joe wintergreen internet zone

staves eco, the canceled late-2000s Deus Ex game you never played because it came to me in a dream

deus ex, it came to me in a dream, staves eco

i had a dream a while back in which i was playing a leaked build of an old cancelled deus ex game called Staves Eco, where dx’s neural augmentations existed, but had had generative AI non-optionally patched in in an over-the-air update. it was concerned with the idea that, in the same way you can alter your own emotional experience longterm by changing the way you speak in your head, something could do that to you, and the horror of that thing being an LLM constantly prompted by your own thoughts

when i woke up, i thought for a minute that the game was real (but really canceled) and thought “wow, that’s some of the coolest shit i ever played, of course it got canceled.” i also thought maybe investors saw it as a bad for the deus ex franchise and it might have had better luck pitched as its own IP, all before i realised it was a dream. such is my brain in the morning
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“interest sources”, contextual interactions for NPCs in Sleight of Hand

dev scoops, game ai, gamedev, sleight of hand

I’ve worked with a few “target-based” contextual interaction systems for NPCs on different projects, they’re one of my favourite things to make, and lately I’ve been making one for Sleight of Hand, a stealth game I’m working on at RiffRaff, deets of which I shall here now divulge. Everyone calls these objects something different: at Wolfeye and (I think) Arkane they were Distractions, I’ve also heard Smart Objects and Chores, but I call them Interest Sources on account of I first read about them in a technical article about Mark Of The Ninja while working on The Siege & The Sandfox, whose interest system I also made.

The idea is that, compared to other AI behaviours, these interactions are “inside out”, in that everything particular to the interaction lives on the object being interacted with (a noise, a chair, an alarm button); the “brain” of the NPC only “knows” how to use interest sources “in general”. This confers design and workflow riches beyond imagining.
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shit i keep seeing: “conflict resolution” via gaslighting

thoughts

An uncomfortable pattern I’ve noticed in workplaces and relationships over the years is that even (what I believe to be) genuinely well-intentioned men (I only see it with men) find themselves resorting to gaslighting at the drop of a hat in relatively low-stakes situations. Specifically, I see guys trying to resolve tension by inventing a prior misunderstanding, notionally the source of the tension, and resolving that. The other party is surprised and relieved to learn of the misunderstanding until later, when, sitting with it, they realise it never occurred.
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i never draw a picture. here are some of them

drawing

in my capacity as a non-artist, i typically refrain from drawing any pictures. the pictures below, drawn in ballpoint pen (or some of them on an ipad), are exceptions. it’s my contention that perspective is for messy bitches so as a put-together ho i don’t fuck with it
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loving oscar, 2011-2025

oscar

about a week ago, wonderful Oscar the cat, my best friend of 14 years, passed away in my arms in the garden. i caught him as a feral kitten living under my house when i was 21, and he was the sweetest creature anyone has ever known. this week has been awful, but i’m so grateful for oscar, so i want to write something about him.
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a quest tool i made once

gamedev, tools, unreal

Some years ago I did a quest scripting tool for an ill-fated open-world game I was contracting on. It was ages ago now, the project’s concluded, and nothing here identifies any of it, so I’m sure nobody’ll mind if I talk about my approach a bit here.

My number one concern when creating tools for designers, especially on a larger team, is to minimise the need for interaction between design and engineering in a way that’s comfortable and safe for all concerned, because even in a (rare) best-case social and technical scenario, if designers need to go through engineers to pursue ideas, those ideas will mostly just not get pursued.
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dev scoops: some narrative advice a Valve person gave me once

dev scoops, gamedev, influx

Many years ago when I was a tiny baby making InFlux (of which there is now a Redux), I had no idea what I wanted to do with it narratively, if anything. Because, from a young age, he had humoured me, I emailed Gabe Newell about it, knowing he was in the habit of either replying or forwarding to someone he thought might reply. I got some good thoughts back from David Speyrer, who’s been at Valve since ’99, which I shall publish here now because at a party last night someone was interested.
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the time no man’s sky fucked up and turned into a sidescroller

no man’s guy, no man’s sky, video game thoughts

yeah so i was playing no man’s sky once and i was on a space station and suddenly every vert’s position on one of the horizontal axes collapsed to 0 and it looked like this. i could see dudes running around. cool bug
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observed a spider today

creatures, thoughts

this is my favourite kind of spider because it visibly goes on adventures and this i feel is a very good example of that. you can see the thought process. she is vibing

if you watch for a while you will see her see a leaf standing on end like a tower and be like “uhh fuck yes” and go up on it
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finally liking Control (2019)

control, video game thoughts

I’ve written before about – even though I’m a huge longtime Remedy enjoyer – not liking Control very much, but wanting to like it. Well, good news! After years of trying to like it, I finally like it. Here I will share with you the secrets, for there are several, to Liking Control If You Don’t Like It Now, which I think is only fair after giving it a bit of a hard time in that other post.

This isn’t really a reversal of my previous feelings about Control, but like Half-Life 2, I think it’s flawed in really specific loadbearing ways that you can negate if you approach it in a certain way. The combat is broken, which you can fix with One Weird Trick, but the most important thing, I guess, was managing my narrative expectations.
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overdrive: conversation system

gamedev, overdrive, weird west

The Weird West side project (called Overdrive) that I started working on some time back is something I rarely find the time to advance, despite having a lot of ideas about, but lately I have a little bit. The other day I smashed out a conversation system!

I really love the result (video below) – I want to get some gesticulations and walking-around support in there, but it’s otherwise where it needs to be, aesthetically and ease-of-use-wise. Easily writing scripts that then automagically become convincing-enough conversations between npcs/the player is such a pleasure.
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mgs3 and photorealisming the painterly game

metal gear, video game thoughts

The recent Metal Gear Solid 3 remake uses a lot of Quixel Megascans (a mostly-free library of ultra-high-fidelity photogrammetry), which I don’t think matters at all in itself, but it’s funny that the bit of wood Snake bites down on when he splints his elbow is 100% identical to a plank you roll over all the time in InFlux Redux, and it’s interesting how a game full of such bespoke assets gets a remake that isn’t.

