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Raven10

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Raven10

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FYI to @jeff and the rest of the crew, the shimmering is due to aliasing on transparent textures. The blur on at least some of the titles is because you were using FXAA to try to minimize the shimmering but FXAA works poorly in lower resolutions and manages to blur the imagine without resolving the shimmering. Since framerate is key I would suggest switching to SMAA in any game that supports it as the framerate hit should be very minor for a major image quality boost.

And for those at home with more powerful PCs, the best way to solve the problem would be to either super sample the image through Nvidia Inspector or the Radeon equivalent, or even try downsampling the image from a higher resolution if the game allows for you to switch resolution in VR. The Resolution scaler that was in Ethan Carter was a downsampling option, but you also had FXAA on which was likely causing the blur. Nvidia's control panel also has an option for using AA on transparent textures. All I can say is that using that, downsampling, or supersampling requires extreme amounts of PC power, likely something in the realm of a Titan or even an SLI Titan setup, but the issue with the visuals here was aliasing caused by low resolutions and the use of a poor FXAA implementation to try and resolve the aliasing. Nothing that could be done in this case, but with a 6 GB graphics card you should be able to power past at least some of the problems. Even switching to MSAA would eliminate the blurring problem, although it wouldn't solve the shimmering in most cases.

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Raven10

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@benjo_t: As your fishing skill levels up and you purchase better rods fishing gets much easier. Early on it is very hard, but I found that heading to the pond just south of your farm and fishing with any remaining energy at the end of the day let me build up enough experience to eventually start pulling in the rare fish. Basically, just keep chugging away. At a certain point you'll get a fishing rod that lets you put on specific types of hooks that allow you to catch even the most difficult of fish.

If it really is too much for you though, there is a mod out there that makes it easier, although I would honestly recommend just sticking with it. You might only catch a couple fish for the first season of your efforts, but once you hit level five or so then you'll be coming home with a dozen or more fish from a single fishing trip.

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Raven10

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Man this game does not hold up nearly as well as Wind Waker visually. I wonder if we'll get a Skyward Sword HD on the NX or if that system will support WiiMotes.

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Edited By Raven10

Man these early Xbox games seem pretty rough today.

Edit: Also it's kind of amazing how there are a grand total of two companies listed in any of these games that still exist as independent entities today (Microsoft and Ubisoft) alongside Bungie who became independent afterwards. The rest were either purchased and then shuttered (Eidos, Lucasarts, Acclaim, Universal Interactive, Sierra, and kind of Free Radical) or purchased and then became a division of a larger company(Activision, Sega, Namco, DICE, IO Interactive, and Crystal Dynamics). And some just went out of business entirely. People talk about the "middle tier" titles that we lack today and I think this video really shows why. Out of 20+ companies whose games are credited on this disc only half still remain in any form, and most of those are just parts of a bigger company. Look at Activision Blizzard. They are made up of the remnants of Vivendi Universal Interactive, Sierra, Blizzard, Activision, and several other smaller companies. Square Enix these days includes not only Square and Enix but Eidos, Taito, and several others alongside developers like IO and Crystal Dynamics. And Sega Sammy contains not only Sega and Sammy but Atlus and various other companies. When dozens of companies are combined into only a handful you get fewer games.

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Raven10

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@pants_ghidorah: What I love is that most of those really early designers are still making games. What other medium can you say that about? The earliest game designers from Atari are still alive and kicking and while most of them aren't making games anymore, there are definitely folks from that era like Richard Garriott and Chris Roberts who are still making games to this day. The fact that young designers can learn directly from the founders of the industry and the inventors of entire genres is one of the coolest things about gaming right now.

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Raven10

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@homelessbird: He's served as the "creative advisor" since day one. He's just coming on full time at the end of the semester instead of on a contractor basis. He served a similar role for the original Ultima Underworld since he was still working for Origin at the time. So he wasn't at Looking Glass all day. He gave pointers and tips to what at the time was a completely new and untested studio and helped them merge it with the Ultima universe. He didn't get as involved in the day to day design until System Shock, so in a way he's actually mirroring what he did back then. It's worth noting that Spector is an idea guy not a programming guy. He comes from a pen and paper background in the 1970's. While there is no doubt that the programming team fumbled the execution of Epic Mickey, the concepts at the core of the design were as solid as always. Spector basically believes that choice should be a part of every aspect of a game's design. That is what makes it interactive. And so largely the feedback you get from him involves adding additional options or more freedom to certain design elements.

