Posts by slicky

  • The 'Core Sketch Thread!?

    the positions for some of your characters are kind of awkward looking, the conte crayon man on the stool seems to have a dual perspective given his posture and the perspective of the cube at his feet. The male character next to the woman on the stool however is excellent, natural looking but dramatic pose.

  • [UT2k4] DM_Baroque

    i just enjoy seeing something done in a truly original style.

    The floor texture does need to be scaled down, and i think you should emphasize the curves in your architecture with less saturated lighting.

    Overall awesome work.

  • Pirating Games

    i dont know about other people but i think pirating can really encourage sales in some cases.

    For instance, i downloaded titan quest awhile ago. A game which to me seemed like it would be mediocre quality and certainly not worthy of the highly select grade of games ill buy every year. I played the game for a few hours, found that i really enjoyed it, then went to the store and bought it, something i would never do on faith, even with a favourable review in PCG. This same type of thing has happened to me several times now.

    My older brother had the same experience with music piracy. He was not a music afficionado in general when he was younger. Rarely listened to music and had no defined tastes. When napster hit the world he got heavy into downloading. Today he has one of the largest cd music collections of anyone i know, i can say fairly certainly without the ability to experiment online he wouldnt have the collection he does.

    As it applies to movies, im simply not going to pay to see many movies in theatres that might still be interesting enough to grab off torrent. (I dont think my girlfriend would agree to see 'snakes on a plane')

    Piracy may not be moral in many peoples eyes, but besides revenue and all the mental equations people are doing (including myself just now) I see it as an overwhelmingly positive thing in terms of culture. That minotauro or a person living in a third world country can still have access to the same music and media of the affluent west, is necessary. I dont think art should suffer the kind of corporate restraints the various publishing industries instill. Besides simple opportunism i view the explosion of pirated media as a reaction to that control. I guess my view basically is buy if you can, steal if you have to.

  • The random model thread!

    quick question -

    Is anyone else using max 8 and know of a good site with tutorials or exporters for getting my content in-game?

    Ive searched for quite some time now and it seems like theres only tools and tuts for max 6/7, any help would be massively appreciated.

  • 2d art sketches

    i havent done any game art authentically in a few years now, but i just started to experiment with 2d sketch work, ive never had much of a knack for hand-drawing (maybe thats why i was a game artist ) but im trying to develop some. These are some of my first so go easy on me.

    i watched sam peckinpah's "straw dogs" last night, so both of these sketches are inspired by the movie, the first is based off the film cover, the second is inspired by the evil characters in the movie.

    [Blocked Image: http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/4387/cowardfinalrf8.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/5521/killerfinalxp2.jpg]

  • Post Your Desktop 2006~~~

    a bit OT, but i couldnt resist.

    If you want to make a GREAT wallpaper + fuck with a coworker or family relation.

    hop on someones computer, take a screencap of their desktop then place it as the background, remove ALL the icons off the desktop into a sub-folder somewhere and then hide the start bar.

    I convinced my older brother his computer was irreperably broken this way. By removing both the icons and the start bar his computer had zero functionality. He asked me to help him 'fix it' and i spent a few minutes shrugging my shoulders and clicking on all the fake icons and the fake start bar while he stared on totally petrified.

  • An Inconvenient Truth

    I'm always so dismayed when i see 'hippy' types trying to affect change by demonstrations, picketing, and 'awareness' messages. The latter being the category of this movie in my estimation. As long as it's profitable to pollute for industry, it will continue to happen regardless of all public sentiment.

    In economics theres a term called an 'externality.' It implies any cost of production a business has, which is a cost they do not face.

    If theres a factory upriver from you, dumping tons of garbage effluent into the river every year, that factory is still creating that cost, but passing it on to the taxpayers in the town downriver who then have to pay for their waterfront to be cleaned up.

    The government is supposed to be trying to force companies to pay for their externalities, otherwise their profits could actually be coming out of your tax dollars. If companies had to pay for every ton of carbon monoxide they pumped out their smoke stacks - not exorbitant rates, just what it costs to clean it up. It would motivate the market to innovate and CUT COSTS. In this case cut down on their pollution. You can't fight capitalism, greed wields too much influence, things can only change from within.

    Skjalg mentioned the environment tax theyve instituted in norway, which is an absolute step in the right direction, so are any government taxes on polluting materials like gasoline that help bridge the gap between present profits and future misery. Coal should not be as cheap as it is.

  • Mapping as a real-world construction tool

    Hi, some of you may remember me from the HL1 mapping scene from the past 4-5 years, I’ve been a bit of a ghost to the community for awhile so I understand if I have very little credibility as a seemingly new poster. Anyway if its necessary for me to post some old portfolio stuff just let me know.

    I’m posting this idea in a general forum because I’m hoping to generate a discussion on the idea, maybe get some useful feedback besides just recruit people for what I hope doesn’t appear to be a conventional project.

    The Idea-

    I’ve worked in the landscape construction industry, primarily as a carpenter (befitting a mapper) for the past 8 years or so and I believe I have a fairly thorough understanding of the business. For a few years I’ve been building on the idea of using mapping technology, rather than autocad or hand-drafting, as a design tool. This is intended for multi-million dollar high-end jobs, not for little weed-ridden backyards.

