Ross's Game Dungeon: TrackMania² Canyon

[seanbob]

I worked in New Mexico for a while and the old version is definitely more accurate.

[RandomGuy]

You might want to see this, Ross.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

Interesting! Most if not all of those map changes I would, again, put down to having to recompile map lighting every time they update something, and not having any standardized settings (which, by this point, they really should have; their internal structure was guaranteed to mean lots of turnover in any given game's team, so documenting "how we do things 'round here" for consistency's sake should have been a given).

 

One other thing I found interesting is that both versions of the grenade launcher feature fully-modeled bolts, whereas for most of the years I've been playing, it did not. To the point where, when they updated the model to include them, I almost immediately noticed. They must have been removed very early on, and I bet that's when most of the downgrades in this video happened.

 

Finally, they show actual real-time ripples being created when water is shot. I... wasn't aware the Source engine could even do that and now I'm wondering how. And why no subsequent games, even single-player ones, have had that feature. Maybe it was patched out for being glitchy and unreliable?

[BTGBullseye]

On 9/6/2019 at 1:17 AM, Steve the Pocket said:

Finally, they show actual real-time ripples being created when water is shot. I... wasn't aware the Source engine could even do that and now I'm wondering how. And why no subsequent games, even single-player ones, have had that feature. Maybe it was patched out for being glitchy and unreliable?

It was available in the original version of HL2 as well... Never understood why they removed it until I played a mod that allowed me to make custom grenades, and overwhelm the physics engine with the number of physics entities. Physics ripples reduced the maximum physics entities to somewhere around half.

Edited September 8, 2019 by BTGBullseye (see edit history)

[RaTcHeT302]

On 9/6/2019 at 9:23 AM, RandomGuy said:

You might want to see this, Ross.

 

I think the original shine tends to be exagerated though, to me that looks like a stylistic choice, and the shadows being fucked up are probably from the map compile settings. Anyway Team Fortress 2 is a special case, a lot of problems are 99% due to the Source Engine being a buggy piece of shit, and Team Fortress 2 is also a giant mess. A lot of the problems in the video are mostly bugs, I don't know what's up with some of the textures though.

 

Also I can't say that I ever cared about that giant knife, it looked silly. A lot of these are just nitpicked bugs though, not really much of a graphical downgrade here. I mean most of the game still looks the same either way, it's not as drastic as TrackMania 2 was. Where the whole atmopshere of the game changed, the lighting in Team Fortress 2 is still fairly warm.

 

I feel like that video is mostly almost exagerated. Some changes are actually reasonable, the water ripples do look too realistic, and why waste performance on something you'd barely see anyway? I mean performance wise, it's probably the same, so that was probably a useless change in that case, but it looked like a stock Half Life 2 effect to me anyway. And the guns don't have physics seeing as you can pick them up. So why even bother having that in? Also the sappers being gone, I immagine that, they likely did that for either performance reasons, or because it just looked too cluttered. What destroys the performance in Team Fortress 2 are the hats, with particle effects, that's mostly it from what I've seen.

 

I don't know, the vibe which I'm getting from the video, is that I'm supposed to be outraged or something by these changes. I feel like a lot of these ARE just bugs though. Personally I was never a fan of YouTube channels like these anyway, they tend to twist information in weird ways.

 

Some of these changes are so minor otherwise, it's like, what's the point? Like whatever, I didn't even notice. It's not like TrackMania where I feel phisically ill from the new graphics. I'm sad that the sappers don't make a giant mess anymore, but I honestly remember things getting a bit clusterfucky when you sapped six buildings at once.

 

I've always been of the opinion that, I'd rather have things look more empty, and readable in a multiplayer game, instead of ending up with the clusterfuck that is Overwatch, where, 90% of the time you are mostly blind, from all the shit that's happening on screen.

 

I think Overwatch is the only game, where with every update, the gameplay has honestly gotten worse somehow though. I used to play it out of boredom, but man, they keep adding all these dudes with shields, and it honestly kills my enjoyment of the game. Every match is mostly my team turtling against the enemy team, and I'm frankly not getting any enjoyment out of it anymore.

 

Like I thought the game was bad, but there's this hero who I really enjoyed playing as, all the time, but it just got so tedious to play.

 

Anyway I don't know, Team Fortress 2 is, not what I would call a downgrade at all. It's nowhere near as bad as TrackMania.

