By Alec Meer on October 21st, 2010 at 6:18 pm.
Indeed. It is true. We’ve put our mouths in front of a microphone and made noises at it once again. Only not very much this time, I’m afraid. Instead, the bulk of the larynx-gymnastics originate from Splash Damage’s Senior Game Designer Ed Stern, who’s behind most of the words and a whole lot of other things in Brink.
Also making vocal appearances are a cartel of RPS readers who attended the recent Eurogamer Expo, at which this chat was held. They had questions. They asked them. Ed answered. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. Many Bothans died.
If that still isn’t enough mumbly Britvoices for you, you’ll be glad to hear RPS’ Alec Meer (I hate that guy), Quintin Smith and Karen Gillan or someone were also in attendance, chiming in with matters relevant, string-related or just plain rude.
You can listen to it below; I’m going to spare you the usual breakdown for this one, as unlike Wireless Show Classic Edition, as everyone is certainly calling them, this doesn’t really roam topics all that much. It’s largely about Brink, but gag-packed as well as fact-packed. He’s very good value for money, that Mr Stern.
Includes: discussion about talking string, the Village People and how many words rhyme with Brink.
Alas, a system bug that we would really like our podcast hosts to get back to us about now please means this is unlikely to end up on iTunes any time soon. Sorry about that.
But you can download it here and manually copy it to your iDevice or whatever else you people like to stick into your ears these days. Also sorry about the big CLUNK noise at the start, by the way.
Or! You can watch it below, via the webcam on Kieron’s netbook. It’s a little in the area of stop-frame animation and the sound’s on the tinny side, but at least you can see who’s saying what. You could try muting it and playing it at the same time as the audio file, like fuzzy Powerpoint slides in a lecture.
Thanks to Ed, and everyone who attended on the day. YOU DID WELL.
21/10/2010 at 18:27 The_B says:
Ahh, RPS Bingo!
Alec.
Quinns
Kieron
21/10/2010 at 19:36 terry says:
A very pleasing waterfall ambience.
21/10/2010 at 19:37 DMJ says:
Not enough Bothans died. Resume killing them. We will tell you when to stop.
21/10/2010 at 19:50 Lewis Denby says:
Can I just say that I’m almost certain I was scratching my nose, rather than picking it, at 02:10.
21/10/2010 at 20:16 Lewie Procter says:
Also, worth mentioning that I was picking my nose almost the entire time I was off camera.
21/10/2010 at 19:50 Nick says:
Ed Stern is awesome and Brink sounds great. That is all.
21/10/2010 at 20:04 Dances to Podcasts says:
*dances*
21/10/2010 at 20:24 Erik J says:
You had me at the title’s Heavy Metal reference.
21/10/2010 at 20:25 Rei Onryou says:
Curses, the video cuts out just before Ed answered my Minecraft question – perhaps the most important part!
It was a great experience being part of the interview. Everytime Ed looked at me, my heart fluttered and I fell for him more. Ed is a bastion of all things great in the PC gaming industry. Moar please!
I think RPS should get readers involved more. It certainly made Alec’s life a lot easier during the day. Assuming it did make it easier.
21/10/2010 at 23:31 stahlwerk says:
what did you ask, what did he answer?
22/10/2010 at 01:17 DXN says:
“Minecraft?”
“Miiiiiiiinecraft.”
24/10/2010 at 11:52 Rei Onryou says:
I asked if he played Minecraft. He said he hadn’t got round to it yet. I cannot wait until he does.
21/10/2010 at 20:40 M says:
Where’s Jim/John’s one they said they were recording, eh? EH?
21/10/2010 at 21:10 Henrik J says:
Did the show switch to a new adress? Episode 41 is the latest on the iTunes feed that i used to get the show from
21/10/2010 at 21:40 Lambchops says:
The Legion guys are pronouncing it . . . oh wait wrong comment thread
21/10/2010 at 21:42 The Dark One says:
When he mentioned baking down textures to tens of megabytes from several gigs, he’s talking about t hat megatexture stuff, right? I’ve never understood how that’s supposed to work.
21/10/2010 at 21:54 Larington says:
Well, one way it helps – In traditional texturing, you’ll often have a single texture that’s repeated over and over along a wall section, but that looks dull and can contribute to broken immersion via a game world that looks two piecemeal/construction/fake. To reduce that problem, an artist can place additional textures with see-through bits in layers on top of the underlaying base texture (Known as decals), stuff like graffiti or damage to the wall (etc). The thing is, when you render the level in game, you end up rendering all of the base texture including sections covered by a decal, then the renderer draws the decals on top of that.
It amounts to a waste of system resources because there’re pixels on a wall that get overwritten possibly several times.
With mega textures, you can place a metric crap ton of decals on top of the base texture, then when you compile the level from an editable form into a playable form, the compiler will burn/transfer the decals *into* the base texture as it creates the mega texture. As a result, you’re rendering one layer of texture, instead of rendering that layer and hundreds of decals on top.
I think it helps in other ways too, but, that’s all I can think of at the moment.
21/10/2010 at 23:01 Shakermaker says:
Genre: Polka
lolled
21/10/2010 at 23:30 stahlwerk says:
Kieron, in a noisy situation like this, sound quality actually improves if you disable any noise suppressing functions in your webcam recording program, or the camera’s driver, or your audio driver, or somewhere else entirely. Just untick everything that says “use ambient noise reduction” or similar.
Result: crispy, breathing sound, no more underwater tinnyness.
21/10/2010 at 23:52 Dean says:
If you want it in iTunes, just choose Add pocast via RSS or something similar. Think it’s in the Tools menu. Or Advanced / Subscribe to podcast on older versions. Then just stick in http://rps.libsyn.com/rss and it’ll work.
22/10/2010 at 11:46 andytizer says:
Thanks I finally got this working in iTunes 10 by going Advanced -> Subscribe to podcast and entering http://rps.libsyn.com/rss.
22/10/2010 at 01:41 Psyk says:
ARGH even worse sound than normal :( Buy a decent mic pleaseeeeeeeeeee
22/10/2010 at 03:05 Robert says:
I watched 20 minutes, but I could not find the hot redhead. :sadface:
22/10/2010 at 07:46 Peter says:
Great! But………………….Chrome becomes non responsive when i goto this page (using IE at the moment), its probably the embeded quicktime thing.
22/10/2010 at 18:15 Tom OBedlam says:
This was awesome to bear witness to. Ed was so funny and passionate, I’ve been telling everyone about this meeting since.
Later, I got given a brink t-shirt by one of the testers :)
(R)evolution
23/10/2010 at 14:37 Shadowcat says:
So, that Ed… he sure can talk about that game!
Frankly, it all sounds awesome. If it wasn’t a multiplayer shooter, my dollars would probably be ready to spend. Still, I’d rather see a team make a game they’re passionate about, and I really hate it when a single-player campaign suffers for the sake of adding multiplayer, so I’m more than willing to sacrifice a single-player Brink for the good of the multiplayer gamers out there :)
23/10/2010 at 19:52 wcanyon says:
Ok so you have to use Advanced to subscribe to a RSS in iTunes?? Good lord. Glad I’m on Android.
23/10/2010 at 19:56 wcanyon says:
Argh, reply button fail!!
23/10/2010 at 19:55 wcanyon says:
Guys, how about an intro? I listened to the first 10 minutes twice and still didn’t catch what game you were talking about. I subscribe via RSS so I just get the podcast without reading the landing page. It’s possible that you did say “Brink” in that first 10 minutes because I was working at the time, but I was certainly listening the whole time. Plus, the intro music/whatever is cool.