Max Payne 2 Impressions

[Yatta]

All we've been given so far are some brilliant screenshots, and a few key features from the game.

FEATURES INCLUDE:


Storyline - a violent, Film Noir love story between a cop and a femme fatale murder suspect, between Max Payne and Mona Sax. Dark, tragic and intense, the story is a thrill-ride of shocking twists and revelations.

Max Payne's signature slow motion gunplay has been improved on every level. Get ready for Bullet Time 2.0.

New guns and new moves make action more cinematic and intense than ever before.

Fully integrated Havok physics engine allows for interactive environments creating incredible combat scenes. Ragdoll characters and physics in slow motion create breath-taking combat scenes.

All new AI - cooperative NPC's fight with Max and more believable enemies create tension and more interesting and varied challenge.

A stunning level of detail: Extremely detailed environments with photorealistic textures, highly enhanced radiosity lighting and extremely lifelike characters (including facial animations & lip synchronization) provide a visually staggering cinematic experience.

Massive production values - including a motion picture stunt crew, professional talent for voice acting and graphic novels, motion capture and authentic digital source material from New York City. <font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">First Impressions
I have to agree when people say sequels in general can suck. There've been many failing attempts to create good sequels. Unreal 2, for example, had little new content and did not interest many people. I doubt it sold as much as they wanted it to sell (obviously). Personally, I thought it was a decent game...

There have, however, been many successful sequels. Not just for games, but for movies and other types of media. Personally, I think Max Payne 2 will be a great game. Now I haven't played the game, and I haven't watched the trailer yet because it's not available to the public at the moment. But something I do know is that it is being made by the same team, in the same brilliant (but improved) engine, and obviously new features (I.E. Bullet Time 2.0). These are the key factors that will make this game kick-ass, and this is why I'm looking forward to this game. In fact, it's on the top of my must-buy list! images/icons/smile.gif

Thanks, and I hope you've enjoyed reading this post. Best Regards,

Yickle. Uhh... I mean Yatta. images/icons/blush.gif

[dark_angel]

Max Payne 2 will be great no doubt about that !
I hope the sequel will live up to everybody's expectations !

[London_Midge]

How can you give impressions of a game you haven't played? images/icons/confused.gif

[FullMetalJacket]

Hey Yatta,

One thing I can't stand is when people talk about Unreal2. Sure, I agree that it's a pretty dull game, but I don't like it when they say that "it's disappointing because the first game was so good..."
Which is absolute bullcrap. The first Unreal was absolute shit, and it wasn't optimized for 3D cards so it usually only ran at playable framerates in the shitty-looking software rendering.... and its only redeeming quality was its brilliant multiplayer, which was vastly improved in UT.
But sometimes sequels are good. Take NOLF2 for example. I liked some of the changes it made, like the RPG stats system, the revamped AI, and the incredible lip-synch. However, some things in NOLF1 were better ... I liked the long cutscenes (it's a shame the cutscenes in NOLF2 weren't longer so you could see how damn good the lip-synch was), and the first game had many more guns and gadgets, much better music, twice as many levels, more gameplay variety, and a lot more hilarious conversations between guards with funny accents. And I liked the original HARM uniforms much better. In the second game, I mean, every single HARM thug was overweight! It was stupid.
UT2003 I generally like better than UT.
Raven Shield is leagues ahead of the other Rainbow Six games.

My point is, don't act like MP2 will be a disappointment. It's virtually IMPOSSIBLE for the game to NOT deliver. At first I was about to say that it would fix everything that was wrong with the first game...but then, nothing was wrong with the first game, as it's the absolute best that could have been done at the time. images/icons/smile.gif

But MP2 will have things that I wanted in the first game, like ragdoll physics, facial animations, every enemy being unique, and every enemy having as much detail as Max himself.

And besides, who cares, even if the game gets negative reviews, many people will still buy it. And if the game makes even $1 of profit there'll be another sequel, I'm sure. images/icons/grin.gif

[SkavenRMD]

FullMetalJacket;
(it's a shame the cutscenes in NOLF2 weren't longer so you could see how damn good the lip-synch was)<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">That's a moot point.

(always wanted to say that)

The excellent cutscenes of NOLF 2 were all lovingly hand-crafted. This time around, the team decided to focus on quality, not quantity. So instead of long and somewhat bland cutscenes, we got short, brilliant, emotionally involving ones.

In a nutshell, animation looks only as good as how much time you spend on it. The longer it is, the more work you need to spend on each second of animation to make it look good.

( You have no idea how much work it takes to make convincing, expressive character animation, do you? Eh? *poke* images/icons/smile.gif )

[hemlock_0]

Originally posted by FullMetalJacket:
Hey Yatta,

One thing I can't stand is when people talk about Unreal2. Sure, I agree that it's a pretty dull game, but I don't like it when they say that "it's disappointing because the first game was so good..."
Which is absolute bullcrap. The first Unreal was absolute s**t, and it wasn't optimized for 3D cards...<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I prefered the atmosphere of the first game. It wasn't about technology and framerates for me, it was about the experience as a whole. Unreal 2 was so linear and controlling, guiding you around by the hand, which is fine in and of itself but it was a sharp contrast to the original game. I loved the 'I'm on my own, what the heck do I do now?!" feel of the first game, and although the second game improved on almost every other level, I felt like I was watching a movie and not like it was really up to me what happened.

Not to go off topic, though; Max Payne will, I believe, not suffer from excessive changes in the interest of making it 'better'. Giving the people more of what they enjoyed the first time around is the obvious way to go. If you were to change Max Payne into a bullet time-driven 'find the object' game, for example, it would lose it's fan base even though the developers would be incorporating more 'popular' game elements.

