Forum Decline

[Zerimski]

at least i would have sacrificed myself for Democracy....

Where did this notion that a democracy exists here to sacrifice yourself for come from? Let me make this absolutely clear. This is a privately owned and run website. There is no democracy apart from whatever freedoms we decide to give you. There is no system of government apart from that which we implement. If your posting privileges on this site are removed, it doesn't make you a martyr or a political refugee or whatever revolutionary new term you want to coin, it simply means you have contravened the rules of this forum.

 

[15357]

Where did this notion that a democracy exists here to sacrifice yourself for come from? Let me make this absolutely clear. This is a privately owned and run website. There is no democracy apart from whatever freedoms we decide to give you. There is no system of government apart from that which we implement. If your posting privileges on this site are removed, it doesn't make you a martyr or a political refugee or whatever revolutionarry new term you want to coin, it simply means you have contravened the rules of this forum.

i was actually not serious....

 

[Zerimski]

Maybe you weren't, but there are others who do actually believe it.

 

[15357]

oh.....

hmm, what shall i do now?......

edit: Done.....

Sorry, everyone. I have been a stupid, idiotic, and stupid person.

 

[Zerimski]

Stop spamming.

 

[xLostx]

Metaphors involving piss....how deep...

 

[15357]

No more of this, please.....

this is kinda pointless....

What is the achivement of this thread?

 

[theGreenBunny]

Metaphors involving piss....how deep...

I found it amusing.

No more of this, please.....

this is kinda pointless....

What is the achivement of this thread?

Discussion about the forums, and a place for the mods to tell everyone they should shut up and report. Quite a valid purpose I would think.

 

[xLostx]

you've posted on this thread 15357 8 times already...what will this achieve..

 

[15357]

you've posted on this thread 15357 8 times already...what will this achieve..

go away! :frown:

 

[oldagerocker]

I think TDE is slightly right, but to make the forums better you just need a good mix of thread starters (not me... i cant think of Anything interesting) and humorous posters to fill out the place (but not spam). Crap threads are only made because people want to spam (report button) or the forum seems dead and everyones out of ideas!

 

[Fat Tony!]

pff lies! hl2 forums have always been crap stick to teh lounge section and your safe

 

[CREMATOR666]

I sure noticed the contents have been a bit dull/same-ish lately but I'm sure it would be better after Aftermath comes out

 

[Tr0n]

After being on the forums for almost 2 years (coming up in a month)...I can tell you it hasn't really changed.There has always been spammers and stupid pointless threads/posts since this site created.

Hell it's like a rollercoaster.All that shit goes up and down from time to time.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Ask yourselves why it's declined.

Yes, it's because of the users. You're all to blame. It's all your collective faults. I'm ashamed of you all.

 

[Asknoone]

It will get better once more Aftermath info is released, more mods are released and hl3 is announced. And so on. There's always stretches of time when things go into stasis.

 

[CREMATOR666]

After being on the forums for almost 2 years (coming up in a month)...I can tell you it hasn't really changed.There has always been spammers and stupid pointless threads/posts since this site created.

Hell it's like a rollercoaster.All that shit goes up and down from time to time.

Word of the wise, tr0n

 

[The Dark Elf]

It will get better once more Aftermath info is released, more mods are released and hl3 is announced. And so on. There's always stretches of time when things go into stasis.

I doubt anyone is really gonna care about all that once UE3 comes along.

 

[CREMATOR666]

I doubt anyone is really gonna care about all that once UE3 comes along.

Mind me asking but....what's UE3? :O

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Unreal Engine 3...

 

[CREMATOR666]

Unreal Engine 3...

I usually think of it as UT3
I'm sure UE3 wont kill HL3, tho. :smoking:

 

[The Dark Elf]

I'm sure UE3 wont kill HL3, tho. :smoking:

You didn't even know what UE3 was .. I'd go check UE3 out if I were you, you may be in for a shock

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

UE3

Purdy.

 

[Tr0n]

I dunno...UE3 doesn't look so good to me anymore.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Then you are broken.

 

[Tr0n]

Then you are broken.

Well I don't know...It just reminds me of Doom 3.

Oh well.

 

[The Monkey]

UE3

Purdy.

Looks like crap.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Looks like crap.

lol bollocks.. I really would love to see someone get the same results in Source (and no, you can't cheat and show that guys pre-rendered, subdivided, HDR illuminated renders neither)

 

[CREMATOR666]

You didn't even know what UE3 was .. I'd go check UE3 out if I were you, you may be in for a shock

I already looked at them screens a while back (at gamespy) I just refer to it as UT3

 

[Sui]

Who cares about graphics. I still find myself playing the original half life, but I no longer play UT-2004...

