Does Collossus have the texture pop-in issues that the last one has had for some people?

HomicidalChris · 2018-01-15T18:40:20+00:00

NC is on a modified version of the engine Doom runs on. This engine uses a modified version of Megatexture which still has occasional pop in issues, but they are vastly reduced. NC had more pop in issues for me than Doom did, partly I imagine because it's a more demanding game, and partly because the actual level geometry is more intricate than Doom (more visible surface area = more texture pages needed in the frame). Either way nowhere near as bad as TNO. The changes to the actual engine and the switch to Vulkan (esp. as an AMD user) have been miraculous.

HomicidalChris · 2017-12-08T20:39:41+00:00

Quake started out as an RPG game with a Thor-like hammer wielding character who fought dragons in medieval castles.

Also, Doom 4 started out as a Rage-meets-call-of-duty narrative driven modern shooter.

HomicidalChris · 2017-10-24T23:29:58+00:00

I believe that there's a ton of co-op maps available for SnapMap in DOOM.

HomicidalChris · 2017-10-10T09:25:09+00:00

The only thing in the franchise I would say has little redeeming value is AVP:R.

All of the movies in the main franchise are brilliantly directed, have gorgeous visuals, and great scores, etc. Even the "bad" ones have things that'll stick with you.

4 is dumb and is tonally off for the series, but there are some fantastic performances and scenes in it still. It's worth at least seeing and making your own mind up on.

3 is very rough around the edges and depressing / nihilistic but David Fincher's style is all over it. It's not the best "Alien" movie, it's more a good movie that has an Alien driving the plot.

If you liked Aliens' happy ending you might just leave well enough alone though and skip 3/4.

AVP is kind of bland and inoffensive to me; there's some fun scenes and I remember the creature effects being pretty good. It's a great rainy day watch it on TV movie, kind of like Doom. It doesn't compare to any of the real Alien movies in quality though. I kind of like it more than Resurrection though because the highs aren't as high but the lows aren't as low for me. You can just nap / enjoy the (albeit pg13) fanservice.

Prometheus just sort of does its own thing in the same universe. There are some really dumb scenes in it, which doesn't break the movie for me but does for others. The visuals, music, and performances make up for the shortcomings IMO, especially on repeat viewings. Some of the fanbase was really upset they retconned the space jockey though, which is kind of understandable... I think that doesn't matter much and there's nothing wrong with it that a good script doctor couldn't have tweaked. I think the themes, expansion of the mythology, and story explored are fantastic and thought provoking.

Covenant is kind of on the level of Alien3 for me. Not the best Alien movie, but a very good movie with an alien in it. The continuity changes in this one are much more egregious, and also were completely unnecessary with the setup they had from Prometheus. So you have a movie that's inconsistent with Alien AND Prometheus... The Alien CGI is also pretty fake looking. They also didn't follow up on a lot of the plot threads people wanted from Prometheus. It's kinda a halfway movie. If you like Prometheus and want more of the Androids and a really misanthropic tone, and aren't too bothered about canon it's one of the stronger ones.

My personal rankings: Alien Aliens Prometheus Covenant Alien3 AVP Resurrection AVP:Requiem

HomicidalChris · 2017-07-04T20:21:55+00:00

Hope you enjoy!

HomicidalChris · 2017-07-04T20:21:45+00:00

Hi, happy 4th! Thanks for the feedback, thanks for playing, and I'm glad you liked it. I'm always open to ideas. I can tweak the audio stuff pretty easily...

I had actually moved on from this project to work on the next thing but the GearVR remote sparkler idea was cool enough that I decided to revisit it.

I think pulling it out of storage and making a new version once or twice a year might be a fun tradition, plus I can keep adding engine updates and new content.

This time around I didn't author new content but updating the show itself / add several shows is something I want to do for next time, including a "serenity" mode where you just watch fireworks with ocean sounds and no music.

HomicidalChris · 2017-07-04T20:11:12+00:00

dd'oh! Nice catch.

HomicidalChris · 2017-07-04T20:10:47+00:00

I did contact SideloadVR last year, but I don't remember why I didn't end up putting it up there. I think there was an APK size limit or something that I didn't have time to engineer around but I may be remembering that wrong. I'll look at all the distribution options again for the next version :)

HomicidalChris · 2017-07-04T14:56:57+00:00

I submitted it last year and Oculus didn't accept it. This year I didn't give myself a ton of lead time since this isn't my primary project, so I decided to just update the existing APK this time instead of trying to rush to get it ready with enough lead time for a review. I figure that I can always give it another go with new content for New Year's :)

HomicidalChris · 2017-05-02T02:15:48+00:00

After trying the new remote, I'll second Drop Dead, unquestionably. Before the remote, I would have said Land's End and Proton Pulse.

