Posts by KungFuSquirrel

Matt said during the demonstration that all their stuff right now uses the "simple shadowing" (I think he called it) that's the normal dynamic stuff - when they get the lightmapping stuff in, I imagine that's a bit part of what it'll be used for, though I'm curious where they'll store the lightmap data. If it's separate, they might actually take a memory hit by doing that (one nice thing about D3 is you take precisely 0kb texture data on lightmaps, though pay for the shadow calculations and such on the CPU at run-time), but they might be able to (and may well want to) bake it into the texture page for the world itself to keep it in a single pass. That's just level designer speculation, though

I imagine they'll also support something similar to unreal where you can get both baked and dynamic light/shadows out of single light sources on a per-object basis.

Coming from a Radiant background, they've made huge strides with this. Radiant is still there, you can still build brushes and all that, but they've just chosen to weigh more heavily on models a la Unreal than with D3.

The tools integration into the one editor is really big for them, as it was a big problem in D3 having artists working in one tool and designers in another - a strong feature of Unreal is that everyone works in the editor. That gives everyone a better understanding of how their content relates to the other members of the team.

I was curious how much they had actually changed; I had heard bits and pieces of information while at Raven but not seen anything and of course haven't been in a position to get that information since coming to Gearbox. Seeing this thing running at the demo yesterday actually surprised me, and it was great to see them addressing a lot of the issues the editor has had in the past.

I was also impressed to see the megatexture demonstration as he was painting the detail onto the terrain, though I'm still trying to grasp how they're tying models and geometry into this. It's a pretty fantastic setup, though, compared to the usual heightmap/color map blending or vertex painting as seen in Unreal or Source and looked really well integrated into the editor.

They've got some new features in the pipe, too, like lightmaps (so it'll be a lightmap/dynamic split like Unreal, though probably still heavier on dynamic) and radiosity, so I think you'll start to see some much more impressive and natural looking scenes coming out of this in the near future. Will be interesting to see if they can actually gain some licensing momentum again, as D3 had of course only one licensee that wasn't for an id-owned game.

Unreal BSP editing tools are currently, hands-down, the most powerful bsp tools available in a traditional CSG-style level editor.

Unfortunately, the interface for dealing with brushwork remains fairly primitive and hasn't gotten as much love as Epic shifts to more of BSP foundations covered with static mesh detail. Radiant and Hammer remain far more speedy for building and texturing brushwork (and Radiant still has a pretty massive lead on Hammer there), but if someone were to add that level of construction efficiency to the Unreal tools... game over, man, game over.

Interested to see what direction id takes the editor for id tech 5, though.

Yeah, they're all so subjective. I've found a few sites where I tend to agree with most of the reviews (Eurogamer ftw), so I tend to skim over their take on stuff when it comes out but even then I've greatly enjoyed some games that review in the 60s and 70s and hated games that review in the 80s and 90s.

I think they've got more players than Quake 4, so there's that going for them at least

I'm actually pretty convinced that the Black Mesa setting is the Macbeth of mods.

edit: clarified myself a bit

I think a better comparison than player counts is who releases vs who doesn't. Yeah, sure, maybe the player counts aren't great, but they've gotten farther than most projects. That it's getting into late 2007, about 3 years past the release of HL2, and Insurgency just released as the first major mod release after 3-4 years of working isn't a good thing. How many projects have gone under in that same stretch of time that might have seen life in smaller, scaled-back, and/or incremental form?

Also keep in mind given that Insurgency just came out within the last month; it'll take a lot of hard work and dedication on the part of the team to maintain, let alone increase those numbers. While I hope you guys will be successful, it's entirely possible you may find in a few months to a year's time that INS is in a similar position as some of these other mods in the player base department.

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And every generation is going to make it less and less feasible for "release early release often" to be a sane approach to game developement.

I think the opposite is true for mod development. The commitment required is skyrocketing beyond what most people can reasonably manage in a part-time situation. Small iterative projects are the way to go if you want to see the light of day without having to throw a huge team at it, which I also think is a terrible trend in modding.

In retrospect, I regret ever aiming for retail/professional standard with NW. We went too big too fast and couldn't hold it in the long run. Worst part is, if we'd just stuck to the initial plan I bet we could have had a pretty damn solid release in a much more reasonable timeframe. That was on a HL mod, too; that was easymode compared to what's out there now. Unless our tools take a huge jump in the near future (which they should for the sake of everyone who's ever had to work in a bloated dev team), it's just not reasonable and I think it really betrays the roots of what made mods mods. Steppen, that you accented a point by saying "just "mods"" is a very telling statement of how drastically things have changed in the wake of CS and DOD's success.

Just like those dismal flops of Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, eh? Or Natural Selection, that for months only had a hacked together technology release of only bare bones functionality and a couple partial texture sets? That drew far more people to the mod than a hushed team would have, and people even made up their own games with it while waiting for the full release (skulk racing anyone?). Those were the mods for Half-Life, and every one of them had at least some form of early hack of a release to start building interest, support, and even draw more talent to be a part of it. You can't just point to Dystopia and say "nuh-uh, look, the entire system is flawed" - if it didn't work for them, well, that's unfortunate for them but not an argument against the entire method.

