Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

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Karasu Tengu: Feb 16, 2011; Humble Tengu Newspaper Reporter

I thought the Strafe kickstarter demo was pretty bad but maybe they learned from it.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 18:08

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# ? May 21, 2024 08:22

Mordja: Apr 26, 2014; Hell Gem

Overbite posted:

edit: oops, someone did a few posts up. Strafe is a roguelite too? Ugh, why do developers keep doing that. I don't like roguelites but it seems like every new game is one of those.

Progression elements tickle the lizard part of the brain that'll make people keep playing and playing, and I guess procedurally generated content is ultimately easier for a small team than handcrafting maps. That's my 2c.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 18:09

Overbite: Jan 24, 2004; I'm a vtuber expert

Mordja posted:

Progression elements tickle the lizard part of the brain that'll make people keep playing and playing, and I guess procedurally generated content is ultimately easier for a small team than handcrafting maps. That's my 2c.

Yeah I understand why indie devs keep making roguelites but I prefer handcrafted levels. Randomly generated maps are never good.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 18:14

Thyrork: Apr 21, 2010; "COME PLAY MECHS M'LANCER."

Or at least use Retrograde Mini's to make cool mechs and fantasy stuff.; Slippery Tilde

Overbite posted:

Yeah I understand why indie devs keep making roguelites but I prefer handcrafted levels. Randomly generated maps are never good.

The "plot and parcel" system XCOM 2 uses is nice and I'd like to see that used in a FPS. Random enough to be interesting and avoids the "Why did the RNG map gen shove a crate THERE?!" problems of true random map gen.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 18:40

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Overbite posted:

Yeah I understand why indie devs keep making roguelites but I prefer handcrafted levels. Randomly generated maps are never good.

Nah, it works fine, you just have to know the limits of random generation systems and work with those. One common thing that helps out generation is what Thyrork alluded to, pre-designed sections created by humans that are randomly placed in the game. You could have a good Doom map that was randomly generated until it lead to the arena from Phobos Anomaly, for example. Humans looking over the results and tweaking them also helps a lot.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 18:52

catlord: Mar 22, 2009; What's on your mind, Axa?

RyokoTK posted:

"Why doesn't anybody Kickstart a game in the style of P.O.'ed," asked nobody.

Where's my Fortress of Dr. Radiaki 2?

Anyway, a few pages ago there was discussion about the Timesplitters series and a few people (me) were disappointed it never came to PC? Well apparently, you can play a couple level of Timesplitters 2 on PC, if you buy the possibly better sequel to a terrible, terrible Call of Duty rip-off.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 19:25

Rupert Buttermilk: Apr 15, 2007; 🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...

catlord posted:

Where's my Fortress of Dr. Radiaki 2?

Anyway, a few pages ago there was discussion about the Timesplitters series and a few people (me) were disappointed it never came to PC? Well apparently, you can play a couple level of Timesplitters 2 on PC, if you buy the possibly better sequel to a terrible, terrible Call of Duty rip-off.

This is sincerely enough of a reason for me to pick this game up (sometime, though not at launch).

We need more Timesplitters.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 19:26

Instruction Manuel: May 15, 2007; Yes, it is what it looks like!

catlord posted:

Where's my Fortress of Dr. Radiaki 2?

Anyway, a few pages ago there was discussion about the Timesplitters series and a few people (me) were disappointed it never came to PC? Well apparently, you can play a couple level of Timesplitters 2 on PC, if you buy the possibly better sequel to a terrible, terrible Call of Duty rip-off.

Fuuuuuck, is it bad I'm actually considering this now :smithicide:

# ? Mar 31, 2016 20:12

RyokoTK: Feb 12, 2012; I am cool.

Seems like PC Gamer trying to get ahead of the April Fools' prank train.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 20:23

Geight: Aug 7, 2010; Oh, All-Knowing One, behold me!

Thyrork posted:

The "plot and parcel" system XCOM 2 uses is nice and I'd like to see that used in a FPS. Random enough to be interesting and avoids the "Why did the RNG map gen shove a crate THERE?!" problems of true random map gen.

I believe Strafe's level generator will be operating on a similar system, fwiw.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 20:26

Rupert Buttermilk: Apr 15, 2007; 🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...

RyokoTK posted:

Seems like PC Gamer trying to get ahead of the April Fools' prank train.

