Hidden, and not so hidden gems

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win3k
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by win3k »

Result!

Enjoy the hovercraft races

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Meatsack
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by Meatsack »

Ahhh... Duke Nuke'm 3D. My first REAL experience in map making.
(DOOM editors sucked and didn't really count.)

I bought the tutorial book that listed all the commands and tags needed to do all the cool effects in the game. I worked on a map all of my 2nd senior year of college ( :P ) just to lose it in the move when I graduated and got a new PC. ( Drat CD-R's not being invented yet! ( 1996! ( Damn, I'm old. ) ) That Pentium 166 was screaming fast, tho!)

Anyhoo... that's when I really started to work with what COULD be done with an engine rather than what an engine is just EXPECTED to do. With all that being said... has anyone else made a klein-bottle effect in their maps using the BUILD editor? I haven't looked around to see, so I don't know if anyone else stumbled on that effect.

The basic rule for the BUILD engine was: "You cannot have 2 floors or ceilings visible in the same x,y space." Meaning, you could have rooms over each other (z-axis), but not visible at the same time at any angle. It caused real bad visual errors.

To make a long story short (Too Late!), with careful placements of walls to satisfy the above rule, and extruding wall segments backwards into other spaces where players could tread, I made pockets of playable space within playable space on the same x,y,z coordinates where neither space interacted with each other. (Clear? No? I get that a lot.) It was exciting to me, anyway, to figure it out at the time.

Oh well... Duke 3D rocks! Gotta try with the 3D models now, too!
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by Klondike »

Meatsack wrote: has anyone else made a klein-bottle effect in their maps using the BUILD editor? I haven't looked around to see, so I don't know if anyone else stumbled on that effect.
If you are referring to sector overlapping, then yes.
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by Daddyo »

If that's like a mobius strip, then you got to put one of Xistence's wild light cycles in there...
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by SweatyPyro »

Meatsack wrote:has anyone else made a klein-bottle effect in their maps using the BUILD editor?
I happen to drink from klein bottles on a regular basis, so I'm not at all excited by this prospect.
(That's a lie)
!!!!
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by Meatsack »

Klondike wrote:
Meatsack wrote: has anyone else made a klein-bottle effect in their maps using the BUILD editor? I haven't looked around to see, so I don't know if anyone else stumbled on that effect.
If you are referring to sector overlapping, then yes.

Thank you. I had a feeling that it was obvious, but I never knew anyone else personally that had stumbled onto it. However, the internet was still in its infancy by the time I had moved on to Quake. I had no online modding community at the time to share ideas back and forth. Good to know...
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by Klondike »

Sector overlapping is also mentioned in the BUILD help file, so I'm pretty sure level lords had fun making those in the city like maps. I remember my friend and I used to dual in a map of that kind. I changed my dethtoll midi to Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer". The Good ol' days. Games were so fun and innocent back then.
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

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Klondike wrote:Sector overlapping is also mentioned in the BUILD help file, so I'm pretty sure level lords had fun making those in the city like maps. I remember my friend and I used to dual in a map of that kind. I changed my dethtoll midi to Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer". The Good ol' days. Games were so fun and innocent back then.
Agreed! Friend's and I swapped patch files on 3.5" floppies. Custom sounds for taunts, etc... I eventually stuck with the "Army of Darkness" taunts. :P

Anyhoo... back to topic... A few gems I sometimes trot out for nostalgia are Jagged Alliance, JA: Deadly Games, and JA2. As far as LAN games went back in the day, it was DOOM, Duke Nuke'm, Master Of Orion I & II , Warcraft I & II , Jedi Knight, and X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter. All in the days of 4MB video cards and 32 MB of SDRAM! Woo Hoo! Screamin' speeds!
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by TronFAQ »

My first ever map was for Wolfenstein 3D, but I guess that doesn't count. :o

Then I made a map for Doom, which I didn't finish and never released. I followed that with a map for Duke Nukem 3D, which I didn't finish and never released. Then came a map for Jedi Outcast, which I didn't finish and never released.

Noticing a trend there? :P

In the case of Duke 3D, I gave up because the Build editor kept crashing on me all the time. I was going to make a level similar to the first Space Port and ninth Dark Side maps, in the second mission.

In fact, Tron 2.0 is the first time I ever finished and actually released the maps I worked on.
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by Klondike »

Your next release should be the widescreen patch. If there's no compiling involved, perhaps the community could help you with it.
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by TRON.dll »

Just picked up Trackmania DS. If you like the free Trackmania game on Steam, you'll love this.

Basically, it's the free Trackmania game, but there's two new environments (desert and an english countryside), two new game modes (platform and puzzle), and it's portable!

Seems like it's not that common, though. Literally spent 3 weeks looking for it, lol.

The most interesting of all the game modes, in my opinion, was the new Puzzle mode. You start out in the track editor, and you have to complete a track, as you already have the start and finish, as well as some checkpoints in some levels. You've got a limited number of track pieces, and you have to use what you have to build a track. Then, you race your track and try to get the best time possible.

The track editor is just as open as it is in the free PC Trackmania. However, you only start out with four pieces (start, finish, straight, and curve). You unlock more pieces by buying them in the store using the in-game money you earn by completing the included tracks.

