The Chronicles of Riddick

Circuit City has it for only $20 bucks through Saturday if anyone still is looking to pick it up. I know I'm going to.

 

Just thought I'd plug this game one more time. There's a review over at firingsquad that ends with the following line:

...but they did get one thing wrong: there is indeed a quicksave feature. I believe it's F5 to save, F9 to load (I may be mistaken as to the exact keys, though they can't be hard to find). So, it's a bit different, in that you only end up with one save anywhere slot and a multitude of checkpoints per profile, but it's certainly not a nuisance.

 

Been playing through Riddick and indeed it is very good. Gamespot actually scored it higher than Half Life 2. It also, arguably, look better than 'Doom 3', too (and has much more diverse gameplay). Not bad going at all for a movie tie-in by virtually unknown developers.

http://www.riddickgame.com/

 

This game has soft stencil shadows. That's probably why soft shadows are so expensive on 6800s.

Do the dynamic soft shadows change their softness based on the lighting situation?

 

Well, more specifically it's regular stencil shadowing with an extra shader applied to soften the shadow edges. And no, the amount of softening appears to be pretty constant no matter what the situation.

 

Oh well, I guess it's too complicated to make the softness of shadows dynamic. It should still look much better than hard shadows.

 

Man, the Starbreeze engine is truly the most "advanced" (yes, it's a fundamentally flawed term, but I don't care) engine i've ever seen. I mean soft-stencil shadows = pwnage.

 

Jesus Christ. Finally got round to uninstalling this rubbish.

Mumble your way round dirty cell blocks. Punch people in the head. In glorious 3d.

Thanks for the recommendation guys. Really.

 

Well, I'm sorry you didn't like it, but I still think it's one of the best games I've played in the last couple of years.

 

I need to pick this game up, but until I break my EQ2 addiction there's really no point.

 

Well, all I have to say is it's a cheap game, and you can beat it in a couple of days of hard playing, so it won't really eat too much into your EQ2 time

 

You can have my copy

 

Wait, the game uses SM2.0+ on GeForce 6x00s to achieve soft stencil shadows? It uses the pixel shader shadow volume extrusion technique? (been around for a while I know)

 

So you didn't realise that a game called 'Chronicels Of Riddick:Escape From Butchers Bay' might be set in a prison and might perhaps include some fighting? What exactly where you expecting?!?!

 

I was a fool and I was punished.

 

In fairness to the game, it really does pick up once you get thru all the silly prison fights.

The game is a bargain for $20. Once you play it thru you'll definately like giving the director's cut a run, the comments about the game make it too interesting.

 

but I might want to install it

 

Really? I considered the prison fights a high point compared to that third of the game where you are running around with just a single shot stungun and stomping on people to kill them.

 

The demo finally came out today so I got around to installing it. Despite being the shortest demo I've ever played, it was fairly fun, though I honestly think it's overhyped.

Oddly enough when I first started up the game I increased all the graphical details to their max in 10x7 and the game was literally unplayable with 10 or less fps. So I turned off player shadows and reduced texture quality which made the game run much much better but I turned the texture detail too low and it looked like crap. So I increased it multiple levels and experienced no performance loss. I found this a bit odd and re-enabled shadows and increased the texture quality to max once again but this time the performance was in the 40+ fps range. :?

 

All you need to do is set it to SM2 instead of SM2++.