A
tweet
from last night has the news that
Allison Road is cancelled,
saying: "Hi all. Sadly Allison Road had to be cancelled. Statement to come in
the next few days. Thx for all your support and very sad it came 2 this" (thanks
nin). This first-person, survival/horror game intended as an homage to
Silent
Hills and
P.T. launched a Kickstarter campaign
last September only to cancel it
three weeks later because of the
"AMAZING" news that Team17 had stepped up with an offer to publish the game.
There's been little news on the project since then, and it seems we will have to
wait and see if we get any further explanation of what went wrong here.
A
post on Battle.net discusses plans to increase the draw distance in
World
of Warcraft in the upcoming
Legion expansion for the MMORPG, adding
the ability to see more distant objects, and adding textures to things
previously seen as silhouettes (thanks
Ant). Here's more on the process,
including how it involves the addition of LOD for game models, something you
might assume was in there from the start, as it is not a cutting-edge
concept:
There are two numbers that contribute to how far the player can
see terrain and structures in World of Warcraft. These numbers are the “fog
distance”—a depth from the camera at which point any object’s pixels are fully
converted to the fog color—and an overall draw distance, after which we clip all
object geometry, preventing anything past that point from drawing. On lower
settings, you can see the second value as terrain and buildings seem to melt
into existence, fully fogged, before slowly getting colored as you get closer to
them.
In Warlords, the highest-end hardware that can reliably run the Ultra setting
manages to push the fully fogged distance to about 1,300 “game units” (yards).
After that point, all objects would be drawn filled in with the fog color until
the clipping distance. The same setting in Legion will draw out to 2,600 game
units. Those who currently play at High settings in Warlords and see out to
1,000 units will see 2,200 units in Legion. Graphics Level 10 is currently set
at 3,500 game units, which you can see in that last screenshot. It’s important
to note that due to memory considerations, all of these new draw distances are
only available in the 64-bit client.
If you’re interested in the “how,” a bulk of the effort to achieve this went
into changing the way we draw terrain and water in WoW to render fewer vertices
at a distance. But it also necessitated the implementation of Level of Detail
(LOD) for game models, like trees, and buildings as well. A model with LOD can
swap to a lower polygon count model at a distance without negatively impacting
the visual quality of the scene. We prototyped aspects of these systems in both
Warlords of Draenor and Mists of Pandaria and learned enough from those two
expansions to feel confident about making this change in Legion.
The
Unknown Worlds
website now offers a new update for
Natural Selection 2, updating the
action/strategy game to version 301. In addition to fixes and changes, the new
version comes with a new map that's free to all owners of the game. Here are
some details:
Welcome to Caged, the newest official map in the NS2
universe. A throwback to the original NS1 Map by Nelson ‘manah’ Ferryman,
Flaterectomy and other community contributors and testers have worked to honor
the original but also offer a new take for the current state of play. Caged
offers players a fun four techpoint map with plenty of res and unique rooms and
corridors for epic combat engagements.
What would a new map be without some other goodies? As a special treat, players
who play on caged for two hours or more within the first week of release will
unlock a new skulk skin. This can only be earned until June 10, 2016. After this
date you will only be able to trade or buy it from players that earned it in the
community marketplace. Get it FREE while you can!
Here's Valve's report of the 10 bestselling titles on
Steam for last week:
- Total War: WARHAMMER
- DOOM
- Youtubers Life
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN
- ARK: Survival Evolved
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Game + Expansion Pass
- Stellaris
- Grand Theft Auto V
I'm feeling better today, as at some point yesterday some sort of bug overtook
me. I started feeling like a nap in the afternoon, and MrsBlue was the first one
who suspected something was wrong when she found me wrapped in a blanket on a
warm spring day. Turns out I had a 101°F fever, and I needed the blanket
to stave off the chills. I'm not sure what was up... my stomach was bothering me
a little Friday night, so I suppose it could have been mild food poisoning, but
I don't know what I would have eaten to cause that. Oh well, it seems to have
run its course quite quickly, so it could have been a lot worse.
R.I.P.:
Lady
Rowena, author of several epic Thief 2 add-on Missions (from a couple of
weeks ago). Thanks Brenda.
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