In a photorealistic-ish style, maybe it doesn’t really matter anymore whose “photos” (or scans) you use for commonplace objects. But it doesn’t feel great that everything onscreen was once a bespoke work of art in itself, and now mostly is not, in what is notionally a faithful remake.
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still acting like a fool: an assassin’s creed odyssey

assassin’s creed, design thoughts, video game thoughts

As my Ass Creed quest continues, I’ve now played through 1, 2, Brotherhood, Revelations, 3, 4 (Black Flag), and Unity, the whole “Desmond Trilogy” and then some. Here are some thoughts about each of those!

Playing them in quick succession like this feels like overhearing an argument – someone wants it to be about this, someone disagrees, someone relents, but gets their way in the next game, only to be overruled again on the one after. Meanwhile some malevolent higher-up keeps interfering and being capitulated to. These games feel so troubled that when they’re good it’s quite exciting, persisting with them feels like rooting for an underdog. I don’t know quite what they succeeded in spite of, but it had to’ve been a lot.
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ask: steam deck verification

Mark asked:

Hi Joe! We recently released our game on Steam and we’re having trouble getting Steam Deck verified. We’ve around the same number of Steam reviews and so I wanted to ask and see what steps you took to get over this hurdle as the game should at minimum hit Yellow verification, which would be massive for us. Thanks for your time.

So the short answer is I don’t think I even faced the hurdle you’re talking about. What happened for me is that as soon as Steam Deck Compatibility became a thing, this button materialised on my Steamworks App Admin screen:

I recently found out this doesn’t happen for everyone.
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when will he stop acting like a fool? an assassin’s creed 1 post

assassin’s creed, video game thoughts

I’m on a bit of an Assassin’s Creed odyssey lately (not playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, just on an odyssey through Assassin’s Creed), going in a weird order – I’ve just completed the first game a few days after completing Unity, which is sort of the last one that’s on the same train of thought as the first one. With the amount of Ass Creed I’m playing, you’d think I really liked it, but it’s Just Ok. But interesting!!!

AC1 is a pretty fascinating game now. When it came out I was disappointed with it; I was one of a lot of folks who were expecting and hoping for something more Prince of Persia-y from what seemed to be a lot of the Sands of Time people, and certainly I wasn’t expecting all this Future Bullshit. But now that it’s 2000 years later I can appreciate it for what it is: a surprisingly lean, uncluttered game with only the very first tentative, unobtrusive gestures in the direction of what would become Ubisoft’s customary rote open-world game-gruel.
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dev scoops: vultures in Weird West

dev scoops, gamedev, imsim, weird west

The first feature I worked on at Wolfeye when I came on board as (what ended up being credited as) a Systems Designer/Technical Designer was the vultures. As well as being ambiently cool, the vultures play a role a bit like the rats in Dishonored, showing up when there’s dead stuff around and conveniently disposing of corpses (which is probably noncoincidental, Wolfeye being ex-Arkane, although I don’t remember if we talked about it). This was a convenient place to climb onto the project because it was a pretty standalone system; the other systems mostly didn’t need to know about the vultures.
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scything around, 12/04/25

gamedev, level design, scythe

I am once again aimlessly enjoying the Unreal level design tool Scythe, which I get to test early builds of. Here’s 40 minutes or so’s messing around today using Half-Life: Alyx textures. It’s really a lot of fun.
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tech art thing: mist-dispelling lights

gamedev, sleight of hand, tech art, unreal

A while ago I made a cool effect for Sleight of Hand, where (since you hide in clouds of smoke sometimes in this magic-themed game), we were experimenting with a type of lantern that guards could carry around and it would dispel any smoke or fog around the light. The fog is all volumetric, so cutting through it in a way that looks good is easily done with a spheremask, but that doesn’t handle occlusion (removing smoke on the other side of a wall from the light). In our game it’s probably not important to handle that case, but I did it anyway using Niagara, and the result looks pretty sick.
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influx redux is verified on steam deck

When it comes to the Steam Deck, InFlux Redux is now verified, thanks to an update I put out a few weeks ago and then several smaller updates over a few more weeks where I tweaked the size of text on various UI elements to be one pixel larger.

Here’s an incomplete list of changes in no particular order:
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ask: player physics in influx redux

ask, dev scoops, gamedev, influx redux

Porygon asked (on the Steam community hub):

Am I the only one who has the movement physics feel… off sometimes?

I don’t remember the first game feeling like this, but maybe that’s my memory being bad. I feel like the marble’s movement and inertia is inconsistent and “muddy”, especially in outdoor areas for some reason. It feels a bit like playing on a “slippery” surface like ice that sometimes also clings like mud – hard to describe.

The physics is definitely totally different here, and that’s on purpose. Here is a post about why!
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further adventures in scythe

gamedev, level design, scythe

I continue to spend time screwing around in Scythe. It’s so fun to finally be making maps again properly in Unreal. Some of the folks in my discord took to scything on stream and a couple times a bunch of us have just chatted and scythed, it’s a good vibe. All this stuff took no time to make!

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on: automating yourself out of a job

insults to life itself, thoughts

So you’re hiring for a technical role, and you end up comparing two people. One of them, let’s call them the Layperson, doesn’t have all that much relevant expertise, but comes across as thoughtful, organised, articulate and cooperative. The other one, let’s call them the Genius, seems to be the cream of the crop as far as their applicable skillset, but might not be such a pleasure to work with. You decide to go for the Genius and risk a hit on the interpersonal stuff because this person is seemingly a knockout in all other respects. At some point, the Genius starts using generative AI.
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one time a game i made was on the pirate bay

piracy, thoughts

So I put a little message on there like: “hey if you torrent this and like it i’d appreciate it if you bought it if you can”, and a bunch of pirates went and bought it on itch, and some of ’em even tipped more than the price of the game. it was a $10 game, more than one person bought it for $100. Some of ’em even said they weren’t interested in the game, they just bought it because they liked my comment. I think I ended up uploading my own version too since the existing one wasn’t up to date.

Then! Totalbiscuit had a problem with all this so he talked about what an idiot I was in a video. I had said “all software is basically on the honour system anyway”, and he didn’t understand what that meant, but it exposed me to even more supportive pirates. Pirates rule sometimes.
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design thoughts: let things be rare

design thoughts

It’s true and weird that while both Half-Life games are considered influential and important, hardly any of what was uniquely compelling about them made it into anything else. It’s still hard to find anything that feels like it does what they did: dynamically-chatty bit-part characters with interesting behaviours, NPC classes with specific attitudes to each other, dozens of elaborate one-off scripted behaviours, the continuous sense of not being the main character. Both games are full of stubs of situations that you could build a whole game around.

