Make Max more furry and less 3d
I really can't wait till the release of the new Sam & Max game.
Only thing bothering me though is that the characters seem to be so metallic and shiny. Especially Max has that 3D-look that I don't think fits. I mean, he's a furry animal, not a glossy 3d prototype model.
Okay, I know that his design is inspired from the comics and the old pixel art game, where he is all white and beige. That look does IMO look better in 2d, and I think it would be nice if you could put a couple of other structures on the characters in this new game, so that you get a better feel for them. You don't have to add fur, as in Monster Inc., only something that gives a less plastic look.
Try to find a more coarse and neutral look on the characters, and my happiness would be complete!
Only thing bothering me though is that the characters seem to be so metallic and shiny. Especially Max has that 3D-look that I don't think fits. I mean, he's a furry animal, not a glossy 3d prototype model.
Okay, I know that his design is inspired from the comics and the old pixel art game, where he is all white and beige. That look does IMO look better in 2d, and I think it would be nice if you could put a couple of other structures on the characters in this new game, so that you get a better feel for them. You don't have to add fur, as in Monster Inc., only something that gives a less plastic look.
Try to find a more coarse and neutral look on the characters, and my happiness would be complete!
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If the game is going to be episodic, why won't telltale make just *one* short episode in 2D once the game is launched and see how popular it will be and how well it sale just to be sure that it won't sell so much that "game earning less game cost" is better with 2D ?
(maybe I should be swearing to make sure I get their attention
I don't like the look of Bone, I didn't like the look of Grim Fandango or MI4 (not to mention the controls in MI4 - my god!)
I simply do not like the plastic coated look that has been dominating 3D AGs to date - and I really think it is too bad, because it really keeps me from seeing the charm and personality of the characters.
I think that even in the old days, which I know will never return, the very pixellized characters had more charm than now, because back then, the graphical representation of most AGs far exeeded the overall "realism" (or whatever) of other types of games (shoot-em-ups, sims, action, etc.).
Nowadays, the developers of AGs often have to slim down the game requirements (probably based on extensive market research - I hope). This means that they have to use basic shaders and that sort of stuff - Only, IMHO, maybe they shouldn't.
Many of you may not know the game "Sheep Dog 'n Wolf". When I tried this game back in 2001, I thought to myself: "Now there is a successful comic adaptation! Best ever, to be completely honest."
I think the engine concept (perhaps strongly updated and modified for the specific task) would be great for many of the future AGs of these times as it would allow the designers to REALLY bring back the charm to comic based AGs (non-human characters). The character animations are really funny and it is simply a great game! (although, by now maybe a bit out of date)
Take a look at this link (the actual game looks better than the screenshots) and this link.
If you are interrested in seeing the game in action, you can download it here .
I will never give up hoping.
Besides, it looks pretty much like the 'original' LucasArts sequel would have looked, (which was also in 3D) at least judging by the ads of the time.
Again, for me, a low polycount is fine, as long as the textures and stylisation works (ala WoW)
I'd rather move forward with the times than stick too much to nostalgia (will I get flamed for that?) [~:>]
What I'm trying to say is that 3D is the way to go - they just have to work harder at making the characters more...ehh...err... charming? I know they already are, but I just feel that some of the charm gets lost in an embossy, glossy and plastic-like look and feel.
In my last post I forgot to mention XIII - do anyone remember this game? Those who have in fact played it will probably agree that the cartoon effects work pretty well! At least, that's what I think...
take a look for yourself here .
that's all that was to it - honestly :-s
It's cool man - Everyone heres chatting because they dig Sam & Max & its definitly a bonus to hear the thoughts and ideas of other fans [:)>-]
This is the Internet. It's never too early to start complaining.
Asking them to be that would raise the hardware requirements for the game by a lot in fact until just a few years ago fur in real time for games was considerd almost impossible to do at any decent speed.
It got limted use on the xbox and gamecube due to the speed requirements though you see it all the time on film now a days Like shrek "donkey" and the big blue hairy guy on monsters inc. I am 99% sure that took lots of computers a few days to draw just one frame.
and I am sure it still does asking a standard desktop comptuer at th is time to do that would take weeks to do just in a couple minutes would not happen..
In film rendering you watch the computer spit out high quaitly hairs on the subject's final version at a very very slow pace. Then when finsihed they are all edited togeather into the film at the full 29 frames a secound.
Games have to draw the animations as fast as you click the buttons meaining it has to put out all the final version of the scene at least 30 times every second to be enjoyable watching or it will be no fun to wait for it sprinkle hair all over sam and max when you click walk.
The newer powerful GPU like XBOX 360 will make it more common though less fancy than films. A game like viva pinyata has the effect all over.
Game rendering fur is Pretty well limited to this right now.
and used sparingly in favor of speed and low computer requriements.
ATI's bear/monkey pretty yes?
http://www.ati.com/developer/demos/r9700.html
and the older Nvidia geforce 4 werewolf.
