Posts by Hourences

totally agree, the fun is gone and almost all theres left are wannabe pros

almost like the hardcore player community, they all think they are pro players........

Rendering such model might make it hard to see what you look at due to the lack of wireframe on top of the faces so his printscreens are fine

Is there a polylimit ? Some things are quite low poly like the pillars and those cube things at the bottom of the pillars, they look real basic and thick. And maybe you could add a little fence around the thing.

And the triangulation of the base platform is wrong.

I always buy nvdia for a reason

However I never heard of your problem before, no one with an ati has reported such problems as far as Im aware so either you got a weird pc or bad drivers or you do other stuff wrong and are blaming the wrong thing

Pay and you can ask me

Seriously, use irc, goes faster. irc.enterthegame.com #unrealed biggest, smaller second version at irc.quakenet.org same channel

And dont make 2 terrains, make sure zoneinfo has bterrainzone or whatever true, make sure the terrain has at least 1 texture layer and rebuild geometry a time

Tutorials at 3dbuzz.com and planetunreal.com/architectonic

They look at your resume, a company looks at both your resume and your art. Hopefully anyway.

Applying at a company directly gives you more chance of being hired for what you can actually do and create instead of what a page of text says

In Max you got lots of ways but in Maya the only thing I ever found was to manually cut it up, I dont think theres a true edge turn tool but maybe I was blind for the year I used Maya

In any way, I always manually cut it up when it went wrong, so I used the regular cut tool and simply cut from one corner to another to create the correct triangulation

UT isnt very forum like, i never use them, but if you really want :

http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/fo ... orumid=249

the forums of unrealplayground.com

possible the forums of http://www.beyondunreal.com

If the level is done it can be submitted at various site which will mirror it for you, possible review it and/or which lets users leave comments

http://www.nalicity.com

http://www.unrealplayground.com (seems to be downish atm)

reviewing only at insite.beyondunreal.com

http://www.mapraider.com

Your level needs more harmony and balance, quite harsh in spots

Hl2 has serious workflow problems, so yes Im not going to mod for it then. Just as I didnt decide to go mod for a whole range of other games. It must be easy to make custom content, must be efficient etc, and HL2 just like some other games does not offer this. Why mod for it then ? As an outsider thats a question you ask, the only group that doesnt ask that question is the HL1 group..That shrinks your potential mod user base

But next to that most problems you source people are facing we faced too in the unreal community, since UT2003 was released...youll get trough. I got the feeling the community is seriously fragmentated in to lots of little groups and forums, we had the same thing and that doesnt exactly help.

Same for things like all those prefabs, people are building cubes and are slamming in prefabs chairs and furniture now and call it a map. In unreal they slam in prefab pillars and wall panels until the whole damn room is prefab and the same old style. That is a serious problem and you should hit back hard on it. Review sites should do the same, as should valve for example but what happens instead ? They organize a contest that promotes using prefabs and reviews sites often rate it 8/10 "because it looks so much like HL2". Thats killing level design on the long term. In a few years itll be even more advanced thus even more people will use prefabs and before you know it community level design will be nothing more than placing prefabs and no one will make anything custom anymore or understand what its really about. That will kill half what level design is about. No more architecture skills, no more texturing skills, etc..And the result is that the people who do know, the pro's and the skilled people will also leave the community completely because "they are noobs who do nothing more than placing things, I dont belong there"

Prefabs = no

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I hope UE3 is going to be a step in the right direction.

UE already offers better workflow right now, as it did 3 years ago already too

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I'd say that UT2k3 and 2k4 killed the HL mapping and modding community, and more specifically the "Make Something Unreal Contest."

It didnt, if anything did than it was because valve waited too long with releasing HL2, HL1 kept dragging on and so yeah, if some other game with newer tech gets released then, unimportant what game, then sure some people will switch over

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there was very minimal modding community in UT before the lauch of UT2k3,

There was a strong, reasonable sized and active mod community roughly comparable to HL1's mod community. Both map wise as mods in general. In fact the map community was more active back then then it is now as was the mutator community etc. And it was more friendly, more for fun while now its more "omg i wanna be super pro modder"

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that is to say that most of the modders were HL veterans.

