Posts by Hourences

if you use photoshop 6 or 7.0 you need a targa update patch i thought, 7.01 or so already had it

if really nothing works for you, try to save it as 32 bit tga, see if that works and then later on compress it in ued to dxtc5

with lights below the rock i mean lamps too

small radius, high brightness lights so there is an area of darkness between 2 lamps

vertexlighting really isnt working well in your map

too many flat shaded textures prolly, you could always try to render lightmaps in max and use those for the map but that is going to be a lot harder

fun concept, tho how far done are you ? you need stuff in the skybox, a sun, meteors, milkyways, galaxies whatever but something + if possible a light source in the skybox + you could have little rocks of debris floating around your main rocks and on top of them

indoor I dont see a lot of lamps or so either and I would add more vertices on some spot to get better vertex light

and I cant see if you already have but you can vertexpaint a sand texture on top of the rock

you can also add small lamps around the building and on the bottom of the rock to lit the place up or youll end up with too much black

looks like an ut map

the super coloured things are terrible, rest is cool stuff

at least not hl2 industrial city like cause im absolutely sick of that style already and i dont even play the game

USA : 72 % 173 miles off 357 sec

European version, level 5 thing : 75 % 155 miles 376 sec

south america level 1 : 83 % 246 miles 356 sec

briliant

rest of interview is also nice, finally someone who dares to say what he thinks instead of all the political correct crap you get most of the times

be careful with too much black around, makes it heavy and dead. buildings and stuff above in pic 2 could use some highlights for example

even if its doom 3, there is too much black in the picture making the whole too unbalanced and harsh looking

BSP will definalty disappear, I dont think its going to survive the next few years. Which is great on one hand, and on the other hand not so great

Great to quickly fix or add a small thing with a cube or so and to zone things off and easily texture them but on the other hand bsp isnt really the fastest way of working and it really is oldskool, next unreal engine wont have BSP anymore anyway afaik and engines that DO have bsp today the day are more of a rarity already than the other way round

You should start to view level editors more as the composers and finishers and not the actual tool to do everything with. We never made everything in an editor in the first place. Things like textures were photoshop. It would be crazy to try and equivalent Max with your game editor. Hard to get such complex program out in just a year or so and not easy for your artist and anyone new you recruit because they have to learn yet another program before they can start to work which slows down.

Editors should be highly specialized in composing levels, easily placing instanced meshes around. Easily making shaders and materials, lighting, particles, special gameplay entities, adding stuff like occluders, simple exporting and saving, testplaying. And all previewable ofcourse

That kinda stuff you need, its the hole in the market because Max cant do it well

And that will prolly be the 3rd job in the future (I hope), Gameplay Dude, Model Dude, The Finish Off Dude

Tom fact that UT2004 is a mess is not our fault, look at ONP, everyone made their own stuff yet (except the themes) its still coherent..

UT2's fault was that were too many people with different skilllevels, too many different mesh artists and specially lack of art direction from the leads are the cause

works here

http://www.adobe.com/

Try the main site and then go to -> Products -> All -> Photoshop CS -> On the left Downloads -> Windows Updates -> Find the 7.0 section of PS in the list and look for targa update

or

http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/pho ... /targa.zip

Er no

First time I see this problem

The wood ones I didnt even gave an alpha channel..

Did you try the copy paste trick ?

Hm, actualy, there is a TGA patch for photoshop 7.0 to 7.0.1 or something I believe, originally the TGA alpha stuff was broken so Adobe released a patch afterwarths, might give it a try ? Could be the cause

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/ ... ftpID=1544

Hm ok, what photoshop you have ? Seems like some photoshop feature I myself never used before, auto display alpha+diffuse or something

Needs to show up seperatly...

So as I never used this "feature" before I dont know how to turn it off, do you have the layer tab on your right ? cant you just click on the layer again ? Any results ? You also have a channels tab, cant you select RGB one in there ? Or try some messing around with the options of channels or layers ? the little arrow top right of the channel/layer window

Cant you simply erase the alpha 1 channel otherwise ? Or select your basic layer one and do crtl a (select all), crtl c, crtl n (new document), push ok and crtl v it ? shows up normal then ?

weird stuff

If anyone else knows how to turn off this thing please tell

hm, could you give me a picture of how you see them ? Trough here or mail or however you want

Familiar with alpha channels ? Stupid question but sure youre not looking at an alpha channel ?

Morning Tom

lets defend some unreal honour here

Thanks for the frontpage thing picture on top thing

HL2 version sounds more and more cool, ill try to find a way

Id love to but I currently have no idea how and I dont even have HL2

So maybe in the future or when I find someone who can do it

poor you

Thanks for comments, and yes mappic is unreal style, thats what happens when you work with the game for years

Could have been just that place yeah, but still. Was pretty big company, big in all meanings of the word. Wasnt really cause of the planning and leads, more of excusez moi, incompetence from some people. If you dont know a(ny) 3d program or vital terms as occluders I ask myself questions..