But a lot of their systems felt complex and amazing because they weren’t the primary focus. You weren’t engaging with a given system exhaustively enough to see the edges of it. These games weren’t afraid to give you a little of something that felt complex, and trust you to imagine a depth that wasn’t always really there.
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adventures in scythe

gamedev, level design, scythe, unreal

I’ve been messing around in the aforementioned Scythe level editing tool for UE5, here’s some of what I’ve been doin’

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max payne 3’s multiplayer bullet-time was good

payneposting, video game thoughts

I don’t love Max Payne 3, but one thing is very good in it: it’s the only thing I’ve seen go out of its way to make player-activated bullet-time work in multiplayer non-jankily. It takes a pretty cool approach, where slow motion gets propagated between players and objects based on line of sight to the slomo-affected things, and it works flawlessly. Here are some thoughts about that.
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new tool: Impromptu Texture Browser

gamedev, something you can buy from me, unreal

This is a “texture browser” utility widget for UE5.5 that presents materials in the style you’d expect from a level editor in the 90s: as square thumbnails.

Unreal normally presents materials in the content browser as lit and mapped to a sphere. This isn’t useful for much. When you’re making a level, you want to actually see the images you’re working with. So this plugin presents them that way. It looks like Hammer’s texture browser. You can buy it on Itch.
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Unreal Scoop: Data-Driven CVars

gamedev, unreal, unreal scoop

If you use UE5, you might have noticed there’s a new-ish feature called Data-Driven Console Variables, and you might also have noticed that nothing comes up when you Google this. There’s not much to it, but in the interests of having something come up when you Google this, here’s what I’ve figured out about data-driven cvars.
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Unreal Scoop: Make your own “shaded textured unlit” viewmode real quick

unreal

Hammer, king of level editors, has a view mode where the scene is unlit, but not fullbright; it’s shaded to make it easier to parse. Unreal doesn’t have that! But you can add it yourself, really easily, with no C++ or Blueprint – just a postprocess material and a line in a config file. Here’s how!
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Unreal Scoop: Making a “Compiling Shaders…” Screen

gamedev, unreal, unreal scoop

Unreal has a reputation amoung the ill-informed for being plagued by shader compilation stutter. As an attribute of Unreal itself, this is basically made up – devs are just not always doing what they are supposed to do pre-ship to avoid this issue. I’ll elaborate, but basically, to avoid compiling shaders during gameplay, you want to do it up-front, like during an initial loading screen, which maybe says “Compiling shaders” on it, and not let the player begin until it’s done. To do that last part properly, you need a little bit of C++. I had to do this for InFlux Redux recently, so here’s mine.
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half-life 2 source code: a trawl

dev scoops, half-life 2

Back in 2016, I was idly going through HL2’s source code and started tweeting interesting tidbits; this interested people a lot and PC Gamer made an article out of it. Twitter’s ruined, so I’m gonna put those tweets here now, and maybe elaborate on some of it. Come with me now on a journey through 20-year-old C++.
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a good level design tool finally came out

gamedev, level design, unreal

I’ve been testing a friend’s WIP level design plugin for Unreal for a while now, and while it’s still very early, it’s available now on Patreon and you should support it there. It’s bringing Source 2 style geometry editing to Unreal, allowing level design to properly be a thing again, and I made a video about it, see below.
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a little car game i am making

fang it, gamedev

I guess in April 2023 (holy shit that is longer ago than I thought) I started making a little car game prototype, sorta inspired by Micro Machines/MASHED/Re Volt etc, and I got back into it a bit recently. I guess so far I’ve probably worked on it for under two weeks cumulatively but it’s starting to look like there’s a universe where I finish it. The vibe is same-screen-multiplayer competitive knockout races where you can blow each other up.
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max payne is a positive male role model

payneposting, video game thoughts

Been replaying Alan Wake 2 a bit, having charged through it at launch too quickly, and forever there is a Remedy game thought percolating in my head, and today it’s that Remedy characters talk explicitly about their feelings, which, while the post title is a joke, does give Max a level of self-examination most dudes have never hit. Often a Remedy inner monologue statement begins “I felt”:

“I felt like I was walking into a trap. I felt guilty, like I was about to get caught.”

I can count on my fingers the games I don’t think this is missing from.
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ask: abstractions

ask

some asshole asked:

How do you feel about abstraction vs models for game mechanics? e.g. having a realistic system for aiming a shot vs “roll to hit”

It’s pretty situational I guess, but I usually enjoy things less the more abstracted or board-game-rulesy they are, especially in a real-time context. But the less that stuff is exposed for what it is, the less I mind it – I probably don’t mind having a 10% chance of headshotting a guy, but I do mind knowing about it, versus just taking the shot if it feels like I can make it.
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“sleight of hand” is a video game i’ve been working on

gamedev

At the moment I’m a Senior Technical Designer at RiffRaff Games, working on a stealth game about a witch. We demoed some new stuff at Day of the Devs the other week. You should check it out, probably!
probability is hard to think about

anecdote, probability, thoughts

so i was working on a game. the game has haystacks sometimes. if you set fire to the haystack, there’s a one in six chance that when it burns away, it turns out to contain a treasure chest! you can get some loot

i implement this. much later, QA reports a bug: the chance of a treasure chest spawning isn’t one in six. uhhh ok. i have a look and can’t repro. i look at the code and it’s the same “random chance” code used everywhere, so if there was anything wrong with it, this wouldn’t be where it came up. i have a bit more of a think and then send it back, CNR.
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what i reckon about yellow paint

design thoughts, gamedev

For years, more or less annually, the bit of the internet where gamers and game developers overlap has kicked off with aggro debate about “yellow paint”, a handholdy game trope where the player is constantly told explicitly what to do and where to go. I always feel a bit insane when this happens. A player thinks the paint is dumb, and then all the devs go “Yes, but you don’t understand, it’s unavoidable!“, but it’s not. You can be clear without being patronising. I’d argue that’s most of what game design is.
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InFlux/Redux comparison/dev thoughts video

design thoughts, dev scoops, gamedev, influx redux

Just spent some time making a comparison/developer thoughts video of InFlux Redux (2024) vs the original InFlux (2013), which was fun. Here’s me opening the editors for both projects side-by-side and saying whatever it occurs to me to say about the development process(es). Get set for 50 whole minutes of unrehearsed dev thoughts
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midichloriopathy

thoughts

some canon new Star Wars thing should address midichlorians by acknowledging them as a whole-cloth pseudoscience and gatekeeping device. qui-gon has the right kind of dadvibe to have honestly believed in it. if there’s a reestablished jedi order or whatever they should view midichlorians the way we view, like, physiognomy. the only people who still ever mention them in earnest should be the sith
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ask: good level design tools when

ask, gamedev, level design

Small Victorian Child asked:

dear mr wintergreen,

when will my father (colloquially known as Good Level Design Tools) return from the war?

