The composition and geometry is really good but the lighting as you have it now is as unfinished as it can get, it does not do justice to the scene imo. It can look mindblowing with the right polish.
It looks to me like youve spend 99.5 percent of your time on the geometry and texturing and just placed a random light to light it out. Almost like default Max Maya lighting. White, no real believable source, very washed out.
Finish it correctly, and itll kill anything and any one.
It does look like it plays solid but I too have the feeling Im looking at UT2004 with a few small model changes.
Same type of gameplay, theme, levels and visuals polycount wise.
They kind of act like having teleporters and jumppads and all that are revolutionary.
Im sure itll be fun though, I just dont always get whats so damn special about Halo.
It doesnt just happen with content, it also happens with the actual features and ideas and thats a lot and a lot worse imo. A lot of companies copy other games way too much. Playing similar games for inspiriation is fine but its a different world when every feature and thing has to be inspired by the other game, "they start their game like that too and since their game is good that means such a start is good!!!11" - "they got such a door too so we need that too!". Cant you figure it out on your own what kind of door you need?
Why cant developers design stuff on their own, and then play the other game later on to see how it can improve their own game, complement their own ideas and design rather than having it shape their entire concept and idea.
Content in the end is still just a tool. Its not about what it is, its about what you do with it. I dont care seeing the same crate or wall texture in 20 different games, as long as they do something cool with it. Legal issues aside.
Nice map and atmosphere, style etc.
Im sure you can go pro if you keep this up.
I played through it, got a real crap end. Some comments on the whole thing:
I apperantly missed that second thing Aggressor mentioned in his post above mine and thus couldnt finish the game properly. I tried to run back to that spot and also look for the guy in cordon but the it really disappeared apperantly. And without it I cant finish the game in a proper way.
This sucks. Open ends fine, but it should be fair and this is not. I couldnt know that the single mission was really that important. If it is, the game should make it clear to me that it is. Or give me a second chance to do it at a later time when I figured out my mistake, it did not.
Open ends should still be rewarding. Players spend hours playing it through, you dont want to present them with the worst crap end there is for all their trouble. Certainly not if they really tried to complete the game well and not rush through it but just didnt knew they forgot one little thing. Thats bad.
The actual powerplant at the end was kinda disappointing. A couple of corridors and before you know it youre in the actual reactor. I didnt even notice until I took a second look, thats not cool. Its fucking chernobyl itself, it must be the climax, most mindblowing impressive thing there is. Not a bunch of concrete corridors with a lot of crates and sand.
World also isnt as big as everyone says it is.
All in all the game is like Far Cry mixed with HL2 for me. Same colors and theme almost as HL2, same type of monsters mixed with soldiers and factions like in both FC and HL2 and same open environments as FC, more or less.
Also had a strong killzone feeling at times, especially in the city.
Anyway, ill prolly play through it again in top speed tempo just to see the end. I also figured out modding so going to try and make my own super weapon just for fun.
The industry doesnt even know the exact difference itself either. At one company a level designer only scripts, at another he still does everything. The term "level designer" lost its meaning in the past few years. If you tell someone from the industry that youre a level designer he still has no clue as to what exactly you do since its so dependent per company.
The situation is so bad that since 2 years Im putting Level Designer/Environment artist on my resume so people can figure it out themselves what it is Im doing.....
I also totally dont think its a neccessity to split the two. The rising complexity has nothing to do with it.
The level designer can still design both the visuals and the gameplay if some modellers and texture artists provide him with assets. Basically like the old day. Level designers had help from texture artists back then too, yet still did everything else themselves.
I think a bunch of managers figured this would be more efficient and implemented the system without taking the artistic things into account. If a single task is fragmentated into too many different people and even entire departments then thats bad for the consistency of the world and the workflow of the designers (they have to run back and forth between two groups all the time, or wait for the other one to finish)
Got the game yesterday, its great altho all the walking is rather boring.
Game runs great for me altho i had to turn off dynamic light to keep it playable in combat.
Played for hours non stop, havent experienced a single crash or serious bug.
Cool game.
Knowing publishers id say they just cant make a game in another part of the world because "it would alienate the american players" according to your average publisher.
Its prolly like SA again, it looks like NY or LA but it just has another name.
Youre looking for the term "Multi/Sub-Object" so google that.
Basically in the mat editor, select one of the 24 things, and at the top right of its properties area you see Standard. Its a button and its below the button that toggles the material on or off in the viewport (the blue checker cube).
Click it, and select Multi Sub. The rest should be self explaining.
Edit: http://fordy.planetunreal.gamespy.com/g ... als/4.html
Tutorial
Its awesome.
