[edit: this is just splitting hairs and doesn't really add anything to the discussion at hand. nevermind]

This describes all software projects tbh.

The same thing that happens anywhere else.

This is basically the difference. So, normally, managers are supposed to spot the leaders and explicitly invest authority in them. With self-organizing teams, the teams are given the tools to invest authority in whoever they want.

It’s not a good fit for everybody, but if you have a close-knit and well-functioning software team, it is more effective to let them dictate how they will work together, rather than imposing some other structure on them from a position of ignorance.

I suppose this is the key; certain personality types are attracted to certain fields. My brother is in software, and describes some of the places he's worked. I would hate to work in those sort of environments, but he loves it. This is why software never appealed to me, but he excels. He would hate some of the places I excelled. Ultimately, it comes down to having the right people in place. Any organization, government, or structure is only as good as the people running it.

EU4 is definitely one of the best games around. It's a bit different from Civ, but I think all around it's a richer and more fun experience.

Also, you get to crush the British with the Scots, and it rules.

Civ 4 was the only strategy game like this that I've really played. With the other ones I tried I got confused in the first few minutes and never played them again.

Oddly, the first mod I ever released anywhere was for Civ 4, and if its original download host still existed, I'm almost quite certain that it'd be my most downloaded one as well.

Meanwhile, in the land of forgotten MotS SP levels

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The latter room, while being an unassuming room from "Galaxy of Fear 1", for some reason creeped into a dream of mine (from that exact angle and all) in April-May 2002 or so... in the form of a sample level for "an instant JK/MotS -> JO level converter". Now, years later, I'm not sure if the "JO-ified" version of that room really did look that better even for the time... oh well.

So wow, 16 years have passed and there's still no "instant JK->JO level converter". Boh!

Interesting news recently about the ill-fated Aliens: Colonial Marines and how a single typo in an ini file broke the game AI. link

Seeing a Wookie post here reminded me of A) these pictures from TACC (even though the one in the first pic is supposed to be Chewbubba)


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and B) The level "A Wookiee's Fate", where you get to play as Han Solo with a lightsaber. Wowza! (Actually deactivated MotS Enhanced etc. for thi screenshot to make sure that the lightsaber was enabled by default and not due to a mod conflict or somesuch).

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Also of note, a lot of these levels become unfinishable if you don't have certain items/weapons at certain parts, thus forcing you to start all over (or load a previous savegame if you're into that stuff). No idea why I didn't realize back in the day (or can't remember if I did), but that does explain some of the TODOA/DXN feedback I got...

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Still annoyed at Berserker@Quake2 not being able to scale my monitor's native resolution (2560x1440) properly (no, it doesn't do that on full screen either).

Speaking of Wookies, I was in Hobby Lobby a few weeks back and one of their licensed Star Wars signs said Let the Wookie win with one e. Of course that's good advice. Maybe I'll pick it up one of these days.

Man, to feel old because looking at (a) Half-Life 2 (rehash) mod looks its age.

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Not that I really find it problematic, but still.

Hell, HL2 is (roughly) 14 years old whereas even JK - nay, even Dark Forces - wasn't 14 years old when HL2 came out.

... and [insert your (least?) favorite unfinished DF/JK mod here] still hasn't been released.

I've been playing a lot of Rainbow Six: Siege these past couple months. It's a really great game. I hesitated quite a while before getting it (after it first caught my eye early this year) because I was worried the learning curve would be too steep, and that exhaustive map knowledge would be required to be competent. But neither of those things are really an issue. I play Casual only (not Ranked), and the matchmaking is pretty good. I've never felt like I'm playing against people way out of my league (at least not for more than a match or two in a row), and it's relatively quick to pick a few "operators" that work for you and then just gradually absorb the finer points, map knowledge, etc.

One thing I dig about it, especially after getting back into 'competitive' online shooters a couple years ago with Overwatch, after years of not playing any head-to-head MP games, is that you have a lot of individual power. Team play does matter, but more in a tactical sense, communicating and supporting each other by holding different angles, etc., unlike the somewhat more rigidly defined roles in other hero shooter games, like Overwatch.

At the end of the day, every character in Siege, despite their various gadgets and abilities, has a gun, and that gun is more than capable of killing 2 or more people with a single magazine, if you're smart, lucky, skilled, whatever. Being the last man standing on your team, defending the bomb site against 4 attackers, isn't likely to end in victory, but it's WAY more doable than in Overwatch (or a 1v4 in PUBG for that matter, which I also played a lot of last year). It's a real highlight when you pull something like that off.

I was quite the fan of Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear as a teenager!

**** I forgot to give Tom Clancy the proper credit

So did you

we ded

Actually, Tom Clancy is dead.

phew, saved. thanks niku, i won't tell the police nothin

this guy always kind of frightened me

Yeah, I also used to play a ton of Rogue Spear and Athena Sword. That was back before Ubisoft started loading their games with crippling DRM.

Finally got around to watching this. It blew my mind. I'm so glad that there are still Kubrick movies that I haven't seen. I think I ruined many of them for myself by seeing them too many times when I was too young to appreciate them. Thankfully, not this one.

I can't imagine how people watching this in the 50s must've felt. So far ahead of its time. Damn.

Great to hear that! I originally read about it on a list of 'underrated' Kubrick films, and I thought it was an amazing movie as well.

From one of the same lists, I saw that Barry Lyndon was also recommended. You could try watching that too, although I have to warn you that it's a 3 hour and 20 minute period piece.