Aw drat, seriously?

:argh:

I thought today was safe?!

# ? Mar 31, 2016 20:28

Klaus88: Jan 23, 2011; Violence has its own economy, therefore be thoughtful and precise in your investment

catlord posted:

Where's my Fortress of Dr. Radiaki 2?

Anyway, a few pages ago there was discussion about the Timesplitters series and a few people (me) were disappointed it never came to PC? Well apparently, you can play a couple level of Timesplitters 2 on PC, if you buy the possibly better sequel to a terrible, terrible Call of Duty rip-off.

I'm sorry, I'm not interested in Red Dawn, the video game. The remake of red dawn, I mean, the original red dawn video games were pretty fun. I enjoyed Freedom Fighter a ton. :allears:

# ? Mar 31, 2016 20:28

Zaphod42: Sep 13, 2012; If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

catlord posted:

Where's my Fortress of Dr. Radiaki 2?

Anyway, a few pages ago there was discussion about the Timesplitters series and a few people (me) were disappointed it never came to PC? Well apparently, you can play a couple level of Timesplitters 2 on PC, if you buy the possibly better sequel to a terrible, terrible Call of Duty rip-off.

Oh fuckin sweet!

But why don't they have any pictures or video? .... I'm thinking....

RyokoTK posted:

Seems like PC Gamer trying to get ahead of the April Fools' prank train.

Oh god damnit!

# ? Mar 31, 2016 21:07

Shadow Hog: Feb 23, 2014; Avatar by Jon Davies

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

Aw drat, seriously?

I thought today was safe?!

I mean, it's already April 1st in Australia.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 21:09

Instruction Manuel: May 15, 2007; Yes, it is what it looks like!

RyokoTK posted:

Seems like PC Gamer trying to get ahead of the April Fools' prank train.

Oh goddam, every time :doh:

# ? Mar 31, 2016 21:10

JLaw: Feb 10, 2008; - harmless -

Geight posted:

I believe Strafe's level generator will be operating on a similar system, fwiw.

Probably Gibhard's too.

I wouldn't imagine that "procedural generation" for any of these games actually means fine-grained placement of everything at player scale -- there's going to be at least some amount of jigsaw-ish putting together of larger chunks.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 21:28

Woolie Wool: Jun 2, 2006

Mordja posted:

Progression elements tickle the lizard part of the brain that'll make people keep playing and playing, and I guess procedurally generated content is ultimately easier for a small team than handcrafting maps. That's my 2c.

Then they should use Id Tech 2 or the Wolf3D engine. Both cost nothing and reduce the man-hours involved in level design by an order of magnitude or more compared to modern 3D engines. You can even license them in proprietary ways if you must.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 21:32

Power Walrus: Dec 24, 2003; Fun Shoe

Just played through WGRealms 2, it's a really nice piece of classic FPS'ing. Am I missing something, or is it unfinished? I beat the Ice Wizard and it just takes me back to the starting zone.

Still, it's an impressive piece with a lot of cool weapons and TOUGH enemies. Anyone who hasn't played it should definitely check it out.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 22:09

laserghost: Feb 12, 2014; ^{trust me, I'm a cat.}

I never finished it because those explosive lost souls have some riduculous damage. Other than that, best Build craftmanship, surpassed only by DNF and AMC.

# ? Mar 31, 2016 22:35

Karasu Tengu: Feb 16, 2011; Humble Tengu Newspaper Reporter

I played the new Doom, the time to kill is super high which is strange considering Doom deathmatch lasts about half a second since everything will kill you in one shot.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 04:12

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

I really hope it's not indicative of the single player game, because it's garbage. TTK is way too low, the SSG is garbage, movement is too floaty, FoV is too narrow with no FoV option, there's no air control and there's no rocket jumping.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 09:57

The Kins: Oct 2, 2004

Ryan Gordon has brought Serious Sam 1 back to Linux/OSX...
https://twitter.com/icculus/status/715714910857129990
...and as a little bit of Linux gaming history, uploaded his original changelog/dev diary from doing the original Linux port back in 2001.

Ryan's .plan posted:

I get asked a lot about the process of porting games, so here you go.

When we were at Loki, we worked out of CVS. It was Linux-friendly, obviously, and the price was certainly right. There were other tools out there, like SourceSafe, but they were out of our reach or impractical. So CVS it was.

