Postcards from us being pants at GTA V

Last night saw some of the most pants gaming ever. Twas fun tho! Glad we got to the end of that heist setup, I honest thought I was going to die. Here are some snaps that capture of some of majesty of last night.

Let's start with the tartan magnificence that is Fish's legs, sitting in the gun turret of the Insurgent. I switched between first person and 3rd person more than most, so many would not have seen his Bay City Rollers trousers this close up before. It's fine as long as he doesn't knee me in the face.

The Los Santos Hecilopter shooting team assemble on Mount Josiah above Calafia Bridge, for an afternoon of taking out Savages flown by very keen and numerous Merryweather pilots. I was stunned by the sheer number of them, approaching the combat strength of the Syrian Air Force in Hind D.

While CEO EMW granite heart bounces yet another 5mm round, Fish pooh-poohs riding inside vans, preferring to feel the breeze through his corn-row hair. The architecture of Los Santos made this desire a reality...

... except for when I took a shortcut through a Downtown Los Santos car park.

Fish parks up his Insurgent on the side of Mount Josiah, north of Fort Zancudo, to wait for his stars to disappear. Big Rob was eager to show off his cut-price, budget, Lidl Buzzard Hecilopter; bought from a man down the pub, who had a friendly face and a cute dog. Most annoyingly, it seems to belch smoke less than mine although he has to fly it with a keyboard - which takes some skill. The same skill you get buying an attack Hecilopter at half price. I'm not bitter.

We'll finish with charming shot taken on a stolen Police Predator on the Alamo Sea. It's rather difficult to make out (we were being chased up Raton Canyon by Los Santos finest) but you can see a calm CEO EMW having guns pointed at him by Fish and I in the back. It's how he likes to enjoy his boat rides.

What was your favourite moment from last night?

Comments

I think the moment on that boat mission from the last screen shot when Fish tried to get in the otherwise full boat and the game decided that meant he should grab the driver, Big Rob, and throw him overboard to take up his place.

Evilmatt's picture

Oh, yes, that was classic. Did I mention that Fish tends to win at games?

brainwipe's picture

I popped in for a little tumble and found myself doing some heist setups with lvls 331, 426 and 201. To be fair, they fucked up way more than we did! I kept coming top of the "shooting things" leaderboard, like they didn't care or were going through the motions.

I bowed out when I had enough to buy a Mamba and then spent 30 minutes driving the little beast around, getting a feel for all that power and no weight at all. It's going to take some practice!

brainwipe's picture

Some notes on how the Mamba drives (stock, couldn't afford upgrades).

It is very, very light and has a huge amount of power - I'd say more than the V. You can't jam on the power and expect it to stick. I spent some time going around the Sandy Shores airfield to better understand how it corners. You have to break before you turn and then gently, progressively put the power on as you come out of the corner. Jab at the throttle and it'll spin. I discovered while driving on dirt that the thing will Scandinavian Flick like a good 'un - although I've not managed to control it at speed.

If anyone wants a go on Sunday, you're welcome to! See if you think the near-1-million was worth it. :)

brainwipe's picture

Another epsiode that I put together before last week's session but didn't have time to edit

Evilmatt's picture

Pieces of comedy genius stitched together!

brainwipe's picture

Poverty stricken CEO Evil Matt takes to gardening to earn cash.

Evil Matt heroically dives into the water to join us in the speed boat. I'm impressed on two counts: firstly that I got the screenie and secondly that Evil Matt's drug and alcohol fuelled character can swim in that state!

brainwipe's picture

Big Rob and Myself stayed on for a while after you left such that it was early evening for me and early morning for him when we finished :D But we worked out a fairly profitable procedure for two people we ran the training hiest the fleeca job on hard for something like 80k each then ran VIP missions with helicopters for the 45 minute heist cool down then the tutorial heist again and so on. All told including the money we made when rob was on I ended up with about 700k which I immediately blew on getting and upgrading then upgrading again the sultan RS which is a very fun car to drive about.

I've been keeping the heist finale ready to go so couldn't initiate any heists myself but I wonder if the cool down is per person in which case you could do two back to back then have less time for vip missions til the first cool down resets. Something to experiment with.

Not sure I'll be able to make the next two Sundays as I'm at PAX West this coming weekend then staying in Seattle next week for a small holiday I fly back on the next Sunday landing at 2pm ish. So probably be a couple of weekends away.

Evilmatt's picture

Popped in this evening to spend some cash from last Sunday and reorganise my garage. Can you see what I bought?

brainwipe's picture

Did you do something with your hair? No ... It's the necklace that's what's new ... the glasses?

Evilmatt's picture

Some excellent guesses there, EMW. No, the hair is going to stay pretty much as it is. I like the necklace (although a little flat) and those glasses seem perfect for her. There's something else that's new in the picture. I'll give you a hint - it's behind her.

I cost $11k and the turbo I put on it (makes a huge difference) cost 50k! I'm eyeing up another muscle car to go in my collection but I can't see any black ones I like yet... :)

brainwipe's picture

Hemorrhoids?

babychaos's picture

Can you buy those? Where do you get them from?

brainwipe's picture

Oh I've got it the muscle car has new wing mirrors.

