• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

STEAM | September 2015 - The Phantom Pre-Load or: AAA Movies Are Just +1s To Us

Status
Not open for further replies.
Also, why would Capcom use Unity for anything? Is this some fan game they bought?

I suppose because their in-house engine built for this gen, Panta Rhei, still isn't ready, so they needed something which is easy to use and has good documentation and support. So, this or UE4. The latter has good Japanese documentation, that's why major games have been using it, like lots of fighters, because save for Fox Engine, Japanese devs and publishers have been struggling with engine development. Is this being done by a Western branch or Japanese?
 

Jawmuncher

Member
I suppose because their in-house engine built for this gen, Panta Rhei, still isn't ready, so they needed something which is easy to use and has good documentation and support. So, this or UE4. The latter has good Japanese documentation, that's why major games have been using it, like lots of fighters, because save for Fox Engine, Japanese devs and publishers have been struggling with engine development. Is this being done by a Western branch or Japanese?

I haven't seen anything yet about who's devloping. It might be in-house though. Since usually these sort of third party contracts are said outright. They didn't hide the fact that anything they did prior was by other studios. Though as you said still odd to use unity over UE4.
 
I wish Sega would hire some of the best indies give their shot at some of Sega's classic IP. Alien Syndrome, Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Space Harrier, Phantasy Star, etc. And I don't mean mobile throwaway titles.
 

morningbus

Serious Sam is a wicked gahbidge series for chowdaheads.
Wait, an I to believe that a platform exclusive, region exclusive game, Yakuza, is a better investment than letting Taxman continue on with his Sonic ports?

Sega, what are you doing Sega.

Sega.
 
I'd take Vanquish over the entirety of Yakuza coming to PC any day of the week. I'm sure Sega will choose right when the time comes.
Both will come. No need to choose one over the other.
You just reminded me how much I want Resonance of Fate to come to steam. The most realistic gun customization you've ever seen.
Wait, so this all is on one single weapon? How does that even work.
MYqTkYt.png

Enhanced Steam has been updated to version 7.9. This release includes the following changes:
  • Added an option to sort your friends page by their time last online
  • Added input validation to "Edit Price" functionality on the market and support for comma decimal separators
  • Adjusted for a layout change that caused links to SteamDB, SteamCardExchange, and PCGW not to show
  • Adjusted for a layout change that broke the removal of games from your wishlist from their app page
  • Adjusted for a layout change that caused the "No" button to remain present while editing an item's price
  • Adjusted for a layout change that caused the "customize" buttons to be hidden on home and app pages
  • Fixed a bug that caused quick and instant sell buttons to sometimes appear multiple times
  • Fixed a bug that caused price history information to get orphaned on the wishlist page while rearranging
  • Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause the "Customize" button on the "All New Releases" tab not to display
  • Fixed a bug that caused multiple clicks on the card drops remaining to show an incorrect total
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the homepage layout to behave strangely under certain conditions
This update is available for Google Chrome and should update itself automatically within the next 60 minutes.

Firefox users: Mozilla recently announced that they are working on supporting Chrome extensions in a future version of Firefox, and I have continued testing Enhanced Steam with the nightly version of Firefox. More information will be available on this project in the future.

As always, please let me know if you encounter any issues with this release.
  • Adjusted for a layout change that caused links to SteamDB, SteamCardExchange, and PCGW not to show
  • Adjusted for a layout change that broke the removal of games from your wishlist from their app page
Awesome! These I am yearning for. Great work Jason.
 

Xanathus

Member
Enhanced Steam has been updated to version 7.9. This release includes the following changes:
  • Added an option to sort your friends page by their time last online
  • Added input validation to "Edit Price" functionality on the market and support for comma decimal separators
  • Adjusted for a layout change that caused links to SteamDB, SteamCardExchange, and PCGW not to show
  • Adjusted for a layout change that broke the removal of games from your wishlist from their app page
  • Adjusted for a layout change that caused the "No" button to remain present while editing an item's price
  • Adjusted for a layout change that caused the "customize" buttons to be hidden on home and app pages
  • Fixed a bug that caused quick and instant sell buttons to sometimes appear multiple times
  • Fixed a bug that caused price history information to get orphaned on the wishlist page while rearranging
  • Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause the "Customize" button on the "All New Releases" tab not to display
  • Fixed a bug that caused multiple clicks on the card drops remaining to show an incorrect total
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the homepage layout to behave strangely under certain conditions
This update is available for Google Chrome and should update itself automatically within the next 60 minutes.

