Weird. The forum does preserve formatting if you paste text, however a 'Pasted as rich text. Paste as plain text instead' link should appear in the editor. Does that appear if you scroll down? If not, I guess that is another bug I should raise.
I'll PM you in relation to the theme.
3 hours ago, [HP] said: Yeah, pretty much the same story for me. It made me want to be a level designer, then it rolled off to environment art.
Kind of crazy how a video game could change my life this much, for the better. I remember playing MP1 over, and over and over again, one day I was so bored I started reading the game's manual, in the very last page there was a little section called "Modding", I remember like it was yesterday, reading that little paragraph saying if I wanted more Max Payne I could hop online and get other people's content and even make my own. I got on a bus to the nearest cyber-cafe, carrying with me an old CD-RW that was rewritten a hundred times already, I couldn't afford internet at home so that turned into my routine for the months to come, we take it for granted now but man having the chance to socialize with people with the same passion for a game and mods was extremly liberating and enabling for me. Which btw, eventually in the search for more games I could mod, I found Mapcore.
Max Payne still has one of the best ambiance work I've ever seen in a video game, the balance between the story, design, art and music was nailed to perfection. It made me realize a video game can be way more than just running in boring corridors killing mindless mean dudes on the screen, they can immerse you and help better your life, I've been trying to recreate that with my art, ever since.
I liked to shoot f**kas in bullet time.
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In all seriousness it really inspired me too. I remember getting MaxED and after about 20 minutes concluded this industry is not for me. Thankfully I then discovered the joys of Day of Defeat and HL engine mapping and so began countless teenage hours of building technically sound and pretty maps that were a pile of hell to play. In the end I decided to just go for a design job because then it just needed to look nice. 
God these games' graphics blew my mind back in the day. It's incredible taking a look back (for the first time in my case) and seeing how much we've come on. In my memory they were still looking like CryEngine 10 or something.
I mean, those guys just sound like assholes @Tisky. Sounds like you aren't particularly close so you're better off having nothing to do with people who make you feel negative like that. If something isn't bringing positivity to your life then it's not something worth investing any energy into at all.
Not sure what your broader situation is, but you seem pretty unhappy. I've certainly been there and know the value of change. Is your town, job, general routine making you feel low? Change one or all of those things as a matter of priority. Variety truly is the spice of life, and it can be so liberating shedding the status quo and making new friends through a new job, etc. Screw the place you've invested time into if it's not doing it for you.
If your ex is forcing a dramatic change in terms of your children, have you considered mixing things up yourself and going and living somewhere closer? Doesn't have to be the same town, but maybe getting the hell away from what you're currently dealing with is a possibility. I guess it depends on how much time you spend doing things in your current area that you couldn't live without.
Of course there might be deeper issues like depression to contend with, and those won't go away no matter the circumstances I described above and definitely should be dealt with properly. However, general dissatisfaction with your lifestyle makes it all so much harder.
I quite enjoyed getting nostalgic with this video that some obsessed rather dedicated person has put together showing a live overhead map of the routes of Gordan, Barney, and Adrian in addition to a feed of each.
My god it exists
I would so stand in that unlit porch and silently stare at passers-by.
I know that scene got criticised for being a bit contrived but man was it satisfying. ?
Looks great! Evokes memories of GTA5 actually, driving one of those big-ass vehicles around with the wind farm nearby. 
Takes me right back to when I visited Normandy (a completely different place but... you know). ?
I took your point about the 'Our Picks' widget being a bit big, especially on mobile. I've hidden some of the less essential information in it which I hope makes it more palatable. While more substantial changes can be done to make to possible to hide it altogether, that would require diving into the templates and potentially custom JS as it's not native functionality, and as Sprony indicates we're trying to avoid doing that as much as possible because it makes updates (which love to occasionally require resetting your templates) very difficult. So essentially it's CSS-based tweaks instead.
The dark theme requests make sense and I'll look into it once we've finished fine-tuning this update. Granted we've never had this and I don't think the forum is any brighter than it's ever been, but it's becoming a popular feature these days so I can look at doing this in a way that again is as easy as possible to maintain. The forum has robust tools for customising the colour scheme on top of a single theme, however it does fall apart a bit once you add custom templates and/or third-party plugins into the mix, hence again us trying to minimise use of those.
Some work has been underway on that, actually we had it enabled for a while last year but I had to disable it because mysteriously people in various regions couldn't access the site. We've also had other issues when I've tried to implement it since (content in posts not loading, asset problems, redirection loops). I need to do some further research and work into a successful migration because the forum software has various quirks that make implementing it less straightforward than one might expect. But it is on the 'roadmap'!
I feel like this might be one of those games where the trailer is a more resonant experience than the game itself. From what I saw they've been showing it at artsy events and I must admit I really enjoyed watching it — mostly because of the thought-provoking visuals and impressiveness of scale. But I suspect that like the closest examples I can think of (Spore, Flower), it'll end up being a sweet sandbox toy that doesn't last for very long. But hey, if it's cheap then why not?
