Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20171111143841/@comment-1496755-20180819165647

Some good news - got the signature on my leave request form, which means that my week off is now 100% official and nothing can stop me! Well, except for a planetary cataclysm or something like that... but anyway, it's all arranged now, in accordance with all the bureaucratic rules.

You work at the same company as your father... and I work at the same university as my mom. Though she has been there since the early 1990's, way longer than me. And just like me, she does a lot of stuff that no one else can.

Abandonware isn't 100% legit, but at least they preserve many games that would have been lost forever otherwise, so in this regard they are actually doing a nice thing. Heh, while new content is not likely to come along, there have been cases when a patch was released for a game more than 10 years later - there was one case when two DOS games caused weird glitches when run directly under XP (something I did a lot of the old laptop) - they'd set your system clock 100 years backwards. And the company specifically made patches to fix this. It's among the longest known periods between a game's release and it getting an update.

The way Daggerfall works, some classes have it fairly easy, while for others it is nearly impossible to beat the game. Even the official guide book says that you can choose a Spellsword or Battlemage for an easy time or Thief for the greatest possible challenge. And indeed, casting spells can make DF so much easier, especially with regard to underwater movement, levitation instead of taking risks with jumping/climbing, and teleporting back to a dungeon's exit instead of getting lost. Arena at leaast gave all classes a somewhat equal chance of success, allowing us to beat the game as a Rogue and a Thief, without facing any truly insurmountable obstacles due caused by the choice of class.

Well yes, some games are definitely more moddable than others and stability is one of the major factors in this. As some guy on YouTube said - "it's walsy reassuring to start the mod, open the console, and see a huge red list of errors."

I surely have little experience with GLQuake (and its close relative GLHexen2) due to them running poorly on my old laptop, but in recent times I could do a little tinkering. Yeah, I saw the mirrored windows - pretty impressive effect for its time, reflections didn't really become a stable feature until Quake 3's engine (and still, very few games had them). Transparent water looks nice too, though there is a side effect - maps were not designed with this in mind, so you could see stuff you were not meant to (potentially looking sloppy). I discovered how to reduce or completely eliminate the blubrriness as well (many of these commands are applicable to Quake 2's GL mode as well).

I suppose we'd focus on the pure game for the msot part, but devote some time to crazy experiments, just to see how wild things can get.

I generally prefer names with a capital letter, it looks odd otherwise. We can definitely have some fun with skins! (this would sound really disturbing out of context)

The best sprites were usually based on some real object - e.g. clay models (in Doom) or people wearing costumes. You can easily tell a game thate didn't use such objects by its very cartoony sprites. And it's even worse with some mods. I notice some of the new Quake skins also have this cartoonish vibe.

Even better when the reading is accompanied by a voice as well - so you can just listen to it, instead of actually reading (Diablo does that and it works nice).

I think the same thing happened to Fallout too - early instalments were way more RPG-ish, while the latest ones are almost like first-person shooters. Indeed, mixing mods can be as tricky as mixing booze - the wrong combination can blow your head off. One thing I've heard about brutal Doom is how notoriously hard it is to make it compatible with other mods... which doesn't stop random fanboys from asking.

Arena's thieving was quite primitive, though I found it funny, especially when I targeted stores that had ripped me off before (take that!). It was really curious to see how evil monsters guard supposedly holy temples at night. Daggerfall had the Thieves Guild that allows you to run errands... though it's quite primitive too and gets old fast.

Mmmm, the old days when there were different DirectX versions and you had to upgrade manually. You'd usually aim for the latest supported by your OS, though keep in mind that DirectDraw became deprecated at one point (at version 7.0, I think).

And don't forget insults - one fo the staples of Brutal Doom is the ability to flip off enemies :P