If you haven't touched FC2 (OWG going wild!)

[Art Blade]

if you haven't touched it for a long time then maybe you'll remember how good this game is when you check out those pics. Don't you want to immediately  start playing again??

If you're new to the game, then you'll understand why we like it so much. To us oldsters who have played it for a year or more, those pics will cause some nice flashbacks  ;D

Enjoy.

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[fragger]

Terrific collection of pics there, Art :-X FC2 would have to be one of the best-looking FPS games to ever come along.

[Art Blade]

cheers, mate  :)

[mandru]

Damn!  Those pics even got me re-excited about the game.  It's the only one I've loaded on my comp and I've been playing it all along.

I'm a gonna have to wrap up this round of FC2 I'm playing and get right back in there. ;)

[Art Blade]

Thanks, mandru ;D

You know, I had those pictures prepared for some time now and never found the right moment to share them. With our renovation of OWG and the return of one of the earliest members, spearhead_22 who states that he's playing FC2 again, and now the new gallery software AEVA, and me coincidentally too having returned to FC2, all this made me start this topic.

I'm glad if you like it :)

[mmosu]

nice series Art  :-X
It really showcases the variety of locales and environments that exist in the game world.  Maybe I should spend some time in Africa before the next Borderlands DLC comes out . . .

[mandru]

Art does have a fine eye for composition.  It makes me wonder if he's a budding Ansel Adams in RL and needs to be out hiking the alps or some exotic locale with a medium format camera documenting seasonal changes.   :)

[Art Blade]

Thanks, guys :)

In real life I don't carry a camera with me any more (yes, I used to photograph). Instead, I remember everything and then tell people about what I saw or experienced, describing details. They'll form a picture of their own in their minds. But in videogames.. hell, I can't count those ten thousands of screenies on my rigs  ;D For FarCry2 alone I shot around 20,000 screenies during like 1.5 years  ;D

However, here is another old series (lol, image IDs 176 and so on, now we're nearly at 3,000) and I add one more old pic which I like. Enjoy :)

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[spaceboy]

nice shots.  I do remember fondly the beautiful and hostile world of FC2.  I may just visit for a spell.  In my current lull of new games I've been revisiting some older ones, so that fits right in.

[mmosu]

I really like that first one.  Unbelievable really, that you can see something like this in a video game, especially when you consider where the state of that art was a mere two and a half decades ago. 

[fragger]

Very true, mmosu. Graphics in FPS games have come a long way from mere pixelly patterns stuck on walls!

[Art Blade]

And gamplay has slightly improved since, too  ;D

Back in the days of my C64 I used to dream of a game where I'd be able to walk, drive and enter buildings. Now they even added fly and swim. Basically, everything is possible today, only it still looks like a pc game. Now I'm dreaming of a true 3D virtual reality. You know, somehow it's not really cool to play with a mouse and a keyboard, looking at a monitor..  ;)

[PZ]

I wonder if any of our members have tried out the #D capabilities of some of the video cards.

[spaceboy]

I haven't been completely sold on the idea of 3D by any means, but I can't say I'm not intrigued.  Motorstorm Apocolypse and Killzone 3 are to have 3D capabilities and frankly I'm quite curious about what pricing would be on a 3D capable LED TV next year.  Probably won't happen but still...   I'd like to see a demo of one of these games in 3D.

[PZ]

I too would like to see a demo - my video card is 3D capable, and Far Cry 2 is listed as one of the 3D games, but you evidently need other hardware parts, and I've been reluctant to invest.

[mmosu]

I hadn't heard that about Killzone 3 being in 3D - could be extremely interesting or extremely lame depending on how they do it (as in, don't do a bunch of gimmicky 3D movie stuff).  Art's comment about "the old days" got me thinking about Doom and Wolfenstien 3D- everybody remember how the dead bodies would rotate with you as you walked around them  ;D  Again, what a long way we've come - Wolfenstien 3D to actual 3D!