 

[CREMATOR666]

Who cares about graphics. I still find myself playing the original half life, but I no longer play UT-2004...

Exactly, although saying I dont care about graphics AT ALL maybe wrong, but I'd say HL3's graphics will be as stunning and the gameplay as fine...or better! :E

 

[ACLeroK212]

LOL, oh sweet irony. A thread about the decline of thread quality eventually turns into a debate about UE3 and Source.

 

[theGreenBunny]

I doubt anyone is really gonna care about all that once UE3 comes along ... and they've all bought a pc that can actually run it.

Fixed quote. I know I'll have to anyway

 

[The Dark Elf]

Fixed quote. I know I'll have to anyway

UE3 runs fine on current (decent) hardware, just gotta take a big drop in texture resolution is all. Other than that it runs just fine.

 

[CREMATOR666]

Graphic isnt everything (as proved by DOOM3) :hmph:

 

[The Dark Elf]

Graphic isnt everything (as proved by DOOM3) :hmph:

ahh that must be why everybody is happily playing 3D monster maze then huh

Graphics are very important, as is the story and gameplay. Think of it as three pieces of pie, if its not an even share for each piece, the others have to compensate.

Doom3 looked great btw

 

[The Monkey]

lol bollocks.. I really would love to see someone get the same results in Source (and no, you can't cheat and show that guys pre-rendered, subdivided, HDR illuminated renders neither)

What's so great about it then? That his armour shines? BF2 will be way more beautiful.

 

[Tr0n]

**** source, BF2, and UE3...

Pong pwnz them all.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

What's so great about it then? That his armour shines? BF2 will be way more beautiful.

BF2 doesn't use 2,000,000+ polygon models as source art

 

[The Dark Elf]

What's so great about it then? That his armour shines? BF2 will be way more beautiful.

# 64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post processing effects such as light blooms, lenticular halos, and depth-of-field.
# Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions; pre-computed shadow masks; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps.
# Advanced Dynamic Shadowing. Unreal Engine 3 provides full support for three shadow techniques:

* Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.
* Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft, fuzzy shadows on the scene using 16X-oversampled shadow buffers.
* Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.

# All of the supported shadow techniques are visually compatible and may be mixed freely at the artist's discretion, and may be combined with colored attenuation functions enabling properly shadowed directional, spotlight, and projector lighting effects.
# Powerful material system, enabling artists to create arbitrarily complex realtime shaders on-the-fly in a visual interface that is comparable in power to the non-realtime functionality provided by Maya.
# The material framework is modular, so programmers can add not just new shader programs, but shader components which artists can connect with other components on-the-fly, resulting in dynamic composition and compilation of shader code.
# Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere.
# Artists can build terrain using a dynamically-deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly-blended materials including displacement maps, normal maps and arbitrarily complex materials, dynamic LOD-based tessellation, and vegetation layers with procedurally-placed meshes. Further, the terrain system supports artist-controlled layers of procedural weathering, for example, grass and vegetation on the flat areas of terrain, rock on high slopes, and snow at the peaks.
# Volumetric environmental effects including height fog and physically accurate distance fog.
# Extensible particle system with visual editor, supporting particle physics and environmental effects.

# Rigid body physics system supporting player interaction with physical game object, ragdoll character animation, complex vehicles, and dismemberable objects.
# All renderable materials have physical properties such as friction.
# Physics-driven sound.
# Fully integrated support for physics-based vehicles, including player control, AI, and networking.
# Visual physics modeling tool built into UnrealEd, supporting creation of optimized collision primitives for models and skeletal animated meshes; constraint editing; and interactive physics simulation and tweaking in-editor.

# Skeletal animation system supporting up to 4 bone influences per vertex and very complex skeletons.
# Animation is driven by a tree of animation objects including:

* Blend controllers, performing an n-way blend between nested animation objects.
* Data-driven controllers, encapsulating motion capture or hand animation data.
* Physics controllers, tying into the rigid body dynamics engine for ragdoll player and NPC animation and physical response to impulses.
* Procedural animation controllers, implemented in C++ or UnrealScript, for game features such as having an NPC's head and eyes track a player walking through the level, or having a character animate differently based on health level and fatigue.

