I think they won't reach player base larger than 20 people.

It's honestly less dead than some other games I could mention. I rarely have trouble getting a quick duel or FFA going. Obviously Quakelive is still way more populated, but Reflex isn't exactly a ghost town right now. https://steamdb.info/app/328070/graphs/

New weapon models are completely godawful in comparison to what they had shown before.

Disappointed. :(

aeon made a very good point on the reflex forums how the q3 weapon design fit in so many different visual settings and schemes because of its simplicity.. i think too this should be guiding them when desiging it all..

also i dont know why you think this means loss of quality, its just change of style.. the models that you see now will look great once theyere textured properly and everything

It's not just a change of style, I'm afraid it's also a restriction of style. During the last couple releases, you've had the choice of making both fully textured maps or minimalistic maps. But from now on you can only go with minimalistic picmip style because the performance of the textures will be practically ignored throughout the development and therefore not supported by default, according to Newborn. As a player I see no problem with this, but as a mapper and a video editing enthusiast I see a loss in creativity and quality. Not to mention this kind of art style is already used up as hell.

I was hyping about the steampunk-ish theme and the ambition the devs had with that style, but not with this one. That's now gone for me.

Maybe it's just me but I really don't think it looks bad at all, at least in those couple of gifs on the forum post. I guess I'll reserve judgment until I actually play on the new update.

Yes perhaps I shouldn't be complaining yet either. They said the performance will get better along with this style, which is kind of reassuring for my gameplay experience.

I wrote up a giant reply but my browser ate it, so here is a shorter version:

As far as theme goes, fully textured Teslapunk would have been far more restrictive on map creators. Since there was 0 chance of us being able to develop any more themes than "Teslapunk Industrial", all the meshes and textures would have been created specifically for that style. It would have been extremely difficult to use those assets to create something gothic, sci-fi, organic, etc.

With the new style allowing us to do things like change the color/material type/scale of every mesh brush, and the fact that lower detail meshes are inherently more reusable across themes, there is now a ton more flexibility for mappers.

In the gothic theme shown, the bricks and big wooden pillars were both originally created for an industrial set but it was trivial for me to use them in a gothic scene.

I grabbed the brick, scaled it down, changed the color from grey to blue and started covering walls and floors with it. Then I grabbed the wooden pillars, lightened up the wood color slightly and changed the steel support bits to a more gothic-appropriate iron.

I also built a flag on the wall out of brushes, since we don't have a proper mesh for it yet. Despite it being a pretty quick and nasty job, it still fit in with the rest of the art.

If you had these tools when you were making Smiledm1, you would have had a whole lot more options. For example, you wouldn't have had to have shiny, orange dirt -- you could have easily made the brushes whatever brown you wanted and given them a less shiny look with an appropriate material.

If however, you'd been working with a fully-textured, AAA-studio quality Teslapunk theme, your options would have been way more limited.

You wouldn't have been able to create white sci-fi panels, because there's no reason to have them in Teslapunk. You would have instead had a choice of brick and cement.

You wouldn't have been able to use any of the meshes as they would also be far more industrial-only.

You could have still just details out of brushes but next to high-poly meshes, they would have looked extremely out of place and amateur.

All of that of course assumes you're worried about the THEME being limited, not the STYLE. But allowing various styles was never something we intended to do, nor would want to do.

Even if we ignore the technical headache of maintaining X unique shaders and lighting systems for each style. AND we ignore the art headache of creating X variations of the same assets for each different style, we STILL wouldn't do it.

Yeah, being able to create a low-poly map or a cell-shaded map or a pixel art map or a painterly map or a realistic map sounds vaguely cool in theory, but it ultimately leaves the game unrecognisable and maps vastly over-valued for their style, not their gameplay.

Imagine you were watching a trailer or a stream and every new callvote made the game look like Doom1, then CoD, then Doom4, then Quake3, then Warsow, then Minecraft, then World of Warcraft. It would be a mess.

The current approach gives a unified style across ALL themes. It doesn't even require the picmip/high vis bullshit of before -- it's easy to make maps that are clean looking, with visible players and items, that are still pretty and still have plenty of depth cues.

Anyway yes, that was the short version.

>I wrote up a giant reply but my browser ate it
If you use FF, get the Textarea Cache addon

I apologise in advance to the modeller but the viewmodels are seriously awful. They look like a toddler was sat down at a computer and told they couldn't have ice cream until they smashed enough shapes of indeterminate colour and size together in Blender. (They're also odd sizes and positions[?])

