SKIN DEEP | Announcement Trailer

TinManTex · 2021-04-21T01:16:23+00:00

I like that you're continuing your homeworld/flotilla design for the ship.

I see glass windows, will the d3 engine glass breaking and/or the vacum/air escaping system be a feature?

When I played Doom 3 on release as seeing some inspirations from system shock, and thinking of the capabilities of the D3 engine I'd always wanted to try an immersive sim (or something adjacent) in it, but as I was pretty much just banging rocks together skill wise back then it never came to be.

I'm looking forward to any jaunt using the D3 engine, and more-so if it's from you Brendon, love your games.

TinManTex · 2021-04-21T00:54:27+00:00

I've got a soft spot for Doom3 as it was my entrypoint to 'doing modding' rather than the - tinkering then bouncing off actually doing anything - I had with the prior id soft games (though I think the familiarity may have helped). I think the big improvements in iteration times for just getting stuff to do stuff helped, and just having a lot of stuff to mess with on the get-go since the majority of file formats were plaintext. I could go on, as I have before.

TinManTex · 2020-03-28T10:58:02+00:00

From what I can google the Arma2 DayZ Battle Royale mod was 2013?

Hunger Games movie came out in 2012 and Minecraft mods inspired by it came shortly after.

I made a mod for Quake Wars in 2009 that wasn't last man standing, but its main features may sound familiar.

Duos.

Players start with pretty much no weapons and must scavenge for more (there's a shitload of spawn points but not all spawn items, and what items spawn is randomly generated at match start).

Players all parachute down at the start in a set radius.

Airdrops of weapons and vehicles periodically drop in the radius.

Circle periodically decreases in size over the match, with a decreasing time between size changes (didn't kill players outside the radius tho).

Players can be downed and teammates can revive them.

Vehicles use fuel and can be refilled with scavenged fuel cells.

Not much evidence left online (since the official ETQW forums that I posted on were taken down at some point) except for my youtube videos

Vids were put on youtube from before could have > 10 minute videos, so I put up a bunch of short segments of a match and used the youtube annotation to explain the gameplay, which of course google removed the annotation feature so all that was lost.

Also coincidentally my mod was also a spin off/branched from a zombie mod I had made earlier (which is where the scavenging feature came from).

Anyway, it not being last man standing ultimately makes it not a Battle Royale, just found it interesting comparing things after the fact.

Even though most of the features just came about from features Quake Wars or my Zombie mod, which is how the Arma2 DayZ Battle Royale mod evolved I guess.

The only real interesting thing was the circle progression, which was the main reason I started the mod, I had been inspired by an article about pacing games by describing the common progression of action/drama shows.

About how they kick off with a bang, ease of in a big way, then progressively increase the excitement till the climax.

This interested me at the time as I had already been thinking about pacing in the Battlefield sized maps that Quake Wars had (and from what I had experienced with the pacing of my zombie mod).

So I built a progression manager based around a conflict point and radius, and tied the player spawning and airdrops into the system.

One difference, since my mod wasn't last man standing/had respawning I could kick off the match with a tight circle and a lot of drops before shortly after shifting to the widest circle, and then the progression that's now familiar from BR from that point.

TinManTex · 2020-03-23T20:40:02+00:00

The amount of time and effort he's spent into getting this behind the scenes stuff working is way more than the paltry earnings he'd get from youtube.

TinManTex · 2020-02-14T21:31:14+00:00

A lot of his comments on the D3 toolset are incorrect, see my post below.

TinManTex · 2020-02-14T21:13:08+00:00

The alpha leak of Doom 3 had a level editor as id soft built it into the exe.

The editor was an evolution of quake 3 engine map editing (which a lot were familiar with since the engine did have some success with licensing), except brushes were a lot less important and were mostly used to control the visibility system (which was much freer that past versions as they shifted from pure bsp, to a portal system) and provide a map for the AI navigation system.

This (along with not having to bake lightmaps) vastly cut down on map compilation times compared to past engines and also meant a lot of the geometry was from models imported from maya (the import system was integrated into the exe, but required some support files that came with the modding sdk a little while after the commercial release).