# Export tools for 3D Studio Max, Maya for bringing weighted meshes, skeletons, and animation sequences into the engine.

# An object-oriented gameplay framework is provided supporting common game objects such as players, NPC's, inventory, weapons, and triggers.
# Rich multi-level AI system supporting path-finding, complex level navigation, individual decision making, and team-based AI.

* Pathfinding framework with full awareness of common game objects such as triggers, doors and elevators, allowing for complex navigation scenarios where an NPC will press switches, open doors, and navigate around temporary obstructions in order to reach its destination.
* Navigation framework with support for short-term tactical combat, cover, and navigation off the path network.
* Team-based AI framework suitable for first-person shooters, third-person shooters, and tactical combat games. The team-based AI framework provides support for team coordination, objective management, and long-term goals.

# AI paths are viewable and editable by level designers in UnrealEd, allowing customization and hinting.
# Visual AI Scripting Tool enabling designers to create complex interactive in-game scenarios, such as player objectives, versatile triggering of game events, and interactive cinematics.
# “UnrealMatinee", a timeline-based visual sequencing, animation, and spline path tool. Designers use this to create in-game cinematics, both interactive and non-interactive by sequencing animations, moving objects including cameras, controlling sounds and visual special effects, and triggering gameplay and AI events.

# Support for all major output formats of each platform, including 5.1 surround sound and certification-quality Dolby Digital.
# 3D sound positioning, spatialization, Doppler shift.
# Visual Sound Tool in UnrealEd gives sound designers complete control over sounds, sound levels, sequencing, looping, filtering, modulation, pitch shift, and randomization. Sounds parameters are separated from code to an extent that sound designers can control all sounds associated with gameplay, cinematics and animation sequences.
# Supports all major sound formats of each platform, including PCM, ADPCM, console-specific proprietary sound compression formats, and Ogg Vorbis.
# Support for sound streaming on consoles.

# Internet and LAN play has been a hallmark of Epic's past competitive games such as Unreal Tournament 2004. The Unreal Engine has long provided a flexible and high-level network architecture suitable to many genres of games.
# Internet and LAN play is fully supported on PC and all console platforms.
# Unreal Engine gameplay network programming is high-level and data-driven, allowing UnrealScript game code to specify variables and functions to be replicated between client and server to maintain a consistent approximation of game state. The low-level game networking transport is UDP-based and combines reliable and unreliable transmission schemes to optimize gameplay, even in low-bandwidth and high-latency scenarios.
# Client-server model supporting up to 64 players as provided. Also supports non-dedicated server (peer-to-peer mode) with up to 16 players.
# Supports network play between different platforms (i.e. dedicated PC serving console clients; Windows, MacOS and Linux clients playing together.)
# All gameplay features are supported in network play, enabling vehicle-based multiplayer games, competitive team games with NPC's or bots, cooperative play in a single player focused game, and so on. Support for auto-downloading and caching content, including cross-platform compatible UnrealScript code. This feature enables everything from user-create maps, to bonus packs, to complete game mods to be downloaded on the fly. In-game server browser GUI for finding and querying servers, keeping track of favorites, in-game chat, etc.
# A “master server” component is provided for tracking worldwide servers, providing filtered server lists to players, etc. Worldwide game stats tracking system.
# Please note that we don't provide a server or networking framework suitable for massive multiplayer games. Though such a task is a multi man-year engineering effort, several teams using the Unreal Engine have done so (including Sigil Games Online for Vanguard and NCSoft for Lineage II), demonstrating the feasibility of using the Unreal Engine as a MMORPG game client and tools pipeline, integrated with a proprietary server component.