    This is my reasoning which I see as the market potential.

    The average client is completely incapable of conceptualizing a two-dimensional blueprint as an actual structure. When handed a topographical map, few lay people can visualize a rolling green pasture. If you could provide a fully detailed navigable medium in which a client could preview their new property, actually walk around in it, hear the trickle of their new waterfall, and feel the proportions of the space, that would be a very powerful tool indeed. The crux of this idea is that this simple failure of communication leads to hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars in redesigns just in the medium-scale company I currently work for.

    Imagine if in communicating with your client, they decide they are unhappy with the position of their new pool, the work gets sent back to the level editor, the pool is dragged over a few feet and resubmitted to the client. It sounds obvious, but believe it or not, in this business, simple change orders like that regularly cost thousands of dollars.

    The use of a level editor in the design process firstly is more efficient in the use of time, and provides a more clear representation to the client. To me, the most exciting aspect of this idea is what happens after using such a tool for more than a few jobs, you would begin to have so many assets pre-manufactured that you could do what would take a hand-drafter days of work in just a few hours. While he is carefully illustrating the branches on the rose tree to make the drawing look presentable to the client, you have dragged and dropped the tree in and are moving on. At first, this idea would be rather unwieldy, I’m going to be making hundreds of photo-sourced textures of trees, rocks, different types of wood and masonry, patio stones, etc etc etc… but once those assets are done, they are completely reusable. And gradually the system would get more and more efficient.

    Extended scope-

    I’ve already anticipated some necessary changes to the level editor, the grid settings must be scaled to a base twelve (imperial) measuring system rather than base 8, with the option of going metric. But there are some very exciting possibilities in this down the road.

    As a cost estimation tool – if you cover a breadth of space with a special grass texture, a custom-coded compiler could calculate exactly how much sod is required to cover that area. If you build a fence in the editor using individual wood boards (which is how I intend for this to work) the editor could count exactly how many fence boards, 2x4s etc, and in what lengths, you would need to construct that fence. It could also calculate volume, if a zone is covered on all sides with a special texture, it could tell you how many tons of soil or pea gravel you need to fill up that area.

    Practical needs-

    I’m a mapper/texture artist, this job would desperately need some basic skills of a programmer to adapt the mapping tools in small ways such as changing the grid-settings. And it would need some very developed modeling skills to reproduce all sorts of different materials from photographs and drawings. No small amount of work would be involved in modeling all this, there are dozens of regularly used varieties of trees alone which would all need to be produced in a couple of variations.

    Fortunately for landscape construction, there are only 4 basic elements in every yard.

    -terrain (soil, gravel, grass)

    -stone

    -wood

    -plants

    Once these elements have a sufficiently ample stock of art assets the work will get more and more easy, and more and more profitable to this endeavor.

    Landscape designers get paid very well, if I’m able to undercut their costs in time as well as provide a better end-product, I think this idea has a lot of money potential. Particularly for you starving students out there like me.

    What I’m hoping to do is a small mock-up of a property and then first approach the company that I’m working for now, and then possibly other companies in my area, at this point I may be looking for a partner to help me get this off the ground.

  • TES: Oblivion.

    The last few days have been quite a journey for me. I haven't left my university residency room for anything except going to the bathroom, showering, occasional cigarettes and joints, and picking up my food deliveries ever since i got this game the morning of the store release.

    I can probably say ive played the game more than anyone else on these forums by this point.

    I beat the main storyline of course as well as a great deal of the lateral content.

    Quote from Mazy

    Its quite frustrating because it seems like other people are having a much better experience than me, even though desperately trying to really get into it, and I truely want to like it.Think I just need to play it some more :G

    This game is very complex to review because of the strange balance of severe game flaws and truly inspired content.

    Before i start my long-winded pessimistic-minded review let me first say this was not a game for me, it was an experience (excuse how corny that sounds) the only other game that has done this for me has been half-life. Oblivion is one of the best games ive ever played.

    Having said that, the game is very short on late-development content. The basic mechanics of the game are impeccable however.

    The best analogy i can use to describe oblivion is that traditional games are like a well, they are very narrow but have a great deal of content within the thin limitations of its scope (IE medal of honour series, anything linear) oblivion by contrast is like a vast shallow lake. At the outset it seems massive beyond comprehension, but if you delve deep enough into any particular area you hit dirt very quickly.

    The late development content i mentioned as lacking would be simple things like extra items, spells, quests, special enemies, etc... I'll get into this more in a moment.

    The inpired content is basically everything thats not listed below as a flaw, the terrible thing is that the flaws ive listed would require SO LITTLE additional effort on the part of bethesda to restore meaning to oblivion for me.

    some flaws-

    There is a total lack of ORIGINAL enemies in the game, so frequently you get to the end of the dungeon and realize you have to turn back, and youre left scratching your head as to where the big dungeon boss was supposed to be. Instead you have to satiate your killing needs on the same enemies repetitively over different level ranges. This also means there is very few enemy-linked special item drops.