yours truly
small victorian child

The answer may surprise you.
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weird west side project

gamedev, overdrive, weird west

In some of my spare time, I’ve been having fun screwin’ around building something out of Weird West assets and concepts, which Wolfeye kindly don’t mind me doing and sharing. I worked on Weird West for years and always wanted to make something else out of their art, which looks amazing close-up. Here’s a video of most of what I have so far.
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Auto Material Instance Maker Tool for UE5

gamedev, something you can buy from me, unreal

Here’s a tool I made a while back that you can buy: it lets you automatically create instanced materials for many textures at once, given a base material with parameters to fill. This saves you a lot of time if you have a lot of textures you want to turn into material instances, like: 200 world textures which each have a normal+roughness+AO map, or whatever.
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half-life alyx’s level design tools are super great

level design

On Twitter once I did a big thread where I went through Half-Life Alyx’s SDK – so this is Source 2 – and had a big ol’ yarn about ’em. That thread turned into a useful resource for some folks, so I made it a Cohost post, and now Cohost is going away so here it is in blog post form. I also put it on the forum.
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helicobacter

helicobacter, thoughts

i had a gastroscopy recently and one of the milder things they were checking for just in case is a totally normal stomach bacteria called “helicobacter” which, when i looked it up, i found out he is a little guy with little flagella that he uses to dig into your stomach lining so he doesn’t get swept away, and he secretes something that raises the pH around him so he doesn’t die from stomach acid. kinda realised all at once that i always thought of “bacteria” as a completely vague substance, but it’s guys. your body is a temple with a massive congregation
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InFlux Redux is out today!

gamedev, influx redux, something you can buy from me

That’s what I’d be saying if I remembered to make this post several days ago when it came out. It is out, though! You should buy it on Steam and leave a positive review. 11 years after the original and some amount of years after I started working on it, here’s a blog post about it.
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animating while not an animator

gamedev, payneposting, unreal

One of the things I’m not is an animator, but every few years I give it a crack, and recently I gave it a crack inside Unreal, which now has really good rigging and animating tools. I made a complete Max Payne dive – sideways, front and back, all blending together just like in the original game, in a few hours’ work spread across a couple of days. Pretty pleased with it.
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Dev Scoops: XCOM/2’s art direction

design thoughts, dev scoops, gamedev, xcom

I had a moan about XCOM 1 being prettier than XCOM 2 the other day and got some nice replies from the Art Director of both, Greg Foertsch.
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my Deus Ex Lipsyncing Fix Mod: making of

deus ex, gamedev

Back in 2021 I made a mod for Deus Ex 1 that fixes the lipsyncing and blinking, which, I betcha didn’t know, was broken since ship. Everything I wrote about it is on Twitter, and it oughta be somewhere else, so here’s a post about it. The mod itself can be downloaded here.
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check out this incredible concept art from Interstate ’82,

video game thoughts

the inferior sequel to the spectacular video game Interstate ’76. Got ’em off the install disc. Great concept art, not a great game.

Interstate ’76 came out in 1997, alternate history ’76, Mechwarrior 2 engine, great story, great characters, great car physics, it’s got a poetry button, you can shoot a pistol out the window of your car in first person, great voicework, great multiplayer, incredible funk soundtrack performed by a one-off band called Bullmark – composed, apparently, of the bassist from Third Eye Blind, the drummer from Primus, Santana’s keyboardist and some other folks. Some of this info is from this ten year old blog.
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FEAR, HL2, AI, and only doing cool stuff when the player is looking

design thoughts, fear, video game thoughts

(gravis did a comment on my FEAR post so long he made it a post, and now I’m doing that with that post, and this ends up being about all kinds of things)

Half-Life 2 (and maybe 1, but I don’t think so?) had a trigger type called trigger_look, which was like a regular trigger, but it only executed if you were both standing in the trigger and looking at the specified entity. They used it heavily for Gman stuff – in HL2, if you walk backwards into an area you’re supposed to see the Gman in, and then turn around, that’s when he straightens his tie and walks away, he only does it if you’re looking.
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f.e.a.r: first encounter assault recon rules

fear, video game thoughts

The video game called F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon gets a bum rap, even though everyone knows it rules. The bum rap is that everyone thinks it’s just the AI and the guyshoot that rule in F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon, when actually a ton else about F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon also rules.
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Unreal Engine Plugins That I Reckon Are Good

gamedev, unreal

Here is an incomplete list of unreal engine plugins that I like

Mesh Tool by Nate Mary is a general modeling tool and the best way to do level design in the editor, though UE5’s CubeGrid tool is really good too (but has fewer functions than this). You can use both together, both just output meshes. I asked Nate to add Hotspot Texturing like Source 2 has, and the madman did it. The pictures above are all of MeshTool stuff, all of it whipped up real quick.
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the time i made headcrabs in unreal

gamedev, half-life 2, unreal

Way before Half-Life Alyx had been announced, I spent a couple of days one Christmas remaking Half-Life 2’s headcrabs (using their existing art and anims) in UE4, but with additional physical reactivity – they can lose their footing and struggle to recover, smash into things and active-ragdoll around after a bad jump, get picked up by the gravity gun, etc. Half-Life Alyx later did the exact same thing, which I remain somewhat chuffed by even if this was just the obvious next step for headcrabs.
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pictures i took in scotland

photos

damn
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edsplash.bmp: a collection

dev scoops, gamedev

in the unreal engine, edsplash.bmp is the name of the splash image presented to the user while the editor loads. projects without a custom edsplash.bmp are considered especially heinous. often a given edsplash will never be seen outside its development studio. but sometimes an edsplash escapes onto the internet. these are their stories
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game dev post: Weird West dissolvin’ walls

dev scoops, gamedev, weird west

One of many things I worked on on Weird West is the hiding of walls/floors/etc between player and camera.