I hope theres country side too tho and not just NY.
After You see the game ending the next thing are credits and then the menu, what I was hoping for was that I will actually be able to continue exploring the zone after the grande finale, but well, seems like you can't do that, shame because there is unlimited amount of quests and stuff to take a look at
Im interested in buying it but Id hate not being able to explore the world to its fullest. Arent you able to just save like 80 percent through the story line and then forget the whole story and explore the world freestyle and for weeks on end? Or cant you go everywhere/do everything yet until the very very end?
It really is too dark.
Textures are nice, although like also requested in the other thread it would help if you also just show the textures themselves and not hidden in a dark level. Its hard to get a good idea of the actual textures like this.
hessi -> your dad is not exactly the average computeruser. My mom doesnt even know how to turn on a pc, even though there are only two buttons on a pc...Your average 16-28 year old should easily be able to figure out the basics of a program like photoshop.
e-freak what do you mean with
i wonder why this is discussed in a more or less public forum and why not discussed while doing e.g. UE3.
?
I expected that there were deeper technical problems or valve would have added the feature a long time ago already.
Never the less, if they can make two great games and an engine then really, it really shouldnt be impossible for them to add features like this for them. Theyd sell more licenses if theyd had some better tools prolly because the engine itself is great.
There are two types of beginners, you got the complete utter noob and you got those people who switch over to another engine or have some other type of basic understanding. I hate tools that have 10 milion wizards and a retard paperclip asking me if I really want to do this or that but theres a difference between that and a program that is simply easy yet still really powerful.
It doesnt have to become like those RTS editors where you can only click and place soldiers and paint some terrain textures but cant do anything else.
Efficiency/=stupid unpowerful crap
If you open Photoshop for the first time anyone can figure out how to paint something or do other basic things, without reading a single tutorial. Its that basic logical design that you need in a program. Of course Photoshop is a 2d program and very different to an editor but you get the idea. Having to make materials by typing words in notepad is not logical or very self explaining.
Open Material Editor, at the bottom of a default material you will find the section DirectX Manager. click Enable Plugin Material and pick Lightmap from the list.
In the section DirectX Shader - Lightmap below it you can then enter the tex and channel.
Ha
I disagree here. Something about unreal lighting I never liked is that it always has this typical unreal look. It tries to emulate radiosity like shadow effects in corners but ends up more cartoony looking. The lighting may be baked in both engines, but they look alot different. Source's lighting model is incredibly realistic, to such extent that it even uses the colors of materials for reflecting light of surfaces. point a light at an orange wall and it will reflect orangy light on the rest of your environment.
This is totally next to the point. Your argument is an artistic argument about which of the two looks nicer, and yes radiosity obviously looks nicer. The point however was the Source doesnt show lighting in the editor and the reason given for that was "it has radiosity" which I countered by saying that technically there shouldnt be anything that holds the engine back displaying lighting in the viewport because in the end, it are only lightmaps..whats on the lightmaps and which engine produces nicer looking lightmaps is an whole other discussion.
Then why do so many beginning mappers seem to not have much problems with creating decent looking lighting in their source maps? The radiosity model makes your lighting always almost look nice, you don't have to do retarded things like placing omni lights in shadows to make them look right etc.. When working on a source map, you'll be tweaking your light setup, but definitely not as much as the tweaking you need to do in an unreal map.
Good, so then youre either saying:
A.) That if Source did had lighting previewing then the Source levels would look even better and could be made a lot quicker than now. What I mean is that if people can get lets say 8/10 quality using a retard system, what would happen when they would put the same amount of work and time in a highly efficient system? 10/10? And that wouldnt be a lot better?
Or
B.) That lighting previewing wouldnt be a great addition to the engine and is useless because your current setup also works "just fine"? Apperantly the whole world thinks differently because alot of developer tools are becoming increasingly WYSIWYG.
I dont know how many times you tweak your lighting in Unreal but I usually place a light blindly, change all numbers just once, rebuild, tweak them and Im done but of course Im not the average developer.
I only tweak lights an average of once or twice after placing AND I can tweak these lights in matter of minutes. In Source you need to wait quite a while, boot up the game and so on. Even IF you have to tweak your lighting less in source than it would still take you more time to adjust it since I can tweak everything in nearly real time. In the time I need to tweak my light 20 times and check the results you just did so once, hows that for efficiency.
