Creative Lead replays Chaos Theory

i know right?

I actually got it from a shitty vidya 'news' site.

They aren't wrong about Spies V Mercs though.

Sounds like a pretty interesting "shitty vidya news site"

It's your standard games 'journalism' sadly but I've got to get news from somewhere.

If you know of any quality places that aren't massively slow I'd appreciate a list.

...

I'm not going to deny the suspiciously convenient timing of the 'leaks' for groups in both the USA and indeed the UK but expecting all developers to have a deep (or even shallow) understanding of political realities is unrealistic.

And again it's right there in the OP to skip the boring shit at the start. Are you actually suggesting this entire video was created to shill the panama 'leaks'?

Anyone wanna coop through this game using lan? I remember the coop being very good. (you can do that with the pirated version too)

Nice. Would be cool if they do more.

I know you can use tungle for it and there's always people up for coop in the Chaos Theory lobby. Sadly they're often slavs.

I don't see the problem

He's from Holla Forums he of course he does.

fuck you. Her voice and banter with Sam was enough to get me off.

Bullshit.

Fuck off, kike. You're not the only one that nose how to follow the money.

So when people say "the game is badly optimized" they really are basically saying "make it run better using any means whatsoever." I really wanted to believe that complaint was aimed at more specific areas of improvement. Not to mention, cutting geometry or reducing effects or enemy counts or generally reducing/altering the content itself is the absolute last thing I'd want devs to do about low framerates. But if that falls under "optimization" too then it's like people are asking for that as an equally valid solution.

Yes, you get it

So you'd also defend the changes made to Fisher?

A lot of people don't really know what they're sating when they complain of poor optimisation so yes they just want better performance.

You can do it without hurting gameplay by simply designing your levels and assets carefully. Hell Chaos Theory never feels like it was hurt by such concerns despite the fact it was designed to work on the original Xbox of all fucking things. Another example would be the Serious Sam games where Croteam use a ton of tricks with prebaked lighting and similar to keep the game pretty. You might notice if you walk right up to something and look with a trained eye but you aren't going to see it in the middle of a fuckhuge fight. The setting of the original games was also partly chosen to help with performance as deserts and temples can be done efficiently. Then you've got things like keeping textures smaller on less important things (again SS uses most of its texture/model 'budget' on the guns, if memory serves).

You also have the opposite end of the scale with something like Max Payne 3 that should have cut gameplay to improve loading times which were instead covered up with fucking cutscenes.

There's only so much you can do in the back end to improve performance particularly when you're working with consoles. Not only is their hardware limited but they often have huge issues with overheating since nobody will ever bother cleaning them out inside (IIRC it voids the warranty to do so anyway).

tl;dr Optimisation is not just toying with code. Every part of development is important.

Fisher doesn't look all that different, and I also don't want to dick him

It's worse in game though they had a much shittier redesign in mind for Conviction originally. Fucking hobo fisher.

Still doesn't justify redesigning her entire character. At least Lambert died before they got him.

I've never played Splinter Cell, but why are the new designs making them YOUNGER when they're getting OLDER? Are they all fucking Benjamin Button? Are the people designing the new games that fucking retarded?

Because it's a soft reboot you dumb fuck

In what universe is any character going to look younger when they're older short of smoking/doing drugs vs not? That's just fucking dumb design. Semen demon looks like she's half her age now, Sam looks like he's 35. I don't care how you want to swing it, the age doesn't match their looks.

So what even made Ubisoft decide to make PREDATOR STEALTH, 24 THE GAME: STILL AS BAD AS LICENSED 24 GAMES EDITION?

Holy fuck, I didn't even know about the valve and the sprinklers in the courtyard. Goddamn.

Mathieu Ferland should never have left the Splinter Cell series, he definitely knew how to make a good game. Maxime Beland is a hack.

I still remember shitposting on the Ubi forums during Conviction's development hell, before they scrapped it and started over again.

The series died with Double Agent, so as far as I'm concerned, it's canon that he's still alive.

I still remember how fucking awesome and sometimes awful SvM was.

Of course you won't see anything like it these days because everything has to be kid-friendly simple and something like dodging through laser tripwires or cautiously listening for proxy mine beeps is way too complicated for today's average consumer.

...

...

Semi-related

He would have to make game with today's publisher and gamer. So it would still have been casualized to fuck.

Even more casualized than Conviction? I doubt it.

I'm both pretty sad and glad that Ubisoft doesn't make anymore Prince of Persia or Splinter Cell games. I don't think they've made anything that's actually good in the past 3 or 4 years.

And I'll never get how everyone's just spreading their ass for Siege. It's just your standard terrorists vs counter terrorist vidya but with destructible environments.

