[BloodEagle]

@bloodeagle

shadowrun you mean this:


I thought it was awful

@mars if you liked half life you should track down half life opposing force

Pre-2000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun_%28SNES%29

[Kolgena]

Did no one play UT99?

And where are Starcraft and Diablo?

A personal childhood gem for me was Buried in Time. That game was frustrating but epic for a 10 year old resolute to beat the thing without walkthroughs.

[T-LoW]

1. Diablo II
2. Knights of the old Republic
3. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
4. Freespace 2 SCP
.
.
.
The list goes on and on (mostly n64 and SNES games and all time classics like Counterstrike, Starcraft, Warcraft 3 and all these things you played at your friends local garage-LAN )

[Unknown Target]

I hated Half Life 2.

Also, Voxels are being used heavily in the Miner Wars game;
http://www.minerwars.com/

[Kolgena]

It's also used in Crysis for its terrain. Yeah, that surprised me too.

But yeah, Batutta's right. Voxels are largely useless nowadays. I figure Miner Wars only uses it as a good way to do cheaper (?) procedural destruction.

[Hades]

I hated Half Life 2.

Awesome. I thought I was the only one who wasn't a fan of Half Life 2.

[Unknown Target]

But yeah, Batutta's right. Voxels are largely useless nowadays. I figure Miner Wars only uses it as a good way to do cheaper (?) procedural destruction.

They're not useless at all. They're still used in a few 3D apps and are quite powerful, and they're used all over in medical imaging stuff. Battutta said (someone incorrectly), that they've been discarded - not that they're useless.

You should go and actually look at Miner Wars. It's not just "cheaper", it's a completely different way of rendering 3D objects. Polygons simply can not do what Voxels do, at least, they can't do it without being EXTREMELY inefficient.

Voxels are the best way of showing non-uniform volumes. Polygons are a bunch of faces drawn between vertex data points - you could define an entire 3D model in a text based table, for instance (you used to be able to open most .OBJ files with Notepad, I'm not sure if you still can - I think there was a text export function way back when).
Now, when it comes to creating a 3D object with vertices and polygons, you have to worry about a lot of things - connecting the polies so that there's no gaps, making sure that what's called the "poly flow" is well laid out and organized, etc - all of this helps to reduce rendering errors when creating polygon-based images. It does, however, require a lot of forethought and planning when creating a model. This means live, fully functional terrain deformation is essentially impossible, as you would have to move around these polygons quite a lot, and you would end up with several errors - for instance, hyper-sharp points, smoothing errors (caused by small radius light sources being applied to very large polygons), flipped faces, etc), when it comes to extreme deformation.

Voxels, however, are arranged much like a 3D grid - if you typed it all out in a text file, it would be in a table with each point's X, Y, and Z coordinates.**
Each of these little "voxels" are essentially representing a single "unit" of space (don't think of them like polygons and vertices, they are a TOTALLY DIFFERENT 3D REPRESENTATIONAL/DATA METHODS). What this means is that a "voxel" object has absolutely no issue with terrain deformation, because if, say, I blow a hole in an asteroid, the game simply creates new "dots" and destroys the old ones - a chunk of the object is simply blown away and new data is made where it used to be.**

** Now, I'm not TOTALLY SURE that this is the 100% PROPER definition. The results, however, speak for themselves - Voxels are able to produce shapes and mesh detail that is difficult, if not impossible, with polygonal based formats.****


****That's not to say voxels don't have drawbacks that polygons don't have - they're two equally well-off 3D representational/data methods, for their own strengths/weaknesses. But that's not the point of this argument.

[Unknown Target]

I hated Half Life 2.

Awesome. I thought I was the only one who wasn't a fan of Half Life 2.

Why's that?

[Hades]

I think it was partially the story-telling method, where you had to go out of your way to find critical plot information on why you are fighting in the first place by looking at the wall. Also, there was the lack of any real alien soldiers, all you ever fought were faceless humans, some somewhat genetically modified, sure, but still faceless human. The combine AI was also terrible, as were the accuracy on the weapons (the ****in' shotgun and CROWBAR were better at range than a sub machine gun and assault rifle thing).

There was also a real lack of the old aliens from Half Life 1, the only one we ever saw was the Vortigaunt.

I think there were some other things but I just woke u so it's hard to think atm.

[General Battuta]

Everything Hades says is basically horribly true, the Combine AI in particular was such a letdown

Still great games though, especially Episode 2 - super atmospheric and i loooooooooooove the art design to death

[redsniper]

Yeah, what Hades said pretty much. I didn't mind the way the story was presented that much and liked it a lot better the second time around. Everything else I agree with though. The enemies were boring, it was all just dumber versions of HL1's marines and headcrab/zombie variants, which was a massive step down after stuff like bullsquids and tentacles and the frakking female assassins. The weapons were lame, that MP7 was just atrocious after how awesome the MP5 was in HL1, and the fact you couldn't carry as much ammo rubbed me the wrong way.

That said, the episodes have somewhat redeemed it, though I still like HL1 best. The striders and physics puzzles were cool too and HL2 had pretty winsome atmosphere.

[Hades]

Yeah, I'll agree, the atmosphere and art design was pretty good.

[General Battuta]

Oh and the infinite ammo box RPG things, hrrrmph

Don't get me wrong Valve is great at gameplay design, absolutely smashing, but I dunno why they thought they needed to give all their weapons the approximate accuracy of a greased pig - I suspect to make the gravity gun more of a star given all the effort they put into it.

