by pressing 'C'. I'll try to tone it down next time :-) On that note I'm also going to throw in some nice blending between camera positions. It should be trivial to code up.

The whole car part was screwed up because of the video recording rate...I assure you it moves a lot faster/smoother than that. I was contemplating not posting this video/taking out the car part, because it really slowed down when I was recording the video. I seemed to capture the vehicles much better in some of my previous videos.

Good point about the civilians being scared of the car....but then we come to the question of programmatically, how can I determine if a AI character should be "scared" of a car. I'll probably take the easy route and say something along the lines of:

if(CurrentPlayerControlledCar.Speed > SpeedLimit && DistFromCivilian < 10 meters)
{
Civilian.Scare();
}

I think that should be all I need to make them at least run from you when you steal a car and start going crazy. Which direction they run, etc. will be up the them.

Again, the text bubble speed is all fux0red because of the issues re-mapping the frames per second of the captured video. But yea it does seem a little fast, I noticed that and slowed it down a bit since.

The amount of time the message bubble stays open is based on the length of the message. Also I'm play a little generic/distorted voice from the 3D position of the actor who is speaking, so that's a nice little effect also, it cuts out once the message bubble goes away.

Yup I've got ambient city noises and all that good stuff playing in-game. Also I have a few more civilian animations I've still got to implement, and I could add some code to make the civilians pause, or engange in short random funny conversations with each other using the new speech bubbles [grin].

Thanks for the great feedback! It's awesome having an international community like GameDev.net for me to bounce my game off of, especially given the size of my team *looks around*...wait it's just me!

Thanks again for the comments guys.

- Dan

Loved the video. I especially liked the part where the woman accidently got ran over by the car. Looking pretty awesome, keep it up.

Based on what you'd said previously, I'm not too surprised that some of what I said was an unfortunate artefact of the recording rather than the actual game [smile]

It could be more hassle than it's worth, but if you could create a system that records events and then plays them back you could record your actions and then play them back in some offline manner so that timing ceases to be an issue.

Quote:I'm also going to throw in some nice blending between camera positions

There's a lot of potential for that looking very cool [grin]

A couple of those shots where it jumps from the player up to the rooftops/ "helicam" view could be quite impressive if you get some transition/animation between...

Quote:we come to the question of programmatically, how can I determine if a AI character should be "scared" of a car

Yeah, theres no easy way for this one I suppose. Probably makes sense to go with whatever suits with the rest of your AI system...

If you could determine if/when the car leaves the actual road then that could be useful - if the player is actually a good driver, but zipping along above the speed limit then you don't want all the peds diving out the way.

Quote:I could add some code to make the civilians pause, or engange in short random funny conversations with each other using the new speech bubbles

DO IT! Perfect opportunity for easter eggs as well - find the NPC's telling each other jokes or whatever...

Jack

Your game is so freaking unrealistic. $1.17 for gas? What world are YOU living in? Been outside recently? =D

Anyway, it looks absolutely amazing. There really isn't much to say in critique besides what has been said, so I will just walk away with my jaw on the floor.

Yeaaa, I needed the webspace :-(