SD, take notes from DICE

(wolfnemesis75) #21

I think they already took notes, plenty up to this point. Every game doesn’t have to be BF3 or COD.

(INF3RN0) #22

I do believe that the people who are the best at a game have the most perspective and understanding. That’s why a lot of devs looking to create a competitive and balanced game out of the box use the available resource to their advantage. Forums on the other hand… not so much rational thought, understanding, or real experience. Not to mention sequels or similar game follow-ups that have promotional pre-release show matches with these elite testers as well. It might not seem like a fair proposition, but I would have definitely given my SC2 beta key to someone like Flash because I know he would give much better feedback and stress testing for the game.

Also you should play the other games and take some notes. Not everyone wanted CoD or BF lols.

(DarkangelUK) #23

Don’t be silly, we all know these forums didn’t exist before Brink and no one had any discussions prior to release that were totally against the CoD/BF route :smiley:

(tokamak) #24

I completely agree. A good game is balanced around the top-tier players but leave the fundamentals intact for the lower players. Starcraft is a great example indeed, they stream-lined the overly-intense original for the beginners but left the intensite micro and near infinite complexity for the pro’s and that’s where the game is ultimately balanced.

Forums on the other hand… not so much rational thought, understanding, or real experience

I’m not denying you have real experience, understanding or rational thought however, you clearly lack.

(GreasedScotsman) #25

While Frostbite 2 does display some nice visuals, the engine is plagued by all the same crap as everything else out there except id Tech 5. I was pretty much weighing the significance of id Tech 5 after Rage’s problematic PC launch (even though I personally had zero problems after fiddling with the console for a bit) and even reconsidering whether I wanted to tinker with iT5 from a modder’s perspective–I’ve been far more interested in the engine of Rage than Rage the game.

Back to Frostbite 2. LOD pop exists everywhere. The tank mission is the best display of this problem. Basically, as you drive the tank, you’ll see tons of shrubbery popping into the scene just a short distance away. This problem doesn’t exist in Rage, and I have to say after playing through its campaign, it is very difficult to excuse this visual problem in every other engine. For all of the issues people have had with mega texture–even if they’re nearly all because id decided to make Rage’s assets the same across all platforms and targeted the ****ty, lowest common denominator hardware of the 360… well, that, and ATI can’t code a driver to save their lives–the fact that iT5 and its use of sparse virtual texturing avoids this problem is amazing. You literally see as far as the in-game eye can see and it’s truly breathtaking at times.

Next: Dynamic shadows are still riddled with the lego-stairs and flicker bull**** that every other engine struggles with… though again, only id Software has tried to remedy (id Tech 4’s unified lighting–sadly scaled back for Brink, it seems… tho I can’t be sure unless we ever get a SDK). While perhaps not a huge critical success along the lines of COD, Doom 3’s atmosphere is still unrivaled in so many ways thanks to the incredible power that id Tech 4 leverages. Running D3 on today’s hardware is also quite amazing as you can plop 50 baddies in a level and go wild… and manage to get that nostalgic feeling of “holy **** that’s a horde of monsters gunning for me,” that Doom 1 & 2 elicited so well.

Third, invisible walls. I need to play the multiplayer to truly get a sense of this, but DICE’s single player levels are quite small. Walk 5 steps away from the pre-determined path and you see “Return to combat or die, nub!” messages. They also have 20+ second loading times. And they load new sections ALL the time. Contrast that with iT5’s Wasteland. Devmap it and start walking. It’s hilarious how long it takes to get to the other side on foot, let alone by vehicle.

Best of all, we know we’re getting a SDK w/ Rage (eventually) and I have 2 first-orders of business. 1) remove the invisible walls everywhere (where appropriate) to see if they were just there to keep the console kiddies from crying because they fell into an abyss and 2) make the game more difficult. While Rage was a cakewalk, BF3 is even easier. The only time I die is if I don’t press a goddamn “knife this guy” prompt at the exact place they want me to (really DICE? Why do I have to knife a guy 5 steps away rather than sneak up to him and do the deed? Oh, because your scripted sequence doesn’t make sense if I’m 2 steps closer. GG.)

