Posts by Hourences

You got to mod the game to keep it fun. Im level 45 and I played it for about 140 hours now. I pretty much got everything now, all quests and i explorer most of the map. Currently exploring the last few areas I missed previous time.

The game became really reperative around level 35 because theres not much new going on + everything grows with you. At level 35 and the game's best weapons it still takes minutes to kill a stupid monster and since you face dozens of those monsters per area it all takes a real long time..so I modded it. My horse now runs a few times faster so it actualy became usefull. My walking speed is 4 times as high as is my jumping and I made myself a new weapon that does 6 times as much damage so my attack power is balanced out to my high level, morrowind style.

Much more fun now

Just roaming the lands for the sake of exploration, not caring about stupid monsters that are spawned everywhere anymore. Just like I played Morrowind.

Edit: I forgot to say but the game is really made towards low level players. It seems to me they never bothered playtesting it at high level. I have a very high run and jump speed that I managed to get without cheating and I can regulary jump out of the level and fall in to the void around places. I can jump on top of a lot of walls and get to places I really shouldnt get to. Bad testing.

I managed to jump over the imperial prison wall for example.

http://www.tcos.com

My own

Youre a level designer ? Feels a bit brush'ish. Try to work higher poly and more stylized. The arms are still too clearly regular cylinders and several other parts are too simple cubes. Hide the original shapes more and dont rely too much on them. Also try to open up areas instead of one big mass of steel. Spaces in between.

And think functional when making this kind of thing. Think of what stuff would be on it irl. A fuel hole, some plates, areas where there is a lot of armor (front/legs) and areas where there is less (the back prolly) and so on and reflect that. Dont make it one big mass. His gun prolly consists out of multiple parts and an area where the ammo can be loaded in yet in the model it looks like 1 big brown block.

Rendering on a black background also isnt always the best solution because black can make it hard to see the thing if its too dark, gray is often preffered because of that

But its not too bad for a first model

Pros:

-Very strong urge to prove myself, over and over again. Pro because it keeps me going

-Strong believe in what I want and believe in which is good for my dedication

-Strong sense for factor x in a world and atmosphere

-Lighting

-Unity in a world

-Efficiency and speed

Cons :

-My modelling often is rushed and occasionally comes across too blocky noobish, lacking line styling as I call it

-I suck at skinning and often refuse to do it

-Im too pasionate which can get me in heated discussion or end me up with lots of frustration

-Im hard to lead

A degree is indeed important if you decide to step out of the industry but on the other hand just being good can help just as much. There are other creative industries out there and for those too its most important to just be good at what you do

Thats my backup plan anyway, widen my skills

I dont know how long Ill keep on doing this but I have to say this industry really is frustrating at times. 'Happened so many times before that some marketing idiot who only thinks of his money screws thing a or b up once again. Look at bethesda right now. They are selling plugins and the community is getting pissed off. If I were an artist working for bethesda Id be frustrated by now.

Same goes for example screenshots. You put in all your effort and skill in to creating cool looking stuff and then some screenshots of a 3 month old alpha version get released. To me thats sending out the message "that was good enough already" so why would I even bother trying to create something cool next time ? If an alpha thing is good enough already to sell your entire damn product with Id rather take 3 months vacation next time instead of working my ass off making something cool.

And so on.

On the other hand if you do manage to keep up long enough with this stuff you might get in a more powerful position one day where you could block such problems partially or completely and after all it still is a better job than most "normal" jobs.

Post your portfolio when you redesigned it so people from this forum who work for companies can see if they might be able to do something for you or not

Id make your new portfolio a bit more too the point too, it has a milion buttons right now and Im kinda confused as what to look at

Adjusted ones are better. The scene is nice in general but next to the cotnrast adjusts Id also experiment with a color overlay on top to unify the colors more.

And if youre really bored Id make a evening or night version. You picked the most boring time of the day right now, noon. Add more feel and emotion to it. Drama. A nearing storm or evening or whatever.

Jump was like that in MW too

I suspect it has to do with the fact that the jumpheights are variable and change all the time so they couldnt make 1 animation

As the jump height and time increases as you level

Then again Im no animator

Ive also been looking quite a while for the best combination of filters to run before you normal map it but havent found the best method yet

yours look nice so Im certainly going to give it a try, thx

Quote from Marcos

Mazy: I dont know if it has the same system of stealing like Morrowind did, but there you had to crouch, point at the item you wanted to steal, and wait for the "steal item" icon was shown to the buttom left of your hood. And yes, sneak skill will improve your ability to steal and aslo do critical damage BTW, just bought a new PC (so I could play this game) Wonder if anyone got about the same speccs as me, and how the game runs?

