Austin Grossman Interview At Rock Paper Shotgun

[tatu]

Mike posted this on the Discord. I made a news post about it. Worth a read.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-ju ... aid-for-it

[Nick3069]

It's pretty heartbreaking that Grossman and Blackley were so traumatized by the failure of the game that they never spoke again, even though they were good friends during the project.

Also, the link on the main site post broken, it leads to https://www.trescom.org/_wp_link_placeholder.

[tatu]

Yeah!

I do wonder if us as a community, keeping the game alive is a reason why the game still gets a spotlight every now and then

Woah, what a lousy person who made that news post without checking that the link actually worked

[Draconisaurus]

That is a nice interview, thanks for sharing. I appreciate that we keep up with the devs as we plug along modding and working with Tres. Tres really was a special turn-point for games. I see a bit of that in us, how we make mods that most gamers would just laugh at. I love that we love a broken game.

[ThatZenoGuy]

-

[Draconisaurus]

3: They lamented that they made the island too big, as a game about physics starts to become silly when you realize 99.9% of the island is just empty trees and rocks.

Oh interesting. What exactly did he say? It's such a true thing about Tres...

[ThatZenoGuy]

-

[Draconisaurus]

Aha thanks.
Hmmm I think JR has a really good balance of spaces, esp. build 55 but also retail. Both confined puzzle spots but also open areas that are scenic. AS levels really are too open.

[ThatZenoGuy]

-

[Draconisaurus]

Heh. JR 55 is a very big place. But the textures and environment are so beautiful, I just like to walk around in them. By retail they took out a lot of the more varied terrain textures in favor of little repeating ones and the ugly base jungle terrain.

[ThatZenoGuy]

-

[tatu]

I enjoy JR, but I do agree a lot is empty, but that is also the charm. But I think both me and Draco sees it from a realism perspective and not a gameplay one.

As for the terrain. I really like the more colours early JR, PH and IJ have. Good terrain object placement does so much more than something like foliage does. For the Isla Sorna project, later on I want to redo all the terrain objects as it can do so much. Even more so after we've discovered that terrain objects does not appear to count towards the overall global object limit the game have for a level!

[ThatZenoGuy]

-

[TheIdiot]

Huh, I might be the outlier here in preferring the Retail level terrain textures. They're so much more colourful and vibrant, it makes the game feel a lot more like a tropical adventure. The old ones might be more realistic in general, but I find they don't really fit the overall atmosphere of the final game, and unfortunately the developers never really made good use of them, especially in JR and PH where they seem to be scattered around at pure random in places. More variety, yes, but in this case I think the simpler look that the final release had does a better job of pulling everything together. I find the final textures also go better with the in-game objects, especially the foliage.