lucid's Forum Posts

  • doesn't work for me rojo. it doesn't apply the filter in editor or at runtime, even if I put actions to set activated and set color again at runtime

  • thank you linkman, I wanted to redo the ui on my editor, because creating a dynamic ui with 's' was getting very ugly eventwise. I decided to try this, and all the group and name options made it extremely simple to use it for on the fly purposes like popup windows or controls that appear only in certain circumstances, or branch off of eachother. exactly what I needed, easier than I had hoped it'd be. thanks again

  • I take it you are over ponies now, then?

    <img src="http://th05.deviantart.net/fs70/300W/i/2011/155/4/4/better_living_1_by_penstrokepony-d3i1n48.jpg">

  • I don't think I'm breaking any new ground here, but damn, what a great game, huh?

    story, gameplay, humor, atmosphere, GLaDOS!!! it's just so damn original and awesome.

    just finished single player. great ending. haven't played multiplayer yet, but will soon.

    also, i think where the idea came from is a great indie success story:

    Portal is Valve's spiritual successor to the freeware game Narbacular Drop, the 2005 independent game released by students of the DigiPen Institute of Technology; the original Narbacular Drop team is now employed at Valve. Valve had become interested in Narbacular Drop after seeing the game at DigiPen's annual career fair; Robin Walker, one of Valve's developers, saw the game at the fair, and later contacted the team, providing them with advice and offering them to show their game at Valve's offices. After their presentation, Valve's president Gabe Newell quickly offered the entire team jobs at Valve to develop the game further. Newell later commented that he was impressed with the Digipen team as "they had actually carried the concept through", already having included the interaction between portals and physics, completing most of the work that Valve would have had to commit on their own.

    The gel mechanic comes from Tag Team's Tag: The Power of Paint, a DigiPen student-developed game that won the 2009 Independent Games Festival Student Competition prize. Valve's vice president of marketing, Doug Lombardi, said that upon viewing the student game "the decision to combine their tech with Portal 2 came naturally".Wolpaw recalled that they had already considered the nature of surfaces in Portal in a binary fashion, whether or not it would allow for a portal to be created on it, and the ability to modify surface properties in the manner that Tag did was an obvious extension of that. Tag Team was subsequently hired by Valve, though initially their work was to "develop Tag in an interesting way" according to Wolpaw, only some time later being brought into the Portal 2 team.

    the wikipedia articles for both games are great reads if you're really into portal.

    oh yeah, and last thing if you're going to discuss plot or new game mechanics please do it like this:

    > do it like this[/color]/code:1f40lshk]
, so it'll look like this:

    do it like this

    and you can highlight the text if you want to read it

  • One of the most absurd things is paying for DLC which is already on the disc. Capcom has no shame...

    yeah, capcom is one of the main companies I was thinking of

    I am forced to add one fact about XBL, though. It is set up and maintained better than PSN or the Wii's online.

    yeah, although my friend who is a recent convert to ps3 after his latest bricked 360 says the actual smoothness of online play doesn't seem to be much better or worse on either system. but the 360 dashboard looks about 800 times better, and has a real ui instead of just a line of stuff. I chalk that up to microsofts unrivaled experience creating user interfaces and reliable networks. I mean...they make windows, the most ubiquitous piece of software period, and an OS no less. sony and wii have alot of catching up to do understanding networks and UI. but once again, this is experience that makes that possible, not so much charging people for XBL

    also...

  • well, obviously there's no way to resolve this, but I stand firm despite your additional arguments in my personal belief that paying for xboxlive is a horrible direction for things to be headed, and that they are providing no service that shouldn't be free (including updating, maintaining, and upgrading their own network, why wouldn't they?). also, valve tactics compared to ms is laughable, tf2 came out in what year? and nonstop its been constantly getting new maps, modes, weapons, rebalancing, and of course bug fixes, etc, with no extra charge. the problem isn't companies trying to make money. there's just a certain line I think ms crossed when they started charging for online play, and when they started pressuring each developer about everything they try to release. thanks for the comic strip btw, the girl is cute

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  • For nested loops just break up the top level loop across multiple ticks. That still cuts up the entire job in to smaller pieces.

    oh yeah, that's way easier than my suggestion, but I already made it, so here ya go:

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/splitsplits.cap

    splits em up into chunks of 10,000 regardless of nested loop position

  • Lets compare the Xbox Live services with Steams services:

    You can't buy music with Steam, you can with Xbox Live.

    You can't watch tv and rent movies on Steam, you can with Xbox Live.

    You can't rate your games and content with Steam, you can with Xbox Live.

    You can't video chat on Steam, you can with Xbox Live.

    xbl has to do those things because it's a console, valve knows I can buy music, etc, elsewhere, as well as video chat. it's a pc, I don't want steam to do all that crap. besides I thought all those features were free, and it was just the online gameplay that you're actually paying for? also one or two pc games here and there charging for a separate dlc or user account is one thing, one companies actions. if microsoft was able to stop each new pc game from releasing something without first haggling about the details is a whole 'nother thing. epic did a complete 180 after talking to ms, from (approx quote) "if [microsoft] would stop being so greedy they could get what they want anyway." to "we want what microsoft wants, to make as much money as possible". it's almost comical, like they take them to a brainwashing chamber.

    my hate for the console isn't just rampant fanboyism. this whole dlc thing is getting worse and worse, and in my opinion microsoft has caused alot of this, and it affects every platform now. they turned a few companies to the dark side, and now it's a fad.