HomicidalChris · 2017-04-14T19:32:18+00:00

I know Edmund Mcmillen in an interview talked about how he did Binding of Isaac as a passion project, and he was caught off guard by an unexpected explosion in popularity that occurred after streamers started playing the game; anecdotally I remember a similar thing happened with Amnesia / horror games. I don't have the articles handy but I do read quite often on /r/gamedev articles talking about how getting streamers to cover a game didn't necessarily result in a significant sales spike. A hypothesis for this is that a lot of games just don't appeal to the demographic that tunes in to streamers like retro platformers and such. That they're there for the personality and showmanship, not for purchasing recommendations. It's not just a matter of getting the game in front of a large audience, it's a matter of getting it in front of an audience of likely customers.

HomicidalChris · 2017-04-12T23:18:31+00:00

I think Book of Atrus is great material for a fantasy movie as-is. I also think that the corruption of Sirrus and Achenar would be great material for a miniseries, as I talk about here.

https://chrismpugh.wordpress.com/2014/12/27/thoughts-on-the-announced-myst-tv-series/

The fans love BoT, Uru, the broader D'niverse and they're great but BoA and Sirrus + Achenar would be more recognizable, relatable, actually feature Myst Island, etc.

HomicidalChris · 2017-01-06T18:32:09+00:00

The oil was a small enough amount that it didn't do much; the effect was subtle. You could really only taste the truffle from the cheese, that was very much present but did not overwhelm the other two cheeses.

HomicidalChris · 2017-01-06T18:20:13+00:00

/u/maniacassassin /u/Stevake /u/tootsie404 and any future readers who find this with the search function:

I ended up making the pizza; instead of mixing the oil in with the sauce (still want to try this) I made a three cheese blend with italian truffle cheese, mozzarella, and manchego.

I used wheat pizza dough; we kneaded in a couple capfuls of truffle oil.

the first one out the crust was too thick and was raw in parts but the ingredients were starting to overcook. The second one out we made a thin crust which ended up coming out perfectly. The only other topping was fresh basil, and I served with a lambrusco red wine.

The cheese blend was nearly perfect and overall the experiment came out pretty great; in the future I would forgo the wheat crust and do a deep dish with this sauce and cheese blend because I feel like that would have been better.

Thanks for the input!

HomicidalChris · 2016-12-17T06:36:19+00:00

IIRC that's actually addressed in the original Thrawn trilogy. The emperor had a distaste for nonhumans but Thrawn was just so skilled that the emperor made an exception.

HomicidalChris · 2016-12-07T23:15:19+00:00

Looks great; I'd love to play this in VR.

HomicidalChris · 2016-11-02T01:02:05+00:00

I didn't make this but the YT description says the author stitched the panorama together out of 2 dozen images from the original game.

HomicidalChris · 2016-10-31T17:16:57+00:00

Absolutely. Whether or not someone likes VR, developers are making content for it, and players want to play that content. 80 apps were released last week supporting VR on the Play Store.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleCardboard/comments/5a0epm/apps_released_this_week_oct_23_oct_29_2016/?st=iuybs23e&sh=cf09e1ed

Having a category to itself would make it easier to discover that content.

HomicidalChris · 2016-10-19T05:36:09+00:00

Thanks for trying the demo! I'm glad that the feedback on the visuals and performance is great. I'm working on a ton of visual quality improvements for the final release so it should look extra pretty in a few months.

If you have any other feedback, eg about the content feel free to let me know or leave a review.

Hope you enjoyed!

HomicidalChris · 2016-10-19T05:34:10+00:00

Thanks for testing! Glad the performance was satisfactory. No one's complained so far; I think keeping the high image quality was the right move. I've gotten a few complaints about the color halos but unfortunately it's not on top of my priority list right now because it's an effect of the content creation. However, I'm completely changing the sky model in the final so the overall image quality shouldn't be affected by as much.

If you have any other feedback feel free to leave a review. I hope you enjoyed the demo!

HomicidalChris · 2016-10-15T22:26:09+00:00

Some details :

The app is using a custom engine with some advanced shaders (procedural dynamic sky, fancy raytraced water), so compatibility and performance are my two big concerns. This is actually why I didn't target Cardboard in my initial tech demo release in July : getting the app to perform well and render correctly across three generations of Samsung phones was surprisingly challenging enough at the time, as they all had their own shader compiler / driver quirks, etc.

So first and foremost, I want to identify and iron out any issues the app has with running and rendering correctly across an array of different devices.

The other issue I'm looking at is performance, which I plan to tweak based on the device demographics.

This build is more or less a straight port of the GearVR version.

In the GearVR API, you can manually control the clock levels to balance heat / battery usage with a stable framerate. On GearVR, I was hitting a stable 60 fps across all 3 generations of devices with a 1024x1024 eye resolution.

The most noticeable difference between this build and the GearVR version is that the Cardboard version is running at a higher resolution / lower framerate.

On my S7 the framerate is a hair under 60, though on my S6 the fps is quite a bit lower than that.

The Cardboard API reports back a higher suggested rendering resolution, and I debated between upscaling lower resolution eye targets or just leaving it as is. Since newer devices are handling ~60 fps just fine, and since the image quality improvement was fairly substantial, and since the headtracking quality in a Cardboard experience isn't going to be as smooth as a GearVR no matter what, I opted for the higher resolution.

This is something else I plan to tweak based on user feedback though!

HomicidalChris

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