Posts by KungFuSquirrel

Quote from Urban

doesnt seem like the higher-ups at ea are very nice to their employees, so if this is true.. how do they keep people on the job?.. seems like alot of people wouldnt take this crap.. or maybe they just love the idea of making games so they take the good with the bad... weird...

As the experienced vets get fed up and leave, they replace them with naive new employees with not a whole lot of work experience. They eagerly take the job, and then are screwed over. They keep the job because a) leaving the team before completion of their first project could be catastrophic to future job hunts and/or b) they just assume it's the norm and don't think twice about it.

I guess on some forums where this is going around there are people re-thinking their ambitions to go into the industry, assuming this is just par for the course. My understanding is also that many of the people that leave EA due to these circumstances end up leaving the industry entirely. Really too bad that people let themselves believe this is normal behavior.

We are getting a new building sometime next year. Room for 150, more aesthetically pleasing environments (I think more wood paneling, non-fluorescent lighting, exposed rafters/girders and the like, all cool and stuff), its own mo-cap studio, weight room, improved kitchen, and access to facilities in the other buildings next to us. That'll be really awesome.

Our guys are mostly split between Call of Duty and Rocket Arena at lunch and after hours. A few might still play UT2K4. We play another game now and then, too.

Ken and I have some fun in our cubes, though no doll of shame... We have the dead chair, for one. His chair was bad. Eric Biessman sat in it and declared he (Ken) needed a new chair immediately. I took Ken's old chair as a drastic step up from my previous one. My old one now lies on the ground between our cubes with a hole in it from where I stabbed it with a pen. It has also been headcrabbed.

I also keep a section from a Far Cry promo I saved from GameStop and have it looking into Ken's cube. I'm going to start decorating him with various hats for various occasions, starting with Christmas. Teehee.

We get pizza day once a month, movie day (at the megaplex uber-screen theater just down the block), and profit-sharing bonuses on all titles (even on games you didn't work on, apparently, but much less than those who did work on it) after you've been there for 3 months.

Everyone always seems to be in a pretty good mood, regardless. Average length of employment at Raven is 6 years, I think (if I recall correctly). A few people have left since I arrived, but not many and none for a while (and those that did were all on excellent terms).

Apparently it's not even a matter of getting the content done - I spoke to someone who was working on the team specifically referred to in the article (and apparently another team had it worse - the 12-13 hour/7 days a week conditions for perhaps a year or more), and he said that not only was it required to work those hours, but content was getting done and people were sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for more content and were still forced to remain there for 'moral support.' Ouch.

Edit: Even more ouch is that sentence structure... I won't even bother

Shoulda gone with Activision. heh

http://www.igda.org/Forums/showthread.p ... adid=13068

Very interesting read. Thankfully that's not really an issue here. Double thankfully, I'd already been offered my spot here when one of the EA guys called me back in May or whenever.

The black and white bits remind me of an old book I had when I was a kid... it was all black and white outlines and stuff, and the first part took place during the day. At the 'end' of the book, you turned it over and flipped back through it the other way, and it told the rest of the story at night. What was a plume of smoke from a factory during the day version was the road during the night version. Really inredible. Gotta try and remember what it was...

please please please freedom fighters 2 or something similar.

Maybe give the arch an actual texture to match the shape? like any nicely constructed stone arch or something? Could fit nicely. *shrug*

Looks sweet, though

If I ever got anything, it'd be a Quake 4 logo. Even if the Quake franchise itself didn't stand the test of time, it'd still have very direct significance and meaning towards me.

Of course, I doubt I'll ever get one.

Oh, duh, .ase works, too. *slaps self*. I'm just so used to LightWave I don't really think in terms of non-.lwo files for map objects

Well, if it says anywhere he did it with Max, I guess that just confirms that vertex painting (and, thus, blending) can hold up on the conversion to .lwo.

however awful that 'terrain' may be...

It'd probably be pretty easy to do a quick export to .lwo format from another program, though I dunno if vertex maps for texture blending would work very well across the conversion.

Lightwave's not too bad, though, and if you've already taken the step to learn Radiant, you're going to have an easier time with it. Some operations are similar, and the interface is very much keyboard-oriented. I'm still known to accidentally use the wrong key in one or the other, but that's pretty common regardless.

I should write up a simple crash course on LW for designer-types to make use of. Biggest thing you'll use it for is terrain, which nice and easy, but sometimes it's handy to export some geometry and convert it to a model as well. Dunno if that'd be overstepping my bounds, though, I'd have to probably check with someone at work for clearance.

Doubtful; I run a 9800 at home with no problems whatsoever. Also know a few people running it on X800s with no problems. nVidia may have a slight performance edge, but the GPU manufacturer shouldn't affect this sort of thing.

Did the camera, z view, or map view not work? And if so, did you restart the editor?

noooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!

editor.

You can create a shortcut to it pretty easily as well. Just make a normal D3 shortcut, then add "+editor +set r_fullscreen 0" to the command line. Be sure to add "+set r_fullscreen 1" to your game shortcut, though. Saves the hassle of alt+enter any time you want one after running the other.

There's a BSP process that handles things like the basic player collision files as well as AI collision and navigation (the AAS files). Also, you can run a -ShadowOpt 2 compile which optimizes the shadows that are cast by lights (they're polgyons that add to your tri count; another reason why large overlapping lights can be bad), but the lights still function fully in real-time.

Larger maps can still take a while just due to the number of faces and volumes (AAS again) that have to be calculated, but it's still a very very quick process. Minutes at most.

Quote from Section_Ei8ht

its specifically angled that way. Its more evident in the game. the bottom of the trim is a verticle brush, and the top is a patch mesh that curves up to the top in that kinda half U shape.

Hmm. Maybe just try taking the whole shape you have right now into a patch mesh, then, and get a little curve out of it. Might pull off well.

Quote

All of my patch meshes are only a 3x3 subdiv. I'm going to go through the map and bump them all up to 7x7 or higher if needed. I'm slowly starting to understand and utilize patches more and more.

Now, wait, you mean by creating a simple patch mesh and then using the 3x3 settings? You'll rarely need any more than a 3x3 simple patch mesh - if you're tweaking subdivisions, use the surface properties tab, click the checkbox for "subdivide surface" or whatever and then use the sliders there to adjust the vertical and horizontal subdivisions. This also opens up the possibility of doing some crazy cool stuff with details following curves (i.e. a simple 90 bevel curve combined with patch meshes at smaller subdivisions with some varied texture stacking). You can't always trust the automatic subdivision to get the desired results.

If this is what you're doing already, my apologies, but I just wanted to make sure - your phrasing confused me a tad Better safe than sorry.

Anything you need to know about Quake at this time is available in the recent PC Gamer article. I believe it has an answer to your question, DD.

Section_Eight: New shots looks good. Is the trim up top specifically angled that way, or is it a low subdivision bevel? It might be worth trying out a curvy top piece there? I think it'd look especially neato on the corner to keep that smoother style.

It'd be cool if you could get a few more lighting highlights in here and there - just little accent stuff with small enough dimensions to keep from giving too much overdraw. You'll see the normal maps really start to 'pop' when you get the lighting just right on them. You'll know what I mean when you see it, but I'll leave that discovery to you