AMD 64 X2 4200+

gForce 7600GT

1GB RAM 400hz

ESC Extreme MB

450W Power supply

Thanks

Display More

My guess is that it will run decent with settings at high (high is not very high so you will have to turn some things off)

The game never runs really great, even on super high end pcs the fps are still quite low outdoors but that doesnt bother me, its a singleplay game afterall

The interface could have been better but its ok imo (for PC), Im getting used to it already, quickly clicking things

Anyone know how to make hotkeys for certain spells like in MW ?

Im at 24 hours playing right now and its still awesome. I found my horse back and figured out how the locked doors bug works so I can get around

it

Beat the main quest and several other guild/other quests and now going to try and level up a lot before i go in the land and start exploring all the dungeons and stuff on my own

Wonderfull stuff

The game is briliant, the same feel and play as morrowind, absolutely awesome

I love it

Altho I do think MW had a bit more style at times, this game is a bit more normal, regular castles with regular forests with regular horses around

MW often was more styled with more special type of buildings and stuff around

It still rocks however

I did encounter some horrible bugs already tho. Maybe someone can tell me where my horse is suppose to reset itself too ? I bought one and now I cant find it anymore....

And another one was even better, I can enter buildings trough the door but when I want to go out again it suddenly is a very hard lock locked door and Im utterly stuck in the inside

And when I try to pick it im arrested

\o\

yay

But still rocks, going to start playing it again right now and will only stop in 11 hours

Its real afaik

Looks cool as a concept, interests me more than all those realism shooters

But the movie and game quality is a bit ugh at times yeah, they got plenty of time left to fix that

I hope anyway

Lee what kind of question is that, UED ofcourse

Although sandbox is great too I still enjoy UED more and have more control over what happens

Thanks for the comments

Thx for the comments and the frontpage plug thing

I didnt knew so many people already made a vertical map. Im going to present it to the UT mapping community tonight and see what kind of response that gives.

Peri > the meshes used only work in my level, it wont be of much use to the community. It are less than 10 meshes and the big rocks are messy made due to the smooth modifier. The textures are just color variations on my released texture packs so they can get it from there too

I didnt made the DM seamless because I felt it wasnt worth paying for the feature with a whole range of bugs that seamless looping also creates.

But glad you all like it

Everything happens with two at a time lately for me.

I made two strange levels. Both of them arent real levels like youre used to.

First of all I recently bought Far Cry and started messing in its editor. And altho its quite buggy at times for me I like it. I like it that much I even made something with it.

Verlan Island

[Blocked Image: http://phalanx.planetunreal.gamespy.com/hourences/stuf…erlan1small.jpg]

More pics

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http://phalanx.planetunreal.gamespy.com ... verlan.htm

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The downside of it is that I couldnt be bothered of learning the editor completely so the map isnt playable. I didnt add any gameplay or objective or any thing, I just did it for fun and to get a nice picture basically.

I tried to make more areas but that didnt really worked out, I also have an aircraft crash area and stuff but that was too ugly.

I also really tried to not make yet another prefab and palm tree map like there are so many already so I picked a more original theme.

All textures including the terrain textures are mine, rock is normal mapped.

Vegitation/tree meshes are mine

Rocks and other stuff too

The ship and related detail isnt, its from the game.

I hope the brightness works out for everyone

____

DM Exz

[Blocked Image: http://phalanx.planetunreal.gamespy.com/hourences/stuff/Verlan/exz.jpg]

And then I also made a UT2004 map with some new gameplay idea. The maps visuals are ok but nothing more. Lots of bsp and little detail basicaly but thats not important.

I tried to make a fun variation on gameplay but I got zero idea if I succeeded.

The map is made of one deep rocky shaft/pit with dozens of platforms all over the place. You spawn somewhere near the top and the only way out is jumping down. The only way to gain health, weapons, etc is to jump down and the only way to escape your enemy is to keep jumping down.

At the bottom of the pit are a couple of teleporters that take you back up.

So its an extreme Z action DM. Might suck, might be fun. I got no idea but the action is quite fast and "flying". You are constantly dropping down and attack your enemy in mid air.

There are 4 jumppads that can take you a few levels up again altho you can never reach the top that way.