Evilmatt's picture

I'm pretty sure it's the yellow kettle.

babychaos's picture

Sorry guys, Pete wins best answer.

brainwipe's picture

you paid 11k for a kettle then fitted a turbo for 50k? I think you were ripped off

Evilmatt's picture

But it boils a cup of water in under 3 minutes!

babychaos's picture

I imagine it works a bit like this:

Bigger Rob's picture

or maybe this

Evilmatt's picture

I THOUGHT I GAVE UP SMOKING! Came the dual Rob's cry. And they had. Time and again, but those heists just kicked the habit right off.

Satre is a classy lady. So classy that she drinks from the bottle. What was that? Use a glass? That's why Satre has the bottle, to break over the head of the person pointing things like that out.

Satre ponders if they'll ever finish that fucking building. Perhaps they're just so obsessed with "the journey" that they fear finishing it.

This is the ISO 9000 way of holding all meetings. Big R, EMW and I are all about the standards.

brainwipe's picture

logged in tonight to try the hydra out a bit more came to some conclusions about it

You need to remember to put the landing gear down before landing
it takes up a lot more space than the buzzard does
the transition from flight to hover and back is tricky going from hover to flight it drops the nose and if you're not careful you slam into the ground and or a tree. From flight to hover you usually have a lot of forward momentum which keeps carrying you forward and it has less trust in hover so where in a helicopter you just pull back and dump the forward momentum into lift it will drift. You can counter this a but by pulling up sharply before transitioning to hover but then you will often be quite high up and going up and down in hover mode is slow.
You can add extra up thrust to forward hover to get more speed but like the helicopter you drift up.
If you land on an uneven surface such that the thing doesn't register you are completely down it will eject you rather than have you climb out
explosive cannons are awesome if a little tricky to aim
when the thing gives out there is no warning none of that sputtering slowly losing height thing the buzzard does it just shuts off and drops like a rock. Similarly its possible to turn the engine off and then switch to hover mode it will not turn back on.

It's a lot of fun to fly and works well in vip missions of all sorts but it does require a different touch than the buzzard. I'm to the point where i can mostly pull off head hunter without getting in range of the bodyguards all the time for the buzzard so it doesn't get hit and so lasts longer. I'm not anywhere near that yet with the hydra.

Oh this also happened

Great spawn location game getting that airborne is going to be tricky

Evilmatt's picture

LOL! That last one is reddit worthy.

brainwipe's picture
Evilmatt's picture

That's superb, EMW! Love it. Of course, I particularly enjoyed us rolling around in the Insurgent. I'm quite inspired. Hearing you say MMMM over and over was brilliant.
The tracking shot at the start with the TV image being super imposed was very neat. Ezekiel is a creepy fucking voice, perhaps the creepiest you've managed so far. Darcy's voice had me cough up my tea this morning! It's reminiscent of South Park, is it a pitch shifter? I almost cheered when Lack-Of Inc CEO turned up. The ads are a nice touch, your voice in the second one is particularly accurate! The mime's car explosion was good, with the fire under the bonnet and around the tires.

The way the characters keep getting up after you've killed them is a pain. I suppose that's just the engine doing the standard thing, there's no way to say "lie down"! How did you record the entire Headhunter run? I thought it only recorded 30 second clips.

brainwipe's picture

I kept thinking I'd got the wrong number of M's I probably did at some stage.

I've been using a video editor called hitfilm 4 express a free editing tool that has some neat features things like tracking compositing and so on it can do some interesting 3d motion tracks (which I've used occasionally to put text matched to moving buildings or add some feature over things). I use the rockstar editor to make a long video with all the various camera shots I want then export that as a avi and use hitfilm to cut that together. Rockstar editor also limits the film length to 30 min which I exceeded due to the multiple angles I had and various extra stuff I didn't use or cut down I ended up outputing 3 different videos from gta to make the final thing. GTA also sticks in this annoying watermark at the beginning of the film which I forgot about and then had to edit out afterwards which was tricky (you can see it in the tv scene in the top left corner I repeated part of the ceiling to get rid of it)

It has simple audio filters to do pitch shifting and panning most of the voices I've tweaked up and down to get them to sound different. The evilmatt voice is shifted up slightly the commentators down and Darcy's way up Ezekiel's wasn't shifted at all. If you shift it too much it starts to sound odd so I've been using a light touch where possible.

The GTA recording engine is a pain in normal mode it stop recording if you interact with certain objects or if you die. In director mode you can turn on invincibility which is why the people get up when they've died if you turn that off the clip will cut out just before you die which is annoying. You have no control beyond that to make them stay down. You also only ever have one character you can't have interactions between characters. So for the interviews I had to find somewhere I could reliably position the camera so it would be in the same place all the time (I jammed it into a corner between two buildings and on top of a bin then aimed at the same spot more or less) then shot video of each character independently the composited the two together with a simple mask. I forgot a couple of things with this the day night cycle means the lighting changed between the two shots and the alignment of the camera was not quite right. I also had random people wandering through the shot which weren't in both bits of film I tried to edit those out but I missed at least one. I could have fixed some of those by reseting the time of day before recording (it's one of the director options) and turning off foot traffic and or clearing the area.

It records for 30 second chunks but if you just let it run it just keeps going in another chunk so assuming nothing happens to trigger a stop (interacting with an object being killed going into or out of a building) then it just jumps to the next chunk so you get a load of back to back 30 second slices you can then stitch together.

Evilmatt's picture