I was at the GDC Awards where he was given his lifetime achievement honor and I just remember thinking just how knowledgable and wise he was as he talked about his various design methodologies. Cliff Blezinski was hosting the show that year and after Spector walked off the stage, Cliff looked over to the section where the nominees for the best student game were sitting and basically told them that they should memorize every word of that speech because Spector was better at designing games than anyone else in the room, which included Bethesda's Todd Howard, the teams from Rocksteady and Naughty Dog, and even members of Valve not to mention Cliff himself. I don't think Miyamoto was present, but regardless, there was not a designer in that room who had anything but fantastic things to say about Warren Spector and his work and the influence he had on them. There were issues with Epic Mickey without a doubt, but I wouldn't exactly lay those at Warren Spector's feet, although he is obviously not entirely blameless. Still, he is a super nice, super smart, super knowledgable dude, and the team at Otherside has great technical folks and is working with the very solid Unity 5 engine so I don't think they'll have any technical issues this time around.

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Raven10

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@two_socks:

@raven10:

http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/22/5335780/gone-home-bioshock-share-the-same-universe

This does a better job of explaining part of it.

There is also the actual physical connection of people who worked at Looking Glass went on to form Irrational which made System Shock 2 and Bioshock and some of those people went on to make Gone Home, so there is that connection as well. Basically the makers of Gone Home were trained by the makers of System Shock 2 who were trained by the founders of looking glass who were trained in part by Warren Spector and Richard Garriott of Origin Systems before the former joined the team full time. So there is a really massive lineage dating all the way back to the very early days of game design with Garriott and Chris Roberts and the rest of the core Origin Systems team that helped get Looking Glass off the ground by adding their Ultima brand to Underworld.

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Raven10

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@homelessbird: As a backer of Underworld I can say that thus far it has been the best managed Kickstarter I have backed, and I have backed the work of most the big RPG revival companies(right now my still to be released backed RPG games include The Bard's Tale IV, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Underworld, and Battletech). I point that out mainly because those companies have all delivered excellent Kickstarted titles already (Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, and the Shadowrun games respectively) and I feel like Underworld has progressed more smoothly than any other Kickstarted game I've backed, with regular updates including new playable prototypes that show real progress and are thus far fully delivering on the promises made during the Kickstarter. I can't say how the final game will turn out, but this far I can say that Underworld has delivered the most regular and transparent updates of any Kickstarter I've backed.

@two_socks:I think the reference @austin_walker is making is how System Shock and Ultima Underworld were heavily story driven first person titles in a time when games had little in the way of story and atmosphere, especially first person games. Underworld came out the same year as Doom I believe. So on the one hand you had an almost story free game where you just shot aliens, and on the other you had a complex simulation that attempted to push players down a just and moral path. Furthermore, both Underworld and System Shock had a very heavy focus on building tension through atmosphere in a way that is very similar to something like Gone Home or Firewatch.

That doesn't take into account the major technical accomplishments of Looking Glass' engine such as having dynamic audio and music and real time lighting and shadows. Both of those accomplishments were essential in not only building atmosphere and telling a story, but also developing the stealth gameplay systems that were eventually fully fleshed out in Thief and have since gone on to become the basis for many other stealth games that take lighting into account. The state based AI was also quite revolutionary, reacting to the character based on a variety of factors depending on the game. In Underworld you could ally yourself with different factions, for example, and that would effect not just their hostility level, but how willing various characters were to trade with you or offer you information. Plus, it was the first game where you could kill a member of the faction, but if no one else saw you do it, they wouldn't know it was you. So all that advanced AI, in combination with lighting system, the audio system, and several other major accomplishments I won't get into, made the engine arguably the most advanced game engine in existence in numerous ways for years to come.

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Raven10

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@yujinred: I think the problem people have with Oshii's version of GITS is just how full of philosophy it is. The sequel more than the first film, but regardless, the whole thing is just a giant think piece. In that sense it is great and obviously one of the most influential films of all time. But I can easily see how someone would find it incredibly boring. Personally it is a favorite of mine, and I agree with everything you said, but someone like Jeff was never going to like an Oshii film. I bet he would enjoy the show, though. And the original manga which he somehow didn't know existed.

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Raven10

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@hassun: Take Two gives each developer a fair amount of freedom. Some consider this a good thing, while others say that a stronger internal producer role might help the company ship a game on time. Take Two has not shipped a major product outside of the NBA series on time since the PS2 era. They argue that they are focusing on quality, which is true, but they also spend an awfully long time on games that it feels like other developers could finish in half the time and with half the money. They are a great company when it comes to creative freedom, maybe the best publisher in the world in fact. But their production pipeline is awful. Hence you get into situations with lengthy, near year long crunch periods that simply put shouldn't be needed. The developers working at Take Two are brilliant folks as I said, but I feel bad for them simply due to the managerial incompetence that makes these games take so damn long to make.