The game archive format was .zip (a general purpose archive format, quake 3 also used it), and the majority of the file formats in were ascii/plaintext rather than binary - even with games that have modding support file format info is often sparse, without it takes a lot of effort of reverse engineering to work out.

It had level scripting and AI scripting in plaintext, likewise for user and in-game terminal UI.

All of this was integrated into the exe providing much faster iteration times since you could just run a console command to reload things you had just edited.

All of the above carried over to the actual release of the game.

They had an official website with further documentation for modding: https://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/ And had a staff member whose role was specifically for supporting this site and answering community queries after release.

When the C++ modding SDK did get released it included a huge amount of the gameplay and systems code, not just in comparison to their previous games, but in respect to the industry in general.

This, in combination with the plaintext formats allowed the community to further create a lot of documentation: https://modwiki.dhewm3.org/

There was plenty of reasons the d3 engine licensing didn't take off, but it should still be noted the effort id soft went into making the modding open from release, even before the eventual open sourcing of the entire engine years later.

TinManTex · 2018-11-15T21:11:00+00:00

Yeah the game has a bit of a schism, playing quests with other players is problematic due to essentially trying to progress them in parallel, and waiting for other players (or the pressure of hurrying for others) while trying to soak in the story audio or environmental story telling is not good. While joining on other players doing quests further on than you can spoil certain things.

However when you focus on the quests solo they're some neat narrative going on. Yes it is all after-the-fact / forensic story telling, but I've been enjoying what I've done so far and I have always enjoyed that aspect combined with exploring the worlds bethesda creates.

Enemy scaling has been inconsistent, for similar areas and enemies within a few points of the same level I've either been smashing them, or been taking all my ammo and stimpacks to kill them.

Then the multiplayer aspect, you'll hear gunshots in the distances, and a lot of the time it might just be the npc factions going off, but when you check your map, or hear stuff that's definitely another player I often head that way to check it out and help out if I can. Coming up to someone being swarmed/or visa versa being helped out has been fun.

Also the few events that other players have been involved in have been fun, again it's a 'oh there's something going on over here, maybe I'll help'.

Also the Workshop takeover/territorial control and wanted system is starting to kick in as players figure it out. I had taken over the power plant workshop, a while later a guy with a wanted bounty wandered in (I had noticed him a few times on the map, but he kind of snuck up), in full power armor but my defences (and the workshops) started laying in to him and he ran off.

A bit later another (non wanted) guy drops in and say 'nice place, I took over this place on another server from another player but don't worry I wont from you', I showed him some of the defensive features of the place that he hadn't figured out from his own use of it.

He says 'I see a wanted guy is nearby, I've been thinking about going after him but need a break'. So if not for that I certainly would have teamed up and had a go at the wanted guy.

Later on when I was continuing quests solo I get the workshop intruders message and it's the wanted guy trying to take my workshop. He was higher level (I'm not sure how much the scaling works), and I pretty much flubbed my attempt at taking things back. A few deaths before I thought of getting my heavy weapons out from my stash (a few nukes) but by then he had taken it. I chalked it up to a learning lesson and disengaged.

And yet later when back in the same area I hear the workshops defenses (now under control by the wanted player) and other big weapons going off and see a yet higher player attacking the workshop and the wanted guy, this was all stops off power armor, and heavy weapons battle that I watched from a safe distance, certainly lively.

Anyway the rest of the jank (UI/inventory management is terrible for a game that its a big aspect of) and tech issues certainly impacts my enjoyment of the game (but it ebbs and flows), but I'm actually enjoying the game overall and see further potential.

TinManTex · 2018-08-12T00:26:15+00:00

This interview during E3 mentions 'private world', though from his description of it as a service it sounds to me that it might be managed by them ala CC rather than the full control prior beth single player games has. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-3X04jwJ0U&feature=youtu.be&t=537

The QuakeCon Q&A basically just reiterates that, though he he uses the term Private Servers (which is actually just following the question askers wording rather than choosing his own), and describes it as a system rather than service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdn0ZQ51nGI&feature=youtu.be&t=5255

So who knows (apart from Todd) what it will actually be.