Blacklist was ok.

It was OK compared to Shitviction

It's still trash compared to CT.

Cool shit, OP.

To sell more copies of the game.

That's it. They also dumped the original VA (Ironside) who was responsible for a good chunk of Sam's personality because his face was too old for motion capture crap.

SvM is heavily dependant on a competent and laid back community also. It can be ruined fairly easily by 1-2 bad players.

Though Fisher would probably kill him all considered. Then again Lambert wouldn't be dumb enough to do field work personally…

Nigger is a clone.

I thought he just didn't want to do that anymore? I know that they dumped Stephen Russell because he was too old for motion capture for Thi4f.

Luckily 2v2 means you only need three other people. Wasn't that hard to find friendly people to play with, even in the days of xfire.

same with Fisher. This is no fucking excuse.

I don't think so. It was the end, the final fight. There was no point in maintaining your cover any longer. You'd get another few hours out of it, nothing more.

You're right, Ironside left on his own.

The mission always comes first and he's hardly much of a fighter. Gameplay aside breaking your cover could easily get you killed.

Looking it up again it seems like it was reasonably mutual. Ironside was known to dislike where the series was going with Fisher and motion capture gives him a nice excuse to duck out without looking bad or breaking any contracts.

The below came up in a quick google and makes for interesting reading, by the way:

That's pretty damned neat

I suspect it's why Grim, Lambert and Fisher seem so natural together despite the relatively small amount of time spent on them as characters.

I miss xfire. I can remember back when Steam came out (i.e. was a pile of shit) and I refused to even consider using it over xfire.

What?
No, you don't understand the situation.

Of COURSE sometimes you cut effects or enemy counts in order to make a scene run better. We don't just sprinkle unicorn tears on the code to make it "better".

If you want an engine that can handle more content than you have in it, then you revise the engine. That could take years. Cutting down content and rebalancing the setpiece so it's still "busy" and full of shit going on, but no longer choppy, is how it's done.

Oh. Just started watching the video. It's a different Mathieu, one that I've never heard of. I do know Clint Hocking, though.

Also, I'm glad they're playing the bank level, that's probably the best one in Chaos Theory.

I don't see what you're trying to show here.

The other Mathieu is the level designer for the bank:

(got it off Clint's website)

Oh, neat. I've only watched the first few seconds, I won't be able to watch the rest until I get home.

Yeah, his looks are inconsistent. Ort-Meyer's research byproducts were superior organs and tissue that he used to increase the lifespan of him and all his buddies. Since 47 is a perfect clone with those superior organs, he's going to be long-lived, if not immortal.

I agree that people don't seem to really know what optimization is, but I'd assume when they want a game "better optimized," they mean changes along the lines of code tweaking more than cutting back the visuals. But as long as optimization means anything and everything, that's vague.

Personally, until a little while ago, I had assumed it meant code and under the hood stuff exclusively. Because in my experience, when people wanted the poly counts or textures usage reduced or whatever because a game was chugging, they never called that optimization. They said cut some detail on the map, the framerate's bad.

But for a while now, I've noticed that every time any game runs badly at all, it's ALWAYS "game is poorly optimized." Which made me start to suspect that my definition was not the collective… non-definition. Which was fine, until I saw OP and actual developers calling changing the level layout "optimization" and now I don't know what to believe.

I guess I just want different terms for improving performance on the code side and improving performance by messing with what players actually interact with and see.

You gotta do what you gotta do to get the game to run well, but you can't deny that better or worse coding can make the exact same content run better or worse. And it's not always years of engine overhaul, I know for a fact that sometimes performance gains could happen in just a few hours. Like "oh hey, turns out game's always doing X, which it wasn't supposed to be doing constantly. We fixed that and now things are way smoother." Or something was conflicting with another thing, etc. Sometimes it is a fairly simply coding error that's behind poor optimization.

Anyway, I'm not opposed to cutting effects or geometry in itself, it just feels wrong to fit that under the same term that describes the coding side of things.

That makes more sense.

You mean things like CK2 having performance issues because everyone is checking if they can castrate each other or not?

Just finished watching it. It was cool to hear their input. I always wondered why the hell there were sprinklers in the vault. And I didn't know you could shoot the fan over the security booth.
I replay this game every few years. I think I'll do a playthrough now.

I don't know if that YouTube channel is Clint Hocking's or not (I think it is), but it's got a cool recut of a Chaos Theory trailer set to The Sound of Silence. Embed related.

He posted the same thing on his site once so I assume it is his channel.

Stealth gameplay is my favorite. But it doesn't make for sexy trailers.

what they did to Grim was one of the biggest fuckups I've ever seen in gaming

I liked it better than mgsv