They should be individual and distinct. All the other changes are good.

Also, why does Reflex use ridiculous% of my 7970 even when absolutely nothing is happening?

Better than Steampunk. It's the right decision.

Diabetical

kik

dont sad ,no need you shred your tears

Well, having bought the early access Reflex, im sad by this change. I feel this is a very basic issue that they should have realized before, its a huge change, that concept art looked really cool, etc. No textures in 2015 due to performance? Nay. Lets make it 2d next, even more performance! Its obvious this decision is mainly to shorten development time, not performance. Yeah it will be ready sooner, but the result will be far from what originally was planed, at least graphically. Im disappoint.

a decision to simplify art style to improve development cycles during software alpha? ridiculous!1

Its not ridiculous, but it wasnt what we were told would happen so im 100% entitled to dislike the change Mr. Anonymous Fanboy.

We never said it was for performance reasons -- like you said here (and we said in the actual preview post), its largely so we can develop art much faster and actually get the game to something polished and 'final' before we die of old age.

Reflex runs at 300fps+ on our machines with textures so we're not exactly struggling to find the performance.

The point was though, that with this new style, one of the extra bonuses is that we CAN milk more performance from it. Although that doesn't matter much to anyone who can run Reflex at high FPS already, there are a lot of players out there who can't.

We're not changing the art style to cater to those players. That's just a bonus.

I understand your reasons as developer, for me as a gamer its a big change anyway.

you are very shallow

Here's my idea you can lift if you are looking for a single player mode.

Have it be about spaceships. Each level is yourself infiltrating a spaceship (from some different races of aliens), and destroying all enemies and getting to the core of the spaceship. After defeating the stylized boss you input some kind of virus (think independance day) to make the spaceship explode.

Right when you do that, then the countdown starts and you must trickjump from the core to your ship and then escape. The trickjumps and shit must be done in awesome fashion or the time runs out and you die and must repeat the sequence..

This way you get the element of defrag + fragging aliens.

The main plot/characters etc can be made pretty easy around what I just said.

I like the shotgun and the new rocketlauncher. The others are meh.

The gameplay will have to be really good to not make it look like plastic, indie, FPS wannabie.
Butt clenched.

An inordinate amount of complaining from people who would play with Lego-style picmip 9999 anyway. So in other words, no news at all coming from the most unreasonably entitled group of crybabies on Earth: the Quake community. None of you have ever written a single line of code in your lives. You don't know anything about development cycles, asset production, or anything of the sort. So please, stop whining for once in your insignificant lives (and stick to playing games, while those with intelligence actually DESIGN them).

>stick to playing games

Honestly we probably would, if these games had a community or competent devs that could attract one































bait

LOL dude, how retarded can you be? I play QL with picmip 0, bloom, etc. So talk for yourself, and if you are brave enough, make an account so we can ignore you, thanks.

Also implying only devs are intelligent and players arent, lol dude, gtfo to your cod forum where you belong.

Changing art style monthly is not exactly a sign of plans going accordingly through some intelligent plan that they wrote up in day one. Sure it takes some wits to know when and where to make changes, but I'm sure the devs realize themselves as well that they just wasted a lot of time working on one art style and then scrapping half of it basically. They probably feel like idiots right now after showing us stuff from the earlier art set few months back, which is never going to happen now. Also, I think I made some good points in my OP about why and how the lack of textures affects us picmippers too, but feel free to ignore it and all. I don't care. I'm not the one shooting myself on my feet by writing preemptively implying troll comments that conveniently turn 100% into troll the instant I realize I'd just written something completely lacking of intelligence.

That's just not true.

I once tried learning HTML on that site that teaches you HTML and I made a webpage that had not one, but TWO images of flufflepuff. One of the images was even a clickable link.

So you, sir, can fuck right off.

I once tried learning HTML

Sounds like you succeeded motherfucker

In my defense, I was very tired when I typed my reply. Probably from all that coding.

