Posts by KungFuSquirrel

Quote from Gloglebag

Also what about this, these folks claim IW copied a community map http://www.codboards.com/showthread.php?t=31565 ?

The guy made Pripyat - a real place. It was already in COD4 (ferris wheel, anyone?). The shots look absolutely nothing like each other except for having a) a similar landmark (the Cherynobl tower, ffs), b) water (with no other similarity anywhere), and c) gravestones (there is at least one cemetery in pripyat).

I mean, sure, who knows, maybe they did lift it (the contest rules probably give them ownership of all submitted files anyway), but from what the guy showed it's not even close.

You know, I thought that looked a little familiar, then I saw the "Dear Esther" on the wallpaper versions

Fucking phenomenal, btw. Rockwork is stellar - are those all hand-built displacements, or did you go with meshes?

Edit: Now that I actually check your blog, I see that it is in fact displacements. Awesome work, though you may be a little insane as well

Quote from sarge mat

I don't really see how its going to be any different than buying a copy of UT3? I would think anyone who wants it has it by now.

One of the biggest advantages might be current UE3 builds - Epic releases monthly code drops, but UT3 is still the newest game on the market. There's a ton of amazing features that it's highly unlikely will ever find their way to solo/small developers without 7 digits to shell out on licensing.

I'd say it's also very likely that such a release would come with much higher level code access than would be available in your typical mod development scenario.

Could be pretty amazing if true.

Wanted to introduce you guys to a little thing called the "spoiler tag"

Quote

you click on it and put words inside it so people casually browsing the website don't see major details of things

Infamous is pretty great, sort of a lower-key Crackdown but a ton of fun (and if you go PS3 you won't be playing Crackdown anyway). Ratchet and Clank is top-notch as well - Tools of Destruction is solid, there's a downloadable episode to go with it, and Crack in Time comes out this week.

also, Warhawk. shill shill

Edit: also, L4D2 is PC/360 only. Not that I see that swaying you, but just a heads-up

Quote from Taylor

The PS3 “yellow light” issues are not worth considering. It’s a rumour that’s come along recently because of a very ill-researched Watchdog episode that suggested instead of paying Sony £100 to fix your out of warranty PS3, you should pay the same to people in a van to try and do it with a very high fail rate. It was fronted by freelance columnist for Microsoft whose anti-Sony articles strangely went offline the day after the episode went out. Yeah.

Good to know. Only saw the first part, not the follow-up. That'll show me! (and neither platforms issues, even the RROD, really strike me as cause to not purchase)

Re: backwards compatibility in Tanuki's post, don't forget that only the old 60gb PS3s support hardware compatibility, and I believe only the old 20s have software. They've dropped it entirely on the new ones.

Honestly, if you can afford it, there's plenty of reason to own both, and if you're still more of a PC gamer owning either has enough of a library to complement your PC exclusives/multi-platform titles.

PS3 is a killer media device with Blu-Ray, in the US the 360 + Netflix is also pretty amazing, but that won't do you much good. The first party Sony game library is solid enough to stand on its own now (aside of my free copy of BIA:HH, all my PS3 titles are Sony developed or published). Batman: AA is the rare case of a PS3 SKU getting a little extra love, but in a lot of cases the 360 still wins the multi-platform battle. If you want shooters, the 360 has a far stronger selection. Sony doesn't seem to drop the price of their older exclusive games unless they hit the "greatest hits" line, which shouldn't deter you but it's something to keep in mind.

For online/multiplayer, the PSN stuff may be free but you also get what you pay for. Live is a total package and well worth the cost (and it's also very easy to find significantly reduced cost 12-month subscription cards online). There are a few MP gems on the PS3 (SOCOM and Warhawk are two of the strongest, MAG may have potential as well), but across the board the 360 is going to lead here, especially if you want to play specifically with friends. Built-in wireless on the PS3 is a win, though if you do get the 360 wireless adapter it works well. There's also some guides online to creating your own wireless bridge if you have the parts lying around or can get them for cheaper.

Reliability has been an issue on the 360, but the new models do appear to be much better and the PS3 has recently seen some issues coming up on older models. On the 360, there's a strong warranty system in place, but the PS3 "yellow light" issues that are coming up appear to be out of warranty.

You may have to buy some cabling to get the PS3 hooked up and to charge your controller. I know they have a combo HDMI/USB cable kit available, not sure what the price is.

For me personally, stuff like Live and my preference of the 360 controller over the DualShock has me leaning mostly toward the 360 It sounds like from what you've listed the PS3 might be better for you, but they're both solid platforms. Like I said to start, if you can afford it, there's no problem with having both

Yeah, I didn't either.

Quote from 2d-chris

Sure you could do this at the end if you want to make a tidy map in editor, but lets face it who is going to care once it's been compiled and turned into a horrible mess anyway?

Keeping clean and tidy in the editor where possible is still useful, and after going back to the godawful mess that is the ns_eclipse .rmf file (which is technically "clean," but basically a giant solid block as a result of HL1-style brush sharing to reduce plane counts and all that silliness) and not recognizing a damn thing, I still recommend it. The way I built for HL1 maps was great for keeping things way under the limits, but is a nightmare and a waste of time to work with now, and kills any attempt to make a quick change, which is one of the most important things to be able to do in a level in development.

It's also really important to be as clean as possible in a team environment, which is why I dropped the habit of brush-sharing on Q4. If someone else gets onto the level and can't easily make out what you're doing, it's going to be a problem - likewise if you go onto someone else's map and are presented with a sloppy mess. I also once worked with a guy who would stack all his critical game entities in one vertical location, or on top of each other, so multiple lines would appear to converge on the same point and you couldn't tell what was what without deconstructing the whole pile. Infuriating!

