i never know what FGR is talking about


Also, I just finished* XWA. It was pretty fun (except for the terrible voice acting). Some missions were kinda glitchy and I had to do them two or three times because a ship would fail to spawn or couldn't hyper away etc.


*I didnt actually finish it because the last mission is hot garbage but I finished the rest of them

Also, I really shouldn't have been told 'bout this new texture enhancement method

http://offtopicproductions.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&p=116064&sid=ec00af2c3e20d8e5506a17901a10dbd1#p116064

What did you use for a controller? I remember giving it a go several years back with my HOTAS and just not getting into it. It's been on the list of games to get back to.

I have an old Mat Catz (lol!) Xbox USB controller that worked on my PC. I had to disable X axis on the right stick because it would constantly rotate the spaceship, but other than that it worked great.

OK, there have been too many JC Denton avatars on Youtube to ignore: Deus Ex is officially a meme.

(Apparently some guy told them to do this because Deus Ex predicted 9/11 and that using the avatar would make you successful. Ugh)

Do you have a single fact to back that up?

I should really play Deus Ex sometime :-)

Best movie scene ever

Capcom hit it out of the park so well with the Resident Evil 2 remake that they're planning on expanding into the PC market.

They learned that making extremely polished, high-quality remakes of old games on the right platform will sell like hotcakes to self-described "hardcore gamers".

Hell, I picked up and played the first Resident Evil remake since that was very good, the Resident Evil 2 remake though is considered by some to legitimately be the best remake ever made.

Keep it up, Capcom.

Finally went back and spent a few days finishing up Alan Wake (haven't played since probably November). Great game but ending was kind of lame considering the game never got a true follow up. My play through the few bonus episodes / American Nightmare before going back to Starcraft.

Hey speakin of which, this is probably happening right now. 50% MoM revenue drop. Analysts are blaming it on everything from a holiday dropoff to a pending new season, but everybody else knows the truth. Kids don't think playing Fortnite is cool anymore. Apex Legends caught on fire. Game's probably settling in to its long tail soon.

Edit:

Some obvious consequences.

Epic could hurt itself in its confusion, like I said. There's really no bottom to how much money you can throw at a game trying to make it relevant again. Once people move on from live services they ain't coming back, though.

Big consequence I can see is that Epic's store doesn't have a main driver anymore. Might mean the store is DoA. Throwing Tencent's money around to buy up smallish exclusives is only pissing people off, you really need some lightning in a bottle exclusive and for the exclusivity to be unimpeachable. Fortnite is the right scale but probably the wrong kind of game, and it also fizzled too fast. They'd really need a Half-Life for which they can make a Half-Life 2, and there hasn't been something like that since.... well, Half-Life 2.

I guess it does make sense, battle royale games grow stale in short order so why not jump ship for the latest? It happened to PUBG.

I knew something was up in the past few weeks when, on the occasion I'd check reddit, there were no Fortnite posts but Apex Legends was everywhere. Hmm, another game I have zero interest in playing..

Didn't Epic use their Fortnite success to try and make their launcher a competitor to Steam, too?

I remember reading some people complaining about it, that Epic's contracts were pretty crappy relative even to Valve or something. In the digital delivery market, outside of a few exclusives people basically do not use any platform but Steam. Why, when Steam clearly has the most competent platform?

In any case if we compare value to uniqueness, digital delivery platforms are not unique and Steam provides the best value, so..

Also, interesting that the video game trend of ~2016 on is to strike the mother lode with a successful pogs title, rake in a billion or two then lose your entire player base rapidly when your paper-thin gameplay bores people and fails to attract streamer attention.

yup I just rapid fire scrolled down r/gaming. Fortnite? Zilch. One Overwatch meme, which was titled "who even plays overwatch anymore".

ya that's what I said.

I don't know about Epic's exclusive contracts, but their normal take is much lower than Steam's. Epic's offering a lot more value as far as the game publishers are concerned. But they're offering way, way, waaaaay less value as far as game customers are concerned, and that's ultimately where the money is. The value isn't just because Steam has more features, or even the network effect of having lots of games on there. It's also because of stuff like Steam sales, which drive Valve's revenue through the roof by firehosing cheap content at gamers (at the expense of game studios).

yup, I'm not alone calling for a pending AAA publisher bubble burst. What they've been doing is clearly unsustainable.

There are more Overwatch cosplay posts than Overwatch posts.

That says everything you need to know about Overwatch and Blizzard, tbh. I can't think of another company which encourages it's female fans to dress up and post pictures of themselves harder.

Also my sister won the Blizzcon costume contest one year, true facts, no I will not tell anyone which year and which costume because that's weird.



Sales contribute, yeah, I'd also wager that Steam has an easy time retaining customers due to being a front runner. Most people who play PC games have a Steam account, and most have invested significant money into it. They're not likely to jump ship and start browsing the store of other platforms when Steam has more content than people have time.