    The problem with this charging for online service is that I don't want it to catch on. PS Plus is the beginning of the end unless one of the other new consoles saves the world. it isn't some tradeoff like everyone says, you're not paying for better service. the fact that they tried to pull this crap on windows proves it has nothing to do with necessity. xboxlive does nothing that hasn't been done multiple times for free.

    you pay your isp for bandwidth, you pay microsoft a toll to be allowed to play your games online.

  • The only other solution is to break up the work over multiple ticks. For example, instead of doing a million loop iterations which takes ten seconds and goes in to "not responding" mode, break it up in to 10,000 iterations per tick over 100 ticks. Not only does this keep the app responding during the processing, but it also gives you the opportunity to update the screen with the progress. That's probably your best bet for the time being.

    here's a sample implementation:

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/splitting.cap

    all the cap does is move the red box around the screen 1 billion times.

    press space to do it all at once. click no when it gives you the 1000000 loop iteration warning, so you have a chance to try to interact with the window, and drag the drag-n-drop blue box.

    right click to see it run 10,000 at a time, you can interact with the window and the blue box as expected

  • only one person can play at a time, why would you need multiple accounts? I play portal 2. turn off steam, and my kids can play on their computer afterward with separate save files if need be. I can log onto battleforge with any number of battleforge accounts on pc. anyone at my house can log onto their account and play mortal kombat on the ps3. I must be missing the benefit here.

    simply saying XBL is more expensive isn't entirely accurate.

    I disagree. XBL being more expensive is entirely accurate.

    pc - free online play

    mac - free online play

    gameboy ds - free online play

    psp - free online play

    android - free online play

    mac - free online play

    iphone - free online play

    ps2 - free online play

    wii - free online play

    ps3 - free online play

    dreamcast - free online play

    starting to see a pattern here? if everything else that provides the same service is free, if ms is charging one cent it's more expensive. they are charging you because they can. it's a complete scam

    any game that forces you to buy the game more than once for you to play with more than one user account is similarly scammy. On my ps3, not only can other people on different accounts on my ps3 play my games, I'm allowed to share all my games and DLC that I pay for off of psn with 3 other people. my friend and brother have both downloaded probably a few hundred bucks of free games and content. this isn't a piracy scheme, sony actually allows this, and doesn't allow it after the initial 3 people per file. if you think ms needs the extra money to bring you xboxlive, you must not be familiar with microsoft.

    hotmail probably gets more hits a day than xbl, combine that with msdn, windows update, windows antivirus, bing, and the gazillions of other microsoft owned and run ip that get nonstop bandwidth abuse. steam is a superior service by a supersmall company, and it's free. it's pure and simple, it isn't even a debate. XBL is a total scam, and there's no excuse for it not to be free. it doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before and is still being done for free on other platforms, by much smaller companies, with much less money, and resources.

    edit: and another thing, unfortunately the corruption bleeds onto other systems, but another thing you're paying for with xbl is ms's greedy bs where they force everyone to charge for dlc. companies try to release content for free on the 360, and then ms steps in forces them to charge. this is why steam went to ps3 and not 360, ms wanted to control everything. now what? they're stuck with a crippled version of the game. you buy once for ps3, you own it on ps3, mac, and pc, your cloud game saves transfer so you can continue your game on a different platform, and all 3 platforms can play co op, later today, I'll play pc portal2 with my friend on his ps3 complete with voice chat. game updates and bugfixes are pushed out the second valve wants them to be. completely superior experience on all other platforms...why? because ms tried to bully valve, and not let them do what they needed to properly release the game. i believe I heard ms finally caved in, and will allow steam in the future, but what a load of bs. originally gears was supposed to have free map packs, but once again ms stepped in to kill the user experience. it all worked out in the end though, because now you have 80 companies who charge to change the color of your character sprite, and an army of fanboys who say that it's somehow a good thing that they have to pay for a "service" they can get for free anywhere else

  • i don't think it's the only game that doesn't respond while loading or generating levels.

    windowed games look unprofessional to begin with, but getting rid of the caption at all would be good, also, maybe a screen that says "loading..."

    or don't make it do all the calculations at once. make it pause every few seconds to respond to user input

  • these fps's would change within a hundred or so sometimes when run multiple times:

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20folder%20%285%29/1.JPG">

    2152 fps

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20folder%20%285%29/2.JPG">

    2150 fps

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20folder%20%285%29/3.JPG">

    1995 fps

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20folder%20%285%29/4.JPG">

    50 fps

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20folder%20%285%29/6.JPG">

    18 fps

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20folder%20%285%29/5.JPG">

    20 fps

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20folder%20%285%29/8.JPG">

    75 fps

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20folder%20%285%29/7.JPG">

    75 fps

  • I think they shouldn't be too different, they're both interpreted at runtime, as far as I know. a construct action gets interpreted and calls a c++ function, or a python command gets interpreted and calls a c++ function. if you're talking about doing everything within python that a plugin does after being called, of course the c++ should be much faster.

  • I don't think it should even be tiles to be honest, I think it should be something like this:

    either the s method, or the proposed plugin could do the same thing