Posts by Sa74n

  • Now playing

    Quote from Gorion

    we have to wait till the "good" games hit the streets

    what ever happened to games with a proper storyline and deep characters?

    theyre too rare. you only get mainstream garbage. are the games getting worse or why cant i find any games anymore that i can enjoy like little big adventure, half-life, max payne, mafia, most lucasarts adventures or even chrono trigger back in the day?

    tried stalker but got bored of it. company of heroes was nice but i'm more of a casual gamer and got pissed off when i couldnt get past a mission. armed assault was disappointing too (having been a big fan of flashpoint).

    bully was fun when i played it at the office but i dont have a ps2 or even a tv myself - not that i actually want one.

    i got the feeling that a lot of game developers/publishers these days are wanking off on their games graphics but people forget that in the end its worth sh** if the gameplay cant hold up. take stranglehold for example. besides the nasty bloom it actually looks pretty decent but i doubt it can hold up with the class and style of a max payne. but its just a guess. shouldnt judge it until i actually played it.

    just me ranting. anyone sharing my views?

  • The random model thread!

    Quote from Warby

    a friend just showed me a super neat tool its a 3d ivy generator you just import an obj double click where it supposed to start growing you watch it grow and you export a new obj of your 3d ivy its main purpose is clearly off line rendering but the ivy generated is lowpoly enough that it could find real time use in next gen custom map ( i am looking at you unreal tournament 3 )

    even for low end games it can be useful. you can just bake the information into texture for a lower poly mesh.

    but yeah, it does look very neat

  • Unreal vs Source.

    Quote from hessi

    there is a point: try to batch change like 100 textures without loading every file in photoshop. vtex does fine. plugin doesnt.

    mazbe something trivial to you ppl, that all got legal photoshop licenses: some users dont want to participate in warez and use alternative graphics tools. for example gimp or Paint 3.0 or Corel Painter. Are there any plugins to those apps? NO! so valve would limit modding support on specific software which isnt what iwant from a software developer.

    i want software that i can run on any system with pulic interfaces to any other software.

    i am not sure but the VTF isnt open source, isnt it? so nobody could use it to implement a corel painter version. that's really crap. vtex instead runs fine with anz painting software because it doesnt need anz painting software at all.

    actually its not a big point, hessi. if you can load and save vtf files from within photoshop there is not really a need to convert 100s of textures. and i never said it should be a replacement to vtex (because after all there might still be rare cases when you need the batch functionality).

    why do you complain about the lack of plugins for painter/gimp? there wasnt even a plugin for photoshop in the first place. personally i'd like to see those plugins available for every single grafics application that exists but theres no need to since photoshop is still industry standart - even without taking the cracked versions into account. i bet valve as well as every single source licensee uses photoshop for their 2d work.

    besides, wunderboy and nemesis did write the vtflib which you can use to make plugins for any application (as far as i know).

    Quote from http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=40

    VTFLib is an open source programming library which allows developers to add support for VMT and VTF files used by the material system of Valve Software's Source game engine. It functions independent of Steam allowing third party apps to use these file types without the need for Steam to be running.

    to get back to the issue:

    im not saying they shouldnt have developed the commandline tools but that valve shouldve released a proper package of additional development tools to speed things up. its just more efficient (for me that is).

    edit:

    im not talking about a material editor here. you have to deal with material files in any engine these days. what would be nice to have is a way to save textures directly from within photoshop (or any tool you prefer) to the game format and choose a template for the material (pretty much like 'save as concrete..', 'save as metal..' etc.) and it generates that material file for you (and saves it to the correct place). if you wish you'd still be able to jump in there and edit it manually. for most world textures it would do the job though.

    and i agree that itd be more complicated to update all the tools when changes or improvements are made but if it was part of the source sdk and it was coded properly with that functionality in mind it wouldnt be too hard to do.

    just my 2 cents

  • Unreal vs Source.

    you have to agree that there is no point in using a command line tool to convert tgas to vtfs if you couldve just released a photoshop exporter with the sdk. im very happy that atleast someone else made the effort to write that plugin.

    theres plenty of things that would benefit some streamlining in the sdk. a proper way to preview materials and models in a semi-ingame environment wouldve been nice. i find it very annoying to always have to fire up the engine and load a map to look at texture changes (and if you added a new texture you'd have to recompile the map - or atleast a part of it). its just not very efficient and a lot of time gets lost handling the tools instead of spending it in maya or photoshop.

    most of timesinks are hidden in hammer though. theres plenty of improvements that could be made. i liked it a lot back when i was basically working exclusively with wc/hammer but since i started working with other tools i see that its actually not very efficient to work with (i posted a wishlist on page 3).

  • Texture Artist required for The Specialists Mod

    you can use all textures and models i used in my subway map if you want

    i can also give you the source file if you wanna merge it into the map. it was made for the 1on1 category of a map contest but that category was dropped so the map was never really used.

    http://sa74n-design.de/portfolio/showIm ... id=03&n=06

    [Blocked Image: http://sa74n-design.de/portfolio/images/leveldesign_item03_image1.jpg]

    damn gotta fix those dark pictures. looked fine on my old screen

    just drop me a message in case ure interested