When I joined the project, roof-hiding and the-floors-above-you hiding were all that was in; the camera went top-down at about 80 degrees when you entered a building. I found that a bit disorienting and wanted to try to figure out a way to smoothly hide the walls, but as with my fire propagation stuff, this was complicated by the fact that a ton of levels had already been built and I didn’t want to add complexity or fixup work onto other folks’ tasks. So this is a wall-hiding system that doesn’t know what a wall is.
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thoughts about Control (2019)

control, video game thoughts

I’m a big Remedy enjoyer, I like Alan Wake and Max Payne and Quantum Break, and I want to like Control, but I don’t, though I like a lot about it. I completed it, was bewildered, and now can’t go back to it. More than anything I’ve seen before, every little thing in it feels like a missed opportunity, and like the thing it should have been was well within reach.

The way Alan Wake 1 sort of peters out, dragging its vague conclusion out over three DLCs that also don’t really conclude, somehow remained pretty charming. Control feels like it took weird lessons from that, and is now not interested in conclusions at all, even unexpressed ones.
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first game-on-shelf experience

thoughts, weird west

Recently had (finally) my first experience of “a game I made is physically on a shelf in front of me for sale in a shop”, with Weird West, which is physically out on PS5 now (it’s on other platforms too but not physically, I guess). For whatever reason, I didn’t really expect to feel anything about this, but I did, although I am not sure what exactly.
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open source the “source 2” video game engine imo

as unity slowly vanishes, and unreal continues to breed unease in pursuit of the least sound impulses of tim sweeney, i sort of think valve could nigh-effortlessly clean up here and make the world a somewhat better place.
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barrels of game goo

insults to life itself

On Steam, by grinding away for no reason, you can earn “Trading Cards”. These can be converted into “gems” which are collected in “Sacks of Gems”. The underlying javascript, though, calls them what they are:

barrels of game goo
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one thing most players don’t know about the scanners in half-life 2 is

design thoughts, half-life 2, video game thoughts

You can let a scanner serve as a “strider scanner” which occasionally happens not very noticeably in HL2. What this does is, if a strider doesn’t know where you are and is patrolling, and the scanner scans you, suddenly the strider gives a big scary “whoop” and comes running over because the scanner told it where you are.
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blurred ball

gamedev, influx redux, projects

Finally trying the material based radial motion blur from ContentExamples (since regular motion blur is bad at things that spin). Works p well
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if you can get a levitator, then you can get some wasps

thoughts

in troubled times, it is comforting to reflect on this
my Weird West first person mod is out

dev scoops, gamedev, imsim, weird west

When Weird West got its final patch, it introduced mod support, and includes the First Person Mod that WolfEye got me to finish up after I put out a vid of a much jankier version I pooped out a while back. Here’s a kind of low-energy making-of video that I threw together.
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target audience

thoughts

speaking of target audience (which i just was, somewhere else) when i was ~15 i had to interview someone for a school project so i emailed the questions to gabe newell and one of them was about target audience and he said “it’s hard enough making something good without trying to figure out how to target an audience”

whether that’s a feasible attitude when you aren’t valve is another thing but it remains pretty much my feeling on it and i’m never convinced any of the concessions small time folks make to marketing concepts genuinely yield anything
laments on half-life 2’s ai and balance

design thoughts, gamedev, half-life 2, video game thoughts

just watched back this video i did about soldier AI in half-life 2 years ago and i still agree with it! what a relief

later, i got to speak to some of the folks who worked on these things, and they also agreed with it, but i wish the video spent more time on exactly how hard this stuff is, and especially how delicate it can be.
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my favourite part of dead space 2

dead space, video game thoughts

is probably this part where you return to somewhere you’ve been before that’s a typical rusty spaceship covered in blood but they mix up the palette by filling it with UV light. Refreshing
my favourite part of mirror’s edge

video game thoughts

It’s the part where they introduce a new named, voiced, modelled and animated character, and he gets this gif’s worth of screen time and is never seen or heard from again.
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went where i grew up recently

photos

haven’t been back in a while, never on my own + with a license. got to catch up with quite a few people, but also a lot of sittin’ around waiting for those opportunities, trying not to get the bad kind of nostalgic. it is beautifuller there than melbourne, i gotta say
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jedi game tech test

gamedev

I spent 8 hours on this Jedi Survivor tech test when I was interviewing for a Technical Narrative Designer job there a while back. Got offered the job, but didn’t take it. The test called for “a system to manage the narrative”, plus timed lifts that are easy for level designers to set up, a trap that shoots a projectile from offscreen, etc etc.
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started makin a little game about hackin stuff

gamedev, projects, unreal

bein a cool little hacker guy
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here’s some pretty pictures from a game i had to cancel amid circumstances beyond my control

gamedev, imsim, projects

map by Suzanne Will and I
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if you want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, graphics tech advancements should please you

gamedev, thoughts

it’s massively massively feasibler than ever before for one-person devs/tiny studios to rapidly iteratively make stuff, all kinds of stuff, from the fancy-graphic’d to the deliberately lo-fi, than it ever has been before, with fewer limitations, because of the same tech advancements that are mostly marketed via boring shit like a realistic building exploding or a couple of photorealistic guys punching each other.
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an insult to life itself

fake art, insults to life itself

in the famous pre-LLM-bullshit video of Miyazaki where some misguided joker tries to pitch procedural animation as a labour-saving device to, predictably, one of the people on the planet least receptive to it, he is met with (to me) ultra-cathartic disdain. in this post i relate that to the fake art generated by what we now laughingly/resentfully call “ai”
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it’s bad for the baby

payneposting, video game thoughts

maybe an hour and a half after max payne quits smoking for his baby’s health, his baby is killed, but true to his word, he never smokes again
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i would like to see good dev commentary in more things

video game thoughts

the dev commentary in valve games is so interesting and useful and educative, but their games come out somewhat rarely and most of the others that i’ve seen do commentary have done it badly
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pondering whether crowdfunding is still remotely possible in this year of our whatever whatever year it is