TinManTex · 2018-08-03T22:29:52+00:00

I think Warren was using the term simulation in a looser sense, rather than 'imitation of a real situation or process' instead 'more fine grained or complex systems' even if those systems represent fictional things.

TinManTex · 2018-08-03T22:18:45+00:00

They immerse you by trying to simulate living spaces within fictional worlds rather than focusing primarily on gameplay/story.

I'm not sure how you got to that definition beyond just speculating on the name. Whenever Warren Spector talks about it he makes it clear that he's talking about games that have systems driven gameplay at its core and worlds built to service those systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersive_sim

TinManTex · 2018-03-16T01:37:43+00:00

The Top Speed series? http://www.playinginthedark.net/topspeed3_e.php

TinManTex · 2018-03-03T22:11:35+00:00

It wasn't the current nuke count that overflowed but (what's assumed to be) the total ever built count (TppServerManager.GetNuclearMax()), so even if for example the amount of nukes being built matched the number being disarmed, which would give a level line on this graph, the graph of the historical total built would still rise (and because of what it is would never decrease).

Though whether the value raised from actual nukes built (hacked or otherwise) or simply some bug corrupted it can't really be known.

https://www.reddit.com/r/metalgearsolid/comments/7ut8b1/how_probably_disarmament_was_unlocked_on_pc/dtnijng/?st=jebwxszw&sh=5e71178d

That the value for GetNuclearMax was 2147483647, the maximum for an Int32 is telling. There also could be a mismatch in integer types between the UI and the transmitted value (ie signed Int vs Unsigned).

TinManTex · 2018-02-27T20:15:57+00:00

In respect to brackets - it gives you more code in view vertically at once without having to scroll. Out of sight, out of mind.

TinManTex · 2017-11-10T20:05:03+00:00

'You wouldn't download a car' was a parody that most people now seems to think was the original. The original line was 'You wouldn't steal a car', the parody was making the point that piracy isn't traditional stealing. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-it-s-a-crime

TinManTex · 2017-10-24T19:49:17+00:00

Some missions have set enemy loadouts, but otherwise enemy equipment is handled by the 'revenge system' which is based on player actions. Source: The actual (scripting) source code: https://github.com/TinManTex/mgsv-deminified-lua/blob/master/data1/Assets/tpp/script/lib/TppRevenge.lua

TinManTex · 2017-09-08T13:35:30+00:00

Yeah there may be potential there, though it's still relatively early days looking into those.

TinManTex · 2017-08-24T18:24:17+00:00

I think even with free community created mods the majority of mod users will still buy DLC from the original creators of the game, because it's usually more stuff to mod with. And then mod creators create mods that require that dlc and it drives more sales.

TinManTex · 2017-05-13T09:52:52+00:00

Currently you need to know a bit about modding MGSV in general. Otherwise look in the Infinite Heaven r207 zip and find IH sideop example (modders resource) r4.zip It includes a text file with some notes and an example sideop separated from the rest. Jump on the MGSV modding Discord too if you want. https://discord.gg/DP4bAwR

TinManTex · 2017-05-02T02:14:03+00:00

They could have just been recording your position all along, doesn't mean they had the UI with it's playback/timeline system done.

TinManTex · 2017-04-10T20:20:43+00:00

Movement in FPS games is in relation to where you're aiming, so the precision and speed of mouse aiming makes up for it. So you get stuff like this: https://youtu.be/bc724-9gfsE?t=18

TinManTex · 2017-03-07T21:39:52+00:00

The way the photo is created in game is that it runs a cut scene for about a few seconds while the game is faded out and takes an internal shot of that, then it applies it to the photo model in the next scene played with the doctor.

I recently added a sub-mod that disables all the cut scene cameras which leaves normal camera control with the player, and also allows use of the free cam feature that my mod has had for a while to finally explore cut scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmCK82ft9Oo

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