🎮 5. Stealth Crossword by @computerjames.itch.io
Free, short, very silly all make this a must play. Runs in browser too, PC and Mac.
computerjames.itch.io/stealth-cw

Every game trailer:

A world beyond belief
An adventure like never before
...
An established genre trope with slightly different graphics to the last one.

I'd have accepted Tony Hawk Underground over Madden and it's not even close to the best Tony Hawk game.

Oh, and there's also the Lone Gunmen spin-off, which both sucked and somehow predicted 9/11 almost exactly in its pilot (no pun intended) episode, which was very weird.

Mostly just a grim example of parallel creative thinking between the showrunners and ISIS I think, but still weird.

Just be warned that Reaper starts out INCREDIBLE for the first season but quickly loses itself in convoluted plots in season 2, and got cancelled before it could conclude properly. :(

I'm sensing a thread of 90s nostalgia and scifi here, so I'm saying Warehouse 13 (the sillier X-Files) and maaaaaaaybe Eureka (the even sillier X-Files).

If you wanna get REAL silly there's two oft-forgotten shows you can try (if you can find them): Reaper and Middleman!

It's more than a descendent - it's technically a spin-off!

(though hopefully that wasn't what you meant by spoilers)

And as sad and negative as this sounds, this is just the natural progression of a medium from modernism to post-modernism.

What we really need is a "concept" showcase that's demonstrating the future: looking at boundary-pushing ideas rather than off-the-shelf consumer items.

Just more weird shit.

That's not to say there's no creativity or ingenuity left, it's just that at this point it's not going to happen within the main thrust of the field - it's happening at the fringes, where the concepts and structures start to fall apart and boundaries become fuzzy.

Where games aren't quite games.

You definitely can!

I was actually working on that a while ago, because I was investigating ways to turn a level upside down.

You COULD grab and rotate every actor in a level, but I found it (slightly) easier to stream in an upside-down copy of the level and sync positions of any moved objects.

(at least until the PCG tools leave Beta, I'm assuming)

Think this might be my next YouTube video, it's a nice neat little learning exercise.

Frustratingly, the Foliage tool literally only works on landscape within a level, so if (as I do) you make tile-based environments you need another solution.

But I redid my tests over lunch, and Niagara is definitely doing something under the hood to make it the best solution for en masse meshes!

That was my first thought as well, but it was weird how it was fine via the Foliage tool and via Niagara. I did check the structure and it was barely half a dozen polys per blade.

In this case, I was using an actor with an HISM component and adding instances to it in the construction script based on a simple grid calculation.

I mean AFAIK both Niagara and the Foliage tool are using ISMs - or specifically Heirarchical ISMs, right?

So what's the diff between Foliage and Niagara's HISMs and using a HISM component and adding instances to it?

I'm cool with using Niagara whenever I can't use Foliage, I just want to know WHY!