I got another job now, smaller company where I have more freedom but I still ask myself questions by some things made up by the general gameplay guy. But at least its more workable now

I do believe it will never be perfect like this. Even if you got a pretty smooth running team you will still loose time because you have to communicate and reshedule more, and other things see previous post This whole gameplay guy vs an artist is basically like the years old visuals vs gameplay argument. .

Its just bound to collide with eachother one day imo

But thats just my point of view

Edit: Now that I think of it, I know some people in this company X, they got a gameplay department and an artist department and they use engine Y. The gameplay department there has -a lot- more experience with this Engine Y than the actual artists who never worked with it before yet and apperantly hate it. They make messy stuff all the time and get stuck constantly (motivation+time loss) yet the gameplay designers who know how to work with the engine are not allowed to help out apart from giving some tips...("you guys are hired for gameplay so youre not allowed to do visual work")

This is almost the opposite of my experience, also by far not cool. Instead of just letting them do everything or at least also the composing and finishing off...

Maybe the system works great in theory but in real life you often want to pull out all your hair seeing it in action

I got bad experiences with splitting up level work too much. Some companies not only split it between gameplay and visuals but also let a seperate guy do lighting, another one texturing etc..

It really does not work well to my experience, for example when 1 persons lightings, 1 models and 1 textures everything, it gets a mess. You have 3 different techniques and methods, 3 different visions on a certain theme, environment and atmopshere, 3 different everything. If youre not careful itll end up in a giant mess with no unity or coherencity at all anymore. The solid feel could be gone..something which is very delicate

Now multiple artists is one thing, an artist vs a gameplay dude is another thing...

Countless times ive been trying to explain to this gameplay dude that you cant just do this or that. That you cant just have a giant open field, that you need large areas to place occluders in (often then followed by the question "what is an occluder") and that you cant just combine 20 different themes in 1 level. They think too much like "yeah cool now I want to have enemies attacking from above, hmm what type of thing could let them attack from above, oh I know, a 15 floor high apartment building!" then they come to me and they ask me if I can place a 15 floor high appartment building in the middle of a jungle...sorry not possible

They dont keep the artistic side in mind more than half the time. Same for the floorplans and general build up. A floorplan of a medieval town is something else than that of a futuristic military outpost. The floorplan itself already has to speak out the theme and form a base for the visuals. The way buildings are placed has to be correct, the correct compositions has to be formed, unity has to be formed, has to give lots of potential for visual stunning things to be added later on etc. And thats what those gameplay only people also dont keep in mind, so they just give you as an artist a type of floorplan thats really bad to work with and doesnt support visuals very well at all...

Oh and another thing, more than half the time they dont realise how big it is what they design and you get to make half the world in one level. I once got a design that we as artists downscaled to 900 percent at the end and we could still barely finish it...

In the end its really frustrating for both sides, in fact, for most games I really dont understand what the point is of having a few guys who only make level gameplay all day long...The best floorplans and levels I made I figured out in less than half an hour or an hour at maximum (SP included). And if you have good tools scripting the gameplay events also doesnt have to take more than a few days or a week at max...A level designer should be able to do all himself

It all eats time too, running between two departments all the time, trying to explain eachother things, writing things down, thats such an incredible waste of time for something so simple like "make an interesting event in this corridor"

Another thing is that when you need something changed, you need to get these 3 other people who are involved just to make your change. And they on their turn must redo their part, and re shedule it etc. Man thats such a waste of time and energy. Why cant one guy just do it..

I can understand if multiple artists make textures and meshes and all, and if some gameplay designers figure out the basic story and idea of whats going on in the map but everything else should be for the real level designer and no one else. Has to be finished by 1 person to ensure perfect harmony and balance

I really want to do everything myself

And I dont see why I shouldnt be able to do so, the overall balance in a level is way to delicate to be trown around between multiple people all the time

heh thanks, why does it look very unrealish tho ? on one hand they do kinda feel like them but on other hand not, what elements in them would you say make it feel typical unrealish ?

If I know what exactly I can hopefully have better control on style next time I make some tex

yay first post

Ive released a texpack, mainly for UT but ofcourse also usable for other games and purposes. Pack is semi realistic and industrial influenced. It are mostly pretty basic normal textures, so no heavy handdrawn stuff but more of the regular bricks, woods etc. Near 150 textures, almost all of them 1024 resolution and tilable. Most of the tex are photosourced. All used photos are self taken

You can get them in four forms, a 300 MB raw TGA zip, a UT1 and a UT2x utx and the JPG gallery on my site. The compiled UTX versions have correct compression levels set, detailtextures, footstepsounds set, shaders set up as well as some other materials, masking/alpha and other things

The pack is made and intented for community use. Means you are free to use it in your non commercial level/MOD/render/freeware game/whatever provided I get creditted somewhere.

For the exact terms of use you can look at the texture page, down at the bottom or look at the bottom of the readme's.

Main site : http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx

Direct link : http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/textures.htm

(not 56k friendly, dont shoot me)

random collage

http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/tex ... onhigh.jpg

random in game usage

http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/tex ... orhigh.jpg