it isn't as open as stalker was. When you're done with a mission you can't revisit the area. It's closed.

I'd love to go back & just explore, like stalker. They should of included the traveling to parts as levels too, to make it more open. IMHO would of made the game that much cooler!

You can replay levels. Go into your map window, under your Objectives tab. You click on the mission you want and replay it. I was worried about that, too, when I noticed I couldn't enter them through the hub. It certainly isn't self-explanatory.

Plus, if your aim is to find gold/intel/books, the ones you didn't find will be the only ones left. That's perfect if you're bad at keeping track, like me.

My actual complaints :

- The actual layout has been made for console, it is such a pain to use the damn UI
- The default language is installed by looking at your OS language, there is absolutly no option to change it. The only way is to copy the whole cd on the HD, change a few parameter in the setup settings file, once we have the language files we wanted installed, to add another parameter to the shortcut to get the menu / subtitle with the chosen language.
- Files system of the engine completly changed, Editor not being implemented by default

MINORS :
- Not a big deal, but I kind of misses the fact that you could cook the grenade, your being able to lean left or left.
- Theres also seem to be a minor issue with AI cover, sometimes they will go out/in of cover repeatedly
- It seem like the firsts level were heavily based on showing the engine capabilities, physiscs, gore, functionalities, but after a certain point, all of thoses things seem to really not come back very often.

I thinks thats pretty much all of it, overall, I thinks this is a good game, had some pretty good moments during the firsts few missions. I didn't finish the game yet tough, so I can't judge on the rest of it.

i'm not a fan of the UI either, but those three don't affect the actual game for me, so I'm not counting non-game related things. I can't stand there's no "edit game" with "exit to menu" in a level too but then I found ALT+F4 seems to work.

ShaZe wrote:

The actual layout has been made for console, it is such a pain to use the damn UI

While I definitely agree the UI is pretty shitty, how does that make it designed for consoles?

ShaZe wrote:

Not a big deal, but I kind of misses the fact that you could cook the grenade

Actually, you can cook off grenades. I almost always do it that way, since the AI is really good at responding to them (they've even thrown a few back).

@The Happy Friar: did you check to make sure you can replay missions? Wolfenstein is so disappointingly cryptic with such a vital feature. I originally found it through accident...the UI isn't very good, indeed.

I didn't try replaying missions yet. I just wanted to be able to go BACK in a visited area. IE caverns seemed pretty cool to me.

One thing I'm especially loving: I had a theory I worked out on paper on how to do huge areas in D3 tech by, as far as everything is concerned, onyl have the areas exist if you see them. IE they 100% vanish when you don't see them (everything, brushes & all!). I always had the entity limits in my theory. Looks like Raven proved the theory right: areas can quickly appear when you open a door, walk around a corner, etc. So they don't exist & there's no computing necessary. Also works well with the random baddie patrols, etc.

The Happy Friar wrote:

I didn't try replaying missions yet. I just wanted to be able to go BACK in a visited area. IE caverns seemed pretty cool to me.

One thing I'm especially loving: I had a theory I worked out on paper on how to do huge areas in D3 tech by, as far as everything is concerned, onyl have the areas exist if you see them. IE they 100% vanish when you don't see them (everything, brushes & all!). I always had the entity limits in my theory. Looks like Raven proved the theory right: areas can quickly appear when you open a door, walk around a corner, etc. So they don't exist & there's no computing necessary. Also works well with the random baddie patrols, etc.

There's a clipping distance, too, with some objects. It's only noticeable from down a real long "hall". I'm sure they use large visportals, too. Even Call of Duty, for using idtech3, still uses portals all over the place to divide up sections.

Unfortunately, there's no way to actually "return" to a level and see the results of your carnage. It's like playing a realistic looking Super Mario World. You have your overworld maps, but whenever you enter and re-enter levels, you always start back at the beginning. At least you can still hunt down tomes, gold, and intel.

evilartist wrote:

While I definitely agree the UI is pretty shitty, how does that make it designed for consoles?