Like some weapon animations broke, yeah well big fucking deal, we don't have the SUNSET anymore in TrackMania 2.

 

THE SUN GUYS

 

THE PURPLE, THE PURPLE IS GONE, THE COLORS ARE ALL GONE, THEY KILLED MY BEAUTIFUL SUNSETS, AAAAAA

Edited September 8, 2019 by RaTcHeT302 (see edit history)

[Delicieuxz]

Nice video. Coulda been neat to mention something about Canyon Platform, the classic TrackMania game mode which was added to Canyon in an update, and which Nadeo even later broke and never did anything to fix again.

 

I recall some fuss about the car handling in Canyon being revamped at one point, and people complained about it. I think I also preferred the original.

 

https://forum.maniaplanet.com/viewtopic.php?t=40834

 

 

Ross, you said in your video that you didn't play the original TM games and didn't find them visually attractive. TMO has some cool handling, but I recommend checking out TM Sunrise and also with the TMS Extreme expansion. Its graphics are a significant step up from the first TM game's, and still look beautiful. Plus, the sense of speed in TMS is greater than in any other game.

 

 

TM Sunrise also has what I think are the best music and menu presentation in the series, and a lot of the coolest tracks. It also has 3 game modes: Race, Platform, and Puzzle. In my opinion, a TM game isn't a TM game without all 3 modes - even if Nadeo has been making Race-only TM games for longer than they made them with the other modes included.

 

Platform is my favourite mode. It has no timer but presents challenging platform-based tracks with checkpoints that a car can be respawned to if something goes wrong. Gold, silver, and bronze awards are given based on how many times the player resets their car at the most-recent checkpoint (which they do whenever they fall off the track, turn upside down, or anything else that prevents progress).

 

 

And some of the Platform tracks get really crazy (timestamped video):

 

 

TM Sunrise is Nadeo's peak as a developer, IMO, and the studio has been putting out mediocre and half-baked releases since being bought by Ubisoft. And to anyone who would suggest playing TM United instead because it has samples of the same environments as TM Sunrise: TM United isn't comparable to TM Sunrise, it's a much worse package, worse music, worse stages, worse presentation. I think it also has less content. Even importing the TM Sunrise maps into TM United isn't nearly as great an experience as playing TM Sunrise.

 

Because of the horrible Starforce DRM Nadeo put into TM Sunrise, to get TM Sunrise to work on a modern PC, either a virtual machine of Windows XP, Vista, or maybe Windows 7 is needed, or some other method. I've seen people get it to work using various methods. I've also bugged Nadeo to release it without Starforce on GoG, but they seem to be pretty stubborn in not doing that, so far.

 

http://www.tm-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=24517

http://www.tm-forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=211090#p211090

 

 

Edited September 9, 2019 by Delicieuxz (see edit history)

[RaTcHeT302]

Yo I made a post for my Exploration Map. It's a big TrackMania 2 Valley map which you can explore at your leisure. No racing.

 

I don't want to spoil it, as it's fairly small. I mean, all the space is filled up. I did design some parts of the map, in order to slow down your car, whenever I was able to, in order to make the map feel bigger than it actually is. It's a trick I tend to use as much as I can, but I put some fast stretches too.

 

Edited September 8, 2019 by RaTcHeT302 (see edit history)

[RaTcHeT302]

OH HEY, I JUST REMEMBERED, THERE WAS A GAME WHICH HAD THE SAME EXACT PROBLEM

 

i completely forgot about this, i mean LOOK AT THIS MESS, MY BRAIN WANTED TO FORGET

[danielsangeo]

Oops.  Forgot to link here.  Subs up!

[SJ-M-]

Isn't this episode available for download yet?

[xawesomecorex]

On 8/31/2019 at 4:10 PM, Welfarewalrus said:

Has Ross heard about the theory that Apple updates their previous iPhones to be SLOWER after they release a new one?

I briefly worked for Apple's helpdesk call center and can answer this. Apple doesn't purposefully slow down their older iphones with the new updates. They just generally roll them out without giving any fucks as to whether the old hardware can handle it or not. This happened to the iphone6 during my first week out of training and iirc there was actually a post-update patch for it and I had to play damage control in the meantime. Granted the iphone6 was still pretty popular back then and I'm guessing they wouldn't do that for a lesser used phone.

[sprite]

This is a bit unrelated, but I don't know where else to put this, so uh.

 

Does Ross script his Game Dungeon episodes? Or are they all improv'd?

