Maybe I'm Biased ...

Aerial Antics is on the 10th page of the gallery and I think we all know Evak is one of the best artists around here. It should be higher ... how about some love?

heh. You have to remember its old, and made in the days before there were nice exporters. Today we have proper multitexturing whilst with Aerial Antics we had only just gotten the ability to export baked vertex colours.

I think it's good for the day. But things have moved on quite a lot since then. Thanks for the nod though :)

I still think it's good for a finished game rather than just being a maxed out tech demo. I have thought of doing a tech demo, but there really isn't much incentive to make something that doesn't really have a real purpose.

Speaking of the gallery... Jon E 5 is really on a roll here!

That game made with Blitz-Backdrop is also really nice.

Showing off?

I still think AA looks great for a BB game.

I don't like its looks, but whatever. Just not my style, don't think it's badly done or anything.

With all due respect we get enough reminders of Aerial Antics on the forums Jeremy.

Personally I couldn't give a hoot about the gallery as nothing i've ever made looks good in a still shot :(. If there was a gallery of finished items though ... then I might finish something.

I agree with your still-shot point.

I personally beleive our Racer has to be seen moving to get a real feel of it. Screen caps dont capture physics, response... etc. At least a video can show off the response and physics, Although to really get an idea of how good something is- if its playable- give a playable demo.

Thats why I wanted to get a playable demo out. :(

Yeah I don't think I will vote for your screenshot actually. I don't see why I should.

The game is an achievement but it is very unremarkable. Move on, make better games?

Ok, well thanks for considering ...

Sensibly, the gallery should be full of screens that are from COMPLETED GAMES only. Would you go to gamespot.com and look at the latest game screenshots for games that are probably never gonna be finished? I wouldn't.

After clicking randomly on screens from the first 2 highest rated pages, not one of them has a link to a game of any sort.

> Jon E 5 is really on a roll here!

I wondered what had happened to him. Where's those Munchies attacking the Techtrons gone?

The racer reached Project Completion- it was not intended as a complete game. We went back and updated the GFX a bit and posted. There's no game because, well, There's no game :P

Of course, having the showcase for completed Blitz Products only would be a good idea.

how can I delete my entry in the gallery? My post IS HORRIBLE, so I think it's better delete it...

> My post IS HORRIBLE, so I think it's better delete it...

Which one did you post? I'm intrigued.

well I never really thought your game was all that great, i mean yeah it was completed which is great but the graphics and gamplay never really seemed enoyable to me. But its not my type of game. Thats just my opinion I know a few people who really liked it.

Sorry ... but this isn't ranked correctly:

4.03 w/75 votes


3.77 w/75 votes


Is the Chaos Moon shot really a better indicator of what Blitz is capable of?

I'd say so. Definitely has a broader appeal.

Its just that people like near-realistic textures Jeremy. Most see cell shaded stuff as old, some might even think the main guy (and other things) is a 2d sprite because of the way it's rendered ya know. But when you play AA then you see the visuals really fit in.

I really don't see it. It's less detailed, more bland, with less color. I just went through the entire gallery and there were still very few shots as good as this AA shot. I didn't even do the artwork for it as you know. Still it is simply one of the best shots in there. Maybe you don't like colorful or cartoon styling but this isn't colorful or cartoonish due to lack of skill as is typically the case.


That Chaos Moon shot isn't better period. I'm not knocking it ... it looks nice but not in the same league as what Adrian accomplished in that AA shot at all.

Yes, you're biased. But remember, so is everyone else. Everyone is bringing something to the table when they vote. Some people will have voted you down because they're making a similar game, or because you made a pro-Bush post once, or an anti-Bush post once or you said you don't eat meat or you said you go hunting. People are that base sometimes.

OTOH, I do prefer the Chaos Moon shot, so I think you picked a bad example there. I don't know where it is now, but there was a time when Anime Tennis ( not Bowling ) Babes was ranked right above Aerial Antics. I remember because they were side by side. Now I'm very flattered that people liked it, but I did every piece of graphic work in that shot ( the crowd model which Bob3d made for me was not in the original shot ) and it was not better than the AA screen. Not even close.

So yeah, the gallery ranks are messed up, but it happens. Take a look at the user ratings on GameSpot, they can be pretty messed up too. People vote for a myriad of irrelevant reasons. Don't take it to heart, it doesn't look like Evak does.

The main bias I see is that no 2D game, regardless of how good it looks, ever seems to get a rating as high as a mediocre 3D shot.

YOu also have to remember that 2 years ago AA was in the top 5 gallery positions for well over 6 months. Can't complain really. Time to move on :)

I think there are better and worse on the first page. I think the cell shaded look is getting a bit old now since you should be able to do it all with shaders, and not lose tons of polys in getting the outline effect which could be better used elsewhere.

If we were to do it now, with all the new tech avaliable in the exporters it would look totaly different with masked, terrains, lightmaps, environment maps and better performance. The character could be twice as detailed with the same polycount, and we wouln't have the same surface count issues we did then. AA had to run on a Pentium 2 400 with Geforce2 with all the detail on maximum. Today we would be looking at a 1ghz system and not have to worry about the surface counts thanks to the extra CPU.

We also have B3D pipeline that we didn't really have back then, allowing for a lot more opportunities in the spit and polish department.

This is true. Although Cletus was ranked high for a while. I don't think it's even on page one any more, and IMO it's easily the best looking shot of all.

Well, Cletus I think looks amazing ... definitely the best looking game on there IMO. I went through and rated every shot exactly how I felt ... and I didn't give bias to 2D or 3D, tech or no tech.

The chaos moon shot is as good as AA in my opinion also, but thats because i can look behind to see what it took to make that shot, and what sort of animation would be present. On the other hand most people judge first impression without taking their time to consider it.



But everyone is biased to think so.

I didnt know AA is that old, in that case thats really well done.

Don't take any notice of ratings, for two reasons:

1) A lot of people give superb looking screenshot 1/5. Don't ask me why they do this, but they do.

2) Newer screenshots will always push older screenshots to the back as they tend to get better scores to begin with then gradually drop down.

So yeah, the gallery ratings are only a very vague indicator of quality.

wise observations from Simon...

also, i don't think it's so much a matter of being better or worse... i think that since both game's approach is so divergent (graphics wise), that there will be a certain audience that is attracted to one, and a certain audience attracted to the other...

nor can the actual gameplay value be rated by just looking at a screenshot...


--Mike

Maybe there should be a gallery of short videos too - you could better judge something if you had a high res screenshot and a ten second clip of it moving.