[PZ]

Indeed - I worry about the "gimmicky" aspect of it though - I've seen  a "3D" video with glasses that really only showed 2 layers rather than true 3D.

[spaceboy]

about a year ago I saw demo of 3D TV and the depth almost seemed like multiple thin layers of images just deeper into the set.  Does that make sense?  If I have to forego great graphics to have 3D I don't want it  - I don't have trouble judging depth in games too much with current graphics. 

mmosu - yep KZ3 will have 3D and like I said - I am definitely curious ...

[PZ]

Only time will tell, I guess.  I watched the new Samsum 3D LED TV at the store the other day, and with a true 3D movie it was very impressive.

[mandru]

I've often wondered why someone hasn't created a synced pair of video clips framed side by side in a stereo photographic pair so that using the cross eyed viewing method the viewer would be able to see a 3D video.

Here's an example of a still stereo photographic pair of a satellite view of an erosion plane in Patagonia with viewing instructions.

http://veimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/305/PIA02760_md.jpg

Once your eyes adjust you can wander around inside the image and you can feel it as your eyes refocus for different depth values.  True for a moving video the producers would have to take it pretty easy on the viewer to keep their eyes from bleeding and crashing them into blinding headaches but I always thought there was some potential in it for giving better detailed information than a simple flat image.

[spaceboy]

wow that's totally neat mandru - at first I thought I couldn't do it, but once I released the tension in my eyes it all came together beautifully - the depth is amazing!

I do agree some tweaking would have to be done so your eyes don't water and hurt (or "stay that way" as we've all been warned) - but potential seems there somewhere to divert the images or something so you don't have to actually cross your eyes.

[mandru]

The old stereo image viewers like the classic View-Master didn't require crossed eye viewing (used in Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome where the lost children filled Gibson in on who they thought he was and the pictures of a history and world he was there to return them to).

With the image I posted above if I use a straight piece of stiff card stock long enough to block the left image from the right eye and vice versa and view looking straight on then there is actually less strain on the eyes but because I have long practiced using the cross eye method I can drop into it with little or no effort and then relax into the feel of it once I've found the overlap.

At least for me in the absence of a mechanism or a piece of card stock the method described with the photo is easiest to achieve.

When the Magic Eye stereograms were very popular in the 90's a female supervisor on a job I was working at that time wore a dress in a fabric that had a very busy pattern with a repeat grid of 1 and 1/2 inches that looked very much like one of the patterns used in the Magic Eye images.

Without thinking of the larger meaning I innocently asked during a training meeting "If I stare at your dress cross eyed will I see the 3D image?" and was promptly slapped by half of the women in the call center.  The other half were rolling on the floor laughing.

[PZ]

 ^+-+

[mandru]

I referred to a 3D vid method a couple posts back and a useful immediate application that comes to mind is every robot that has a remote operator that I'm aware of has a single camera and sends a flat image back to the person controlling it.

How much more effective would a robot that is intended to disarm bombs be if instead of a flat image there were two cameras, properly spaced, sending right eye/left eye information to a headset worn by the operator so he can actually see what he's working on ("which wire is closer?") as if it was right in front of him in 3D?

Our eyes interpret R/L parallax information instinctively and I can't help but believe two properly spaced cameras with a way to view them would give us the ability to go many places human eyes usually would never be able to go.

[mmosu]

They're actually doing that here in our university hospital with surgical robots mandru.  The robot is controlled remotely by a surgeon sitting across the room.  The advantage to doing it with a robot is a smaller surgical field - the robot has tiny hands and wrists so it can accomplish the procedure through a much smaller set of incisions.  Anyway, the robots "eyes" are tiny binocular cameras that transmit to two separate viewing screens that are set appart based on the distance between the surgeon's eyes.  All of this translates to accurate depth of field for the surgeon, like their eyes are inside the patient's body.  It's really cool stuff.  The hope is that someday this technology can be used to routinely do surgeries on patients in other parts of the world who don't have access to surgical specialists or who can't travel to one.