Urgh, it's amazing just how busy
a bunch of OAPs on their day release can keep you. I swear if
the dance instructor I'm working for atm pushes them any
harder she'll kill them all. Every five minutes it's "I feel a
tad feint, can I sit out a minute?" or "Can you ask her to
turn the music down, I can't hear her over that blasted
racket." Like sommit out of Dad's Army.
Anyway, my first order of business today is repaying a
favour. Having abused her personal message board by using it's
as a firm ground on which to have a spacky with my ex-Clan
Leader Teardrop I thought it
only fair to mention fellow xx fragger
^Qbabe^`s
homepage. Slowly finding her feet in the world of
Half Life and
TFC mapping she's just released
her first effort for public consumption, so wander by and give
the girl some support.
As with my last update, I thought I'd spend a little time
thanking everyone who dropped a line to say welcome back. A
lot of people mailed concerning my game related rant
yesterday, suggesting Valve's
Team Fortress 2 would be closer to what I appear to be
searching for. Abs of
QuakeNation fame sums it up nicely.
TF2. Saw it at ECTS thanks to cro and
bloody hell if it isn't perfect :) From what they said the
commander will basically feel like he's playing an RTS but the
ickle men and stuff will be real humans. That plus included
voice comms and mist and many many other cool features (read
my review on www.actionnation.com if u like) means this is a
game I cant wait for.
Only flaw I can see is rather than
having your man's AI making it a pain to do sommin you'll have
some hot shot thinking he can take on the world not doing as
you ask :) still at least you know they'd attack if engaged
properly.
Now having been a long time fan of
Team Fortress and to some
extent Team Fortress Classic
I'd heartily agree, TF 2 is
exactly what I'm looking for, only there's one problem. It's
programmers. Since the release of Half
Life Valve have done
nothing but disappoint me. Not just the p*ss poor netcode and
it's spiking and warping and general slugishness, but also
from the server`s point of view, watching as the
BarrysWorld servers fold time
and time again no matter what Ted
or DBs did to their config. And
the 70Mb server side patches were a joke in themselves. The
fact they could release a product that needed 70Mb`s worth of
work done to it... Now thse are the ppl that took
Team Fortress from the public
domain, promising to jazz it up and give us more features and
graphical Oooos and
Ahhhhhhs than we could wish for, but
from their previous attempts it's so hard not to be cynical
about it. So having replied to Abs
explaining how let down I felt I was surprised to get this
back...
Didnt get to see it as
such (netcode) but I chatted with some of the coders and the
things they mentioned where that a) the guy doing it wasn't
just doing netcode as another thing on the pile like with HL
b) They were using some NASA technology for prediction c) data
sent had been lowered immensely so a shotgun went from
100bytes a shot to 3 and they generally seemed pretty
committed to the whole thing.
I know how u mean I swore
I'd never pay for another valve game after buying HL purely
for TF before its announcement. I went in to chat to them
ready to just have a go but they really seemed almost
apologetic about the netcode and extremely enthusiastic about
how much effort they are making to write the wrong. You prolly
had to chat to them to see what I mean but there are few
companies who can take "sorry but tbh the netcode in HL was
shite" and simply say were really sorry it was a poor job as
opposed to pulling marketing bollocks as certain people do.
Anyway we'll get to see
when they release all these spiffy new changes for HL ...
Opened my mind a little that... Roll on the
next Half Life patch I guess...
While I'm on the subject of code changes and
game companies listening to their fan base,
Redwood
mailed me this morning after returning from play testing again
at the id offices, and it would
appear a lot of the changes to Q3a
people such as
Blue and
sCary
and ourselves had put forward have been listened to and taken
onboard. The rail trail for instance is now much narrower and
no longer looks like a badly drawn lens flare.
J So hopefully I'm be able to
worm some more information out of him later, so expect a
further update tonight when I get back from work. Admittedly
it was only when Rauper asked
me for a Quake3Test duel the
other day that almost went so horribly wrong for me, (and
required me to a) sober up rather
quickly, and b) relearn the game in
the remaining two minutes of the match to catch up and
eventually win...) that I realized how much I'd missed it.
From a critics view point, (not that I'm biased at all, honest
J) I`ve gotta say the netcode in
the test, (snaps 30, cl_maxpackets 30 for ISDN and higher btw)
was a breath of fresh air after the laggy and sometimes
extremely poor Utdemo which
we've all been forced to play on less local servers. (Madafish,
Madafish beat us to serving for
U