Anyway, don’t get me wrong. I’m enjoying BF3 immensely and I’m amazed at some of its technical achievements, especially the destructible areas of its environments. Sadly, there are only “specific things” you can break, just as there are only specific areas you can mantle/vault over, etc. All the technical issues that remain jar me from the experience because I know there isn’t a lot of room for improvement… BF3, like COD, is just the pinnacle of the old… there’s not much new there that will carry games forward.

Yet, for all of their faults, both Splash Damage’s Brink and id Software’s Rage attempt to take age old problems and fix them.

Brink’s SMART movement system, while faulty, does make every other game seem cumbersome in the movement department. Over time, hopefully SD (or us modders, if we can get our hands on a SDK ahem can refine this and improve on it. Everyone knows its a great idea… it just needs some time to grow.

Rage, on the other hand, takes LOD pop and squashes it, while rendering the world in completely unique textures. Again, it’s hard to look at other games now and not notice constant pop or tiling. On top of that, Rage reintroduces literally 5 second level load times. Contrast that with the 30+ second loads of BF3. Further, the texture pop-in problems are mostly driver related… after a few config tweaks, I never experienced them again–so it’s not the engine. And finally, the low-detailed textures that are common screenshot fests of the morons out there are simply a result of a design decision by id to ensure all 3 versions used the same game assets; they are not a limitation of the engine.

For these reasons, I will enjoy what DICE has offered, but I certainly won’t go “ga ga” over it once I’m done playing, and I will continue to appreciate the strides id and SD are taking to grow gaming possibilities.

Even if the games SD and id have made may not live up to the hype of their competitors, from a technology and modding potential standpoint, I salute and applaud their efforts because they’ve proved that there ARE alternatives to the spoonfed bull**** that plagues every other engine out there.

(light_sh4v0r) #26

Nice post Greased, now I’m doubting about copying that over to the DL* forums, all BF3 fanbois…

(tangoliber) #27

Good post Greased. I hope that Rage modding won’t be too difficult. I know that they previously said that the tools would be available but that they expected the game would still be difficult to mod because of the engine’s complexity.

I’m hoping that 2 months after the mod tools are released, we will have a nice and simple deathmatch mod for Rage.

(GreasedScotsman) #28

See, this is what Bethesda doesn’t understand… we modders don’t give a rats ass if something is difficult to learn or do. In fact, in many ways, we relish the challenge because it makes reaching any goal that much sweeter. I remember learning how to mod and map for Doom 1 before tools like DeHacked came out. I was part of the crowd who tinkered with the early D3 stuff (much to id’s chagrin, I guess) and wrote and recorded tons of tutorials helping people get their model content into the game. We didn’t have any official help, zero tools… we merely had curiosity and drive and we got stuff done. Probably one of my best creations was the D3 Trigger Tutorial map… a labor of love that taught people how to use all the trigger entities found in the D3 engine.

We don’t need a polished set of tools or documentation. Whatever was used to create Brink will do just fine. We’ll tinker and document to our hearts content and, who knows, may even breathe some life back into the unfortunate ghost town that has become Brink on the PC.

Same thing with Rage and id Studio. We don’t care how difficult it is to create stuff. We don’t care that MT takes a crap-ton of HD space and will be hard to distribute… we have torrent technology for a reason. :slight_smile: In every case of id and SD’s success, it was the community that took their raw, often fantastic ideas and molded them into something slightly different, slightly better. Sadly, while we often think of those results as the gems they became, we often forget the critical community input, effort and time it took to modify the original “thing” to what we so fondly remember.

(INF3RN0) #29

[QUOTE=tokamak;383132]
I’m not denying you have real experience, understanding or rational thought however, you clearly lack.[/QUOTE]

In that case nearly every advanced/recognized player lacks there as well, considering I have a fairly similar mindset to most I know. Your issue is that you isolate what I say as somehow separate from the whole, and your thought processes as uniquely more rational and intelligent because I disagree with your opinions; ie the ideal forum hero, but not in-game hero. At least you agree with my SC2 example, and I truly hope SD utilizes their player base next round for helping iron out the mechanics pre-release with well-organized testing events. Players/modders should never have any motive to fix the game out of the box. Any custom content should just be zombie mods and cgi boobs for female NPCs. This “modders saving the game” trend needs to be dealt with.