But yeah, as it applies to mitering, you can of course build cleanly without doing it to everything. Only matters when you want to more quickly texture stuff or anywhere you can see the top of a corner/curve.

That looks fantastic, insta. Looking forward to it

er, yeah. Old habit of calling it that.

Quote from the0rthopaedicsurgeon

which looking at Valve's maps and what other people have said I don't think is necessary? I've never heard a proper answer either way on that.

Oh, overlooked this when I replied earlier - it's not necessary. The CSG process also strips out all outside faces automatically. But, this is another one where it can still be helpful sometimes to improve readability of the level; it's a little more work and can get a little tedious sometimes, but it won't hurt anything.

Quote from barrakid

Miter corners are good for optimization if they are "inside corners", since you save one "face" on each corner when comparing with a "regular corner" (see pic). It also, in some cases, causes less splitting of the floor, ceiling and adjacent brushes, and they're easier to texture (again because you only have two faces to texture instead of 3).

This is incorrect. Since HL1 (and I think as far back as Quake) the CSG process merges coplanar faces with identical texturing. In HL1, it could actually hurt you since the limits on things like planes were so low. I have a screenshot somewhere of a testmap example I made to debunk it for HL1 using your exact example, as well as another one where I took a 128x128 square and clipped it into 1x1 brushes - which were also all combined.

Now, though, it doesn't really matter either way. The faces will still get combined but the limits are high enough that it helps build cleaner and easier-to-read geometry. I got in the habit of doing it on Quake 4 both for cleanliness and the ease of texturing by brush rather than by face (i.e. grab entire brushes and apply texture rather than grabbing individual faces), and tend to do it where possibly in my Hammer work for similar reasons... though it annoys the hell out of me that I can't stretch mitered brushes like in Radiant.

Activision also pulled the Quake 4 1.1 patch because if you changed display resolutions over and over again really super quickly between resolutions that weren't supported, it apparently caught really old CRT monitors on fire. :\

Quote from dux

Was jsut watching some trailers for it, looks REALLY cool. Then it goes inside the cockpit with the driver and... oh dear. It looks like their budget ran out when it came to modelling and animating the driver

You never see the guy except in a few replay camera angles, though; there's no need wasting time on a UT3-level character or something - the hands and wheel/shifting motion in the in-car view, which you actually see, look great.

Also the XBL avatar mirror decoration is possibly the best thing ever.

Quote from 2d-chris

To make good games you don't need cutting edge tools or streamlined art pipelines (I hate that word pipeline!!) What you need is the right people and long enough to do it. I've seen so many people blame bad tools for making a bad game, when there are plenty of developers who build better games with worse tools. My point here is a good workman never blames his tools ... it just takes most people a decade to realise this.That being said, daily I use one of the most feature complete engines in the world so my perspective might be a little messed up Making the best use of techonolgy you have is an art form by itself

There's any number of ways to make great games, whether it be licensed tech or custom tools, and the best way is going to vary greatly from one studio to the next. There are, unfortunately, lots of situations where the tools and pipeline (as much as you hate the term, it's one of the most critical parts of efficient development) end up being a bottleneck and/or a liability, especially in large teams. Unstable tools are unacceptable. Tools with performance issues are unacceptable.

The bigger the team and the bigger the budget, the more critical it gets. If a team of 10 designers each lose an hour of work per day due to inefficiencies or crashes, that's more than a day of lost productivity... every day. I've been in situations where tool or build instability has resulted in far greater losses than that.

Everyone's complaining about teams being too big, budgets being too high, and games costing too much - With better and faster tools, you can build faster with fewer people. Built faster with fewer people, your budget drops. Your budget drops, you need less money to make a profit. Need less money to make a profit, maybe you can sell your game for cheaper. Sell your game for cheaper, maybe you luck out with more sales and end up with even more money to fund your next project. A bit of an idealist approach, really, but I believe in it.

Unfortunately tool development in itself isn't exactly cheap. I recall hearing that the budget for UE3 tools development was something like 3x a decent AAA title - and that was when Gears was about to ship. I imagine you guys at Crytek have put some significant time and effort into your engine and tools as well, with significant financial investment.

Now, there's another half of production that this ignores, which is planning and scheduling - if you can't properly prioritize, plan ahead, or commit to certain key decisions (the combination of which often leads to not even being able to properly play the game for months and/or years), you're hosed no matter how good your tools are. Way too many traps out there, heh.

No, but it is: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0175834/

They got most of the cast of the animated series to do the game VO - including Hamill as the Joker, who is fantastic.

I would highly encourage you to get into Wolf and take your own screenshots of the areas you specifically were responsible for. It's always a little weird seeing images pulled from IGN or GameSpot on a portfolio. Sometimes it's what you have to do, especially in the case of a console title where you aren't as likely to have easy screenshot-taking access, but for a PC game I'd recommend always taking your own shots. Given the nature of Wolf MP and it being shuffled around a bit, I think it's even more important you focus in on your specific contributions, as this type of question will come up in interviews. The more you can do to to address that ahead of time, the better off you'll be.

Even if the shots you posted are of levels you worked on, marketing shots are going after very different things than what you want to show in your own shots... and let's be honest, Activision doesn't take great screenshots.

Your site itself looks solid, btw, I just think you'll be able to show your most recent work a lot better with your own shots

I picked this up last weekend and I've been living this game all night almost every night since. Loving it. The Codemasters racers are easily some of the best presented titles out there right now. Amazing interface, effects, etc. Just a really satisfying game to play. Get it!

It's pretty great, one of the better games I've played this year so far. I think I'm about 20% in. Probably will finish plowing through it during my internet-less window at the new apartment (stealing my wife's computer for the weekend before she moves down )