[RaTcHeT302]

1 hour ago, sprite said:

This is a bit unrelated, but I don't know where else to put this, so uh.

 

Does Ross script his Game Dungeon episodes? Or are they all improv'd?

Scripted.

[sprite]

23 hours ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

Scripted.

Thanks. Sorry that I had to ask -- I just wanted to take notes on that kind of thing for my own hopefully upcoming game review series, inspired by GD.

[RaTcHeT302]

56 minutes ago, sprite said:

Thanks. Sorry that I had to ask -- I just wanted to take notes on that kind of thing for my own hopefully upcoming game review series, inspired by GD.

Man, I wouldn't worry about that. I mean why would anyone be bothered by a question? If anyone ever got angry at you, he's probably a weirdo.

 

Anyway, you can always improvise the lines on the spot, as you write the script, just don't forget to write them down somewhere. You can record them over and over again, until you are happy with the result. If the line doesn't work, then feel free to cut it out.

 

As far as the video footage goes, I think putting some kind of timer on your phone, and writing down the time stamps to the most interesting moments could help. When I was making YouTube videos, I had to manually re-watch every single clip, and it wasted a lot of time for me personally.

 

Also as far as video editing goes, if you can't really figure out what structure you want to go for, you can always just take all the video footage, and you can just stich it togheter, in the order you recorded it in. Then you can tackle any topics you'd like to talk about as you go, and once you feel like you have a rough structure, it's probably easier to record more specific lines, for specific parts of the video.

 

Another general approach, is to just, film the footage, stitch it up, look at the footage, and think of a line you'd like to add into, and then move on to the next part, but this approach might get messy quickly. I think having some kind of general layout would help.

 

It can be something simple, like - Introduction, Gameplay? Music Interlude, More Gameplay, Annoyances, Something Positive, Something Negative, Etc.

 

Then you can just, add filler in between, jokes, random stories, etc. Wherever it clicks the best really.

 

Otherwise, you just gotta experiment, and for your first video, my suggestion is to brute force it a bit, don't over think it too much, see what works and see what doesn't. If it's not working, then chuck it out. You always have time to improve and to do better, in the next video. If you are not experienced enough, my suggestion is to just try and make it, and to try to solve new problems, as they come along, instead of trying to do everything at once.

 

I wouldn't worry too much if your early work is sloppy. Just get it all out, then you'll get into the groove, you'll build familiarity, and you'll find it a bit more obvious, as to what needs to improved. Early on it can be a bit difficult to tell. The video might look fine, but a month in, you watch it again, and it's a mess.

 

I wouldn't worry too much, you have to learn to move on in my mind, from my own experience, or you'll never get any large sized videos ever really done much. Personally I stopped with YouTube, because I just lack the hard disk space, and it's just not profitable for me personally, and it's too much work. You either do this for fun, but as far as making money goes? I don't know, it's though.

 

It can be done but... it's hard, to make money off just YouTube.

 

If I ever start making YouTube videos again, I'm editing them properly. And they are totally going on my website, YouTube just destroys the colors and the quality, I used to bump up the contrast or saturation, just because of how badly YouTube screwed the colors up.

 

It's a dumb trick but it worked for me. I'm only going to make videos again for fun though, not for money, it's just not worth it.

I hope to free up some hard disk space, see if I can figure something out.

 

PS: Most people don't have the eye to spot any errors, mistakes, or any subtle but sloppy editing. So, if you noticed an error, odds are that 99% of the people who watch these, won't pick up on it. So I wouldn't worry too much about it.

 

I've spotted some minor things in the Game Dungeon videos. You can see a pretty sloppy cut, in the Realms of the Haunting video, near the ending part, where the video suddenly skips. There are other minor errors, but I honestly forgot.

 

If you want to see the error. Start at 44:28 (it's barely just one frame, but it's an editing mistake, it can be fixed - even if it's the footage itself, I would feel annoyed if I hadn't fixed it)

 
I bet most people who watched the video never noticed that though. If they do, they are probably too focused on the video, to really care about it.

 

Most people are going to pick up on audio issues 100%. You totally want your audio to be perfect, trust me on that.

Or at least, close to perfect. Editing wise, meh, whatever, it's passable sometimes.

 

PSS: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MAKE SURE YOUR AUDIO IS IN SYNC. IT'S THE WORST KIND OF MISTAKE.

Edited October 21, 2019 by RaTcHeT302 (see edit history)