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More Terragen 2 Test-RendersJanuary 12 2007 13:42:09. |
Here are some more test-renders I made. Both are set in a snowy mountain environment. Be sure to visit my Terragen page if you want to see all my terragen work.
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Terragen 2 Technology PreviewJanuary 06 2007 05:08:05. |
The people over at Planetside released the much anticipated Terragen 2 Technology Preview on December 15th 2006. I have been toying around with it a bit over the past couple weeks. Even for being a Technology Preview it's already pretty damn powerfull. And when I then read the quote below, which comes from their site, I start to wonder what they are all planning. :)
The Technology Preview does have some limitations. For example there isn't much configuring possible when it comes to water and the maximum rendering resolution is limited to 800 by 600. Also, it's not optimised for speed yet, seeing as it's just a preview. Rendering scenes can take quite a while with this Technology Preview, trust me I know. Half an hour, an hour or more for one rendered scene is no exception. Terragen 2 (Technology Preview) is an all new version of Terragen and has many new features. It contains a cutting-edge adaptive subdivision renderer and allows the rendering of entire planets, sweeping vistas, tiny rock gardens, or anything in between. Another much desired feature is the ability to import 3D objects for rendering. Combined with "instancing", this allows you to render millions of boulders or trees. You can also add multiple heightfields to your scene or use procedural terrains that can span an entire planet. Overhanging terrain is finally also available by using procedural displacements, image-based displacements, or imported geometry. Finally when it comes to clouds, Terragen 2 contains a much better system of volumetric clouds. Here are some first test-renders I made. Be sure to visit my Terragen page if you want to see some other! I updated this page to reflect the two different versions of Terragen.
Visit Planetside. |
Happy New Year !January 01 2007 03:30:30. |
Happy new year to you all. My best wishes for 2007 and may all your dreams come true. |
"The hows and whys of Level Design" BookDecember 23 2006 03:37:05. |
The book can only be ordered through Lulu.com who handles the ordering, payment, printing and shipping. They have extensive FAQ's so if things are unclear check those out or contact the Lulu.com staff. Lulu.com accepts creditcard payments of all major types as well as Paypal. They ship worldwide. There are two editions available. The first is a printed edition at 39.96USD/32.17EUR. The second is a digital PDF edition at 18.50USD/14.89EUR. I recently received my printed version of the book and I can assure you that the overall quality of the book is good. I haven't been able yet to read through the book, but seeing the history of Hourences, I'm sure it will be just as fine ;). Having browsed through it though I can definetely recommend this book. |
Titan Quest Patch 1.20September 26 2006 01:50:01. |
IronLore/THQ released another patch for Titan Quest. This patch mainly focuses on a few balancing issues. For example the melee characters are now better balanced and more playable. One thing they also changed is the difficulty of the end-boss. He used to be rather easy to kill, but now he's really hard to kill (perhaps too hard in my opinion). Apart from the balancing tweaks, they also included the possibility of disabling the day/night-cycle. Disabling this considerably increased performance for me! :) Read the full changelog of the patch. To update you can use the ingame updater, or one of the links below (depending on what version you're currently running). 1.01 ->1.20 (15MB) |
More small updatesSeptember 16 2006 04:20:55. |
I did a few small updates to the site. There were a couple of links to external webpages which didn't work anymore. In particular certain links to Planet-Generals were removed. This site went down some time ago and going to Planet-Generals now just forwards you to CnC Inside. This site however does not seem to contain the same downloads. Hence I removed the download-links that pointed to Planet-Generals. I also updated some other external links. Two internal links didn't work either. These have been fixed as well. |
Update your bookmarksSeptember 12 2006 11:05:40. |
As I mentioned in my last news post, this site has been completely redesigned. As a result your bookmarks will most likely not work anymore. Please update them! :) I have provided a forwarder for some frequently used links though, such as the UED FAQ, UED Links and so on. I also updated the RSS feed as there was a bug in it. It should work better now. |
New Site OnlineSeptember 11 2006 11:10:07. |
In a previous news-post I mentioned the fact that I'm checking out new possibilities to maintain this site. I also mentioned the possibility of returning to a combination of plain HTML and PHP-scripting. I decided to go for this combination. The site you see now is using my own system. Lay-out has been mostly centralized thanks to some PHP-scripting. The news uses a PHP-script which allows easy addition of new items and an archive script is available to browse through the old news. There is also an RSS feed available, if you want to stay up to date with the news of this website via an RSS-reader. The RSS-feed is even valid by feedvalidator.
