Hey old friends, and I emphasize the word OLD

Productions save money shooting in Canada because we are used to working for lower wages with less people. Here we make about $32 CAD for what they make $50 USD in LA.

I worked on a Disney puppet show once that decided to shoot for a week in LA. Only a skeleton crew from Canada got to go, and reported back how the LA crew was 2x larger than what we shot with in Toronto.

Combine in with tax credits for shooting in Ontario and productions save a fortune.

No wonder American crews are reported to have slurs for the Canadian crews ("Mexicans with sweaters" and "Snow n-words"). I have never worked in the USA so can't confirm if this is true.

That is really wild to hear about the animosity from those folks in hollyweird lol.  They are probably just butthurt about living in paradise lost aka Los Angeles.  For my high school graduation present my parents sent me and my best friend on a three week vacation to Southern California, this is back in 1993.  First we were staying with a family friend in San Diego.  It was nice and scenic there but being from NY and 18yo the pace was a bit slow and it was challenging to find stuff to do.  Then we went up to LA to stay with a friend who had moved there from NY and that was a bit more fast paced, but still seemed a bit slow compared to NY.  It was just a totally different vibe out there and at this point we're talking over 30 years ago so SoCal was more of a 90210 scene back then if anything lol.  Haven't been back there since but what I see on the news makes it sound terrible and people I know that moved out there have been really unhappy with the crime and homelessness.  That and the obscenely high cost of living, NY has a lot of the same issues which is what prompted my move to rural Alabama ten years ago.

We are definitely products of that analog era of film production, it is quite mind blowing what the average person can do with today's technology and the ability to distribute content online.  Funny thing is, I still prefer legacy media over youtube, netflix, etc.  When I do watch netflix, it is generally something big budget for example my wife and I just finished watching the final season of Vikings which was itself a spinoff from the original series that ended years ago on the history channel.  Now that is done it could be years ago before I find another show to watch lol.  I have pretty much given up on looking for entertainment that suits me, if it falls in my lap then great but otherwise I just spend most of my time reading on topics that interest me.

Have you seen this code someone created and uploaded to github that lets you convert .scn files to .obj?  I am tempted to muck about with it but at the same time scared of going down another rabbit hole lol 

bAr0n wrote:

Have you seen this code someone created and uploaded to github that lets you convert .scn files to .obj?  I am tempted to muck about with it but at the same time scared of going down another rabbit hole lol 

Ya, that person was actually the infamous Alien Abducter.

The result isn't much use to output back into Swat 3 sadly because of how the geometry gets divided into triangles.

Although the feasibility of people actually continuing to play swat 3 diminishes as we move further into the future, I still truly enjoy using it as a sandbox and believe it has a lot of potential for creating machinima content with it.  3D animation programs such as poser can import .obj files, which is something I have always been curious about in terms of seeing how the missions would look when rendered outside of the game.  The holy grail would be if there was a way to export the characters using either the .obj or .fbx format.  Not sure how much of an audience there would still be for this sort of thing, but I am tempted to test that out.

On another note, do you recall how the game handled certain textures being animated such as static on TV screens, fireplaces, etc. ?

The L.A wildfires brought me back. Seeing the city on TV reminded me strongly of SWAT3. Also the realization that its been 25 years since SWAT3 released. When I started playing 2003/2004 the GOTY was only 3 or 4 years old. Now I'm getting old and the guy who introduced me to it has been gone for 7 years...

Yet still I want to come back and play SWAT3. There's just something about this game. Like someone on Youtube said, it really has that 'end of history' vibe to it, before things started going to hell and reminds me of those sunnier, hopeful, more optimistic days in the early 00's.

It's also relatively simple to make mods/maps for - despite WC being an absolute relic.

I wouldn't worry about this game becoming unplayable in the future. As long as WINE/Proton are a thing, this game will be playable. Last time I did years ago,  it ran quite well on there.

 

Sadly Neuwon appears to be entirely dead and along it with it any real multiplayer.

Hey S4, great to see signs of life in our own little corner of the proto-metaverse!  Swat truly is a time capsule of the late 90s/early '00s which is quite incredible since that is the last time I remember the world making any sense to me.  Not sure exactly when things went off the rails, but by leaving swat and coming back to it in the past few months I appreciate it more than ever.  The houses I grew up in have all been bulldozed and built over, but I can always go return to the Forman residence in West LA or the Getts home in Hollywood.  The places and people in swat are frozen in time, a perfect snapshot of those halcyon y2k days.  It's the closest thing to going home for me at this point.  I realize that may sound a bit desperate, but swat was there for me in some very troubled times in those years and all my friends on WON or even some of my nemesis provided me with a lot of my best memories in life.  At the time I never would have imagined that a game and the people I played with would have such a huge impact on my life.  SJ was one of the first people I met playing swat when multiplayer first launched back in 2000.  Getting to talk to him today is a miracle and a blessing that I am beyond grateful for.

Maybe in my old age I am getting a bit like costner in field of dreams, but I really do believe that if there was a way to make swat easily playable for anyone online at any time kind of like how counterstrike was back in the day that this game could see a huge resurgence in popularity.  The reason I know it is that my 16yo is the one that recently got me back into swat after not playing it for the past 15 years.  She remembered how much I had talked about it all those years and wanted to try it out.  Then I was able to actually get a LAN session working on two laptops and played a coop marathon with my 11yo who thought the game is absolutely awesome. 

Looking forward into the future, swat in my mind is almost completely open sourced at this point in large part due to the work that legends like SJ have done.  Furrycat's gsmhacking if so epic, I have been using that lately to do some really wild stuff like converting player swat characters into terrorists which is really hilarious.  My thinking is that the key to keeping things fresh would be getting that online multiplayer as user friendly and easily accessible as possible as well as creating new maps.  Based on some of the crazy stuff I have seen, there are ways to make swat maps that could elevate the game into more of an RPG experience which was something that I always hoped for.