I want it to be worthwhile – if you have a decent pitch already that you’ve been being turned down by all the usual people for because it’s 2024 – to throw it up on kickstarter or whatever else as a last ditch “give us money and maybe this can happen, otherwise it won’t”
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this poster rules
a funny thing happened when i told a lie on the internet

gamedev, unreal engine

i suggested that this photo i took near my house was a screenshot out of unreal engine 5, and many people believed me and were amazed, or didn’t but were unsure, or recognised it as a troll but thought it was a troll on people thinking it was a photo (which it was), or just got confused and annoyed, it was pretty great

but then: somebody spent 3 weeks recreating the photo in unreal engine 5
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dev scoops: dhabih eng reveals a previously undiscovered half-life 2 easter egg

dev scoops, half-life 2

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dev scoops: Max Payne Kung Fu Edition

dev scoops, gamedev, payneposting

The most impressive video game mod of all time is for certain Max Payne: Kung Fu Edition, which, despite being by far the most accomplished Payne mod code-wise and having a ton of custom animations high quality enough to fit in with the rest of Max Payne, was developed by one guy, Kenneth Yeung.
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Dev Scoops: Simulating Eyes in Half-Life 2

dev scoops, gamedev, half-life 2, source engine

Years ago, I was making a stealth game in Unreal that I’ve since had to cancel amid circumstances beyond my control. At one point I was trying to make my characters’ eyes nice, and the gold standard for that was (and arguably still is) Half-Life 2. Valve’s Ken Birdwell helped me figure it out.
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thoughts on the spiderman 2 video game on the play station five

design thoughts, spiderman, video game thoughts, video games

I was playing this, and I webbed up an oil tanker that was going to explode (this makes it not explode) and Peter goes “geez, if i’d webbed that up a second later…😬” but of course, it would have been fine, they never explode. Nothing bad can happen in this game.

Got me thinking how much more I would enjoy that other game: a version of a spiderman game where you actually have to face consequences for the occasional failure/miscalculation/oversight/fuckup/hard choice. Spiderman movies (and probably comics, whatever, I’m not a nerd) are all concerned at some point with how he is viewed by the community; which is often negatively. I want to have to manage that stuff.
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is it an imsim: splinter cell chaos theory

design thoughts, imsim, video game thoughts

imo, yeah a little bit? but it’s not much of one.

i reckon the core of imsim is “things are systemic”, they don’t work/not work arbitrarily or case-by-case, and also the world has to be designed as a world, not a level, filled with those systems. this is how you get cool emergent results, and in chaos theory you don’t
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thinkin bout how

design thoughts, gamedev

it seems like smaller-to-medium-sized game development often starts from recognising some feasibler-than-it-seems, high-bang-for-buck gimmick or tech thing, with which you can reliably wow people, and then imagining an otherwise small-scope game around that
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the worst part of deus ex: human revolution is actually the best part

design thoughts, deus ex, gamedev, imsim, video game thoughts

You know how when Deus Ex 3 first came out, it had boss fights that you couldn’t get around, you were just forced to fight and kill a guy? And everyone was mad? And later the devs patched in other options, basically one for every style of play you might be into?

Well I’ve decided they were right the first time
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design thoughts: inventing a new special infected for left 4 dead

Hi I’m Joe and here’s what I’d do if someone at Valve put a gun to my head and told me to add a new type of Special Infected to the video game Left 4 Dead
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breath of the wild takes from the joe wintergreen take vault

botw, design thoughts, video game thoughts

instead of the DLC giving you access to quite a slow motorcycle, which sort of undermines horses and climbing and ends up not being very fun, it should have given you a bicycle
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games should require specific input to pull the pin on a grenade,

design thoughts, gamedev, video games

separate from throwing it. 90% of the potential interactivity of a grenade is collapsed when it explodes
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thoughts about the television series “house: medical doctor”

thoughts

after watching, on a whim, the first episode of House last year, i posted:

watched the first episode of House having never watched House and it was the funniest shit ever. we were laughing the whole time. i love how he is supposed to be a sherlock genius but multiple times he will have one of those “stop in mid sentence slow zoom on the face oh my god he’s had an epiphany” epiphanies and then the epiphany is wrong, and then the way he solves the case in the end is by magically also having exhaustive knowledge outside his field (parasitology this time). if that’s what it is every time – “house has an additional degree he never mentioned” – i am into it

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Dead Space 3’s ending was really good

dead space, half-life 2, video game thoughts

I mostly ignored Dead Space when it came out, but last year I played the remake and then just recently I finished up 2 and 3 and 3’s DLC, which it turns out (I did not know this) is essential and is the end of the story, and it’s a really good ending. This was a while ago now and it’s really stuck with me. I think it must be the grimmest game ending I’ve seen, super horrible, super good.
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no mmo is good

video game thoughts

when i was a kid mmos began to exist and my mind was blown by this, but i never played any because there was no money, so my mind was actually blown by its own ill-informed imaginings of what that must be like. i hadn’t even seen any videos. i did not yet understand that mmos have to suck shit.
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when i was a kid my mum was always enacting illconceived money-saving strategies

for instance, when we wanted frozen yoghurt, which is delicious, mum thought it was too expensive. but. what if i were to purchase regular yoghurt and freeze it at home? delightfully devilish, mother (this makes an inedible brick)
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Sellin’ my Light Audit Tool

gamedev, something you can buy from me, unreal engine

Selling this on itch and fab. It’s a helper widget I made to help track down expensive lights in UE5. Sorts all the lights in your scene by how expensive they probably are (based on how many shadow casting objects are in the radius, etc).