Plus you can really see how some parts of the plot were victimized by cuts; we got to trudge through Water Hazard for aaaaaaages but the entire uprising the plot's been building up to happens while you're trapped in a very slow teleporter. 

The Combine Soldiers were super cool in terms of their art and audio design, though, they sounded like BAMFs and the Overwatch voice was sweet. They just behaved so duuumb.

[Unknown Target]

I agree with pretty much everything negative about HL2, but I'd like to put special emphasis on their awful, awful storytelling. You were supposed out about the entire war that led to Earth surrendering to the enemy (pretty much everything that happened prior to Half Life 2) from a newspaper clipping in the basement of a lighthouse in a level where you've stopped after driving a buggy at 60 mph and before you see a bunch of rockets littered around that you need to stock up on because there's an enemy helicopter trying to kill you. Yea, and that newspaper clipping is a WALL TEXTURE - which means if you, like me, were running a less than stellar machine, couldn't even read it because your texture detail was too low!

[Hades]

Yeah, that definitely bugged me. I played through the whole game on my first try not knowing much about why I was fighting the combine, and I too had to play on low (I didn't even know at the time that the story was on the walls, either)

[Mongoose]

Yeah, what Hades said pretty much. I didn't mind the way the story was presented that much and liked it a lot better the second time around. Everything else I agree with though. The enemies were boring, it was all just dumber versions of HL1's marines and headcrab/zombie variants, which was a massive step down after stuff like bullsquids and tentacles and the frakking female assassins. The weapons were lame, that MP7 was just atrocious after how awesome the MP5 was in HL1, and the fact you couldn't carry as much ammo rubbed me the wrong way.

I'll give you those *****ninja assassins, but are you talking about the bullsquids and tentacles that you could kill with all of three bullets, or the MP5 that I could shoot thirty rounds into a soldier's face and not kill him with?  Yeah, I'm not really seeing the pluses.

Don't get me wrong Valve is great at gameplay design, absolutely smashing, but I dunno why they thought they needed to give all their weapons the approximate accuracy of a greased pig - I suspect to make the gravity gun more of a star given all the effort they put into it.

Plus you can really see how some parts of the plot were victimized by cuts; we got to trudge through Water Hazard for aaaaaaages but the entire uprising the plot's been building up to happens while you're trapped in a very slow teleporter. 

The Combine Soldiers were super cool in terms of their art and audio design, though, they sounded like BAMFs and the Overwatch voice was sweet. They just behaved so duuumb.

I found the Combine pulse rifle to be fairly accurate at range myself, especially if you were going more single-shot with it; in any case, the Magnum was what you wanted to be using for longer-range headshots anyway.  I also don't look at the uprising as it was portrayed as being any sort of "cut victim;" from the beginning, the game was much more about your actions on a personal level than anything else, and I don't think being part of a full-scale invasion from the beginning would have worked as well as trying to fight your way to the Citadel specifically to rescue Eli.  (Besides, you wind up doing some heavy-duty fighting in the end anyway.)  I will give you the Combine soldiers' AI being lame, but I loved the hell out of pretty much everything else in the game.  It's easily one of the most intricately-crafted gaming experiences I've ever played through.

(Also, for anyone trying to claim that the enemies were unimpressive: Fast/Poison Zombies.  *shudder*)

Edit:

I agree with pretty much everything negative about HL2, but I'd like to put special emphasis on their awful, awful storytelling. You were supposed out about the entire war that led to Earth surrendering to the enemy (pretty much everything that happened prior to Half Life 2) from a newspaper clipping in the basement of a lighthouse in a level where you've stopped after driving a buggy at 60 mph and before you see a bunch of rockets littered around that you need to stock up on because there's an enemy helicopter trying to kill you. Yea, and that newspaper clipping is a WALL TEXTURE - which means if you, like me, were running a less than stellar machine, couldn't even read it because your texture detail was too low!

Waitwaitwait...you're saying this when the first game didn't even have a plot in the first place?  Like Battuta said, you find out more about the original Half-Life in the sequel than you did in that game proper.  I thought a lot of the beauty of HL2 came from dropping you in the middle of this dystopia without knowing what was going on, and then using the environment itself (as well as character comments) to fill in quite a bit of the backstory for you.  And as far as that newspaper clipping goes, did you perhaps fail to notice the same one earlier at Black Mesa East in Eli's lab, one which Eli specifically comments on when you look at it?

[Unknown Target]

Waitwaitwait...you're saying this when the first game didn't even have a plot in the first place?  Like Battuta said, you find out more about the original Half-Life in the sequel than you did in that game proper.  I thought a lot of the beauty of HL2 came from dropping you in the middle of this dystopia without knowing what was going on, and then using the environment itself (as well as character comments) to fill in quite a bit of the backstory for you.  And as far as that newspaper clipping goes, did you perhaps fail to notice the same one earlier at Black Mesa East in Eli's lab, one which Eli specifically comments on when you look at it?
[/quote]

What does the first game have to do with anything? I was critiquing the SECOND game.

[Hades]

He can't refute the criticism of the second game so he has to resort to trying to get us with the first game

[General Battuta]

Um can we not turn this thread into personal attacks because we can't agree which of two very excellent video games is slightly better

thanks

[T-LoW]

System Shock 2