Posts by rockdude86

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    displacements in source simply are lacking in a lot of ways... its so damn iritating to make the geometry right at places where different disps meet eachother and the fact you can only use 2 textures on a face really makes it even more iritating... if they just had looked at the unreal engine for example...

    (edit) it actually allready is on request on the valve developer wiki... hope they will do something with it

  • Two rants on level design, need opinions

    I totally agree with you Hourences and this is also something I wanted to point out with my post on the previous page. But, I think I didnt quite succeeded in that and you did (guess that has to do with English not being my first language) Your attitude is the right one to go with, thats for sure

    I want to add my 2 cents on a somewhat different perspective of things. I'm a person who knows (not to be egotistical here) a lot about many things, yet I'm no expert on them all. Though I do have the insight in certain area's of game design that, for example, CAN make me a good mod leader and thats why I think its important not to overspecialize yourself. Keep the variety in things and your horizon becomes a lot wider. It allows you more posibilities.

    Most importantly, you have to learn that some people DO specialize themselves and that they are simply better at things than you are yourself. This also adds the fact that it, for me atleast, makes me a person who knows (very well) how to work together with others. I think in gamedesign, you should allow your teammates the freedom of how they see things and how they work. Ofcourse you work together but if for example a level designer on my team says he wants to do it his way instead of my way, and it fits to the idea we aim for, then he gets that freedom. Its about being realistic in these things and working together well and understanding each other, because some cases simply won't let you do it yourself. Someone else might make your idea even better then it already was and, if you can accept and learn from that and are open for good criticism, then the possibilities are simply endless in what you can achieve.

    REALLY understanding each other in what you say is what many times can make or break a mod or even a game. Its just so important to not be afraid to ask if you dont understand. Many people I've worked with in the past weren't like this when I first met them. Most of the time, I succeeded in "changing" their way of working and thinking (in ofcourse an as much positive way possible), so that we could really work well together.

    I could rant about this all day adding more things but I dont want that and neither do most here, but I do hope I can "affect" some around here in whatever way. It might be so that some things I have written down here aren't clear to people cause I may have formulated things in a wrong way. If you dont get what I'm saying, then ask me and I'll try to explain. If you disagree with me, tell me why, maybe your right i dunno, we're all humans after all.

    (anyway, sorry for the hard read. I hope you find it worthy of reading)

    E: Mojo: Just made it easier to read so its all now

  • dm_grale (updated on 15-08-09)

    yeah alt + right click... but thats not the end of the story, some "arches" need different texture scaling etc... also its sometimes really iritating seeing the fact you can align them to the world or the face but i use the "align to face" technique most often. also i make use of a lot of helper brushes that are deleted afterwards (sometimes theres nothing to alt + right click on or there is but doesnt work like you want to right away so sometimes its simply faster to create a "helper" brush)

  • Two rants on level design, need opinions

    that would certainly rock my boat

    but about the "specialization" thing.

    i think there will always be those who are able to do it all themselves AND most important in that i think is that with doing it all yourself you can realise what YOU envision and not what a combination of a lot of people think (guy A screaming building1 should have blue lighting and person B who created the building saying NO it should be yellow).

    in some or many cases *dunno about that* it would be good to add to eachother but that would depend on how well the team works together. by making things together things tend to get less original and more and more mainstream.

    wich also adds to the fact that big company's many times work with the specialization thing and smaller company's most times let their people choose what they think it should be.

    much more freedom. also when i look at games nowadays, almost all games i REALLY like are made by the teams that started at a big company but stepped away and started their own company just because of the fact they want their "freedom" back.

    these company's employees many times have already "proven" themselves and therefore CAN find their fundings for original and just simply weird ass games. the way i see the game industry, where going towards a big monopolised shithole, but one way or another, there will come a time where the "big" company's realise theyre doing it the wrong way (cause they simply *many times* create shitty or mainstream games, gaming gets more and more mainstream wich means more and more gamers will know what the good games are wich will result in them not buying the "mainstream sucker" games. therefore it wil posibly be so that they step away from their fast fast fast! method and start realising that the smaller company's who create the coolest games with less funding then their bigger brothers will become more aparent...

    i know hard read, but i think you guys get what im saying

    smaller teams, original idea's are the future.

    also a thing that makes this possible is the fact that the way content is created gets more easy, yes ofcourse it takes more time to create like say a unreal engine 3 game compared to a unreal engine 2 game BUT like epic works, they try to create the best tools they can to make work more easy. if you then look at valve... well no need to say much but they should be ashamed of themeselves. if they had created better tools right from the start we would probably already be waiting for hl2 add-on nr.4 or so...

    anyway this is the way i look at things and for most part hope things will work out in the future. but ofcourse this is something like a best case scenario, there will always be those who want to cash in instead of create games they like themselves. those with the passion and the will to sacrifice a higher loan in the beginning will be the winners eventually.

    start small and end big will always be around the corner, its our nature. these days i fortunately see more and more people rejecting the capitalist ways of thinking...