Also gives you an easy way to directly change properties of LightComponents inside Actors without selecting the actor and then the component.
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frustration

gamedev, thoughts

feels like my gamedev superpower is “not getting frustrated easily by tasks”. when something goes wrong frustration is hardly ever what i feel. when it is, it’s pretty hard to push through and often i just don’t. but it’s rare

i always see someone hitting a concrete wall that for me (even if stumped) would feel like a speed bump, they get so frustrated they get angry or depressed and i’m like, geez, if i was that frustrated there’s no way i’d be able to solve this same day. and it’s just luck. i’m not pushing through where others give up, i’m just not experiencing the same thing. which is pure random brain shit i have no control over
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palworld

insults to life itself, video game thoughts

everyone getting into this fake ai pokemon game is the type of person to wish their dead friend back to life on a monkey’s paw and when they see the friend Came Back Wrong and is a rotting soulless animated corpse they’re like, oh my gosh he’s back! 😍

everyone’s like “well people are desperate for a pokemon game”. so what? i don’t care about pokemon, but… it’s not a pokemon game. I’m never so desperate for a chocolate milkshake that I’ll drink whatever liquid looks the most like one. it’s like the “hd mods” for old games that make them look awful, but get covered as just “better graphics”, made by the people with the most time to throw away in devotion to your game, who you’d hope would also be your Biggest Fans, but plainly they’re not, because they think everything you made is an error they can correct.
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gta4 minimap thoughts

design thoughts, gta4, video game thoughts

Playing GTA4 and thinking about how much a minimap can ruin this type of game. GTA and Red Dead 2 both become whole different games when you turn it off, in a weirdly instantly-refreshing way. In RDR multiplayer, I got a friend to turn it off as we were just riding our horses around, and not even 5 seconds later he went “holy shit”.
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gta4 and accidental anachronism

design thoughts, gta4, video game thoughts

The best way to play GTA4 these days is with DXVK and several mods to fix things which never worked in the PC version, or have broken since, and to make the graphics less bad. Is that the way I just played through the entire game? Haha, no! I set all this up and then played through it on the Xbox because I wanted to be on the couch.

The most interesting thing about playing GTA4 for me now is how particular it is to 2008.
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ask: porting games to the switch

ask, gamedev

@Xuelder asked:

What is the biggest technical hurdle you see when porting games to the Switch?

A lot of people say the CPU, but for me it’s usually been the GPU and the limited memory. The Switch is effectively a 7 year old mid-range android phone, and it’s very difficult to get to 30fps (forget 60, for most things) without making your game look real bad. This is a big issue for InFlux Redux whenever I try to put that on there – a lot of that game is about looking and sounding nice, and there aren’t a lot of options that will survive the Switch’s gpu and memory situation.
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ask: should tim sweeney open-source UE1

ask, gamedev

@ETPC asked:

should tim sweeny open source unreal engine 1 and 2

absolutely. i gather the reason this doesn’t happen (at least for 1) is a valve-style “it would require a fair bit of work nobody ever feels like doing”. but it would fucking rule

i feel like it’s not acknowledged enough that unreal engine 4/5 is in the weird position of being the only commercially available game engine, in the sense of what a “game engine” traditionally was: tools and tech emerging from game development, not just for game development. it’s not a good state of affairs
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spiderman thoughts

spiderman, thoughts

I want a Spiderman thing that recognises that there’s usually no reason for an investigating cop to think a guy webbed to a wall even did anything. Like wouldn’t that immediately turn into trying to prosecute Spiderman for randomly tying people up and running away

Spiderman stops a mugging, suspends the guy from the power lines, two hours later the cops show up, there’s no witnesses or victim or any suggestion of a mugging, just The Case Of The Guy Who Keeps Doing This
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ask: half-life 1 anniversary update

@blazehedgehog asked:

You touched Valve’s 25th Anniversary update for Half-Life yet? Does it meet your standards?

My standards for Half-Life 1 Anniversary Updates are “absolutely nothing for 24 years” so yeah I’m blown away!

They’ve been making the occasional obscure fix for years – a lot was broken, but a surprising amount was added or still functional too – they added AA, high refresh rate support, fixes to texture filtering, all in the last few years. But this update fixed way more stuff and I’m really happy with it, especially the fixes to brightness/contrast defaults so it’s no longer washed out for everyone playing it for the first time. The most amazing thing is it includes actual new maps, official ones, from Valve level designers. There have been Valve level designers fucking around in Worldcraft this year, making really cool shit. What a gift.
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i think the ai art thing is really about,

fake art, insults to life itself, thoughts

people aren’t comfortable with their own disinterest in things. they don’t want to make art but they want to want to. they can’t make themselves want to. but that’s not ok with them. but they imagine it would feel good to have made art

i think these people are in a real distressing crisis of identity. they feel like they are supposed to have dreams and ideas and creative urges and they just don’t. they think they want a shortcut to where they’re trying to go, but there’s no such place. but it’s ok to not dream?
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ask: why do i think max payne 3 has bad graphics

ask, payneposting, video game thoughts

Anonymous Guest asked:

Honest question (as in I’m not just asking this to rile you up)…. why do you think Max Payne 3 has bad graphics? Like, there’s a lot to not like about “the Housers present: knockoff Man on Fire starring Max Payne for some reason” but I genuinely dig it’s PS360 era grime. like sure, it’s not turn of the century photosource texturing but what is?

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10 years on from Max Payne 3

payneposting

and 19 years on from Max Payne 2, it’s interesting to note that while 2 had good graphics, for 3 they decided to go with bad graphics. every project is different
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Ugh I Guess I Want To Move From Unity To Unreal Dot Com

gamedev, unity, unreal

Decided to do something useful: whipped up a quick Internet Site for all the Unity folks who now want to learn Unreal and don’t know where (or whether) to start because it’s daunting as hell.

http://www.ughiguessiwanttomovefromunitytounreal.com
played a bit of metal gear ground zeroes

video game thoughts

i never played any metal gears besides phantom pain which i didn’t like very much mostly. ground zeroes seems like what i wanted from phantom pain: linear-nonlinear missions with a surprising amount of freedom of movement, in the dark, in the rain, pleasing systems in surprising places, cool smart takes on commonplace interactions. a modern “project igi”. nice. i also enjoy pointing my binocs at something and asking a guy to tell me what it is. that rules and i want to steal it.
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unreal engine general beginner tips for persons who are beginning with unreal engine

gamedev, unity, unreal

Spent some time on a comment to help someone out who was having trouble starting out in Unreal, but it might as well be a post, so here it is:

Unreal is really good, but it doesn’t teach itself well, which frustrates me a lot. Once you’re across it it’s wildly empowering, but getting across it is way harder than it needs to be, so you’re not alone here at all.
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apple vision pro announcement thoughts

insults to life itself, thoughts

the Apple Vision Pro (???) announcement video is vibeswise identical to every other Big Tech Announcement Video you ever get now – not only rancid, but so overwhelmingly rancid that it’s literally hard to talk about. it’s such a dense ball of interwoven awfulness that pointing out any individual strand of it feels like you’re missing the point. a wonderful defense mechanism

one of the parts that always stands out to me the most, though, is the way these things are always depicting an idyllic but harried life where you’re walking in a park, or spending time with your children, or patting your dog, and thank god that’s not all you’re doing right now, thanks to the thing on your face that lets you also do what’s important, which is an email or a spreadsheet. you’re at work, but the kid still thinks you’re mentally and emotionally present, so that’s 100% of both of those needs met. nice one.
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i dislike “official [region] [topic]” internet communities

thoughts

as in, “the melbourne writing community” or “the perth gamedev discord” or “the hylian ornithology forum”. all you have to do is use that format to name your website or forum or discord and everyone seems to go with it, as though all of a sudden there is a single canonical “Hylian Ornithology Community” or whatever, that you can be “in” or “out” of.
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the time a did a payne face

payneposting

on a challenge issued by my discord, i took a photo which was variously modded and photoshopped into max payne
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thoughts

one of the least pleasant parts of running a conspicuously lefty online community of some sort is when someone who’s ostensibly all about empathy and kindness comes in looking for a fight

this happens in my discord a couple times a year. someone busts in and starts making garden variety political statements everyone agrees with, but reframing everyone’s agreement as dissent, light-heartedness as spite, and any further discussion of the topic as outright hostility. eventually they’ll declare the chat to be full of conservatives and storm out (or be banned), and then they will go on a farewell tour of the local internet and tell everyone your ostensibly progressive space is actually, like, super right wing so don’t be fooled!!
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porting Adios To The Nintendo Switch Entertainment System

adios, gamedev

Couple years ago, I handled the port of Adios, the game about the pig farmer who doesn’t want to dispose of corpses for the mob anymore, to the Switch. It took a week. The Switch is weak as piss, so this is always a little bit of a pain, but the port ended up looking visually pretty good and runs at a solid 30fps, usually at the full 720p in handheld mode. Sometimes it has to dynamic-res to a lower res, but it’s usually not noticeable thanks to Unreal’s temporal upsampling.
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nine eleven post

i remember the morning 9/11 occurred I was 11, and i was not familiar with the existence of the twin towers, so i went on “Keyhole Earthviewer 3D” (Google Earth before Google bought it) to have a look, and the satellite photo had already updated and all you could see was smoke
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You know what’s a good curse?

curses, thoughts

Pirates Of The Caribbean 1 curse. Steal a coin, have a terrible time til it’s all returned. Solid curse. Real nobody-to-blame-but-yourself curse. Easy to lift unless you’ve really gone nuts with your spending, else potentially impossible. Good curse.

You know what’s a lousy curse? Pirates 2 curse. Cursed with a spot on your hand that attracts a Kraken who Kraks on behalf of Davy Jones, himself subject to, and issuer of, a variety of convoluted curses which are weirdly transactional/contractual in nature.
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Dev Scoops: Max Payne 2’s character shadows

dev scoops, gamedev, payneposting

A while ago I tweeted about Max Payne 2’s character shadows, which were really nice for 2003. Luckily, a couple of Remedy folks who worked on the game saw it and provided scoops:
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ask: ideal games job

ask, gamedev

@johnnemann asked:

If you could wave a magic wand and have your ideal video game studio to work in, what would that look like? How big, what roles, and what would your job be?

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ask: dishonored thoughts

ask, design thoughts, imsim, video game thoughts

Anonymous User asked:

say a thought about Dishonored. maybe multiple

Dishonored rules, obviously. Here are some selected thoughts I have had about Dishonored.
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ask: level design tools

ask, gamedev

@porglezomp asked:

I remember I originally followed you on Twitter for level design tool review stuff. Do you have opinions on level design tools that should exist but don’t? I always want to hear about tools

i have many such opinions but i’ve spent so much time expressing them over the years that i’ve somewhat burned out on it. being extremely correct is not in itself very satisfying
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ask: the next big video game tech junk

ask, gamedev

@mahalis asked:

what do you see as the next big tech challenge that the engine people should try to solve, post-Nanite and Lumen?

(I realize neither of those is “done” so we’re not exactly post- them, but you probably get what I mean)

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ask: favourite Dishonored levels

ask, design thoughts, imsim

Anonymous User asked:

favorite Dishonored level from each game? (I’m the Dishonored Anon I’m only capable of thinking about the game Dishonored)

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at a chip shop in scotland,

anecdote

i ordered a “sausage in batter” and the woman i ordered it from gave me a look like i was the stupidest prick in the world and said “we only do them in batter”. i said “i’m just reading off the menu”. she rolled her eyes. the menu was next to us both, large backlit text, and it offered both “sausage” and “sausage in batter” and another type of sausage. between us in the food heater thing, in both our eyeline, were sausages both in and out of batter. i think about it a lot
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game dev post: Weird West and the Case of the Cursed Strawberry. cw: unsatisfying conclusion

gamedev, weird west

So in this game Weird West, you can cut foliage. Like if you’ve got a machete or something you can cut away grass or bushes or whatever, and some of them drop stuff. I did a post about some of that stuff. A little while after ship, I got a bug assigned to me where sometimes, a player will be in a certain level, cutting up foliage, and suddenly they can’t interact with certain objects. Most objects. Including the travel zones that let you leave the level. So they’re just stuck forever.
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game dev post: cooking and crafting in Weird West

gamedev, weird west

More stuff I did on Weird West: the Cooking/Crafting system.

You can cook raw food over a fire or stove, use forges and tanning racks to craft weapon upgrades and armour, smelt ingots from nuggets or melt ingots back down into nuggets, etc. Arguably what I did for this ended up being a little overengineered versus the game’s requirements.
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dev scoops: Fire Propagation in Weird West

dev scoops, gamedev, imsim, weird west

Here’s something I did on Weird West that I thought was cool: fire propagation across grass and foliage. Lots of stuff is flammable in the game, and there’s a general elemental signal system that handles most of those interactions, but foliage needed some special handling.
read more
anecdote

randomly remembered the time i met palmer luckey when the oculus dk2 was new. i was like, “positional tracking is super cool, but the camera is a bummer. keen for in a few years when you can do it without an external camera”

he goes “no, that will never happen. it’s impossible”
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