Be sure to grab some jumpboots that are scattered around or else you will experience falling damage if you are not careful. Thats kinda the issue that Im running against. Falling damage.

http://www.gamedesign.be/Hourences/DM-Exz.zip

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Even if you dont got UT2004 you can prolly imagine the concept and the gameplay would work the same in HL2 or in Q4. Im looking for opinions and thoughts about the quite unusual concept.

If this works out ill remake the map for real. Prettier and better gameplay.

____

Quote from kleinluka

Time contrains for one thing. Like Zaphod said earlier, depending on the scope of your game you simply cannot design, model, texture and light a whole next-gen quality game (level) all by yourself under industry standard deadlines. Also, just because you are an all-around-guy doesn't mean everybody else is. I know a ton of level designers who are just that. Designers. I think anything related to art should be left to the artists to create, not the designers. Of course the two should always be in constant communication with eachother so both visions are merged into one.

Umm you DO know that movie CG is even more specialized and split up than games right?

Some parts of movie cg yeah. Depends where you end up.

The whole point about splitting level design is that there is NO point. It does not save time. The only thing that became more complex these days are your models and textures but everything else which ranges from gameplay to floorplan to placement of those models to lighting, particles and whatever else ALL is just as much work as it was 5 years ago. It only looks nicer now. So I dont see why it should be splitted, apart from some texture and mesh creation.

Some companies make you part of a machine. Thats not creativity.

I know plenty of people from the level design communities who seem to master both graphics as gameplay. Ofcourse they are always better in one of the two they still manage to do them both well..

Splitting gameplay and art is a choice I could understand but on the other hand it isnt that neccerary for the reasons mentioned earlier. At work we're currently trying to design a new world, instead of waiting for god knows who I designed the floorplan and concept myself, which took me half an hour to do and after an hour long meeting today the design was agreed upon.

If I had to request that design from gameplay department I would have had to wait for at least a week if not more. This saves time.

The point for me is that the current workflow at a lot of companies is frustrating and inefficient.

Well no because I am also a designer...gameplay wise...so calling myself just an artist still wouldnt do.

Everyone keeps saying that things get too complex and that it is normal they get split up but I simply wonder why would they need to be ? Thats especially the case for lighting. There is really no need to split lighting from the rest of the design. It doesnt take that much time to do and with good tools it can be applied just as fast as in the old days so whats the use of splitting it ? Its not the complexity driving the split. Only for mesh and texture creation I can fully understand the split because they really can take lots of times but all other aspects still take the same amount of time these days as they used to...

I enjoy level design as a whole, I dont enjoy lighting in specific or thing a or b but creating the whole of a world, everything included so Im not going to choose. its the combination that makes it good or not.

If the future is like trackmania I quit this whole thing and go to movie cg graphics. There is no point in being dictated what to create. Trackmania tells me the theme, atmosphere, mood, sky and so on while those are things Id love to have in control myself and are at the centre of mapping. If that is the future peoples skills and understandings will drop dramatically and youll end up in a rts type of mod community. Random map generator and all people do is place some AI things for the PC's army.

Nah, its ok. And i worked on various placed before and its the same everywhere. No matter how good the other people are you will always have discussions at some point and loosing time because of all kinds of things that shouldnt occur in the first place.

I like toms method best and it made me think of extending the rant with a "in a perfect world" example. The best workflow.

I know too that in next gen you just cant make every asset yourself but like I said it would be fine if there were artists making just assets. A house, a tree, etc. and one guy who directs that + places all of that in a level and works it out by adding gameplay, lighting, and so on.

Thatll be fine and fixes most of the problems I mentioned. And sure if one level designer of your team is better in lighting it cant hurt to let him go over all the levels and tweak the lighting everywhere but it shouldnt go as far as letting him do absolutely all lighting and taking the original level designers from that task...

No fun to work on something if you can only touch the lighting or the geometry.

If the director is really good it could indeed work out but then again, a. I have no interest in being the puppet of the director which is basically what you got to be and b. there are not so many good directors around in games.

Games are quite new, and most directors or leads come from just 1 specific art/design 'branche'. Situations occured for me where a lead or director cared more for a bad texture uv in an environment than the horrible lighting or bad geometry composition..the latter is much more important than a bad uv for the general look and feel. They often lack specific level design knowledge.

I dont think there will be lots of teams creating levels for next gen engines. Considering the pretty low amount of levels created for current games I think there are barely going to be any decent custom map releases for the new games. You only got x number of people and if you do that /4 to make a group you got even less teams/peoples left who could make a decent map

1 decent map per half a year or so..