Firefox users: Mozilla recently announced that they are working on supporting Chrome extensions in a future version of Firefox, and I have continued testing Enhanced Steam with the nightly version of Firefox. More information will be available on this project in the future.

As always, please let me know if you encounter any issues with this release.

Oh hey JShackles, I used to be able to see who in my friend's list owned a particular game by going to the */friendsthatplay/* page but currently it only those who have actually played it. Was that feature broken?
 

yuraya

Member
I'm still curious to see if those cut contents will appear later in a Substance version or they are just dead.

The only cut content I want to see is the beginning of the
nuclear
trailer. That wasn't anywhere in the game and it seemed like some important piece. I can't imagine Kojima just tailored a false scene for show. The youtube mission was really bad anyways so I don't care much for that got cut nor the Camp Omega stuff since it already exists with GZ.
 
Dota modders giving their opinions on Reborn. How are tools, documentation etc


Something that has been amazing recently is that some Valve employees such as Daniel Jennings and Jeff Hill have been reaching out to us and even going in the IRC chats and just talking to us about things we need or things that are bugged. It's wonderful to have some developer involvement, considering we were left in the dark for sooooo long before.

The new tools are great, but most people suck at using them so far. This is partially a lack of documentation and also partially the fact that there are so many different ways to do things that people without a lot of development experience aren't going to immediately know how to get from "idea" to implementation.

Here are some things I was able to do with the tools that I haven't seen anyone take advantage of yet, which hopefully shows how much growth there is still available:
Side-scrolling Mario-type Platformer with Keyboard controls (as a warning, the actual platforming engine would still need to be written and it's not trivial for most)
Tileset material set modification/addition
Additional Targeting modes
Trippy Visual Effects
3rd person camera in Reborn
Advanced/Configurable Pathing systems
3D Platforming systems
Advanced Projectile collision systems
Advanced Projectile collision systems 2
Terrain/Physics-based motion/navigation

Basically, the tools aren't nearly as limited as people think (though I will admit that there is a lack of model assets which shows up in a lot of WC3 mode recreations).

  1. The tools are more patchwork than the WC3 tools, but often more powerful in the specific area they focus on. In general, you get less flexibility, because of the engine's targeting for Dota, as opposed to RTSes. The documentation is 99% community-made; sites such as moddota.com (disclaimer: I host it) host most of the practical documentation, and the valvedeveloperwiki hosts a lot of community-generated API information.
  2. The scene in general is fairly healthy, but could be a bit wider. After the reborn release, we saw an increase in the number of players, but not really the number of modders (since if you really wanted to mod, it was easy enough way earlier).
  3. Valve needs to unfuck a lot of their code. Good portions of the game are black boxes or close (e.g. FoW code) and much of the game is coded with the intent to make a DotA engine, not an RTS engine, so we have to re-create a lot of things from scratch if we want to modify the behavior in interesting ways.

I used to mod Broodwar and UnrealEd.

Hammer takes forever just to setup a map for modding. I spend a great deal of time just setting everything up just so I can being modding. I'm also playing with scripts that don't have complete documentation, or an IDE and are separate from Hammer, forcing me to use my own IDE.

All the aforementioned games have built in scripting, directly in the editor.. but hammer does not. This is a huge dealbreaker for me.

Setting zones is a pain the ass. The camera controls are a pain in the ass and play like a FPS and not a tool like say any other editing program would behave.

The tiling system is garbage, everything has generic 'good' 'bad' names appended to the front of them in place of dire/radiant etc. You can't select the EXACT prop you need, you select the type and cycle through it until you get the one you need.

