me @ the doctor 15 times a year every 5th time when a doctor quits and i get a new one

it is true and weird that both half-life games are considered super influential and important and were good, but almost nothing of what was compelling about either of them was adopted into anything else. they are still pretty much the only place to find the things they did

https://twitter.com/thetaxgoblin/status/1519093723782516736

one of the funnier ones is people thinking they have taken the "it's first-person the whole thing!!!" thing from half-life but they've actually discarded the "never take control of the camera" thing and gone with "it's all one long shot!" which is fuckin nothing

I'll make the new Twitter. It'll be great. I'll make it in Unreal Engine 5 "Night Mode" won't just be a colour change, there'll be a whole day/night cycle. It can rain. Your tweets can get wet

Hi I'm Joe here's what I'd do if someone at Valve put a gun to my head and told me to add a new type of Special Infected to the video game Left 4 Dead First you need an issue you want the new thing to solve, imo, so for me that's when players rush. AI or VS, players in L4D can pretty much rush past everything if they want. I don't like those players, they can only have a good time if everyone else has a bad time, SO

Neat Small Things In Weird West You Might Not Notice Thread

-dynamite is imsim mode at all times. if it's lit, it will douse if the lit part of the fuse gets wet. if it falls partly in water, it's still gonna blow if the fuse is dry down to the stick. doesn't matter who threw it -lit molotovs also can be doused. if you throw one in a river, it goes out instead of exploding and you can fish it out of the river and reuse it. neat!

I've begun the PC version of Splinter Cell 4, which I never finished. It's by Ubi Milan and Shanghai again, like 2, which I just finished and quite enjoyed, sort of to my surprise. Xbox/ps2 version of this is by Montreal (devs of 1 and 3) and completely different, but same name Chaos Theory introduced the "you can see stuff what's electric" viewmode and pretty much did nothing with it, this is already making good use of it, which is neat.

Something else I worked on on Weird West (@WolfEyeGames) is the hiding of walls/floors/etc between player and camera. Roofs dissolve out completely based on some more-involved-than-you'd-think traces, walls dissolve (using TAA dither) from ankle-height up in a plumbob shape #ue4 Initially I was not using a plumbob shape and just trying to math my way out of the problems that come with using a cylinder, this is better and was a suggestion from @kurtruslfanclub (DSD's does that)

Gonna look at Half-Life: Alyx's SDK and tweet about it a little. If you don't know already, I've historically had a big old axe to grind with modern level design tools! Still do. Neither Unity nor UE4 has level design tools worth mentioning built-in. This looks more promising. Of course, Valve's not Unity or Epic - Valve just makes games; they're not big into licensing. These are internal tools, so there's gonna be jank. It's part of why actually devving on this engine would be a bad idea. But we sure can steal their awesome tool ideas!

<me, idly, looking at cat pictures>: the idea that the alien from Alien was created by anybody rather than just evolving makes its existence fundamentally way less scary the idea that you could just be wandering the universe and come across something incredibly horrible and terrifying is way more scary without it having to have been a biological weapon created by some other dipshit

level design is a field on life support having been stomped on by expensive AAA workflows which have been artificially forced as standard and has fallen into a hellhole where people confuse it with other skills more often than they don't

https://twitter.com/jazzmickle/status/1041997902393028609

theory: widespread adoption of modular mesh based workflows and dropping level design tools came out of epic doing it successfully but that only worked because of them

-being super rich
-making games at the time that didn't particularly need strong iterative level design (gears)