Video Games Thread

[harv]

Blimey, talk about OCD lol

I still prefer the Sony trophy system myself but these are a thing of the past for me. Both Steam and Oculus Home have achievements but there's no score involved in them. The Sony system is excellent though, it has RPGness in that the higher your level is the more trophies you need to level up again.

Much better than a score system imo.

Not sure if I'm going to have Achievements in my game or not, might have to contact Oculus to find out how to introduce them to my game.

I've found an excellent Plugin for the Unreal Engine that makes free locomotion a breeze to implement and he's going to add comfort options to it after I asked him about it. Haven't done much work on my game for a bit because I've been hit by another wave of depression but I'm going to try and do something these next few days if I can.

Going to do some texturing of my props soon using Substance Painter, it really is an amazing piece of kit. Going to start with my storage crates then the shipping containers after that.

[jman]

Well I really haven't used the Sony system so wouldn't really know, only general internet searching on the differences between them and TBH I think I'd still be happier with the achievements system in general:

1)  It has progress tracker across all achievements so you can see how close you are to unlocking one.  The fact I can also pin whichever achievements I want to the screen to track whenever is also a great feature.

2)  Smaller achievements can all have different points values based on difficulty - not just one generic level "Bronze", "Silver", "Gold"

3)  Achievements have been in place since 360 conception so all the games I have played are included in my GS.

4)  Achievements are standard - pretty much every game these days has 1000 GS - I've heard a lot of PS4 games don't have platinums and also in some cases, the trophy count per game is less than the achievement count.

5)  I love the new monthly leaderboard score system - I can see how far I am ahead of everyone every month   Although I think Late actually beat me a few months back - I must of been on holiday or something

The only thing I like about the PS system would be the platinum trophy - the xbox used to have a showcase area of all your 100%ed games but they got rid of that ages ago.. although saying that.. most games have multiplayer achievements requirements which I never go for these days - I'd only consider 100%ing a game if it had zero-little multiplayer involvement so its really not that important.  Plus I don't know how xbox would bring a showcase feature back because when DLC comes out, they add the DLC value onto the base score for the game regardless of if you've bought the DLC or not - I guess I would prefer trophies in that aspect.

I used to play on Kongregate a lot - and that has a Badge/RPG level system - to be honest I find it annoying that I can't see what my base score is easily - especially in the later levels when it takes an absolute age to level up.

[stupac]

I love the trophy/level system on playstation. Just hit level 18 last weekend getting platinums 31 & 32 which is awesome.

If I properly play a game I like to get all the trophies if I can. But if it's trash I'm not too bothered about having 1% complete games on my list, I know some people hate that lol.

There's a few games on my list without a platinum trophy but they seem to mostly be small indie games.

[harv]

One thing I can say for certain is that EVERYBODY working in the industry hates them both lol

They're a pain in the arse to test and an even bigger pain in the arse to fix when they're broken.

I'm hoping that Oculus are going to have some sort of trophy room (yes, I know they're achievements but trophy room sounds better I think!) so that you can see what you've got. But that would mean that developers would need to model and texture the things because it would look shite if they all look the same.

I can live without them tbh but I'm still going to put them in my game I reckon. Having problems with my models and texturing them at the moment which is a pain in the arse. Think I might have a solution to the problem but I'm going to look at that tomorrow.

No wonder developers spend most of their lives drunk lmfao

[harv]

Started playing Killing Floor Incursion earlier. I started off like a boss, headshots at distance all over the place

But then later on I started having a hypo so it didn't end well lmfao

Am going to make sure I stock up on chocolate and sweets when the zombie apocalypse hits because I don't want to end up as lunch lololol 

Never played any of the games in the franchise before but I quite liked what I played just now.

I've got gaming ants in my pants again, can't settle on one game so I have several play throughs of different games that I'm working on. At the moment I'm switching between Elite Dangerous, The Mage's Tale, Alien Isolation and Lone Echo.

[harv]

Woo hoo! Solved a problem that I was having with Substance Painter so I can crack on with texturing my models now! Awesome!

[jman]

Microsoft just announced Age of Empires 4 for PC

[harv]

Have never been into RTS games myself, but I might try one or two in VR. VR is a very strange thing, there are plenty of people that change their opinions on some game genres once they've tried them in VR. I was never a big fan of puzzle games (apart from having puzzles as a part of gameplay in RPGs or adventure games) but I've absolutely LOVED the Esper Collection so far.

After messing around with Substance Painter and my Large Storage Crate model I've decided to make a high poly version so that I bake normal, ambient occlusion and height maps for my low res version from my high res version. It's a fair bit of extra work but will add the surface details of this:





To my low res version of the model here:




This purchase of Substance Designer and Substance Painter is going to make my models look REALLY professional. My plan is to get some sort of prototype done so that I've got something to show and then approach Oculus for funding. To 'officially' get the software I'm using I need around 3 thousand smackeroonies

I'm planning on having all of the proceeds from this game and any others I do going to cancer research so hopefully Oculus will be happy to donate their 30% cut to it too. I reckon $4.99/£4.99 will be a decent enough price for a four or five hour long game, although I might raise that by three quid or so.

Getting the price of software right is such a nightmare, too cheap and nobody will go anywhere near it because they don't think it's going to be good enough and too expensive and people will either not go anywhere near it because it's too expensive or if they do they'll buy it and refund it if they're not happy with what they've paid.

[Late]

Ha - it's probably quite a while since I got any achievements. I got some when I picked up Titanfall 2 a while back, but for the last month or two I've been playing it online - and I don't think there's any cheevos for that.

Have never been bothered about achievements, but it does screw with my ocd sometimes.

[harv]

Well I'm getting there! I decided to use a high res model of my crate to bake in some surface details via normal and height maps and it's looking good even though I do say so myself

Low res model in Substance Painter:



Low res model with baked normal and height maps:



I'm just waiting for an answer to a query I've posted on the Allegorithmic forums and then I can start to texture this baby

Edit: Only 220 polys too!

[harv]

Just started texturing my first crate. First part is done, now I need to work on the display panel and light at the front, some decals with the Nakamura Mining Company logos and maybe paint some parts of it orange. Not looking too shabby so far:



Any feedback, positive or negative, would be very much appreciated!

[harv]

Rockstar have announced that they're working on LA Noir The VR Case Files. It's going to include 7 cases from the original game (not sure how many were in the original?).

What with this, Fallout 4 VR, Doom VFR and Skyrim VR we're starting to see more AAA games from third parties coming to VR. Great news!

[Late]

Damn but I hated that game. Was a good idea, but poorly executed.
Most people seemed to like it, though. :/

[harv]

It's a game that I've been meaning to buy since it came out but I never got around to it so I reckon I'll pick up the VR version if Rockstar don't take the piss with the price.

[jman]

I enjoyed it in parts but it wasn't as good as it was hyped to be.. There were parts that were completely stupid