(coolstory) #30

Damn this forum is like more alive than brink! cuz brink so bad and this forum so good.

SD dont take notes from that dumbed down POS BF3 but take notes from your forum!! Make your forum bad and your game good then everyone will log into your game to talk about how bad the forum is.

(Humate) #31

Been playing MP a bit…
Getting constant crashes like this guy - Link
When the game works… its pretty, it does a good job of sucking you in - but as a shooter it seriously takes zero skill. I sometimes feel like im playing singleplayer its that bad. The other issue I have is there are far too many effects that are tied to mechanics. Brink took a similar approach if I remember correctly. I do however like the scope ‘sunlight’ mechanic that allows you to spot snipers from a distance, its a nice twist on the Rail Gun trail from ETQW…

(Slade05) #32

Hold your judgement for a month, then try again. BF3 suffers currently from typical launch problems every shooter has - tech stuffs, bugs, questionable design decisions(proper map anybody?) and most importantly audience that can`t tell head from ass three meters away.
Plus, maps are really inconsistent in quality, big ones tend to work much better than choked corridors of urban ****, that bazaar thing especially horrible.

Still, at the very least, it will be alive month away!

(Ruben0s) #33

bf3 indeed takes no skill
http://postimage.org/image/qk1mv0llj/

after playing the game for 15 minuts I am able to get scores like this.

(H0RSE) #34

[QUOTE=Remasters;383056]like almost all games these days I thought BF3 was pretty much geared up for consoles (only played the demo).

the lack of a in game server browser say’s it all tbh. even the IDtech5 game engiine is limited/optimised for consoles.[/QUOTE]

Are you telling me the PC version of BF3 has no server browser, because even the xbox version does.

(Slade05) #35

It has inhuman **** for browser allright.
How does leaving game(and I do mean leaving, with process shutdown and all) to change server ring to you?

(Metal-Geo) #36

As much as I’m in the area of “EA the Evil Empire” as well, EA is a great publisher for smaller game developers, such as Splash Damage. EA knows marketing and they know budget. When they release a game, at least they try. They are money hungry folks that try to cash in from a game as much as possible. Usually with DLC. And they will do a lot to try and keep a game alive as much and as long as possible. I’m willing to believe they’d be on Splash Damage’s asses to get fixes and patches released quickly too.

[QUOTE=Slade05;383430]It has inhuman **** for browser allright.
How does leaving game(and I do mean leaving, with process shutdown and all) to change server ring to you?[/QUOTE]
Agreed. Although I really do start to love the inbrowser server master list, it’s a bit idiotic it’s the only way to connect to a game.

(Exedore) #37

We take notes from all over, including here.
:eek:

(BioSnark) #38

Next will be staplers and then bank account information.

(wolfnemesis75) #39

[QUOTE=BioSnark;383728]Next will be staplers and then bank account information.[/QUOTE]LMAO. That’s funny. I can provide detailed notes too! Reaches for post-its…

(DonkeyDong) #40

[QUOTE=GreasedScotsman;383192]See, this is what Bethesda doesn’t understand… we modders don’t give a rats ass if something is difficult to learn or do. In fact, in many ways, we relish the challenge because it makes reaching any goal that much sweeter. I remember learning how to mod and map for Doom 1 before tools like DeHacked came out. I was part of the crowd who tinkered with the early D3 stuff (much to id’s chagrin, I guess) and wrote and recorded tons of tutorials helping people get their model content into the game. We didn’t have any official help, zero tools… we merely had curiosity and drive and we got stuff done. Probably one of my best creations was the D3 Trigger Tutorial map… a labor of love that taught people how to use all the trigger entities found in the D3 engine.
[/QUOTE]

Agreed. Them saying “We think it’s too difficult for you” actually means “We think it’ll be difficult for us to make mod tools”. Just a weak excuse to not bother doing what they should be doing.