Comments - DariusII

I can't recommend this tool enough. The fact that it does automatic UV unwrapping , AND bakes normal / curvature / etc textures on top of the automatic retopology. I used to use Simplygon but now I'm more than happy with the results of InstaLOD.. The automatic UV unwrap is great for most things but for objects that require more hand care like 1st person weapons, I prefer to do the UVs by hand.

It's the Jay Leno Bear

I like when the bad guy gets out of the car and it loks like he's sitting on thin air. Did he just arrest Chris Angel?!

yea, looking good.. but as the above two posters stated, the 1st person "animations" are non-existent. It looks as if the player is running around with a gun impaled in his stomache

cool, i'm definitely getting it. I really enjoyed the demo. good luck guys!

This game is great! I really enjoyed it. When are you gonna rls the full version?

how hard is it to explain the "gameplay"? Why dont you put up a video of someone actually playing the game.. IF the game is that confusing to explain, I doubt there is any actual game to it. It sounds more like that old Dragon's lair game of the early 80s where you press a button and watch a video.. and then repeat the process every few seconds.

best of luck man! Follow your dreams while you're still young. Working in a company is such a drag..

Looks great guys! Can't wait to check it out. When is it going on pre-order?

I concur.. VERY nice texture work on that rifle. Kudos.

Guys, you gonna have a pre-order so people who pre-order can play the alpha? (ala Natural Selection2, Mimecraft, etc. )

looking great guys! My only suggestion is to move the guns closer to the player view. They look really small. Or you can try changing the viewmodel_fov. Other than that, it's looking awesome!

Will you guys have drivable vehicles? That's the one thing I thought would have been fun to have in L4D.

I can totally relate to this phenomenon you describe. I do a lot of animations myself in XSI and run into this problem of trying to focus on the main source of motion. I find it really helpful to be able to hide parts of the mesh (ie. arms) when i'm doing the first part of an animation. Do you not have this capability in your animation package?
I can't imagine doing my more complex animations with the arms obscuring the motion...

whoever made these models deserves a popsicle...
with cream in the middle.

cool! that's a neat trick, thanks for the tip.

hey, how'd u get the lighting to look like tat on the flower pot and the bookshelf? IS that done using projection mapping?
I can get my walls to look like that (with a very high res lightmap) but I can never get my prop models to get that kind of lighting.

Thanks for sharing this guys. It was really informative. I wish more developers would share their development routine. It would save a lot of time for us newbies asking "How did they do that?"

I thought it was free too.. I guess you guys really are "Breaking the Rules"

btw, the animations look great. Are you using motion capture? or did you animate that by hand. It looks really well done.

Looking good! I really love what I'm seeing from this game except one thing. The proportions for the characters seem really odd. Their arms look too short. It looks really odd.. like their chickens.

Wow, I just heard of this game.I can't believe it fell off my radar for 2 years. It's amazing how a game with such high production values can go unnoticed by some people (such as myself). Great to see it now.

looks good so far. Really dig the M79 animation. Nice and smooth. You may want to check the dimensions on the hand model. That thumb looks freakishly long. I'm sure many a basketball player would be jealous of such long digits.

really great work guys. Keep it up. If I can make 1 suggestion. Ease off on the motion blur. It looks really excessive and only someone who's had 20 beers would have their vision that blurry.

This pic is awesome..

Hansel: "You can DERELICT my balls"

Mad Dog Mcree

Really appreciate the informative tech posts. I never knew exactly how this was done in games, but now I do. One problem that I see in games (even current ones such as MW2) is the problem with screen overdraw when you have several large sprites overlap each other. For example, when someone throws a smoke grenade in MW2, the FPS will drop considerably as the player gets closer to the smoke clouds.
Source engine games alleviate this by actually putting a grey overlay on the screen and not rendering any smoke sprites that are too close/too large on the screen. It's kind of a hacky method but it works decently enough.
Do you guys have a system to combat overdraw of alpha sprites when too many of them overlap and fill up the screen?

It's funny how video cards have advanced so much over the past decade allowing us to spit out more and more fancy polygons, but the problem with rendering overlapping alpha sprites is still a big bottleneck for video cards.

didn't the original BF2 have leaning? Why would this feature be removed?

They removed leaning from MW2 (when it was in Modern Warfare1). Was it considered cheap tactic?
I guess some people were abusing it...

great job getting a working beta out. I played it for an hour without any crashing. You did a something 90% of mod developers couldn't do, which is release a fairly stable first BETA. I hope it grows from here. Here's some feedback from me:
- Please add some kind of visual feedback or aural feedback when you hit a player. It's really hard to tell if I did any damage to my enemy. The blood sprites are very hard to see at medium - long range. Adding a sound effect that plays on the attackers machine (like Call of Duty) will really help. If you really want to impress, add some flinch animations to really give players that satisfaction of hitting someone.
- Please add a bit more jetpack juice. I think adding 50% more will allow players to really try some cool things with the boosting and probably won't cheapen the gameplay too much.

Really love the gun animations and sound f/x. You guys did a really good job in that area. It's very satisfying seeing them in action.. but again, if you could do the same for player damage, the game would be even more satisfying.

Good luck.

Oh, and I wasn't getting any FPS issues.. that others were complaining about

Parallax maps only look good if the protrusions aren't extreme (ie. similar to bump maps). You'd get massive stretching, not to mention the fact that trees have empty spaces IN BETWEEN the leaves which is impossible to emulate with a parallax map. The tree would look like a spiky mess.

I think Speedtree has the fastest/best looking implementation of foliage. Each of the leave elements are ALWAYS oriented to face the view. This gives the trees a very full bushy look.
Mind you, this doesn't work with all trees as some trees are naturally more planar (eg tropical trees).
We do a lot of foliage in our game and it's a pain in the *** getting them to look good while keeping the polycount down. I'd recommend going the speedtree route (ie. making each leaf element a sprite facing the camera) for the majority of your trees.