I dont know a -single- person in the unreal mod community who started in the HL community, well actually I knew 1 mapper but he quit a long time ago now.

Most HL mappers would complain too much if they had to work with UED, why would they switch

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the community was still going on, and still is today

Its going quite slow at the moment, in fact, the UT mod community right before UT2003 was more active than the UT2004 one right now. Most mod teams have died, they seemed to have done it all for the money instead of for fun and supporting their product. From the moment on the contests stopped they all disappeared(minus some exceptions ofcourse). Also a reason why the original UT community did better, they did it for fun so they kept on going.

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BF2 isnt really indoor like, a good mapper should also be able to make good indoors. The old style.

And all those people who quit mapping just because they got hired somewhere clearly werent really devoted to their stuff then...you dont quit if you really like what you do.

It should always be fun ofcourse but I dont agree at all with the "dont be the most popular, it wont do you any good"

Getting regular media attention helps a lot in getting the right contacts, in getting companies to notice you, etc. The same goes for reviews, Ive saw people getting offered a job because they were map of the month at their planet site.

If youre unknown no one knows who you are, what you do or how to contact you and only you can land yourself a job, if they do know you you can get jobs landed without doing anything. And that matters, a lot more opportunities.

And if you want to become popular you dont join a mod because mods push away individual work and make it all become team work and therefor your name doesnt get enough publicity

Game site often use flash stuff too, driving me completely nuts half the time. I just want to see screenshots of the damn game and not 3000 hours of animated intro, loud music or other such crap to then finally be pressented with 400x300 res screenshots..Portfolio sites often do the same kind of thing and thats real bad yeah. But if they manage to do it properly it might be cool, or the artist could make 2 versions, the flash one and a simple version..

Rest of article was pretty good but I dont agree with having your entire portfolio on 1 page with just tumbs, often its just too much work or info to post on 1 single page. Doesnt help the readers focus and itll load slow too prolly

And I often like a lot of info or news pages or stuff because it shows how active or involved the person is and if I have more info I know better with who Im dealing and who he is and what exactly hes doing so I dont have to go ask 300 questions in the interview or email conversation. If it appears the guy doesnt want to relocate for example Id like to know such info as soon as possible

I normally work with Max but can work perfectly fine with Maya too, so whatever happens I can live with it altho I preffer Max over Maya

I dont think theyll dump any of the 2 nor make a hybrid, that would be stupid and would alienate both user groups, they might only shift Maya more to animation or movies or something yeah. Fine by me.

Or they might take some of Mayas functionalitity and use it to enhance their Max

Or like some people say theyll raise Maya's price so its more in line with Max again..

Itll take years before youre going to feel the effects of this I think and I dont think theyll change their own Max so Im ok with the news

Demo has more of such type of problems, liked the original more

It runs slow, the style is too flashy for me and hard on my eyes and I got iritated from the jumpad jumping game..

I also managed to get stuck on some platform after I landed on it with my aircraft. My aircraft disappeared and I got stuck so had to commit suicide. Thats really bad level design or else Im missing something..

If I can reach it there must be a second way to continue in case you decide to leave or crash your aircraft

Epic, Bethesda, Rockstar, iD, Valve

Poly, always

Only when I need to check triangulation mesh sometimes, altho poly can do that too..

Tetris and Mario

Later on Unreal 1 started it for me on pc and more serious

The book is overrated imo but can be helpful

terrible title they picked

The videos on the ECE and on UT2004 gold/collectors/whatever edition are the buzz videos + some extra ones you cant download, all made by buzz crew

The freely downloable ones should help just fine already imo, no need to spend money

When we started we had just 1 txt with just 3 pages of explanation

Well yeah, if your team is really big you need more than 1 leader but it must still strike a balance, the more leader crap the less friendly the environment imo, less group of friends feeling.