There's a huge lack of content in props, tiles etc.

Everything is there, it's just so inaccessible I feel like I'm decrypting some lost relic.

It's going exactly as well as it went for sc2 mapmakers. A lack of art assets and materials to work with -> blah.

There's a few things that have come up in the creation of stuff like w3x-to-vmf (which is a project primarily by SinZ and Yoshi) on some core differences of the mapping system. One of the biggest issues preventing porting of wc3 maps directly to source 2 is that we don't have anywhere near the same tileset density of wc3; while in wc3 you could use all 16 terrain textures in a close space, in s2 we have at most 4 per tile (which contains ~16 cells). We also run very close to the map geometry limit when doing so.
Something you may have noticed playing custom games is that the source 2 engine is worse at handling large numbers of units than the wc3 engine. There's other related problems; wc3 generally has good lag compensation and feedback control, while s2 isn't really there yet.
A lot of the core issues come from the fact that Valve set out to make a Dota engine, not an RTS engine, so a ton of stuff in the game is geared towards just that, instead of having been designed initially to support a large number of custom scenarios like the wc3 engine was.

The camera in dota is basically just gordon freeman flying around while facing towards the ground. I've had issues with him getting killed by stuff, which causes the camera to drop a little bit (to the level of his feet) because that's part of his death animation. On top of that there's large chunks of the engine that exist, but can't be used at all due to being FPS-specific (such as the FPS AI code, which is far better at a lot of basic stuff than the dota AI).

Another thing: it's not really new behind the curtains. It uses quite a lot of 2012 and earlier techniques/code. Everybody can see it's nothing to be impressed by at this moment, and is one of the main reason Valve is looking up (and contributing) to Vulkan.

Yeah, the Source 2 engine shares a massive percentage of its code with the Source 1 engine, and a lot of the parts that are different (e.g. physics) are things that don't really affect the game in an RTS/ARTS scenario at all.

One thing to note, Reborn is a port, a hybrid and not full Source 2, so that should be better. (hopefully)

WC3 or SC2 editors are waaay easier for making intermediate level terrain aesthetics (so the kind of things your average mapmaker would want to do to make his maps look good).

What I mean by that is that like just making something is easy enough in both but it's so fucking annoying to texture properly, texture sets are super limited and also there just isn't enough aesthetics stuff to work with as well (textures, props, tilesets).

I believe in theory Dota tools would be more powerful if you'd try to do something complex from scratch but yea, that's not every day applicable.

I never made any mods in WC3, but the tools are definitely better than the ones for the Source 1 engine. It is much easier to work with models and materials, add animations, etc. However, if you want to modify existing Dota 2 models, you still have to decompile them using 3rd party tools. In my opinion, that was one of the biggest issues with Source 1 modding... You had to rely on all of these fragmented, broken and outdated third-party tools and plug-ins. Hopefully Source 2's tool chain will get better -- not worse -- with time.

One of the biggest issues right now is simply a lack of documentation. The community is doing a pretty good job of figuring things out, especially the people at moddota.com, but the process involves a lot of trial and error.

I also find the particle editor to be pretty confusing. I have a lot of trouble creating my own particles from scratch. Many of the operators and initializers have no description, so again, work involves a lot of trial and error. I usually just resort to taking an existing Dota particle and changing a few colors or adding some control points.

I'm sure things will improve as we gain experience and Valve enhances the tools/API, but right now it is a bit of a struggle.

Valve still has a long way to go it seems...
 
Why the hell you would think they will use that engine if EA buy them anyway?

And even so its weird comment, not like W3 as it is having severe engine problem.

Because EA has dumped a lot of money into it, and what better way to prove you have the premiere engine than with a big old flashy Witcher game?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT GRAVITY RUSH 2 AAAAHHHHHHHHHH

And Bloodborne DLC.

My day has been made.

$20. While the Souls games have had incredible DLCs, I'm interested to see the amount of content that 20 brings. Though, Ludwig as a boss sounds awesome.
 