# The Unreal Editor (UnrealEd) is a pure “What You See Is What You Get” content creation tool filling the void between 3D Studio Max and Maya, and shippable game content.
# Visual placement and editing of gameplay objects such as players, NPC's, inventory items, AI path nodes, and light sources -- with a full realtime view of their appearance, including 100% dynamic shadowing. Includes a data-driven property editing framework, allowing level designers to easily customize any game object, and programmers to expose new customizable properties to designers via script.
# realtime terrain editing tools allowing artists to elevate terrain, paint alpha layers onto terrain to control layer blending and decoration layers, collision data, and displacement maps.
# Visual Material Editor. By visually connecting the color, alpha and coordinate outputs of textures and programmer-defined material components, artists can create materials ranging from simple layered blends to extremely complex materials and dynamically interacting with scene lights.
# A powerful browser framework for finding, viewing, and organizing game assets of all types.
# Animation tool enables artists to import models, skeletons, and animations, and to tie them to in-game events such as sounds and script notifications.
# In-editor “Play Here” button puts gameplay just one mouse click and a fraction of a second away. Here, you can test gameplay in-editor in one window while modifying objects and rearranging geometry in another.
# Every Unreal Engine license includes the right to redistribute UnrealEd publicly, enabling teams to release the content creation tools along with their game to the mod community. Mod support has been a major factor behind the success of many prominent PC games today, and we anticipate that support for PC-based mod development may be a significant factor in future console games as well.
# We provide plug-ins for 3D Studio Max and Maya to bring models into the Unreal engine with mesh topology, mapping coordinates, smoothing groups, material names, skeleton structure, and skeletal animation data.
# All the other niceties you'd expect from a modern content editing tool: Multi-level undo/redo, drag-and-drop, copy-and-paste, customizable key and color configuration, viewport management.

Distributed Computing Normal Map Generation Tool
Most of our characters are built from two meshes: a realtime mesh with thousands of triangles, and a detail mesh with millions of triangles. We provide a distributed-computing application which raytraces the detail mesh and, from its high-polygon geometry, generates a normal map that is applied to the realtime mesh when rendering. The result is in-game objects with all of the lighting detail of the high poly mesh, but that are still easily rendered in real time.

# Unreal Engine 3 includes example content and 100% of the source code for the engine, editor, Max/Maya exporters, and the game-specific code for our internally-developed games.
# Extensible, object-oriented C++ engine with software framework for persistence, dynamic loading of code and content, portability, debugging.
# UnrealScript gameplay scripting language provides automatic support for metadata; persistence with very flexible file format backwards-compatibility; support for exposing script properties to level designers in UnrealEd; a GUI-based script debugger; and native language support for many concepts important in gameplay programming, such as dynamically scoped state machines and time-based (latent) execution of code.
# Modular material component interface for extending visual tool and adding new shader components usable by artists in the visual shader GUI.
# Source control friendly software architecture, scalable to large teams and multi-platform projects.
# Unreal Engine 3 is provided as one unified codebase that compiles on PC and all supported next-generation console platforms. All game content and data files are compatible across all supported platforms, for fast turnaround time between code and content development on PC, and playtesting on console or PC.
# Seek-free DVD loading optimization pass for consoles, able to load levels at >80% of DVD's physical transfer rate.
# Extensible content-streaming framework suitable for multithreaded background DVD streaming of resources and predefined groups of resources based on LOD or programmatic control.
# Unreal Engine 3 content and code are localization-aware, with a simple framework for externalizing all game text, sounds, images, and videos. Unreal Engine 3 is based on the Unicode character set, and has full support for 16-bit Unicode fonts and text input, including importing TrueType fonts into renderable bitmap fonts. Our games have shipped in 9 languages including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Typical Content Specifications
Here are the guidelines we're using in building content for our next Unreal Engine 3 based game. Different genres of games will have widely varying expectations of player counts, scene size, and performance, so these specifications should be regarded as one data point for one project rather than hard requirements for all.

Characters

For every major character and static mesh asset, we build two versions of the geometry: a renderable mesh with unique UV coordinates, and a detail mesh containing only geometry. We run the two meshes through the Unreal Engine 3 preprocessing tool and generate a high-res normal map for the renderable mesh, based on analyzing all of the geometry in the detail mesh.

* Renderable Mesh: We build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on the expectation of 5-20 visible characters in a game scene.
* Detail Mesh: We build 1-8 million triangle detail meshes for typical characters. This is quite sufficient for generating 1-2 normal maps of resolution 2048x2048 per character.
* Bones: Our characters typically have 100-200 bones, and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.

Normal Maps & Texture maps
We are authoring most character and world normal maps and texture maps at 2048x2048 resolution. We feel this is a good target for games running on mid-range PC's in the 2006 timeframe. Next-generation consoles may require reducing texture resolution by 2X, and low-end PC's up to 4X, depending on texture count and scene complexity.

Environments
Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 200,000 to 1,200,000 visible triangles.

Lights
There are no hardcoded limits on light counts, but for performance we try to limit the number of large-radius lights affecting large scenes to 2-5, as each light/object interaction pair is costly due to the engine's high-precision per-pixel lighting and shadowing pipeline. Low-radius lights used for highlights and detail lighting on specific objects are significantly less costly than lights affecting the full scene.