In any way, after a while there will always be people in the team who put in more time or have more knowledge and who will kinda turn in lead or senior or whatever and who people know they can turn to if they got a problem or a question but Im kinda against putting that in font size 900 on your site "dude x is lead y"

NDA's really are not neccy, we never had them a few years ago and no one leaked stuff back then either...ofcourse if you wanted to release something you should go ask permission etc but not with all kinds of paperwork..

And the NDA's arent even legal...nor would you get sued if you breached them, so whats the point ?

I dont even have an NDA where I work, its just based on trust, We're trying not to be too corporate so the work stays fun and thats good cause I speak out of experience that too a corporate workenvironment can be frustrating but yet some mods try to be exactly that..weird people

Some take it too far, its still for fun and a hobby and they are still just amateurs

This is going to go a little off topic, sorry

Reply to the guy above

Long time ago mods used to be made by groups of people, friends, doing something they like together

Thats cool, I used to work like that, we made mods like that and they had great success. We didnt quit, we succeeded but we didnt had all the fancy names and titles. It worked cause you felt eachother, you were on the same line on what to make and how. No need for a lot of communication, it just flowed.

While nowadays theres a decent sized group that are wannabe crap. Look at the titles they give themself sometimes. Lead Material Artist ? Hell, we dont even had such person in my company, nor the in the last 2 I worked for but sure a mod needs one. Best one i came across till now was a mod with -9-members and the coolest name was "Senior Lead Project Manager"

Give me a break

You need 1 leader and thats it. You dont need to name people lead or whatever, itll only destroy the "group of friends" atmosphere, youre all equal. You dont work for a boss when youre in a mod, you work for the group project.

I already have to do all day long what my boss tells me, last thing I would want to do is listen to yet another boss who tells me what to do when I get home and try to do my hobby.

And then the names, Blabla Studios. Blabla Inc. Blabla Games, etc. They are just a team, nothing more and they make a mod not games...

Next, if you finally do apply to them they ask you to send trough your CV/Resume to a [email protected] adress and they copy paste some fancy job requirements from a real company...

Its not a job, it doesnt pay, the resume stuff is utterly stupid as a simple mail would suffice already and the giant job requirements are idiotic and sometimes longer and more complex than those of real companies

If you do continue at this point youll be confronted with a "trying to be pro" thing. First of all youre getting a makeshift NDA, non disclosure agreement (like you would want to do anything with the ideas anyway + the NDA's they give are almost never legally correct so..) and after that you sometimes get a "real" contract (wooow)

Next to that they often try to chat cool and email cool. Perfect sentences, perfect english, giant email signatures (""""company"""" this, lead that, contact here) and nice "this email is confidential, do not blabla"

I dont even have an NDA where I work now, for all places I worked we never typed in nice english, we didnt had or barely have email signatures and neither confidential email crap...But hey, some mods seems to need it...

And thats what I mean with wannabe

Type of mods I would avoid at all costs..

And none of that happened a few years ago..

Yet lots of great and extensive mods were made back then

ECE is international

Original UT also had all the video tut extras but only the collectors edition or whatever it was called

That one had 2 dvd's afaik, the 1 dvd/6cd one is the standard first release

Most of the videos can also be downloaded, its just 3dbuzz stuff tho some are exclusive

I only join teams in which I know some people and how they work etc or if the mod already had some releases and was succesful at it.

Its also not just a matter of quality but also how the mod is being run and how the members are, they might completely not fit your personality or so which wont work out in the end anyway

I dont join something if it just looks good and pro, they need playable releases prefferably. Too many mods release great art work or maybe a playable demo but they never seem to find the time and effort after that anymore to actually make an entire mod out of it..

Since the last year or 2 its getting increasingly common to act like a company while theyre actualy just a mod. Absolutely horrible, last thing on earth Im going to join is a group of wannabes...