Yeah, no ****ing kidding:

https://www.barrons.com/articles/take-two-stock-downgrade-red-dead-redemption-2-51549984536

Read Dead Redemption 2 "underperformed":



Uhhhhh, are we at the point where production costs are so exorbitant that smash hits are now "underperformers"? Really? No wonder loot boxes are so common, they're literally the only way the business model is sustainable.

Yeah, buzz is RDR2 cost the better part of a billion dollars to make, all-in. Line and marketing only. Not including the ponderous girth of staff positions clogging up every large company. After discounting, RDR2 has probably just broken even.

Games don’t have a price/saturation problem. Games have a budget problem. They are way way way out of control. Game studios are eating themselves to death... again, not even including the bloated staff organizations or the extravagant manager pay.

also, til Reid’s sister is hot. Or dresses up as a ...dog thing. I don’t play Blizzard games.

That's it - killing myself

Anyway, I do like the results of this texture resizer/enhancement tool, even if I'm still not going to pay 99 bux for it in order to start resizing all the textures from old JK & MotS custom SP levels.

I've never played Deus Ex. Is it good? (Trick question, you already think so, I'm just curious as to what you'll say as a justification)

ESRGANs on YouTube. Gotta train it tho

Well, I liked it

Yeah, these things definitely have a learning curve and won't just bring proper instant results with a few clicks.

I paid about 2000 eurodollars for that mistake (damn UE4!)

Anyway, here's TODOA TC MP with Georgian brandy

[Unable to find specified attachment]

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/99021-v-0-95-doom-neural-upscale-2x/

There’s a doom model, would probably work for jk too

Seems pretty apt, yeah, especially considering how JK has similar textures to these:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/1950462

Then again, with JK you can only get instant hi-res textures for those that were 256x256 (or 128x256 / 256x128) to begin with, the rest would require a lot of messing with texture coordinates and the like.

Why?



Brandy and dictators, Georgia's best exports.

Hmm...

Never really thought about why I like things, tbh. This could take a while.



Yeah, I was a bit confused why there was only one Stalin-related souvenir in Tbilisi.

[Unable to find specified attachment]

Apparently he's far more popular in Gori, his hometown, instead. Hmm.

Nikumubeki, is there a high resolution texture patch for JK? Texture coordinates would need to be modified but that isn’t as much an obstacle as the 256x256 limit.

There are two (JKE and JKR, both on Massassi/JKHub), but in case of the textures that originally weren't 256x256 in size (so all the 32x32 switches and general 64x64 textures etc.) they've just gone with the slight retouches since a 64x64 texture can't be instantly replaced with a 256x256 (or a 1024x1024) one.

I guess in theory you could get super-high-res versions for the 64x64 textures as well, but then you'd also get 100 MB size textures and whatnot.

Sorry no, I'm not sure I understand. I'm not asking for an existing high-res texture pack, I mean a patch that lets jk.exe load textures bigger than 256x256. Is that what you're describing too?

It wouldn't take me long to write a program that can scale up the UVs in a JKL. The issue is, in order for this to be worth doing, JK.exe needs to be able to load and display a 1024x1024 texture. If someone's patched JK.exe to load 1024x1024 textures, I could at least write the program to automatically scale JKL UVs. Then someone could experiment with ESRGAN or some other tool to scale up JK's level textures, without even really having to know much about editing JK.

Dangit, Jon, you completely threw me off the loop there, since the 256x256 limit was already broken/patched in 2006 so I didn't get that you were asking about that >_>

Zeq's patch (JKUP January 2008 being the latest version) removes the limit, but more importantly - so does Xzero's JK2013 Patch (compiled and released by FGR). [/plug]

Oh cool.

Well, maybe I'll do that then. Although I think the ideal solution would be an executable texture override patch, since unless the jk devs were on crack patching the levels will probably break the multiplayer checksum.

seems ok

Oh yeah, that looks pretty nice (and also reminds me that of all games, Dark Forces would benefit from the usage of ESRGAN/Topaz).

Random observation: In early 2010, you could pretty much fill a JK mod full of 1024x1024 textures and it wouldn't actually affect the (SP) framerate that much (hence all the fancy textures, but not texturing, in TODOA).

These days with dgvoodoo and the like required to even get JK working, the abundant hi-res textures actually crash JK pretty much all the time (which is why I had to resize all textures in TODOA 2: Enhanced Edition down to 256x256 or lower because the original version would crash immediately at the beginning of the gameplay level).

pretty much 'just click'. By that I mean, a bunch of cryptic terminal commands and some gorc utilities to extract and convert files.

If the original jk crashes with high res textures then I don't really see continuing past the initial experiment stage.

This is just ESRGAN running with some manga model I found. It's unfortunate if the major problem with making a complete high res texture pack for JK isn't even making the textures, but the fact that jk.exe is useless trash. (frankly, though, it's not unexpected).

Pretty much.

The Nar Shaddaa graffiti one looks pretty amazing as if the painted parts had been "actually" painted on the wall.

I might get around to checking how ESRGAN works with Dark Forces' textures.

Send some to me, I've already done the bull****.

It takes me roughly a millisecond to generate a texture.