    The game has been lobotomized quite a bit to suit the console user.

    There is VERY little item content, pathetically little really. There is only a few armor classes in each range, and once you get the best one (which wasnt even hard) there is essentially no more upgrading to do. As for weapons, i found the umbra sword around level 10 and i have been using it for the past 15 levels, kinda pathetic as far as item content goes.

    Ironically the game has massive item content in areas where its totally useless, things like calipers, a bucket, millions of varieties of pants and shirts youll never wear because its somehow more practical to wear armour if youre in combat.

    There is no more spears, crossbows, throwing weapons, etc.. etc...

    In a game like this, the players material motivations should be dangled in front of him - that one staff/sword/axe youre just dieing to buy but you cant afford - that armor set youre desperately trying to collect by looting and stealing. Oblivion fails at this rather badly. I found i reached a threshold after which upgrading was almost irrelevant, what was worrisome was how quickly it happened. Now i have like 200,000 septims from loot-sales and nothing to spend it on - at all -

    The most serious flaw in my game experience:

    I dont want this to sound like an elaborate boast, but the particulars of my character are such that he is utterly unbeatable, he is such a tank i can just stand and take blows for hours. I happened to find a few EXTREMELY overpowered items early in the game (with the aid of a few billion quickloads) and it made the game almost broken. So much so i beat the end of the game as though it was little more than an annoyance. Pushing the difficulty slider up extra-extra high is an option i realise, but i just cant handicap myself that much, that would be like tossing your best items away just to restore the challenge.

    When i play oblivion now, its an exercise in going into extremely remote areas TRYING and continuously failing to find enemies that can challenge me. This is essentially because of how bad the level-scaling system is (to those not in the know, the game scales the difficulty of nearly every enemy you encounter and every item you find to the level of your character) If your character's actual strength exceeds his or her level as was the case with me, you will find the game pretty boring.

    Attach that to the lack of upgrades in equipment, and it now feels like its pointless to play anymore.

  • Whats ur opinion about teh iran shit ?

    Islamic nations are by definition opposed to western values, given the option between American imperialism, and islamic fascism, who in their right mind could choose islam. Theres absolutely no comparison between the degree of responsibility a country like the United States would excercise with those weapons versus iran or a comparable nation. Iran is ruled by a total maniac, read some of his press-conferences!!

  • Whats ur opinion about teh iran shit ?

    Its not the nations themselves that pose the serious risk where nuclear weapons are involved, the law of large numbers basically safe-guards us against nuclear apocalypse, no large legislative body is going to collectively decide to mutually assure their own destruction with another nation.

    In fact nuclear weapons may well have saved millions of lives during the cold war by stabilizing both nations. Similarly for India - Pakistan

    The risk is in the individuals. Clearly the USA is not going to arm some splinter faction with a nuclear weapon to go destroy Syria or North Korea.

    But Iran, well that's a question isnt it. They support jihaddists, as do the majority of the middle eastern nations (though not nationally.)

    Many experts have also speculated that Iran acquiring nuclear weapons would spark an arms race in the middle east that would incorporate Saudia Arabia Syria and Egypt into the list of nations with nukes.

    I think if that happened we would end up in a very serious situation indeed. No more nuclear proliferation, it's irrelevant who already has weapons.

  • Share yourself with your mapcorian friends

    Great read, its amazing to see how mappers tend to gravitate to similar paths. I don't really know any of you but i feel like im bonded to you all in a strange geeky way.

    The state of my life right now is it's bright and early in the morning, im a little hung over from last night, and i seem to remember making out with a random girl on the dance floor last night, the shame in that being that i have a girlfriend and i can't feel bad about doing it even though i want to.

    I haven't done any REAL mapping in more than a year now, Im in a constant state of lethargy, where my life mostly consists of laying around in my university residency playing games, watching movies, maintaining decent grades, but really i feel like my life has no purpose right now, i feel utterly lost. When i was younger i thought i had everything figured out, i knew what i was good at, and i knew what i wanted to do. But in the past few years i feel like i've lost so much of my passion for life.

    The irony is that I'm about a year ahead of a few of you who are trying to mature your lives out of game dev fanboyism, and i still dont feel like my life has gained any more meaning, in fact my former isolation gave me a greater sense of self satisfaction because i was so deluded sitting awake into the nights staring into a fluorescent screen that i could at least make up some delusions of grandeur. I miss the peer validation i got when I would post a WIP and get compliments, other than that there's nothing im missing about game dev.

    Last year i met an absolutely amazing girl, who is so far out of my league it's not even funny, she's horribly in love with me and i think she would marry me if i asked. But my problem is that i just dont appreciate her anymore, as though all my love for her has simply faded away, I have this strange subconcious desire to sabotage the best thing i have. I create fights sometimes just for the sick excitement it gives, i just want to have more passion for my life, I think I'd be a happier person with a cause to be depressed, because right now I don't even feel like i exist. I'd rather be dead than bored.

    So i guess the question is, what do you do when your life is perfect and you still can't be happy?