If you started programming after the beginning of the Subversion epoch, you might not be aware of an interesting quirk of CVS: it doesn't store atomic changesets. That is: when you commit to Subversion, Perforce, git, Mercurial, or any other number of modern tools, you're not committing a bunch of changes to files so much as you are committing a single unit of work, like "fixed this bug," or "added this feature," or "changed all the tabs to spaces."

That wasn't how CVS worked. It kept revisions per-file, and didn't keep much concept of its relation to other files. As such, some things we take for granted, like "show me everything we did this week" wasn't as easy as looking at the shortlog, and things like bisecting were completely out of the question.

For porting, your single unit of work, at commit time--especially at the start of the project--is what I refer to as the "BMW." Lots of commits that touch lots of possibly-unrelated files, all with a commit message that reads simply "Bunch More Work." I made it through three more files and it took an hour? Bunch More Work. Reworked all the templates and removed that nasty macro all over the codebase? Bunch More Work. Ready to go to sleep for the night and everything is different than it was this morning and you don't even remember what? That's a classic Bunch More Work.

This isn't normally acceptable practice, but for porting, there isn't usually a direct set of changes you made precisely--there will be later, when the thing is mostly working and you're applying spackle to all the cracks--and you aren't usually working with anyone else anyhow and if you had to look 100 revisions in either direction it's just an unbuildable wasteland anyhow.

So, between CVS's inability to document complicated changes and our inability to articulate them, the people I worked most with at Loki had a protocol we followed: we wrote changelogs by hand, like diary entries.

This wasn't a new idea at Loki; the GNU project demanded this as protocol for any contributions they accepted, probably because of CVS's predecessor RCS, or maybe because of the nothing that predated that. Surely there was a time when revision control was just Richard Stallman uploading whatever was in his home directory that day to some FTP server, right?

GNU changelogs even have a formal protocol, well documented. In practice, they look like this.

The GNU form was very succinct: quickly jot down what file you changed and why, and since you probably did related work on the same day, you get a reasonable grouping that simulated the Single Unit of Work. But the GNU project was generally setting out to do a Single Unit of Work on any given day, so this made more sense for them. At Loki, we were always at the start of another porting project, and almost everything we did was a big messy pile of Bunch More Work.

Bernd Kreimeier was the master of the Loki changelog, and he insisted every day that I write my own, too, because you can't write it later. That information evaporates into the air. So I didn't just write what I changed in the source code, I wrote what I was planning, what my upcoming concerns were, what I tried that didn't pan out, other things you had to do on the project outside of revision control, like the time you spent rebuilding a Win95 box from scratch to see what a game was supposed to be doing. It would have been a good example of what you'd say at an Agile Scrum Standup thing, if that was a thing we did.

If Richard Stallman was a changelog Hemingway, writing terse, direct prose, I was a changelog Kerouac, writing out stream-of-consciousness on an endless scroll of paper.

When I left Loki and eventually started working on Serious Sam, I kept this habit, even though the CVS repository was just a directory in my home dir.

Eventually CVS moved off my box to a server on the LAN, then became Subversion, and then became Mercurial, and then there was no immediate need to write those massive diary-like changelogs. It's certainly more convenient now. But blowing the dust off of Serious Sam 15 years later and slamming two codeforks together, I was grateful to have this document to see what I did and, crucially, see why I did it.

I'm posting that changelog now. I consider it to be a nice piece of Linux gaming history, so I hope you enjoy it, even as dense as it is to read. But it's also almost 10,000 words about how to port games in the same way that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance is accidentally a manual on how to debug software.

Please note that I was 24 when I wrote this, and even though I should have been a grown-rear end man, 24 year olds say a lot of cringey things that we think we stopped saying at 14. There's definitely moments in here where I'm certainly scolding Croteam for various design decisions, shaking my fists at the clouds, while those clouds were just trying to ship a game the best they could and feed their families. Fundamentalism and righteous frustration are tones we don't drop until it's way too late. This just happened to be the hill I died on.

