Posts by Hourences

The game is massive, a year old and primarily made for the PS2 so yeah what do you expect. Displacement mapping?

The whole game sticks to a certain style and the texturing, detail, colors etc are consistent and thats most important imo. The game as a whole stands.

The gameplay is identical to Vice city but extended. If you dont like the gym and the eating you can always type in a cheat. The nigga crap is indeed crap but has nothing to do with the gameplay and once you get past the first 25 percent of the game youre trough with it and you can enjoy a nigga free gaming world.

The game is great. One of the only games that actually gives me value (in play time) for my 50 euro. Something you cant say of 99.9 percent of the games out there.

The show is part of the gaming culture, sad to see it go.

Its their own fault tho. They all tried to overdo each other and spend more and more money each year and at the end they find out theyve hit the ceiling. Thats a smart strategy.

Also khaeon for me, Sjoerd Hourences De Jong

In half a year time we are in 2007. 512 was the standard in 2003. 2048 does slowly become the standard, 1024 already is.

Its never bad making your tex too big you know. Makes them last longer, serve more purposes and could improve the quality.

Normal/Spec map does influence it but its dependant on your situation and (re)use of those extra maps.

Nice originality, nicely done for a pretty difficult theme too.

Im personally not really fond of your type of baroque tho. It looks a bit homo and girl like. Rawer colors and perhaps some damage/decay could make it more atmospheric.

You said you need serious lighting and I hope you mean really serious with that.

Good ammount of specularity on everything can help too. Fits the theme.

Quote from Mazy

Heh, I stand corrected. Could've sworn that Unreal didn't have that kind of tech, and I really dont remember that in the singleplayer or multiplayer portions of the original Unreal. Was it something they had in the engine but wasnt used until later on by the community, which would explain why I never saw it?Anyway, I'm fairly certain the maps that came with UT didn't have this kind of stuff, otherwise I'd have noticed

/me hides

Maps that came with Unreal 1 even had it. UT itself didnt made a lot of use of it but it was used sometimes. DM Fractal for example. If you step in to the pit in the middle you end up on the ceiling of the room and fall down.

Unreal 1 had a multiplay level that had it, in a castle. Forgot its damn name.

And as mentioned before certain singleplay areas like after you fought the queen you walk trough a portal without noticing it. I guess they didnt manage to fit the corridor in anymore and thus placed it somewhere else.

1. Textures these days should be minimal 512x512, ideally 1024x1024 and best 2048x2048 and hey, if you can go higher then that its never a bad thing. Your textures will still be usefull in a few years like that + they can also be used for cg renderings and all of that stuff.

The size of the ref picture does not matter but you obviously dont want to scale it up too much. A 450 res ref pic is not going to do for a 1024 res texture.

You scale it down after you're down with the texture

2.Clone and heal are just fine and they are the most used things. If the texture has clear shapes such as a brickwall has (=the bricks) it can help a lot to manually select certain bricks and copy paste them to lay them over the seam.

3. Your stone wall is not easy. Your stucco is. Textures that dont have clear shapes or patern are simplest. Stucco, grass, sand and so on. Rock on the other hand has a clear patern, as has brick, roofs, and so on.

4. Its not important because the offsetting is only used for your own help and once in game no one is going to notice how far it has ever been offsetted to allow seam-killing. If you miss a couple of spots you might obviously see seams in the final texture and you dont want that.

Youll always have tiling, live with it. The first texture does has quite obvious tiling though. Try to lighten darker areas and the other way around to get it equal. When you look for ref pics or take them yourself look out for any clear patern in it, if it has a clear patern forget it already. If you take a ref pic of sand and theres a tree branch on the sand youre never going to be able to turn it in a good texture unless the branch is small enough to be photoshopped off.

There are also things like Macrotexturing to fight tiling

I think he only meant that we now regard portals as a revolution and a cool feature while 8 years ago there were plenty of similar things and that thus the so called evolution we went trough isnt big at all.

Unreal 1 had portals too. Unreal 1 had mirror floors and surfaces that could reflect the entire level. Most features that we got today already exists years ago in one way or another but you just can use more of them and better looking ones nowadays. I guess thats the only real evolution.

That I also goes for the gravity gun of HL2. You could have made one in Unreal 1 too, or HL1, it only works better with the current hardware power.

I know a bit of "this" stuff

Ofcourse there are always certain things that one day will be oudated. For example lighting demanding a different approach (simple game lighting vs complete and fully working radiosity/GI lighting) but the majority of things will always be the same. You dont make a cubic building now and you are not going to make one in 10 years. Itll always look bad.

The only problem I might face are outdated pictures.

The book wont be aimed at a specific engine so the last few people should be happy:)

A cd would be nice but also demands a lot of extra work + its hard if your book is not aimed at a specific engine. For what engine should I make the example content?...

And printing and distributing a cd = 5/6 dollar. So thats 48+6=54 dollar already.

Its been proven with tests that if you actualy ask too little for a product you sell less than if you would ask more. People regard something as low quality if its too cheap and thus wont buy it.