There's also multiplayer, but it seems like you can't race your own tracks, which is a bit disappointing. There's also no online, which is the one thing critics are really crying about. It's really not that big of an issue though, as the game is still as fun as the PC counterpart.

Overall, I'd say it's great for road trips and small parties. There's a hotseat multiplayer mode that goes up to 8 players, which I'm yet to try. Definitely check it out if you have a DS (or DSi, since it plays DS games).

It's definitely something that a lot of people haven't heard about. I haven't seen a single ad for it, and I couldn't find it at hardly any stores. It's well worth the scavenger hunt if you try to get it. :D
Image
http://timewastergames.blogspot.com

Timewaster Games = teh w00t :D
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by Meatsack »

That reminds me of STUNTS for the IBM-486 PC.
It's a car racing game with a track editor...

I guess that makes an even older map making game that I've spent hours of time figuring out what can be done, and what isn't feasible.

Oh heck! That now reminds me of the Racing Destruction Kit for the Commodore 64! Now I'm map making back when I'm 10 years old! I think Adventure Construction Kit was out at the same time... Dang I feel old now. :???:
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by win3k »

Morning chaps

Image

Yes.

I'm not normally a great fan of this genre, but this game stands out. Graphically, it's highly stylized, and it's more Austin Powers than James Bond. You play the titular Evil Genius, laying out your evil base and populating it with traps, minions, henchmen (The Matron is a particular favourite), giant lasers and the whole panoply of things that an aspiring world dominator requires, as you carry out acts of infamy to raise loot and reputation.

In all honesty, there are some parts that jar; running low on loot is pretty common, and it takes time to re-build your bank. Your minions can be dumber than a box of rocks, and are often hopelessly outgunned by even small numbers of investigating agents (who turn up in numbers proportional to your reputation).

That said, capturing agents and sending them to be interrogated in a giant food mixer, watching an agent get caught in your carefully planned multi-turbine wind trap, and finally getting to the stage of holding the world to ransom are all guaranteed to get you grinning like a loon.

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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by TronFAQ »

I came across a nice list of 30 great PC games over at bit-tech.

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2009/ ... -you-die/1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A lot of the games we've mentioned are on the list, but some aren't. And there are even games I've never heard of before.
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Re: Hidden, and not so hidden gems

Post by win3k »

Morning chaps

Just finished playing this:

Image

I'm torn, tbh.

At first glance, it's first person shooterage set in the Arctic. What the game does really well is make you feel the cold (even going so far as to overlay icing effects onto the corners of the screen). Enemies are weighty (think "The Thing" meets "Hellraiser", with a side order of just-plain-weird).

Weapons fall into two categories (melee and guns) and range from the effeminate (an improvised knuckle duster, a flare pistol) to the brutal (a fire axe, a Tommy gun), but all of them are modelled on the real world equivalent (so loading your rifle, f'rinstance, takes time to complete, swinging the axe about knocks your stamina bar etc.).

The developers (Ukrainian) have taken pains to make the game something different, and have succeeded in some areas. First off, your character moves slowly; you have a "run" button, but that depletes your stamina bar faster than an asthmatic with a heart condition. At first irritating (especially if you're used to bunnyhopping silliness like Painkiller), you soon come to accept it (you''re in the Arctic, and swaddeled in about 3 feet of thick clothes. You expect to run?).

Second, they've done away with that whole health/armour thing, and replaced it with a dual heat gauge; the external one (it's rendered as an old fashioned pressure gauge) shows the current ambient temperature and the internal one shows your "core" temperature (zero = dead), which gets depleted as you take damage. You regain heat by locating heat sources (ranging from lightbulbs to electric heaters) and warming yourself up (with the added effect that your stamina gauge refills much more quickly near to heat sources).

The other major departure from FPS-land is the "mental echo" ability; when you locate a corpse, you are able to replay the last moments of that person's life - and change how things played out. Novel, and brilliant as an idea, in practice, however, it amounts to little more than "work out the arbitrary sequence of actions that we, the developers, want you to follow, because believe me, you're going abso-lutely-fricking-nowhere until you've done it exactly the way we want". Any departure from the script throws you back to the real-world, from where you have little choice but to start the sequence over and over again. Simply put, these are quick time events without the quick.

Final muttering: this game runs like a turd on even very high spec machines; apparently (according to teh interweb, always a reliable source) the issues are related to both PhysX support (the game proudly displays this on the back of the box, but amounts in practice to a few boxes that can be kicked but have sod-all to do with the gameplay) and/or using ATI, rather than Nvidia cards. The forums (http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/forumdisplay.php?f=136" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) are filled with unhappy bunnies who've bought the game, taken a second mortgage for their PC, and are now looking at seriously withered e-peens.

Final thoughts. Despite the gripes, I liked this game (I hesitate to call it a game, because to me it played more like an interactive story). Yes, the engine lets things down a bit (the draw distance for the engine is painfully limited, which is why you'll never find yourself in an area where you can see further than about 50 feet), and the mental echo thing implies a freedom to interfere with history that you don't actually have. All that said, the developers have shown that they have the cojones to try something properly different, and in these days of cookie-cutter shootage, that should be applauded and supported.

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