Over this past quarter, simulation in 3DS MAX has been a hot topic that I have been struggling to work with in my class. MassFX, the daylight system, particles, and cloth simulations are a special part of 3DS MAX that are so cool and interesting, yet so frustrating and hard to deal with. They're a blast when they work and a pain when they don't. There are a lot of things about the features that I like, but those mainly boil down to how cool or funny things can work. MassFX is not that complicated, there is just a lot to remember and a lot of small things that can go wrong. I like how they do simplify it more than they could've (because they could've left a LOT more things less easy to access, understand, or use in conjunction with other things), and how when I do get it to work it's just stupid fun. Making things crash int each other and knock things down is way more fun than it sounds. The daylight system is also pretty cool. It allows you add just that extra bit of spice to your final render. It's easy to set up; all you have to do is select what location, time of year and time of day you want it to simulate (and where you want you light to come from in your scene). It does the rest itself. The only hard part is actually getting it to render correctly. There are a lot of small settings that have to be on or off that aren't that easy to intuit or even remember on your own. Particles are also in that "stupid fun" category, but doing more advanced things like using pbombs and other forces is still not entirely clear to me. I think understanding particles will just take time. Unlike Particles, cloth is, to my understanding, a pure incarnation of evil. It can and will fail to render, fold in on itself, not obey collisions you have set up, and crash your computer for seemingly no reason at all. When it does decide to work, it can make things look cool and more natural. But most of the time it will fight you just for having one setting missing or doing one thing out of order. Overall, I think that the simulation features in 3DS MAX will be great tools for me in the future, but for now, I do not know how to use them to their fullest potential
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Recently, the Master Chief Collection was released on steam. I, never having fully played through a Halo game before, decided to buy the whole collection. Despite Reach being the only game from the collection that has been released at the moment, I have still had a lot of fun with it. I definitely am happy with my purchase of the whole collection and hopefully will not be let down by further additions. That being said, there still are some issues. Because the game was ported, controls on keyboard in comparison to controller were not really taken into account. The game doesn't let you crouch and move at the same time (you have to stop, then crouch, then continue moving), although the developers have acknowledged this issue and are most likely going to fix it in a later update. Another weird control issue is that you can't use your strafe keys to move vehicles, you can only use the mouse to dictate what direction you want to go. This means you can't really look around while driving a vehicle, you can only look ahead of you. This issue isn't as big a problem as the other, though; it doesn't impact game play in any major ways, I'm just not used to that sort of vehicle control for a keyboard and mouse. Other than control issues, I don't have any big complaints. Other people have experienced bugs in which they cannot load the first level, or things along those lines, but I haven't run into that issue myself. The game play is really fun and satisfying. The game's menus/HUDs are also relatively convenient to navigate, the only minor nitpicks that I have being that you can't select/ban any maps you may prefer or dislike, and that the multiplayer player overlay is too close to where you select your presets (meaning you run into it a lot, which can be annoying). I have never had the full console Halo experience, only bits and pieces at friends houses and the like. I personally think that The game was ported over well, but I don't have the experience to give a full opinion of that. I still am happy with my purchase, and I hope to enjoy the other halo titles as they get ported as well.
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