Overall, the lay-out has been tweaked a bit with some small additions and touch-ups. I made the lay-out more consistent across the whole site as this wasn't entirely the case previously. I also went through all the existing HTML-code and cleaned it up considerably to make more use of CSS and remove unnecessary code. As you know, this site had been running SimplePHPBlog for a few years now. Back in the days I decided to use SimplePHPBlog because it would allow easy maintenance, yet it was an easy blogging system without too much features. However, over time a few hacks/security issues came up. This is however normal for any system being used by a certain amount of users and I certainly don't hold this against the makers of SimplePHPBlog. However, the system was purely made for blogging. Some of the extra things I did needed some manual adjustments in the system. On the other hand, SimplePHPBlog had a whole bunch of features I didn't need. The new system I use is I think more flexible and able to coop with some of the special things I need. Also, I coded it so I know what's going on. :) As always with a site redesign, there might be links that don't work or certain features which contain bugs. Please don't hesitate to contact me and let me know. |
![[Valid RSS]](images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
Titan Quest Patch 1.15 - BugAugust 30 2006 11:45:12. |
First of all, let me express my gratitude for the continued support by IronLore/THQ for this game. I've seen one too many publisher/developer dropping game-support after 1 or 2 patches have been released. Not so for IronLore/THQ! Keep it up please :). As I mentioned in my previous news post, they recently released a new patch. I installed patch 1.15 a couple hours ago and I've been playing it ever since. The option to disable shadows alltogether is great! It has definetely increased the overall performance of the game (even allowing me to increase texture-detail again). However there seems to be a glitch in the no-shadows option. Let me explain with the help of a few screenshots. Take a look at the first screenshot. The sharp edge between darker and lighter is out of place there and shouldn't be there. The lighting should be equal everywhere. However when I move so I stand in the lighter part of screenshot 1 the whole thing looks fine again (screenshot 2). It's very weird and it just switches between the two instantly. If I move back to the position I have in screenshot 1, the sharp edge in the lighting is back.
And here is another example (on the acropolis). Again it's a matter of moving just a little bit to trigger the difference in the two shots below. Here the flowerpots seem to keep the correct lighting though (I think).
I'm guessing this might have something to do with the fact that the whole game-world is divided in square segments? Perhaps the sharp-edge in my first example runs along the border of 2 segments of the world? I obviously don't know enough about the engine, but that would seem reasonable. The second problem I cannot explain though. Anyway, I don't seem to find a way to solve this :( I'm hoping IronLore/THQ is aware of this problem (I posted about the problem on a Tech-forum) and are able to solve this with another patch. Other then this problem, the new patch seems very stable! As I've said I've played it for a couple hours now. :) Thank you again IronLore/THQ and keep this up :) |
Titan Quest Patch 1.15August 29 2006 11:45:12. |
IronLore/THQ released a new patch for Titan Quest, a great game which unfortunately has quite some bugs. This new patch brings the game up to version 1.15 and tackles quite a few things. One of the major changes is that you can now turn shadows off! This gives quite a considerable performance boost, but you pay a bit of a eye-candy for it of course. The changelog:
They released 3 patches. Depending on the version you're currently running, you'll need to grab a different version of the patch. Or you can use the ingame updater of course.
Patch version 1.01 to 1.15 |
Titan Quest ScreenshotsAugust 19 2006 03:01:43. |
I uploaded a bunch of screenshots of Titan Quest which, albeit a bit flawed, is still an awesome game. Note: Some of these screenshots shows bosses and possible spoilers! You have been warned :) |
Site ProblemsAugust 02 2006 11:08:38. |
I'm aware that the site sometimes doesn't work or that it is sometimes very slow. I have however at this time no idea what's causing that. I'm looking into it. It started a couple days ago without any obvious reason. Both the old version of SimplePHPBlog and the new one I installed recently have shown this behaviour. I might even decide to revert back to my own website system (plain HTML with a bit of PHP) instead of SimplePHPBlog. I'm keeping my options open at this time. |
Titan Quest TipAugust 02 2006 11:06:14. |
After some more testing I finally found a way to play Titan Quest without too much trouble. So I thought I'd just post it. :) What I do now is start playing my game until I reach a rebirth fountain. Then I save the game, leave the game (to go back to the main menu) and reload my game. This seems to help a lot. Even better seems to be to just quit Titan Quest entirely from time to time and then restart it. This helps me, so it might help you. :) |
Website UpdateAugust 01 2006 02:42:45. |
A quick post to let you know that I updated the software of this site to its latest version. Graphically not a lot has changed though, but one of these days I might update the theme as well. |
Titan QuestJuly 28 2006 09:21:45. |
Recently I got Titan Quest, a game from Iron Lore and THQ. It's a hack & slash rpg game which is very Diablo-alike in gameplay (including the item-fever). Graphics-wise it's superb ... if you have the hardware to run it. On my old rig it runs, but of course I'm not running at high detail or anything. However, even then it looks nice. I can only imagine the thrill to play this game on high detail on a recent machine. :) For the most part I love this game. It's nice and it's got gameplay I like. It also has nice levels and environments where you can kill monsters as much as you want. There are however some problems with the game. I've been reading online of a lot of people who have problems with the game. I'm able to play the game quite a bit without too much crashes. However I've had very weird things happen while playing this game. Some of them are:
Overall, the game performance ain't all that good. This is possibly partly due to my machine, however other people have been complaining about performance while they have more recent machines. So it's not all down to just my old machine. I think the main problem here is in the configuration possibilities you have for the video-settings. There are just 4 or so. I realize that they possibly did this to make configuring the game easy. But having more control over what graphical details to use and what not should solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. Shadows come to mind. You can't seem to turn them off. I'm sure that if I was able to do that the game would run sooo much better. Especially with the day-night cyclus Iron Lore put in the game. This is very nice to see and all but at night your character emits light so that all monsters coming close to you cast shadows. This just hits performance quite badly. Another possible configuration item could be the amount of vegetation that should be rendered. Also when I first boot the game it runs nicely, but after a while it starts to act a bit weird. Then it runs nicely until for no apparant reason the game freezes for 10 seconds or so and then continues. Once this begins, this happens periodically, making the game way less enjoyable. This might be some sort of bug perhaps in Iron Lore's streaming technology? I'm not sure how it exactly works, but I know that the gameworld is subdivided in small parts, which can easily be loaded/unloaded on the fly so the player never sees a loading screen. While this works nicely, it seems to have its problems. Again, I'm not sure that this is the reason though. All of this makes me wonder if the game was rushed to the market? This has happened before and almost always resulted in bug-rich games. I cannot remember the last time a game acted this weird on my machine. It runs a lot of recent games without any problems. I'm talking about games like Doom III, Half-life 2, Battle for Middle Earth 2,...! ;) If this PC can run those games without a problem, then the performance issues/crashes in Titan Quest cannnot be blamed on my hardware. I really really hope Iron Lore and THQ are serious about supporting this game and try to release patches that solve these annoying bugs that make this great game (yes I mean that :) ) sometimes a pain to play. I realize that making a game is an immense effort and a technological challenge, but it seems to me that a lot of these bugs could be caught in more intense internal testing. They have shown good intention so far though. They already released 2 patches (1.08 and 1.11). I just hope they don't stop after 2 patches, as some other publishers/developers tend to do. If they can iron out the performance issues, this truly is a great game and I can imagine a considerable community evolving around this great game. :) Conclusion: So Iron Lore/THQ, you have a potential superb game that is however held back due to the performance issues/crashes. Please get those out. :) When the game runs nicely here I enjoy playing it a lot! ;)
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OMC 3 Prizes arrived!July 18 2006 08:20:07. |
As I told you in my last post, I would let you know when the prizes of OMC3 arrived. Well, today -almost a year after the contest has been over- they finally arrived. Better late then never I guess :) Anyway, I took some pictures of the package. Click on any of the pictures to see a larger version of it. The whole package unloaded:
Prize 1 (Renegade Soundtrack):
Prize 2 (Renegade Mousepad):
Prize 3 (Tiberian Sun Platinum Edition):
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Finally an update ... sort ofApril 30 2006 08:30:45. |
Yes yes, I know it's been a long time since I did anything on this site. Sorry for that. Real-life has been keeping me busy. :) Today, I did however update the blogging software used to run this site and played around a little with the fonts. The fonts didn't quite work out so that ended in no changes whatsoever. So nothing major changed, just general maintenance. The blog now does have emoticons. ;) On the mapping front, things have been a bit quiet. There is some news though. As you might remember my map Jungle Canyon came in second place of the Open Map Competition 3 (OMC3). Recently I received the cash prize associated with that place ($22) and the other prizes are in the pipeline to be shipped over to me. I'll keep you updated on that. |
Happy New Year!January 02 2006 13:52:16. |
Yeah, I know it's a bit late but happy new year to you all. May 2006 bring u whatever it is u desire :) |
Middle Man now also available at CNC HeadquartersDecember 28 2005 08:15:04. |
Middle Man, my latest map for Command and Conquer Zero Hour, is now also available over at the German community site CNC Headquarters. So drop by for a visit and while you're at it, why not give some of the other Headquarters Websites a visit (see below for a list)? :) Do note that these sites are in German. Read the news post about Middle Man on CnC Headquarters. Learn more about Middle Man. Headquarters Websites:
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Middle Man now available at Command and Conquer DENDecember 28 2005 04:17:25. |
Just a quick news entry to inform you that my latest map for Zero Hour is now available over at Command and Conquer DEN. It's a highly-detailed 3-player map set in a tropical/jungle environment. Be sure to give them a visit. Visit my page at Command and Conquer DEN. |
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