In the current state (placeholder, I hope) these weapons look worse than Warsow. But I guess as long as they'll give the weapons actual animations (instead of these awkward, artificial-looking translations while shooting/switching) it'll be fine. Unlike textures and geometry, animations are the one art-related aspect where you simply cannot compromise and expect a decent-looking result.

can someone give me an example of a game that looks good without textures?

tetris

This seems odd. How will they do their microtransatcions and weapons skins and hats when the weapon models look so bad? It seems contrary to their business plan for the game. Maybe they'll change it back to the first art style when they get it to the point where engine, gameplay, and matchmaking changes are near-final?

Looks like shit.
10 steps backwards.
I honestly don't care about this game though.
But it looks really shitty.

nice weapon design

NOT

hahaha

ha

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Visual clarity, faster art, better performance, more flexibility for mappers, wider variety of visual themes.

The only downside is that casuals wont be able to latch onto super high poly models and textures, but they still might be enthralled if the geometry, colours and overall aesthetic is looking nice.

I think the gothic map in the gifs looks pretty damn tasty

more flexibility for mappers

Minimalism is pretty much the only style you can go for from now on. There won't be flexibility for using custom textures, at least they're not planning on spending time optimizing them to work properly. It's kind of what I was looking forward to myself, but it was wrong of me to assume there was going to be freedom of style and creativity with the editor like there was back in Quake/Doom days. But as a player it's not going to budge me much.

I just hope they wont force cel shading next.

Surely this allows them to create a fuck ton of assets in a variety of styles as opposed to only having the resources to create high poly teslapunk assets and release a couple every patch.

Also

With the new style allowing us to do things like change the color/material type/scale of every mesh brush, and the fact that lower detail meshes are inherently more reusable across themes,

Yeah but you know, texturing is le passion :(

i dont think casuals necessarily want that, atleast a large portion doesnt. the game just has to be pretty. and thats still possible with this visually minimalistic artstyle.

even tho i dont like LoL, and i think dota2 looks better. LoL also has a minimalistic artstyle hat looks nice/aesthetic, if you know what i mean.

Now it looks like Warsow, GeGe...

I told you so. I understand it was hard for some to understand my criticism to what once was a blank canvas, but anyway.

It's easy to destroy and hard to create.

You sound like a little kid angrily kicking someone else's sandcastle on a beach because your own sandcastle was shitty.

This looks like Nerf Arena Blast.

nerf arena has textures

nerf arena was the shit

I wonder what most of you all referring to, are you a part of some secret test group that already have access to it so you can judge it already?

There is one image of sample environment that was probably put together quickly just to show some kind of preview. Maybe it would be wise to first give it some time, let people learn it, see the results than and judge after that.

The closest example I can think of is probably minimum
https://playminimum.com/wp-content/uploads/20...ot_08M.jpg
https://playminimum.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/TER03_01.jpg

which doesnt look that bad at all and it doesnt even use materials per say. If you can take it as a base and start adding 'realistic' things into the mix like actual water/lava that is not a texture and cloths that reacts to enviroment and combine it with proper light system and start breaking the flat surfaces with meshes I think it has a potential to look good and unique.

Obviously there are pros/cons and it could have looked like this http://www.resimsi.com/wp-content/uploads/201...garden.jpg but I guess realistically speaking not before 2050 unless they scrap the whole project and start over with UE4 and trying to fix their input/netcode but I guess they would finish roughly at the same time.

The last link tries to give my computer AIDS or something.

I am skeptical of it's promised performance improvements, based on how the game works in the current and previous builds. Since they're removing textures, they will have to compensate the lack of detail with brush detail. The maps with lowest FPS rate for me are thct7 and thcdm13, from which I'm fairly sure it's because you were using brushes and meshes instead of textures. Every map with excessive mesh and brush usage which fills entire corridors and areas comes with the heaviest FPS drops for me.

Keep in mind that I play without textures already. Assuming there's no performance improvements, it's only going to get worse for me. So basically their engine will have to be optimized a lot to compensate the increase of brushes and meshes which in themselves contain a lot of tris/brushes/polygons or whatever. I am extremely skeptical that they can achieve this already at 0.36, but I'd gladly be wrong about this too.

lmao its warsow. at least its not steampunk.

>playing this when QL is already there
Whats the fucking point in any case.

QL is as slow as CS zzz

movement is way more enjoyable in reflex IMO

Quake Live is fun

Reflex is fun

They are different games. Play them both and you can have 2 different enjoyable experiences.

Your ass hates your face and that's the point.