Knurek

Member
Why the hell you would think they will use that engine if EA buy them anyway?

And even so its weird comment, not like W3 as it is having severe engine problem.

Everything EA does is using Frostbite now, if they'd acquire CDPR, sure as hell they'd have to use it as well.
RedEngine 2 is a weird beast. I can get 1080p60 in DA:I (with some drops in drawcall heavy scenes), but for the life of me I can't get Witcher 3 to output 1080p60 (45-57 fps no matter the graphic quality). Also, Frostbite games benefits greatly from being run from an SSD, no difference in Witcher 3 as far as I can tell
Probable reason is my 2 cores/4 threads CPU, but still, Frostbite rules.
 

lashman

Steam-GAF's Official Ambassador to Gaming-GAF
So what do I get if I buy Cities: Skylines After Dark?

xyA83Zm.png


Yesterday we talked about the content update coming to all players. Free stuff is good and all - but what do you actually get when you buy After Dark?

First and foremost; you make it possible for us to continue developing Cities: Skylines.

Beyond that...

  • Several new landmark buildings
  • Prison & attached functionality
  • International airport
  • New large cargo hub
  • Massive bus station
  • Taxis, taxi stand & depot
  • Bikes and bike paths
  • Roads with bike and bus lanes
  • Leisure specialization + buildings
  • Tourism specialization + buildings
  • New beautification (parks and other ploppables)
  • New props, vehicles, citizens and more!

Only 9 days left! Are you as excited as we are?
.
 
Everything EA does is using Frostbite now, if they'd acquire CDPR, sure as hell they'd have to use it as well.
RedEngine 2 is a weird beast. I can get 1080p60 in DA:I (with some drops in drawcall heavy scenes), but for the life of me I can't get Witcher 3 to output 1080p60 (45-57 fps no matter the graphic quality). Also, Frostbite games benefits greatly from being run from an SSD, no difference in Witcher 3 as far as I can tell
Probable reason is my 2 cores/4 threads CPU, but still, Frostbite rules.
What the heck is this?

The terrain of Witcher 3 is sooo much more complex and complicated, populated by a significantly larger number of people and animals than in DA:I, and all the models are more detailed.

CS:GO runs better than Crysis 3 on my computer, therefore Source engine is the superior engine right?
 
Everything EA does is using Frostbite now, if they'd acquire CDPR, sure as hell they'd have to use it as well.
RedEngine 2 is a weird beast. I can get 1080p60 in DA:I (with some drops in drawcall heavy scenes), but for the life of me I can't get Witcher 3 to output 1080p60 (45-57 fps no matter the graphic quality). Also, Frostbite games benefits greatly from being run from an SSD, no difference in Witcher 3 as far as I can tell
Probable reason is my 2 cores/4 threads CPU, but still, Frostbite rules.

It's true.
DA:I runs so much better on my rig, 1080p/60fps on ultra and I can only run Wicher 3 at 30fps on ultra. However, I think it's actually due to the fact that DA:I is a cross-gen game while Witcher 3 is current-gen only.
 

Kyougar

Member
Yeah that's what I was getting at. They couldn't really mess with the price on consoles. But PC it's free reign.

I think they themselves think, that the game isnt desirable for many customers with a 60€ pricepoint and wanted it to be cheaper. But the middleware pricepoint didnt survice Gen7 and all 30 to 45€ games have a bad outlook on consoles. Most Customer think of them as cheap and the games themselve doesnt have the free get-out-of-jail card Indies have.
So either you are indie on Console and survive through Impulse buys and word of mouth, or you are AAA 60€ game that sets the expectation to the customer, that you are worth the 60€.
 
Any new games revealed on the Sony TGS show that will probably end up on PC?

Biohazard is already confirmed for PC. Other than that, KoF will probably coming too, and those KOEI TECMO games as well, NIOH and Toukiden 2. SquareEnix games are kinda hard to predict as of now. Oh, and that One Piece fighting game from Bamco too.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom