Artlav

Guys, chill. Like, have you *considered* what that point of the game looks like? Gordon comes into that hideout minutes after being heavily pursued, and yet everyone is acting like nothing of interest is happening and talking about getting him out of the suit and working, or go play with the robodoggy. It might not be the best episode, but it's well made and still in character. Anyway, i'm looking forward to Ravenholm. Really looking forward to it. And, Ross, if there isn't a great chemistry between our dear Freeman and father Grigori, then i would ask for my bitcoin back. (j/k, but still - take as long as it takes to make it *good*)

Looks like the old soundtrack links have expired and not everyone who wanted it got a chance to get it. I dug through my archives and i think that's the same files i processed last time: https://orbides.org/etc/ad.zip (557 Mb) Didn't keep the actual files i uploaded before, so it might be a bit off.

Well, yeah. 95% of the math involved go towards deriving the camera position and movement from how the images change, while simultaneously mapping the environment to have something to do the derivation against. SLAM, simultaneous localization and mapping. If you could precisely control the camera position from the game, you would instantly simplify the problem to a mere mapping exercise of depth and texture extraction. That won't cover games that don't give you direct control over the camera, however. Ideally you would just read the camera position from game's memory, but if you can access enough of the game data to get the camera position, then you likely can access enough to extract the whole visible scene as raw geometry, rendering the whole approach pointless. I've never made or played online games, so i can't comment on how practical that would be in case of cheating countermeasures. I guess i do. Then again, the larger game worlds i can think of are procedurally generated infinite maps of one kind or another, where you would only need to extract enough resources to get the tune of it to work. For more interesting artistic worlds, what man can do man can undo. This does kinda loop back to the original problem of only the popular games getting the treatment since only they would have enough fans to do the work. Is there a direct corelation between the scale of the game, it's goodness and it's popularity?

Sigh. As someone who wrote the kind of software that takes a video and spews out 3D models, i can say that this is hellishly hard to do, and what you tend to see in demos often are carefully picked best case scenarios. What i would have loved to have and was working towards is VR photography - take several 360 pictures or a video of a place, and receive a 3D model of that place to look around and/or walk around in VR. But without all the busywork and preparations, so i would actually take such pictures on the go instead of going on dedicated expeditions with several pieces of rare equipment and a tangle of wires, followed by being too lazy to actually do the processing and cleanup. The technique would work well in a game world, but one thing i didn't notice you or anyone mention is that it would take A LOT of time. A game world can be vast, and recreating it via video means you have to cover all the ground, at a distance close enough for the finest details to load in. For a game that lets you drive all over a continent to scale this would be an untractable job. On reverse rendering it's basically what it says on the tin - you have lights that emit darkness. You do the geometry calculations, but instead of writing the texture to the image you read from image to texture. That's how i did texture extraction in my thingy. So removing shadows shouldn't be too hard if you can identify light sources and/or determine shadow mapping parameters. Removing more modern ambient lighting and raytraced lighting might be much harder, however. Also, i like the name. Dream software. Dreams are worlds you wander around. Lucid dreams are ones you where you do it deliberately. Nice fit.

I've been looking at the last two videos and how passionate Ross is about companies killing games, and it slowly dawned on me that i'm guilty of this too. I used to be an indy game developer, and two of my games went far enough to be played by more than just me. As time went on my interests drifted away and i couldn't keep improving and maintaining either of them, so in the end i quit. One of them was fairly straightforward and conflict-free - it's a strictly single-player game, so i posted a long rant, some conclusions and a final version with all the features unlocked, after which things slowly faded away. The other one was a purely multiplayer game, with all the logic on the server. I posted about not having the energy to work on it any more, promised to keep the things running for the rest of the year at least, and signed off. After that every few months i'd get e-mails about what happened to the server, so i would reboot it and it'll work again, but eventually they disappeared and the server quietly died for good. The most peculiar part, however, happened a bit later. It developed that the remnants of the community were making a new version of the same game, as an open-source project. Someone asked me if i wanted to help them out. For some reason, at that time it made me feel infuriated. Something about people making a better version of something you made feels like an insult. This got me back into the development for a moment, i went through a year's worth of bugs and feature requests in a month, revived the infrastructure... and silence followed. A few people tried it, left a few bug reports and then it slowly faded away again. Figures. Kind of like a heartbreak, i guess. Somehow it never occurred to me to just release the server, even though a few people asked. I think i thought it would be pointless to waste the effort to get it into a user-friendly shape? Something like that. Anyway, it's been about four years since then, all the emotions have died down to indifference by now and i had a chance to think of how i could have done things better. One more of these things i have just realized is how bad of an idea it was to disable a game like that, and what it could have been like from the player's point of view. So, yeah. Thanks Ross for that insight. I sure will be keeping that in mind if i ever get back into gamedev.

Sadly, it does not work like this.This would produce what is known in physics as evaporative cooling - when the hottest particles leave the remainder's temperature drops. Same thing here - when the saner members of a community leave the community becomes dumber, then the next smartest ones leave and it gets dumber again. Thing is, there is a surface layer of smart that evaporates and then there is a bulk of mediocre that won't go anywhere. So they can evaporate away, but the ocean wont notice... The only way to stop BS like that is to make advertisement illegal, but good luck with that for the same reason.

I disagree with the expression "fan welfare". You make good art, we pay for it. You earned it, no apologies required.

Well, about half an hour ago his life depended on being able to shoot every vort on sight, as they appeared out of nowhere. He did get some calm time looking at them and realizing they weren't a threat, but once back into the fight or flight mode the old habit kicked in before he had a time to think about it.

What exactly is the problem?Is it technical (does not play), or something in the interface (crappy design)? Do you have ad-block? Do you have a video downloading plugin?

It's interesting how the fan base split between "i totally expected that" and "i totally wasn't expecting that". I mean, after his reaction to the vort behind Eli two episodes back this was kind of the only outcome.

Sure, i like a challenge. I'm interested in all sorts of tech and software, and for me to understand equals to implement, as a result i have a fairly good idea about a lot of common and uncommon formats, protocols and algorithms. I also made one full remake of an old game (M.A.X.) and a few half-done ones. So if you have an old piece of software that is refusing to behave or give away it's secrets, feel free to hand it off to me for a lobotomy.

Sure, go ahead.

Ok, raw WAVs it is. Uploaded to Dropbox, 558 Mb zipped: https://www.dropbox.com/s/38kamff3b5rrllw/armed_and_delirious_sounds.zip?dl=0 Enjoy! I dunno, the data came as PCM samples.The game feels old enough (and odd enough) to not be aware of sound compression.

Another question: To mp3 or not to mp3? It's 900 Mb of WAVs, against 165 Mb of MP3s.

Ok, it's going on smoothly so far, even though the file formats are a bit demented as well... It would be about 700 Mb of sound files. Any ideas on where should i put them? Dropbox, i guess?

So, i got the game and figured out how to decode the sound files. The question is - do anyone actually want the soundtrack, or was it some idle wondering? Bonus question - what would be the legality of posting it?

Huh. I wanted to take a try, but the game is not on the pirate bay or any abandonware sites i know of. Anyone knows where i can find a copy?

Wow, that's either quite a bit of audacity or a poorly configured bot. For some cultural perspective, the concept of copyright is bizarre to many people in Russia. There was no concept of selling copies of digital stuff in the USSR, and then almost no valid way to buy anything much smaller than Windows licensed up until things like Steam came along. Pre-internet, software, movies, games, music, etc all was sold per CD, per DVD. It takes quite a bit of thinking and context to figure out WTF should one buy an $200 DVD of software when the cost of DVD of stuff is $3 (or $15 for Mac). As a consequence, stuff like unexpected translations happens. I had at one point had to negotiate peace between a group of fans of a certain webcomic that were posting translated versions of it on their site and the author of the said comic, who was quite angry about it. The fans just loved the comic, and had no idea they were doing something wrong - it's online, therefore it's free to use what-how-ever as long as you mention the author. So, unexpected translations are perfectly normal and monetizing such a translation is kind of not ok, but not exactly surprising. How the heck did someone think filing claims against the author was a good idea, however, i have no clue. Either a bot, or someone as stupid as a bot.

Ok, Ross. If this is for real, great job, i like where this leads. If it's not for real, please name a minimum US dollar amount i should dump on you to make this real.

Huh?Is that a cutscene, or something you can build in-game (google isn't helping much further than "there is something like an airship in this game series")? Sounds like i might want to check it out after all.

Which game was that (if a tiny off-topic is fine in this thread)?

Three unconnected situations from the same game. Looks like space pirates are active in this region. Sometimes you look around and wonder how the heck did you end up in a situation like this. That's a big moon... Might be too big to get away from.

Congrats to the winners. It's a pity most of the shots were in e-mail... Almost none from the thread are in this list, which suggests there were a lot of good ones we can't see.

Screenshots! I'll be surprised if anyone guesses the game without cheating. And just in case i missed any "by participating in this contest you forfeit your soul to Ross for all eternity" clauses, i thereby explicitly declare that i refuse to accept whatever it is if there is a clause like that.

You should have made this video in 3D, the proper one. On Oculus Rift, i'd be optimistic. I have myself made a game/demo for it, involving riding a space elevator. It's kind of bland and had a few bugs, being made within a week for a space camp. But, it blew people away there never the less. Results were from awe-struck, to inspiring. Some people realised just how friggin big the space elevator was, even if they were working with all the numbers for years. Some had an almost spiritual experience, seeing what is there ahead for mankind. All that from a 5 minute ride, with 90s grade graphics, no shaking, scaring, sudden jumps, things flying into your face and other stuff like that. Another neat thing about OVR is that if you are cross-eyed, it can still be made to work. There might be other problems, like your brain not being able to process the newly-experienced stereo imaging, but at least you can experience it. So, yeah. I'd be optimistic about it. Assuming the big business won't screw it up when they replace enthusiasts...