Someday. I have to savor these movies. Might not be able to watch it for another decade or so.

While I'm very glad that there's a full playthrough of my mod, I can't help but be amused by the video description:



Technically, you did play through DXN, so...

Barry Lyndon is one of the greatest films ever made.

I agree!

(It took so long to watch that I began to think I was there)

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/membrane-an-alien-first-person-shooter-pc#/

It does pain me to see our own Shred18 not having much success at getting his game funded.

... which, self-servingly, once again reminds me of how (even despite having been released for games that were pre-historic when the mods were released) TODOA and DXN ended up being released exactly at the right point in time. Any earlier and released mods would have been quite worse - any later and they'd have gotten zero attention.

Having told this to Antony and landfish on the chat a couple of (hundred) times, I still think that Mass Effect could have been the sci-fi phenomenon of this century - perhaps as big as Star Wars (or bigger).

ME1 was already great, and ME2 was matter-of-factly even greater (and actually had pretty good DLC on top of it all... and some bad DLC too, but eh)... and then they ruined it all with ME3 and set the grave on fire with ME:A.

Thanks, EA!

Needs marketing TLC imo.

Copy puts narrative forward (weak), then supplies “retro first-person shooter” as the hook. That’s not the cool part to me, the cool part is the cartoonish, kinda 1950s serials inspired aesthetic. He should double down on that aesthetic and present it first in his copy, then instead of talking about power ups to progress around obstacles, explicitly call it Metroidvania (if that’s what dominates gameplay) or just “fast action first person shooter” (if that’s what you spend most of your time doing). And then he should change his plans to make his marketing copy as true as possible.

Basically, I know I’d buy an indie game with the aesthetics of his critters. I wouldn’t buy a “retro first person shooter”. Helpfully, aesthetics of critters happens to be the area where shred has historically demonstrated a lot of skill, so doubling down on that is something he’s probably more prepared for than e.g. narrative or sound design or something.

I can’t guarantee that changing tack this way will be a huge improvement, but it’d be a lot better than the approach he’s taking right now.

(idk if shred still checks this forum, but maybe this will be food for thought if someone else is thinking of doing something similar. It’s fine to have a really cool original design idea but you need to figure out what your customers will find the most cool about it.)

I recently played ME:A. It wasn't nearly as bad as every claimed. The story was kind of dumb, but serviceable. The voice acting and writing easily the weakest link, as it was fair-to-middling. I didn't notice any major animation issues, but it had already been patched several times by the time I got to it. I was kind of bummed there likely won't be a proper sequel or DLC. I really liked the ME universe and characters.

Shreds creatures look like the sort of thing you should blast with a “death ray”, and if that’s not a literal weapon in the game, then there’s something wrong.

IMO.

Blast Johnson vs the Alien Membrane

EA has said rather recently that the universe isn't dead and that there will definitely be more ME games, although exactly what they'll do after everything that happened with ME:A is anyone's guess.

Yeah, I played it twice back-to-back and oddly enough the first time I had a pretty good time, the second time I ran into a ton of progression blocking bugs and problems w/save files. It felt like it could have been a decent 8/10 Mass Effect if they'd had more time to polish it. I really enjoyed the combat and it's a pretty gorgeous-looking game in general.

I think it had the misfortune of coming out when Gamergate was a big thing and Bioware was already under a lot of scrutiny for the ME3 ending + for being a SJW Developer. They were always gonna get judged harshly for ME:A, and they were unlucky enough that it was kind of a clunker.

E - Also, from what I understand, it's probably fair to blame EA brass & management for a lot of the problems with Mass Effect Andromeda, but the story choices people hated in ME3 were 100% the responsibility of the creative leads. They really misjudged what about Mass Effect was connecting with their audience and paid a price for it, but that was genuinely the story they wanted to tell.

I only played it once. I didn't notice anything majorly wrong with it. Minor little clipping issues here and there and some bad stitching every once in a while, but in a game that large, what can you expect?

The story was kind of a dud. It was compelling enough to get me to finish, but pretty standard sci-fi fare. The squad options were either flat or boring copies of established characters from the first games. I really didn't care about any of them and chose them entirely based on their utility at the time - not because of any interest in their commentary or history.

Easily the worst part was the clunky dialogue and bad voice acting. At times it sounded like high school production.

That's a lot of complaining for a game I enjoyed. The combat was good, the exploration wasn't bad, and I enjoyed it overall. Like you said, it was potentially 8/10.


I looked at some upcoming games on the usual sites recently, and nothing really struck me as exciting (other than Red Dead 2 [Edit: AND ALSO CONCRETE GENIE]). Maybe I'm older or games or dumber (or both).

so essite for cement wizard

I bought No Man's Sky last night. One for me, one for my partner.

I was really hyped about that game from the first teaser they released, but as launch became imminent, reviews and reactions seemed to strongly indicate it wasn't quite what I'd hoped for. But with each new patch and each bit of new content, the responses of critics or reviewers I generally agree with has been increasingly favorable, particularly with this week's major release. I figured it was time to check it out, and figured the ideal way would be in co-op, running around together, building bases, checking **** out. That should get me at least some hours of enjoyment.

Any of y'all played it before (or now), and particularly liked or disliked it?

Never played it, saberopus.

However, your namedrop cameo in DXN is now permanently on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2B6InK5PKY#t=3m37s

you can just say korko, we all know you're luvrs