Defining Awesome

Another video log of the stuff I’m working on right now in link-dead. HDR effects, parallax scrolling, ambient lighting, dynamic lighting all is here, check it out.

Remarks:
– by ambient light rays I meant the static ones that look sort of like sunlight coming through the clouds.
– the second light I added was static that’s why it messed up the scene a bit when I moved it. I use static lights to optimize the rendering.
– the actual map was drawn by Sigvatr, the background is some random illustration

How do you create a classic? That means a game that will stand the test of time and will be remembered for decades to come. Classics are very easy to find. Whenever I talk to people that were gamers in the 80’s and 90’s they bring up the same games: Wolf3D or Doom, Another World, Sensible World of Soccer, River Raid, Civilization, Contra. ANYONE that has been passionate about games back then knows these games. It’s like asking old people about the Beatles. Those are classics.
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You might know this or not but all my Soldat and other game related stuff are now hosted on one server. This post is to inform you that we’re going a big step forward now. You might have noticed that all the Soldat142.zip mirror files are gone and I’m hosting it only from one location. This is a dedicated server machine hosted and built in Chicago personally by Mr. FliesLikeABrick. Everything is hosted in one location, I know it was a pain to maintain everything at couple locations (like lobby server, mirrors, BattlEye server, SVN reps, forums, site etc.), so a brick has been lifted off of FliesLikeABricks shoulders. Finally I can afford to own a machine like that thanks to all people that are registering, so this is because of you (and keep it coming cause I have to pay the rent;). I haven’t bought myself a new car from the registration money yet so you can see that I’m investing the money in my games. We are preparing for the future. We need a server like this to handle all future requirements not only for Soldat, link-dead but for everything that might come next. FliesLikeABrick assures me that the server will take the load, so I trust him and I’m preparing a new game that will beat everything else in popularity and really stress test the server.
You can read more specific details on the server and hosting adventures on FliesLikeABrick blog.

This is a presentation of a new technology and feature in my upcoming game link-dead. I decided to make a video log for a change. Enjoy.

References:
Dynamic 2D soft shadows
Gish – uses a dynamic lighting model, that’s the only 2D game I can recall now.

I am very much against any kind of rational thinking, it gets through my posts and I need to clarify things (this is from a person which does computer programming all his life – how reasonable!). Most people think that the brain is a rational or logical instrument and that the way they think is because that is how it works and that is the proper way of thinking. So they live with the belief that the world can be understood by using ratios and by using logic. Unfortunately this is a destructive way of thinking and unfortunately probably 99,9% of people in the world operate like this. It is a primitive mammalian brain tool. This is ONLY a way of thinking, one of many tools inside your brain.
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I’ve had the character dude working for some time now and recently I made the ragdoll physics work inside the game so I decided to show this off to you. I made a video of the actual player sprite in link-dead. Below is a more detailed explanation of what you see.
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Sigvatr has posted a lot of info on link-dead on his website. You can see actual game sprites there, more technical details on the game and most importantly gibbage concept art! Be sure to check it out here – link-dead graphics.

The other day I was talking with Sigvatr (link-dead’s graphic artist) and we came up with a brilliant idea. While we were discussing gaming ideas, mainly cooperative multiplayer games, we both agreed that this area of gameplay is very underrated. It also needs more intensity to become really fun. I’m fascinated by the fear of dying you get in games and I’m always seeking for solutions how to magnify this aspect of gameplay. So we came up with this idea.
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You all probably know I’m a major Predator fan/lover. So do you think I anticipated the Alien versus Predator movie? Hell no! I knew it would be crap all along. I recently watched it and decided to write about how you should not make movies. If I’m really lucky maybe a Hollywood producer will read this, if not maybe you’re a future film maker so read on. This post is in the Arnold classics category because I want to show you how much Arnold movies are great in contrast. You may forget how actually awesome they are until you watch some shit movie like AvP.
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I got some new pictures to show off, all made by Luc the concept artist. These are mainly character concepts, how the different class looks and armors will look like. I’m working also with a graphic artist called Sigvatr lately which has a passion for Doom as you can see on his homepage. We’ve been working pretty intensely on the actual game sprites and characters. So we’ll bring Luc’s concepts into flesh along with a lot of our own ideas. I’ll show that in a while, first the concepts:

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