Garry's mod is no more an exception than the widespread appeal of the Wii - it's simple, and it's fun as hell. Does anyone even remember the stuff randomnine did back in the day? Canned Tuna? Turbo, the snark racing mod? It's great when a big group of people get together and do something big and impressive, and I agree that it's shitty of garry to be taking potshots at mods, but people have got to stop treating every mod like it has to be a replace-every-last-bit-of-original-content re-invent the wheel retail-equivalent package in order to be worthy of play or respect.

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I also think that people like Valve should think a wee bit and take a look at the example they set with holding their newest sequel back for 2 years before they say release early release often.

They already have, as I mentioned in my earlier post; they regret using the episodic term applied to the HL2 expansions, and 'release early, release often' does not hold true for retail products.

It's not like he did it for popularity, either; he just happened to hit upon something that a ton of people find really fun that didn't involve years of effort or a massive team - there's a lot to be said for that.

There's also a lot to be said for people who work within a big team and produce a highly involved big-time project, but while I disagree with the shot at Black Mesa, I whole heartedly agree it's counter-productive to hang onto something for years rather than iteratively improving it. Alas, cursed hindsight. :\

I mean, Valve's regretting using the 'episodic' term as they're doing basically yearly expansion packs, but the people who should be embracing that concept the most are mod teams where the resources of a commercial product don't exist. Imagine if on NW we'd taken Adam's first chunk of the game with the first couple weapons and enemies, and released that. Then built upon that momentum and success to release tommy's comms facility a couple months later, with new enemies, an extra weapon, or something like that. I think had I had the knowledge and experience I have now back then, there's no way I'd have tried to do it all at once in the huge package we were promising. It'd have let us stay smaller, more focused, and more productive - and we'd have something tangible to show for the effort other than a couple lines on a resume and some old archived screenshots.

Quote from R_Yell

He mentions Insect Infestation like a misunderstood mod, but hey, they released with a ton of bugs.

Wasn't that... the point?

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Wow this is taking forever... how's this?

http://www.button-masher.net/design_new ... o_item.htm

One thing to keep in mind through all of this, as everyone seems to have comment or a friend working on UE3 all of a sudden, is that finding developers that bitch about the engine they work on is like finding a needle in a stack of needles.

This is not to say that SK is automatically without merit, but a bunch of developers on the internet complaining about UE3 doesn't suddenly mean it's sub-par inferior tech. Coming just recently from D3 tech, I'm basking in the glory of the best support I've ever seen (even though I miss certain elements that D3 did really well), while there's probably people who have been with Unreal for a while eagerly looking at the latest updates to Source or highly interested in id tech 5.

Hell, Epic doesn't check uncompiled code into your branch, take your code and submit it to competitors (unless you offer a code solution to them, in which case they sometimes will include it officially), change the entire collision system 2 weeks before you go gold, or randomly re-do the item layouts in your MP maps resulting in online lynchings. What's not to love?

For real-world style stuff, as much as it pains me to have stuff not on a 32 or 64, I actually tend to go with 144-high floors, using the normal 128 for each floor, then 16 for the space between them. This does force you to use either an exterior trim or a vertically tiling texture, but better represents the amount of space for structural support without stretching things too tall and gives you the option of retaining 8-unit-thick brushes for floors and ceilings without having to worry about brush splits that don't match up between floors giving you nightmares... and of course lets you use the full texture without scaling on the interior walls.

Even if you're as big a grid nazi as I am (an unlikely prospect!) get used to having stuff offset by 8 and 16 when you're working with realistic buildings with both interiors and exteriors.

I think I just did

It's clear you've invested in the correct elements of the room, though, well done!

NW Represent!

JeanPaul - what's this? No curves?! Nothing wrong with stock content, especially not for a doodling sort of thing. I like.

Robert - I loved the night setting, but I think if this is going to be playable you'll have better luck with this theme. People like to bitch about even moderate darkness and even in CSS I don't see a lot of people wanting to spend money on nightvision... though it'd be funny to see if a release of a map like that would actually skew demand enough to upend the new pricing model

Well, I mis-read the "receive all profit" part, but they do ask for Epic to give up the entirety of the profit they made on Gears of War. Check the PDF of the filing, page 52.

Yep, that'll do nicely.

When you license an incomplete engine, you get incomplete code... That shouldn't shock anyone. Doesn't matter who you're licensing from.

SK may have some merit in elements of the case, but I think once they started demanding that they receive the entirety of Epic's Gears of War profits in damages plus the ability to keep their version of the engine and all their modifications to it as their own property with no licensing costs, I think they crossed the line into ridiculousville.

We'll see what happens I guess.

I dunno, the shark eating the fat dude was pretty epic...