Satan Sam.co.uk

I really should be using headphones more frequently when playing and developing. Not even my Rega Alyas can put me as far into L4D as my headphones can, only problem is when somebody wants my attention and I jump through the roof when they creep up on me. But the game. Good god the game. So much sound needed balancing, the new weather effects I added have been heavily tweaked. The frequency of the rain sound alters depending on how heavy the rainfall is, and the volume is slightly increased when its very windy. The wind sound too now pans 50% to the left or right rather than 100% when its at full speed. The volumes adjusted too and gets quieter as wind speed drops.

Explosion effects have been really enhanced too. I’ve reduced the number of particles generated by them and added a new expanding effect that sits ontop of everything else onscreen. I’ve smooth out a lot of the effects too. Also lowered the requirements for the low quality graphics mode. This is the barebones effects that removes pretty much everything but the game itself. Visually its okay but it’s not as boom-y or pow-y as high quality mode but it will run on pretty much any PC I can throw at it, though the memory usage is still high (thanks, large graphics).

Hmm, I tried uploading more than 1 picture but WordPress throw a wobbler. And Windows Live Writer or whatever they want to call it crashes when I try to post. So that’s all your getting kiddos.

Computers back from the shop. Now have 500 giggerbites running around the inside of my machine, 120gb to transfer across. Time to sit back with the PSP!

My iMacs HDD is failing which means in the 7 years I’ve owned my own computers one of them is finally breaking. Theres a 500gb (up from 160) drive making its way to my place now but it’s going to involve opening up a white iMac which Apple didn’t make easy!

Inspired by NeoGaf I’ve made some box arts for my games (and TCFI by MrPineapple).

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Full DVD versions are available but they’re like so mega big with their filesize, so they’ll be offline for a bit.

Also the site will probably be undergoing maintenance. I’ve already started but it’s just a matter of getting into the guts of the coding to spruce the site up a bit. Planning a new gallery, new music playback system thingy, pages to be the width of the site (no sidebar). Might take a while since I’m busy with a few other things.

In a little celebration of finally sorting out co-op multiplayer support I dan gan made theeerse.

To get the best performance I’ve had to throw in a low quality mode. Low quality mode cuts out on certain effects, turns off lens/distortion effects, turns off physics on background particles and other little bits. I’ve also decided to remove all other framerate options (previously you could select between 50, 55 and 60), locked it to 60 and optimised the hell out of it. I’ve also enhanced the auto-quality mode (that alters the quality if the framerate drops) with an option to turn it off completely.

Top row- low quality, bottom row- high quality (sorry they’re the wrong way around!).

Click for full size

The ending of the game has also been fully programmed in. So all I have to do now is fill in the middle.

By the way if any of you play L4D my steam name is Shelderslow though I think I posted this a while ago.