Also, as a form of autobiography, you can see when I started to sputter out. I had fixed the big problems, like it not running at all, and was at the point where every problem would take longer and longer to attack for less and less return on that investment. And then, I stopped taking notes. You can see it end after four months of silence, not with a bang but a whimper, on April 24th, 2002, when I wrote the date, no notes, and left a few sad wishlist bugs at the bottom, probably never revisted. By this point, all the notes would have been me banging my head against the wall, trying a million unsuccessful things, cursing my limited tools and time and skills and maybe my own mortality, and just eventually saying gently caress it.

So the final unwritten advice at the end of that guide might be: don't give up, always finish, ask for help, and don't let the work consume you. There can always be patches later. Learn what you can, check your assumptions, do better next time and don't beat yourself up too much. Sleep a little sometimes.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 10:48

KozmoNaut: Apr 23, 2008; Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle

Jordan7hm posted:

Man, I don't need real 3d. I just need some loving height variation. The game looks boring as poo poo.

I just want a decent exploration FPS with RPG/roguelike elements or straight first-person RPG. Doesn't even have to strictly be an FPS, but I feel like the first person view best translates the appropriate sense of scale and world design for me.

Something to give me that same sort of feeling of curiosity and slight apprehension I got while exploring the Glow in Fallout 1 or the abandoned research lab in Red Faction Guerilla, something akin to the sense of discovery and feeling that you can't wait to see what's next, like when reading a sci-fi novel with really immersive world-building.

The 3D Fallouts came very close, and did hit that specific feeling in some spots, but I've done literally everything in FO3 and New Vegas (and I'm saving up for a new PC to play FO4). System Shock 2 was awesome, the Bioshock games were decent enough, but not amazing. Bulletstorm and the Serious Sam games were interesting in that they had a lot of the right elements, but were too shallow to really follow through with it. I want more.

Maybe I'm just overlooking a bunch of awesome games, I dunno.

KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 12:25 on Apr 1, 2016

# ? Apr 1, 2016 12:19

Convex: Aug 19, 2010

Play Stalker if you haven't already!

# ? Apr 1, 2016 12:40

Zedsdeadbaby: Jun 14, 2008; You have been called out, in the ways of old.

Seconding that, Stalker is a must-have. If games would ever become relics, Stalker is the prime candidate, in a good way. It's incredibly unique.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 12:47

KozmoNaut: Apr 23, 2008; Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle

Oh yeah, I've played through all the Stalker games countless times, Call of Pripyat is one of my favorite games ever. Stepping into the ruined reactor in Shadow of Chernobyl for the first time was awe-inspiring.

Basically, I guess I want Call of Pripyat, only much bigger and optionally more sci-fi in scope.

Stalker 2 could have been so awesome. I've played through Metro 2033 as well, it's close, but no cigar. The book was great, though.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 12:54

The Kins: Oct 2, 2004

Doom: The Golden Souls 2 is finally out! Looks like it went through a couple of changes during development, though...

This came out today, as well. Looks like a promising graphical enhancement mod! I haven't played it just yet, but I'm hoping they didn't half-rear end it.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 13:49

laserghost: Feb 12, 2014; ^{trust me, I'm a cat.}

Those batteries :lol:

# ? Apr 1, 2016 14:24

Klaus88: Jan 23, 2011; Violence has its own economy, therefore be thoughtful and precise in your investment

April fools, you gullible goons. :razz:

:iamafag:

# ? Apr 1, 2016 16:00

RichterIX: Apr 11, 2003; Sorrowful be the heart

I forget, is First Encounter HD bad? I seem to remember people complaining about it back when it came out but now I can't remember. The reviews I find are all pretty good but I seem to remember the word-of-mouth being lukewarm at least.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 16:04

Rupert Buttermilk: Apr 15, 2007; 🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...

RichterIX posted:

I forget, is First Encounter HD bad? I seem to remember people complaining about it back when it came out but now I can't remember. The reviews I find are all pretty good but I seem to remember the word-of-mouth being lukewarm at least.

I'm not a massive spergy SS fan, so I found it just as good as the original, or rather, if there were any huge differences, I don't remember seeing them. In essence, it's still SS1. :black101:

# ? Apr 1, 2016 16:14

Assepoester: Jul 18, 2004; Can't post for 10 years!; Melman v2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryb2FscXFso

# ? Apr 1, 2016 16:16

Zaphod42: Sep 13, 2012; If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Lemon-Lime posted:

I really hope it's not indicative of the single player game, because it's garbage. TTK is way too low, the SSG is garbage, movement is too floaty, FoV is too narrow with no FoV option, there's no air control and there's no rocket jumping.