I thought that the animation was so funky as a way of limiting costs, seeing as this is a team of two developers (plus sound people) and obviously movement animation can be really time-consuming. But apparently it's riffing off of this weirdness:
According to CloudFlare MapCore is OK. In their words:
Quote Fortunately, your domain is not one of the domains where we have discovered exposed data in any third party caches. The bug has been patched so it is no longer leaking data. However, we continue to work with these caches to review their records and help them purge any exposed data we find. If we discover any data leaked about your domains during this search, we will reach out to you directly and provide you full details of what we have found.
As a matter of caution it's probably wise to consider changing passwords if you use the same one on multiple websites — CloudFlare is used by a huge chunk of the internet so as far as internet screw-ups go this is a pretty big one.
If you really want to use the same password on different sites, I recommend 'salting' it with a character or few unique to that website's name/address. That way you're more protected from things like this.
While CloudFlare provides benefits my confidence in it is pretty damaged by this, so I'll be looking into migrating off of it. Thankfully MapCore doesn't use most of its features, which potentially contributes to us being unaffected.
This game really brings home the futility of war...
These GIFs are amazing. I'm going to absolutely devour this game upon its final release. I love the feeling of a new Battlefield game when everyone is still pretty unfamiliar with the levels including myself. Always feels more immersive to me when I don't know where the hell I'm going and I just follow the chaos. 
Well we clearly disagree but that's a tangent really so no need to dwell on it. Anyway, glad your mapping is coming along! Be sure to get a post in the 3D forum once you're ready to get some of that all-important feedback.
If you don't consider design a form of art or creative process then I think we just have diametrically opposed views on this. If it were merely a set of rules or a non-creative process then why not just get machines to automate the whole thing? (Actually someone on this forum has done just that, but I'm sure they'd freely admit that the procedural generation is obvious, and a human hand has still guided the way it generates.)
Even programming is often considered a creative process because you have to create solutions to problems by constructing something from nothing. There might be rules and conventions, but innovation and creativity are required. Also, is it the case that you only intend to create white boxes for levels or are you planning on making them aesthetically appealing too? Because you'll have difficulty getting your maps played or jobs if you can't produce sexy-looking material.
I've seen a lot of people flourish in terms of developing skills and careers in the 16 years I've been in this community, and the vast majority did so by simply pumping out map after map. Some maps received lots of feedback, some didn't. But they just kept on creating because they loved doing it for the sake of doing it. By doing this, with time you'll develop the skills and you'll get plenty of feedback on the way — especially once you start creating stuff that actually looks good, which is certainly as important as something that plays well if you want people to give it a go.
Want to know which game to make maps for? One that a lot of people are playing. Once your maps are good enough then people will notice them, play them, and provide feedback on them. You have an excellent community here for that too. If you're not hitting the threshold of quality then you'll just have to make do with what you can get and keep working on it. Feedback is of course important, but you also learn a lot from experimentation. If you can't trust your own judgment then you have a problem.
Honestly, your last sentence makes me feel like perhaps you're barking up the wrong tree by implying that you wouldn't do level design for pleasure. If it's something you just see as a means to an end or 'a job', maybe you'd be much better off pursuing something you're legitimately passionate about. I'm a big believer in people basing their careers around what they love doing and those who don't usually end up being people I don't want to work with because of their lack of enthusiasm once the grind and frustration that inevitably occur with any job rear their heads. You'll never love your career if you don't love what you do and aren't happy to do it regardless. You know how many game developers deal with bad pay, bad conditions, and bad hours but do it anyway because they love it?
Honestly, just go make something. Virtually anything you do in terms of level design will put you in a better position than you are now, which seems to be no further along than you were three weeks ago, or in 2005. There's no perfect engine or perfect process for this. You just need to devote hours — and a lot of them — to learning this craft. Imagine where you'd be now if you'd persisted with building even one map a year since 2005. 11 maps! A whole portfolio.
Anyway, I'm probably devoting too many words to this seeing as I myself decided to give up level design because even though I love games I started finding the process more grating as detail and complexity moved beyond GoldSrc-era expectations and I was more passionate about another aspect of design. Gotta be honest with yourself right? I should let the real level designers share any more thoughts they may have. I wish you the best of luck.
Some very good points made on this page about the value of feedback and the impact that it has on motivation/morale. However, I will counter with the point that if you truly enjoy a form of art — which many people would consider level design to be — then it's enjoyable for its own sake.
That is, a passionate painter doesn't really care if anybody looks at their work, they just love painting. A musician doesn't really care if anybody listens to their jams, they just love playing an instrument. You could lock a creative person in a room doing their passion for a year straight completely isolated from the outside world, and they'd still enjoy what they're doing.
The creative process itself is the goal, not having a finished map and being able to say 'I'm a mapper!'. I agree that feedback will definitely help you along, but you know what will help more than 50 pages of feedback? Simply making another map. And then another. And then another. And then another.
Because every single time you map, you're practicing — and that's what develops your skill. Going back to the music analogy, it doesn't really matter if someone playing the piano gets a mountain of feedback and notes from listeners and/or fellow musicians. Sure it might provide some pointers, but more than anything what will develop that pianist's skill is playing and playing and playing that piano for dozens, hundreds, thousands of hours.
In my experience this is what makes the difference between successful people in any creative industry (including my own, UI development) and those who fizzle out after a few knock-backs: having a true zest for the creative process itself, to the point where it doesn't even matter if you never finish anything or get any feedback on it.
Of course, getting stuff finished is a separate topic...