Whaat!

It cannot be more obvious than that, the whole thing has been designed to be a good interface for a controller. Thanks for god sake, they did't forgot that a mouse could click wherever the cursor was positionned.

Just look at the type of menu, buttons always on the bottom, such a great place to put them, ring-shaped menu system...., every action available to a button displayed in text.... I mean if you don't say it has not been designed for console, you are just blind lol.

As for the cooked grenade, that's a good news, I guess they just removed the ticketing.

ShaZe wrote:

Just look at the type of menu, buttons always on the bottom, such a great place to put them, ring-shaped menu system...., every action available to a button displayed in text.... I mean if you don't say it has not been designed for console, you are just blind lol.

I was wondering if that's what you meant (the ring-shaped list, button hints below, etc.). Just thought I'd ask to be sure we were on the same page. A simple list would've been better for the main menu. At least the pause screen had that right, even though it takes about 1 second for the damn thing to come up.

evilartist wrote:

There's a clipping distance, too, with some objects. It's only noticeable from down a real long "hall". I'm sure they use large visportals, too. Even Call of Duty, for using idtech3, still uses portals all over the place to divide up sections.

I don't think it's vis portals only, I think they unload/load sections of maps when they're not there. notice how the baddies seem to stay in an area & don't wander around the map, they stay at checkpoints? Not a complaint, just an observation!

Everything is streamed in real time... The world loads in realtime as the happy friar said
I tested this by spawning via console some enemies. (their texture needed to load and stuff) + you can sometimes see how the world loads

One time I turned around quickly and all the textures were super blurry for a moment...reminded me of BioShock actually.

The Happy Friar wrote:

evilartist wrote:

There's a clipping distance, too, with some objects. It's only noticeable from down a real long "hall". I'm sure they use large visportals, too. Even Call of Duty, for using idtech3, still uses portals all over the place to divide up sections.

I don't think it's vis portals only, I think they unload/load sections of maps when they're not there. notice how the baddies seem to stay in an area & don't wander around the map, they stay at checkpoints? Not a complaint, just an observation!

=FF=Sturm wrote:

Everything is streamed in real time... The world loads in realtime as the happy friar said
I tested this by spawning via console some enemies. (their texture needed to load and stuff) + you can sometimes see how the world loads

I guess that would explain the really quick load times. Even for current-gen hardware vs. old hardware (aka Doom 3 hardware), loading is pretty damn fast.

I wonder, why are some people having framerate issues? Even my Xbox 360, being classified as lower than low-end PC hardware, has zero performance problems (that's no exaggeration). How can this be?

evilartist wrote:

The Happy Friar wrote:

evilartist wrote:

There's a clipping distance, too, with some objects. It's only noticeable from down a real long "hall". I'm sure they use large visportals, too. Even Call of Duty, for using idtech3, still uses portals all over the place to divide up sections.

I don't think it's vis portals only, I think they unload/load sections of maps when they're not there. notice how the baddies seem to stay in an area & don't wander around the map, they stay at checkpoints? Not a complaint, just an observation!

=FF=Sturm wrote:

Everything is streamed in real time... The world loads in realtime as the happy friar said
I tested this by spawning via console some enemies. (their texture needed to load and stuff) + you can sometimes see how the world loads

I guess that would explain the really quick load times. Even for current-gen hardware vs. old hardware (aka Doom 3 hardware), loading is pretty damn fast.

I wonder, why are some people having framerate issues? Even my Xbox 360, being classified as lower than low-end PC hardware, has zero performance problems (that's no exaggeration). How can this be?

Well, I experienced some delay in control input... Overall framerate is ok, but... but.. with my config

Intel Quad core Q9300 @2.50 ghz
8 gigs of ram
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT 512

the game runs with decent framerate at 1920x1080, but with a HUGE delay in input from both keyboard and mouse... At 1280x900 the delay is still there, it's minor but there is... But again, overall framerate is ok...

i get no delay @ all @ 1440x900....