But you need a 9700 pro or later in real game with buildings or wheat ever you would need more.
Sam and max on screen both realy fuzzy would be quite straining on older computers and if they did that they would have to add hair on all the people on the screen or they would just look out of place.
I'm sure telltale wants everybody to play it even if they have a really old PC and do not buy video cards often.
I think they look great just they way they are the comic never had fur and I don't blame them who would want to draw tons of fur by hand? It would take hours
The bump mapping look on the wall is awsome enough for me.
a) expect some graphic glitches.
b) it might not look as you intended to.
c) i like the "3D plastic" look, and if dont like it, try this - use some post-rendering effect to make it 320x240 and pixelated.
it works! (and no.. its not a joke. try it)
Doom 3 using normal mapping wich is just simply Fancy wallpaper to make it look better than it does..
Using other things the hardware is capable of doing to make "illusions" to make things look more than they appear to be has been used since games has started and they work great.
But the wider scope of people they want to buy like just abot everybody girls boys adults kids not all have fancy cards that even have the modern "short cuts"
Like the ever horrible built in Motherboard based graphics that come with common store bought computers at wal mart or laptops ETC are barely even considered cut out to be graphics proccessing.
At least right now on the future even bargain basement computer graphics will have fancy special effects like fur at high speed.
The trailers graphics have slight aliasing since no graphics card has antialiasing that is good enough to truely cover it.
The drawers in there office shimmer since it is a straight edge it stands out even when the best antialiasing is going.
The gril of the car and window trim are other jagged edges and himering things that is not realy telltale fault just the nature of 3D that give away it is all in game.
I am going to say it is all In game it is very possible to get everything seen in the trailer into the game these days.
But I'm not too sure if it would really fit into the 'style' of Sam & Max - especialy given it's comic book roots.
The graphics do look very similar to the never-released sequal (from a couple of years ago) so potentially it could look better and still be within equivelent spec - So maybe they'll up the graphics for the second series? - But then again - adventure gamers are pretty notorious for having crappy PC's.
For now I'm more interested in getting a solid Sam & Max adventure - I can gripe about the small stuff later
(I always though since they'd pretty much finished the Sam & Max sequel that even if LucasArts didn’t want to publicise and release the game, they could have at least made it available to download – Sorry, I know that’s not relevant, but it still p*sses me off ïŠ )
Of course this is 2005 when 800-850xt was out and that is like 40 years in graphics card years.
and That what is on the box don't cut it and you get very little enjoyment with it without a 9800 pro or higher and even the 9800 pro can get slow with everything on high.
From there read me.
D. Minimum PC Configuration
Processor - Intel® Pentium 4 1.6 GHz or equivalent
Memory - 512Mb RAM
HDD Space - 3.5 Gb free hard disk space
Operating System - Windows® 2000/XP
DVD ROM Speed - Any Speed
Videocard - DirectX 8 based 64Mb video card which supports pixel shading (see Notes on video card chipsets below)
Soundcard - DirectX 8 compliant sound card
DirectX - DirectX 9c (supplied with install)
3. Black and White 2 is a very graphically intense game. As such, your graphics card will draw a lot of power from the power supply in your machine, especially if it is a PCI-Express card.
Having an insufficient power supply can cause the computer to hang and crash under high loads, like those experienced when playing the game. Additionally, if the PCI-E card's power usage level is set too low in the BIOS, similar results can be seen.
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The sam and max graphics preview
http://dl.tv/blogs/digitallifetv/archive/2006/07/28/17081.aspx
Doesn’t that mean we’re therefore 40 years on from when B&W2 was originally released too? ïŠ :-/
Okay?
All I ment was that fur in games has been valid in the mainstream games for a few years now (remember B&W2 also had that really cool grass, the magical effects, shadows, weather effects, those little floating deities, the pet thing, etc a whole crap load of stuff suckking up the power from the graphics card to generate the images)
The gaphics engine for a point and click adventure isnt anywhere near that computationaly expensive either from the processor or the graphics card - To get B&W2 quality, certainly doesnt require a machine with the same spec
Having said this - I'm not into S&M having a swish graphics engine - I just want a good game
errm... I didn’t know how to respond to this bit without sounding sarcastic, so sorry about this man - Dells 'cheapest' desktops & laptops exceed that specification.
I have no idea why you mentioned that? Sorry man!
Look Tell-Tale are a small games publisher;
On the one hand they have to try to appeal to the largest possible audience
This means they'll want to appeal to people with 'out of date' PCs - By which I mean systems that people who use their computers only to browse the web and word process use, or maybe playing a game or two on an office PC, non-standard gaming environments.
But on the other hand, they don’t want their games to look and perform in a way that’s too dated - Otherwise nobody is going to be playing beyond the demo (people buy on looks after all).
So they have to juggle potential audience against making the game relevant and saleable - & this is the balance they think will work for them.