[ 08-28-2003, 11:10 AM: Message edited by: hemlock_0 ]

[Synti]

I trust on the good ol' Finnish know-how images/icons/grin.gif

[Uisor]

what I'm interested is can you make facial expression to your mods?

That would be very had, I believe.

[SkavenRMD]

Facial animation is like any skeletal animation. It's not really an "engine feature", the characters just have 'bones' in their faces that can be animated like the rest of the body. It is, rather, a design decision whether to add facial bones or not, since a large number of bones in the character also means larger memory and CPU usage.

In this sense, creating facial animation for mods shouldn't be any more of a problem than creating body animations.

[j]

So, um, is stuff like lip-sync automatic? Like, you assign a sound to a character and it's analyzed somehow and the lips move accordingly?

And can you assign a facial expression to a character, say in a cutscene, at frame x and the character will have that expression from frame x until a new expression is assigned and stuff like lip sync will still work nicely?

And oh, more good sequels: Baldur's Gate 2! Fallout 2! Umm.. Virtua Fighter 2 (and 3 and 4)!

[London_Midge]

Originally posted by Yatta:
That explains it. images/icons/smile.gif [/QB]<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">No, that explains why you posted, now how you can get an actual impression of a game.

[eggyolk]

I think Max Payne was so good because no one was expecting, anticipating it to top a previous game.

Expect nothing, recieve something.

[FullMetalJacket]

Originally posted by hemlock_0:
I loved the 'I'm on my own, what the heck do I do now?!" feel of the first game<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">That's part of why the first game sucked! I must have spent three and a half hours trying to find my way out of the crashed prison ship, the "Vortex Rykers," in the first level. Find-the-switch/object gameplay is no fun, excessive puzzle solving like in JK2 is no fun, but damned labyrinthine level design is no fun either. Those are all just cheap ways of padding on a few extra hours of rather non-solid gameplay. images/icons/smile.gif

[Yatta]

Originally posted by London_Midge:
How can you give impressions of a game you haven't played? images/icons/confused.gif <font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">In my original post, I said:
Now I haven't played the game, and I haven't watched the trailer yet because it's not available to the public at the moment. But something I do know is that it is being made by the same team, in the same brilliant (but improved) engine, and obviously new features (I.E. Bullet Time 2.0). These are the key factors that will make this game kick-ass, and this is why I'm looking forward to this game. In fact, it's on the top of my must-buy list!<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">That explains it. images/icons/smile.gif

[Monkey_Man2003]

Hi everyone,
One thing I would like to say is that if no one had seen or heard anything about Max Payne 2
a feature like a new story, improved graphics would be enough for all Max Payne
fans, and to make them want to get it.

But the companies behind the sequel have managed to upgrade the whole engine including Bullet Time and intergrate a very good physics engine, aswell as make a story alot longer than the first game.

Well done to all the companies behind Max Payne 2 cos i'm sure that its going to be a great game.

[SkavenRMD]

j:
So, um, is stuff like lip-sync automatic? Like, you assign a sound to a character and it's analyzed somehow and the lips move accordingly?<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">The voice sample's volume is analyzed every 0.3 seconds and a "talking mouth" sub-animation turned on and off accordingly; it's a cheap, efficient solution for third-person view NPC characters that you don't see up close.

For dramatic close-ups in cutscenes, it is recommended to animate the facial bones by hand.

And can you assign a facial expression to a character, say in a cutscene, at frame x and the character will have that expression from frame x until a new expression is assigned and stuff like lip sync will still work nicely?<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">There is support for so called sub-animations, which can be facial expressions, hand gestures, whole upper body movements or such. They are overlaid on top of the original animation, and can be triggered with a message at any point, from level FSMs, or from within an animation at a specific frame.

Several sub-animations can be running simultaneously, but if they both involve the same bones, the one started later will override the previous one.

[j]

Lovely, pretty much what I expected images/icons/smile.gif

[Jokke_r]

Nice nice. I'd just hope remedy would add a character animating tool (i dunno if actor fx did this) so that one wouldn't haveto get 3D Studio Max for decent animations...

For example i would hope for an application where you would just have a skeleton and you would set keyfames and easily create these so called sub animations...

[Uisor]

that would be very helpful

[Uisor]

Originally posted by SkavenRMD:
Facial animation is like any skeletal animation. It's not really an "engine feature", the characters just have 'bones' in their faces that can be animated like the rest of the body. It is, rather, a design decision whether to add facial bones or not, since a large number of bones in the character also means larger memory and CPU usage.

In this sense, creating facial animation for mods shouldn't be any more of a problem than creating body animations. <font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">That's right, i mostly ment lipsync, it's hard and time consuming if you want it to look right.

[SkavenRMD]

Nice nice. I'd just hope remedy would add a character animating tool (i dunno if actor fx did this) so that one wouldn't haveto get 3D Studio Max for decent animations...

For example i would hope for an application where you would just have a skeleton and you would set keyfames and easily create these so called sub animations... <font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Since we are mostly concerned about getting the game done in time -and- have a suitable tool to do it, from a development standpoint it would serve little purpose to create our own animation tool. However, programs like MilkShape (http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/ms3d/index.html) should make it easy to create animation for mods.

MaxED, on the other hand, was created because level geometry and mechanics are such in nature that a proprietary tool is better suited for the job than a commercial modeling package. Same goes for ParticleFX.

[Karthik]

Originally posted by eggyolk:
I think Max Payne was so good because no one was expecting, anticipating it to top a previous game.
Expect nothing, recieve something. <font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Finally, I thought I was the only gamer who played my games that way!