I get super fps in multiplayer rofl

r_skipinteractions 1
com_gpuspec 0
r_shadows 0
r_skipatmosphere 1
r_skipatmosinteractions 1

The single player on the other hand runs excellent without tweaks and at high resolutions. The MP is fucked up

Musings: health systems, hub maps, and wolf.

There's certainly downsides to a full health regen, while it does promote the player taking risks (and ups the battle pace in general), it actually goes too far in that direction, without the increased danger of low health, it lends to gung-hoism as the player goes into every battle with full health.

Traditional health is a more longer term resource management than regen, the downside being you can get intro extremes of situations where you're coming into a new battle at very low health where a sneeze can knock you over, or in a full engagement with multiple enemies it can be difficult to retreat - doubly so if the ai flanks or spreads out (I could go on about it promoting quicksave/load abuse which could be viewed as a manual derivation of health regen)
On the up side lower health promotes caution coming in to encounters, and (if the game design supports it) stealth.

This is where Wolfenstein fell down, it had stealth mechanics, it had a more open hub world with multiple routes, but both of those were short changed by health regen as you are pretty much at full strength every single encounter.

There's are benefits to hub maps for single player (that are similar from multiplayer maps). In traditional single player, linear levels, the player is likely to play through a level once - and while this can be fun from a exploration/appreciation of new stuff standpoint - the downside is that the players knowledge of the space is just being formed and is generally poor, and resulting decisions under pressure (combat) can be poor.
A hub map however, much like a multiplayer map, pushes multiple play throughs of the same space (as well as having a greater connectivity/more routes than traditional linear level design).
With knowledge of where threats are likely to be, the layout of the battle space, routes in and out can lead to much more satisfying encounters.

That said, I don't think the battle spaces, or at least the deployments of enemies in the Wolf hub were all that good, basically the lead in routes were too cramped in many cases to have a solid engagement.

Back to traditional linear level design, it actually proves promblematic for a traditional health system, there will be situations of low health where the player will backtrack through the emptied level they have come through to find health (I could go into how this contributes towards quicksave/quickload abuse), which understandably breaks pacing.

ShaZe wrote:

- The default language is installed by looking at your OS language, there is absolutly no option to change it. The only way is to copy the whole cd on the HD, change a few parameter in the setup settings file, once we have the language files we wanted installed, to add another parameter to the shortcut to get the menu / subtitle with the chosen language.

I bought the english version and while the speech was english, the menus were not: they were german on my german WinXP box. All I had to do was to change the shortcut though:

for SP: your\path\to\wolfenstein\SP\Wolf2.exe +set sys_lang "english"
for MP: your\path\to\wolfenstein\MP\Wolf2MP.exe +set sys_lang "english"

This may be more complicated if the speech files for your language weren't installed, of course.

i see quite a bit of z-fighting/texture flicker. anyone else?

pbmax wrote:

i see quite a bit of z-fighting/texture flicker. anyone else?

I didn't want to nitpick anything graphic-wise, but I have noticed that, too. And these aren't hard-to-see spots that you'll only notice when searching for secrets. I see ones that are within door and window frames that are along main paths. I can't imagine anyone could miss them. Were the level designers just being lazy or were they being rushed?

Speaking of weak level building: in Downtown west, when you go up the first veil ladder to a ledge and go through a veil wall, there's two windows overlooking the Nazis below. Have you noticed that the window frames are slightly higher than their wall framing. They look about 2 units off. I'm sure most people won't notice that much, but I always go up there...so I always notice. I can never stop looking at it.

Well lets see its to easy things die way to easily, upgrades are unbalanced they could use a better weapon carry system but all in all its a good game burred by flaws more than a unfinished game buried by flaws like bioshock and fallout 3....