What a lot of tool and engine programmers fail to realize is that every single second and every single mouseclick is important. And I critize Unreal for that too. There are a lot of tools and features in UE3 which are highly unoptimized and take too much time to use. If a simple and often used tool requires two seconds then thats one second too much, and on the course of an entire level a designer can lose up to an hour or more that could have been invested in actual polish and development. Every click and second matters.
Source not being 100 percent (or actually 10 percent) WYSIWYG-thing because it has radiosity and the like is absolute rubbish. Its simply because the tools were badly designed, not because it can handle radiosity.
What does radiosity matter in the end? Once lighting has been baked into lightmaps it doesnt make any difference what kind of lighting it was, for example if it had radiosity or not, because its just baked into an image and projected onto a wall. Unreal does exactly the same, Unreal already uses lightmaps since 1998 and already managed to show lightmaps in the viewport back. Blaming the radiosity is lame.
And you may be able to set up your lighting blindly, I often do my lighting blind in Unreal too, but the average guy cant do this, and the inability to simply quickly check his lighting can be a huge hassle for such person. You do not only design tools for the experienced people.
Regardless if you can or cant light a scene out blindly, a preview is NEVER bad to have.
And the story has totally zero to do with the tools.
And a thing not discussed yet is Kismet, visual scripting of gameplay and other elements in a level. You make pawns do stuff by adding event and action nodes and connecting them.
Quote from hessiDisplay Morei worked with unreal2003/04 ??? made a single simple scene and light setup was like the biggest piece of crap i have seen in my entire life! why do people blame compile times? source is using a prerendered lightmap. that means: no waste of cpu for raytracing and other "useless static" stuff. so there is no way to make a realtime preview of a lighting in the editor because there is no such thing that can render a lightmap of an entire level in real time.
so i am NOT b00n! i just call the fact, that there is no possibility if you decide to use prerendered lightmaps.
why i dont vote for 100% realtime lighting calculation: lighting is almost static the whole time and the calculation of global illumination, hdr and all the other stuff just takes a bunch of time (as we can see if you hit a renderbutton in max, maya or launch vrad).
i did never say unreal is the worst piece of code shit. it sure is a nice engine for what it is meant to be: fast pipeline, some nice shaders of the directx api and fast lighting calculation (that is not as good as a source or mental ray raytracer).
blame me if you want but just calling a n00b because you disagree with me is kind of foolish.
btw sourcefile and binary map file combined is not a feature i personally would like to have. my work belongs to me. though source-engine already offers too much!
why should unreal be easier to learn? there is a source sdk wiki with plenty of information and you can grab a lot of knowledge from forums or already existing standard content.
It is easier to learn because you have a what you see is what you get interface. Unlike source you see the changes right away and that is a lot easier to understand for your average kid than having to type in words or command lines.
The future of engines is not in graphical power, it is in efficiency, There is going to be a time when every engine on the world is able to render briliant stunningly photo realistic graphics, the only thing that will see the engines apart is from how it achieves its results. Not previewing anything is not a good way to achieve results.
So because you made a single room with a program or engine you know how it works already? Im not going to critize XSI or lightwave either if the only thing Ive ever made with it was a cube or a sphere. Its logical that if youre new to a program you totally dont know your way around and you are prolly not finding your way through but that doesnt mean that XSI or lightwave or in this case Unreal sucks goats and other mammals. You are just not used to it.
If you would be you would have known that Unreal doesnt has real time lighting either (unlike you think it has), or in any way not a whole lot of it. Most and in some levels nearly all lighting you see is prerendered lighting baked into lightmaps and vertexlighting. So what exactly is the difference with source? Unreal already previews lighting 100 percent in the editor since 1998!
Source BSP lighting is great because it uses radiosity crap, but its mesh lighting is a bitch. UE3 automatically unwraps all staticmeshes and renders lightmaps for each staticmesh inside the editor. Or if in case the mesh doesnt require a lightmap then it renders vertexlighting to the mesh and automatically subdivides the mesh according to the lighting near it. Thus you dont have to manually tesselate meshes anymore.
So, does source do that?
Because it was released in 2004 and doesnt even has the most basic functionality like lighting preview, requires you to make materials with notepad and cant handle meshes very well ?
There are +100 games UE3 games in production at the moment, its becoming an absolute huge market to specialize in so the guy is right.
http://www.beyondunreal.com is the largest Unreal community site so if you follow that site you should stay pretty up to date, also about any new tutorials and all that get released.
http://www.roboblitz.com/RoboBlitzEdito ... /Main_Page for additional UE3 stuff.
Dont you have another and larger scaled rock texture for the cliff? You can see it tile and the texture itself doesnt has enough structure, it looks very noise like and without much definition. Bigger scale and more definition would help imo.