I understand the change (limited dev resources) but man I'm kinda disappointed by it. The textured version of thcdm13 I saw on youtube (can't find link) looked amazing. I think I'm one of the few players who actually used r_detailtextures 1 in cpma

*edit* found it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSeNtzIxlHA

I think ive read somewhere that current textures will come as meshes if that makes any sense, Im not sure tho.

im guessing the map will look practically the same, minus the floor textures.

except for the textured floor(and the tree ofcourse), the rest of thcdm13 is very minimalistic anyway. the bolts in the wall and the rocks lying around add alot to create a nice athmosphere, but they aren't textures.

rabble rabble rabble

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I'd like to see him square off with Sane.

Post is SRS.....

Wootpty woot!!

Wootpty woot!!

DOA

gamers these days are all about graphics. What you should have done is focus on the graphics and single player (painkiller) and then made the multiplayer a ton of fun (better than painkiller)

And it would have been a hit.

Now... nah its fucked. Sorry, anyone who thinks this game will succeed is high as a kite. I play quake for the gameplay but the kids these days are all about what looks awesome. so gg :<

I bet if we take quake live(without loadouts hahaha :D) copy-paste it in new uber modern advanced high tech engine with graphics, physics, particles, limbs all over the place, blood, gore, flames, effect, etc - it will be huge success. You are right - nowdays it's all about graphics... and let's be honest - who of us wouldn't want to see the detailed modeled head of our enemy explode after headshot with the railgun in overtime last seconds? I mean... we are older, we are about the gameplay and still it won't hurt to have the same gameplay/game in modern outfit to match the technology advance over the years.

yeah instead of q3 to ql they should have made q3 into that you described, did not happen tho

What you should have done is focus on the graphics and single player (painkiller) and then made the multiplayer a ton of fun (better than painkiller)

And it would have been a hit.

My advice too is to make a game that is basically perfect in every way possible. That seems like a good idea. Why aren't you getting on that, newborn?

del

minecraft is fucking multiplayer lego what the fuck would graphics add to it?

Something like quake or doom needs graphics to be immersive, the first time i tried quake 1 i was astounded at the graphics it was amazing. The gameplay is why i stay around but the graphics is what hooked me at first.

I'm actually going around playing ps2 games I skipped because they looked very visually bad but have really solid ratings for gameplay.

That new "art style" is bs. Grab a brick, change color from grey to yellow and you have a piece of wood...
Wasn't the point of reflex to have quake3-like game on a newer engine, with some extra stuff (matchmaking etc.)? Now instead of the very old 1999 look, we get the 80s no textures style.

What about making some very generic textures? Like being in grayscale and the color is set by the dev? Eg. "cracked stone". Or something like this: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/rsrc/Three/Ter...amples.gif
+ bumpmaps so the depth perception is better.

Its not only bc of the work of texturing, but to improve performance, so no.

Increasing brush count to replace missing texture detail sounds so counter intuitive for improving performance though. Textures, normal maps and bumpmaps can always be turned off, brush detail not as much.

Agreed, im clueless.

You can reduce mesh detail with LoDs but to be honest, you've got a pretty dated understanding of game engines. Things like pixel shaders and lots of buffers can easily hurt cards more than polycounts.

My general understanding of game engines is that the more stuff there is on the screen rendering at once, the slower frames per second rate comes as result, I have yet to seen some magic engine where it is not the case. And as it so happens it seems to apply to what I'm observing in your engine as well, maps with a higher mesh/brush count simply run slower whereas maps with equivalent texture details run faster (and even faster when you turn the textures, shaders or both off).

This is not entirely performance related, but imagine brickwall cavities of some brickwall mesh, will you be able to flat them out completely by turning LoD down or will the depth and texture always remain there no matter what? The depth of those walls is pretty much the same as having textures and the harder you make it to disable them the worse it is for people seeking for minimal distractions imo. Textures and shaders makes it easier to adjust the distraction/visual/performance ratio and you can only control polycount LoD to a point without making it look unbearably bugged or trippy.

what the hell man? didnt he already tell you its not for performance reasons in this very thread?

Agreed, im clueless.

Some vector based textures would be cool too. Could even let players toggle them on/off

play more warsow

to be fair even at that state it looks better than wsw

Feels better too.

does this have a release date?

this month

wow, though it was 2016

shootersman said he still has extra stuff that came up, but prolly 2 weeks or so

I too am a picmip fag and I like how reflex is coming along.