[EDIT:] Whoops! I should try reading all the posts before writing my own. Oh well. [/EDIT]
Besides which, I've always felt that if you don't lke a game simply for it's graphics, you need to be beaten about the head with a bat with a nail through the end. And although I too love my 2D adventure games, I've yet to find anything to compain about with these fancy new 3D games. Personally, I find the pictures that Telltale has released to be full of the charm that Steve imbued into the comics. And in the comics, Max always seemed to be made out of rubber to me.
That’s kinda my point - since the absolute bottom of the line system from dell is more then enough for B&W2 - The spec is well within the range of the average Joes home users system.
Like I said B&W2 doesn’t just do fur, graphically it needs to process a whole island including ground, trees, grass, plants, worshippers, god effects, weather effects, etc... all of which can be dynamically zoomed, rotated, etc... Far more processing than would ever be required for an adventure title in 2006....
They could include fur using a much more modest spec system than B&W2 required - here’s not that much real-time rendering required for an adventure game after all - the interactivity is generally scripted, walking around would following the same pre-defined animation paths, etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while it IS feasible technologically (the expected computers for the average Joe user should be up to the task (can you even buy 64MB graphics cards these days? standard on-board Intel chipsets have 64MB as an absolute minimum - 1 gig systems have been available since 1998 - how far back do average Joe’s systems really use?) Can you even buy 1.6 gig systems anymore?
I reckon the problem for tell-tale is cost - If nothing else there’s R&D involved to updating the game engine, re-styling the whole games look to make sure the fur doesn’t look out of place with the current style, figuring out how it should look and move, etc...
Naa - screw'em all!
Personally, I wouldn’t mind if the game used the same engine as hit the road (as long as the gameplay, puzzles and gags were up to the same standard) - but at the same time, I don’t want to play a game in 2006 which has NES/C64 quality graphics (unless its a NES/C64 title, or some kind of retro type-thing, or it just looks right with those graphics, or...)
I'm not into the idea of fur on Sam or Max; I'd prefer it suited the comic book look - I just don't think the guy who asked for fur was being unrealistic in his request (as far as 'standard' system specs go).
The sketchbook that Steve was selling at Comic-Con has some reference drawings of Sam & Max that were (I think?) drawn for the people doing the cartoon show. One of the sketches is of Max's tail, and it specifically says "Not too furry."
I think that Max's animations are going to be just as important as his appearance (if not more so), and from what I've seen so far, fans won't be disappointed on that front.
He's got a clear picture in his mind and he wants to make sure this game (and anything else Sam and Max) fits his vision's parameters.
The point I'm trying to get to....if Steve Purcell thinks its good, its good enough for me.
Well sadly he kind of is. The key to 'Fur' and other stuff like that is generally shaders. Which Intel Integrated chipsets don't support. Despite speed and memory increases, those things are straight out of 1999.
Argghhh!! You've made me beat my head against my desk until it bleeds and white stuff has started coming out! People are staring now too!
The point of the last few posts was to point out that; not only is fur in games now a mainstream thing, and has been for the past eighteen months - two years also that fur in games doesn’t require mean Monsters Inc. level of processing (you don’t have to figure out the position of every hair, etc..).
You don’t have even have to go to B&W2 level of processing for hair, there are plenty of well known shortcuts/hacks that don’t require heavy shading (shaders or DirectX), shadows, lighting, antioscopic filtering, particle effects, model decals, reflection, volumetric lights/light density, FSAA, shadow details, soft shadows, texture filtering, Pixel doubling, the game running at 1600x1200 or even complex mathematical calculations - That it is suitably feasible to 'present' fur (even on a P3 800 with a stock Dell graphics card) and have the game running smoothly
This is especially true since Sam&Max is an adventure title using pre-defined movement (and animation) routines, static backgrounds, you don’t have to worry about how the hair will react to a breeze, when he shakes his head, etc... How it will react if the character jumps and then spins or spins and then jumps, etc...
Essentially it doesn’t have to dynamically react like fur, be processed like fur, be an accurate simulation of fur, it doesnt have to BE fur, it just has to LOOK like fur.
being a 'rabbity thingy' does not mean he is a rabbit with a fur, carrots and all that..
and if you would ask me i would say that the game looks GOOD!
of course 2d would be better but you can't have everything.
i'm glad that TellTale decided to make a point&click-adventure of it and not a 'keyboard-game' where you don't have to use the mouse
It would be cool if they could have make incorporated Steve Purcell's art style - Definitely have the feel of the strip then.
Then again, the original HTR graphics still look pretty neat to me;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sam_max.jpg
btw...if you have a pocketpc or a palm - try to play Sam&Max with ScummVM on it...it looks AWSOME!
I played S&M on my PSP. It was fun.
Frankly they look like overblown balloon animals.
I really hope Telltale Games will at least make nonshading or celshading an option in the game.
In it's basic implementation it isn't even that difficult to do.
Even just turning shading off completely, would be better than nothing.
Portable Scumm games? - Now that sounds cool!