Yeah it’s technically better (crisper, higher res, etc) but the visual language is totally different and IMO worse. That fire just doesn’t look as hot, for example.

Lighting as an art form is highly coupled with the given tech. Something as small as just changing the shadow method can require artists relighting a whole game. My guess is they aren’t doing this or maybe are pushing the stark lighting the same way depth of field, colored lights, lens flares etc got juiced in previous generations.

That’s always wrong. The tech should service the art, not the other way around.

Ubiquitous in the games industry unfortunately, for at least the art side but often code as well.

Last place I was at called them build “masters” for this reason.

Broodwar remaster was also good. If they faithfully uprez the graphics, fix severe bugs, and do nothing else then there’s hope. The 2D remasters have a good track record so far.

That said, had anyone played WC2 recently? It’s pretty rough. It’s fun for nostalgia sake and if you’re into the lore of Warcraft or the history of RTS, but it doesn’t hold up like Broodwar still does.

Sucks, but sounds like they’re taking the right steps. I have a little experience with animation graphs, but enough to know that making major updates to the player graph in a live, multiplayer game is a fucking nightmare to debug. The complexity increase is exponential because new states must play nice with many, many existing states and transitions. It’s also hard to automate testing. Also parts of the animation system run in background threads so you can get race conditions. Players find that a particular input fails to trigger some flag that it should and you are now in uncharted territory, and fixing it potentially involves large logic reworks. Fun times.

Sorry that doesn’t drive MAU, DAU, or ARPPU. Also we want users on our walled garden data harvesting service that’s just “Steam but Worse”, so I’m afraid you need to close your studio. What’s that? Sorry you’re breaking up, must be something wrong with the phone here in the Swiss Alps. Ok ta ta.

Check your regional Craigslist, mine’s full of them. This is also why the fair exists (besides funnel cake).

The article doesn’t really do Tim justice. He’s a bodger who is basically a genius for what I can only describe as Goblin technology. His projects are as much about fun and experimenting as having a result. In the first windmill video he acknowledged that he could just buy a small electric windmill, but that’s not the point.

I mean, this is the dude who made a narrow gauge railroad and a compressed air locomotive to transport wood to his terrifying biochar chopper and crucible.

Years ago I was on a flight where you couldn’t turn this screen off. You could turn off the programming, but the screen still glowed. I discovered that if you take an advertisement from the back pocket and fold it, it can be inserted perfectly into the cracks around the screen and block it completely. Use the ads to block the ads.

Same thing happened with “VitaminWater”, a product in the category of “enhanced water” (a term reminiscent of “enhanced interrogation technique”). Coca-Cola argued that, despite the name, no reasonable person would believe it’s actually healthy. They settled.

In cyan’s defense, every other point and click mystery/adventure game at the time was so much worse about this shit. Spacequest had stuff like if you forgot to do something in the first room you fail in the last room and can’t fix it. Even Nancy Drew, which was made for kids, had some bullshit (but at least a built-in hint system). Game design had come a long way. The new monkey island games are great.

You might be remembering Sonny Landham, who was a costar of Ventura in Predator, hosted many shit takes, and also tried to break into politics.