I was originally hoping that since Certain Affinity was doing the multiplayer (of Halo experience) that they'd just be doing maps, which is I think what they did for 343i. But now I'm hoping that they actually balanced the MP all on their own, and that Bethesda didn't make the same mistakes for Single Player, because yeah, its pretty lovely.

I mean, it works as an FPS, but its the Halo model, not the Quake model. The movement speed needs to be really high and the TTK needs to be HUGE compared to most modern shooters. COD the TTK is like .2 seconds. Quake 3 the TTK with things like lighting gun or plasma can be tens of seconds if you have armor and poo poo. The whole point is that you're supposed to be able to juke your opponent and make it challenging for him to keep landing shots, or otherwise you have to land a couple skillful rockets which again you should be able to dodge because you're so fast.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 16:19

Instruction Manuel: May 15, 2007; Yes, it is what it looks like!

laserghost posted:

Those batteries

I love this :love:

# ? Apr 1, 2016 17:24

Hollenhammer: Dec 6, 2005

Narcissus1916 posted:

The gold standard for remastered FPSes should be Perfect Dark's 360 port. So goddamn good.

That's the only FPS I've ever played that has made me motion sick

# ? Apr 1, 2016 17:38

Karasu Tengu: Feb 16, 2011; Humble Tengu Newspaper Reporter

Zaphod42 posted:

I was originally hoping that since Certain Affinity was doing the multiplayer (of Halo experience) that they'd just be doing maps, which is I think what they did for 343i. But now I'm hoping that they actually balanced the MP all on their own, and that Bethesda didn't make the same mistakes for Single Player, because yeah, its pretty lovely.

I mean, it works as an FPS, but its the Halo model, not the Quake model. The movement speed needs to be really high and the TTK needs to be HUGE compared to most modern shooters. COD the TTK is like .2 seconds. Quake 3 the TTK with things like lighting gun or plasma can be tens of seconds if you have armor and poo poo. The whole point is that you're supposed to be able to juke your opponent and make it challenging for him to keep landing shots, or otherwise you have to land a couple skillful rockets which again you should be able to dodge because you're so fast.

How is the TTK not huge already? A one on one fight can take like 30 seconds if both sides have armor. The rocket launcher does 60 damage on a direct airborne hit, much less with splash, and the automatics only do 6 damage.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 17:42

Zaphod42: Sep 13, 2012; If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Elliotw2 posted:

How is the TTK not huge already? A one on one fight can take like 30 seconds if both sides have armor. The rocket launcher does 60 damage on a direct airborne hit, much less with splash, and the automatics only do 6 damage.

I haven't gotten a chance to play it yet, I'm just watching all the videos I can. But that was the impression I got, and a lot of other people in the Doom thread are saying the same.

I'm hoping that I can try it myself soon, and that the impression I'm getting is wrong. I hope. But lots of people are saying the same. The first footage I saw of the #DayofDoom thing looked horrible, but it was all RoosterTeeth people on console with really low look sensitivity, so it seems a good bit better on M&KB.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbYnaf3Zi5o

Some things even should have a low TTK (railgun, etc.), so its not even that simple necessarily. There's a lot of factors at play, between move speed and damage per shot and things like that. The TTK on the machine gun feels about right, but everybody says its garbage and you should just replace it asap (lol, loadouts) and then you can spawn with a plasma gun forever...

If everybody spawned with a gauntlet and a machine gun and had to go find a plasma gun or an SSG it'd probably resolve some of the pacing issues, maybe they'll give us a loadout-less mode or something.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 17:48

The Kins: Oct 2, 2004

I like the pace of the beta. I think this is because I have lovely reflexes.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 17:52

Shadow Hog: Feb 23, 2014; Avatar by Jon Davies

The Kins posted:

This came out today, as well. Looks like a promising graphical enhancement mod! I haven't played it just yet, but I'm hoping they didn't half-rear end it.

HaaH, WaaW

# ? Apr 1, 2016 17:53

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# ? May 21, 2024 08:22

TerminusEst13: Mar 1, 2013

Hey guys, the long-awaited Doom 4 beta came out! Hope you have fun!

April Fool's, it's bad.

# ? Apr 1, 2016 18:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

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