My original idea was like 30 euro but that appears to be impossible to pull off financially. Production cost is a lot higher for me than for huge multi million dollar companies who do everything with discount and in bulk.

Ill prolly be going for 48 dollar/38 euro but thats not for sure yet.

Making a book about a specific editor is not a wise decision since there already are books for the most used editors out there, published by huge companies with lots of money, hard to compete with them.

You cant find everything online, there are barely any design and art tutorials online and those that do exist are either incomplete or only focus on one aspect like multiplayer gameplay and not sound, effects, textures, and so on. So thats the hole I intend to fill up.

More pages doesnt work btw. It are the pages that are expensive. More pages also means a higher price. If you want 400 pages I need to ask at least 75 dollar to pull it off.

Looks to me like half the people would pay what I would ask so thats fine to me, its a small target audience anyway.

Ill release some more info in a few months.

Im doing a bit of research on how much people involved with game modding would pay for a book about level design.

Lets say that the book you would want to buy has over a hundred example screenshots and 200 pages on A5 sized paper in total, and the cover is looking nice:)

Ive done research on amazon and the like already but I just want to get an idea of what the people themselves think.

There is no option "I dont want to buy one" because Im not interested in hearing who would and who would not, I just want to get an idea of what people would spend -IF- they are interested.

So regardless if you actually buy books or not how much would you find an affordable and acceptable fair price for a book on level design?

Thanks!

I agree with the grav gun but the turtle shield ? or the halo sword ? A shield or a sword, wow original. Never used in any games before. And really hard to use too!

The turtle shield only requires minor timing and no aiming, strategy, combo situations, environmental influence and so on. And it doesnt cast a pretty effect either to compensate the other elements that are important in weapon design. Thats pretty boring design.

I especially miss the UT shockrifle/ASMD. A good weapon has combo abilities and or can be used for multiple things and not just killing enemies. Like getting around an obstacle in the environment. UTs piston jump does that as does some quake weapons and ofcourse the grav gun.

For me the shockrifle is on the first place. It has the timing and functionality of a rail gun yet it also has a projectile based energy ball with splash damage like a rocketcannon and when the energy ball is shot by the "rail gun" you get a huge blast. Thats gives more depth and potential.

When a weapon can combine the aiming and timing required by instant hit weapons together with the timing of projectile based weapons in 1 its great imo.

Quote from Pericolos0

you spelled my name wrong

Thats cause your name is way too weird

The unreal level people of our game did an interview with Beyondunreal, the biggest unreal related stuff site, and we released four new level panorama pics of the game.

interview link: http://www.beyondunreal.com/content/articles/153_1.php

Click all pics for bigger ones.

MountOfHeroes mainly by Noz:

[Blocked Image: http://www.beyondunreal.com/staff/hal/article/BU_TCOS_MountOfHeroes_thumb.jpg]

Ringfell mainly by myself:

[Blocked Image: http://www.beyondunreal.com/staff/hal/article/BU_TCOS_Ringfell_thumb.jpg]

Carnyx pretty much completely by myself:

[Blocked Image: http://www.beyondunreal.com/staff/hal/article/BU_TCOS_Carnyx_thumb.jpg]

Quarterstone city by everyone, I personally did the sky, lighting, atmosphere and day and night setup:

[Blocked Image: http://www.beyondunreal.com/staff/hal/article/BU_TCOS_Quarterstone_thumb.jpg]

What everyone did you can read in the first question of the interview

Also note that most environment textures you see are Pericolos0 tex.

With the exception of the skies. All skies were completely made by me.

_____________________________________________

Unrelated to the game I also made another painting, matte painting this time. Im trying to shape up my 2d skills:

[Blocked Image: http://users.pandora.be/Hourences/sea3smaller.jpg]

Its based on a self taken photo I took on holiday: http://users.pandora.be/Hourences/seasource.jpg

it might not be completely done yet but I dont know what to change anymore. But if anyone does has a suggestion feel free to tell me as long as it doesnt mean redoing half the thing

[Blocked Image: http://phalanx.planetunreal.gamespy.com/maps/hourences/sewerlol.jpg]

DM Sewer map \o\

Made without a tutorial or other source of help.

Total Annihilation addons and morrowind add ons, specially bloodmoon.

Very nice, its going to be a great time

Only the water is a bit too blurry

The practice has been around for a while. There are quite a few companies around who have licensed the Unreal engine 2 Runtime purely to make architectural presentations with.

Autocad isnt great for that. You need to be able to walk trough an area yourself and see it fully litted and textured.

The idea is good tho and surely has a future, along with the future of interactive contents.

Go make a museum in a game engine and allow people to walk trough it themselves, theres a much larger and unexplored market out there for such things than most people think

I wonder how the guy found any team members at all if hes such an idiot.

Does he do anything himself ? mapping, coding, graphics, whatever or just "leading" ?

Perhaps we should write a "how to pick the right mod" guide so new people dont end up with things like these anymore

Sucky

Im glad I didnt go there. I was pratically hired there a few years ago but in the end decided not to go for a wide range of reasons.