Posts by Defrag

Really, really slick trailer. Loved the music and the level design & attention to detail is impressive. I will be downloading this Best of luck!

Early(ish) Reeves & Mortimer. Legendary.

Yeah I hate that shit too, Hessi. Reminds me of the bad old days of Packard Bell PCs and paying £3726937634 for 4MB of proprietary RAM (instead of half the price for generic).

Quote from Thrik

Heh. I stopped buying Microsoft mice a number of years ago after having three of the bastards end up with the left mouse button not working after a year. The build quality of Logitech stuff has been so much better in my experience, feeling solid and still working fine two or three years later.

Microsoft are insanely generous when it comes to replacing faulty mice (or they were back in the day when I had one). Having said that, I've had an MX510 & MX518 for years now and they're far better than anything I've used from MS

Apparently a similar/the same clip was on some artist's portfolio page, so I'm sceptical as to whether this is realtime. Furthermore, I'm not really banking on their business model. They need powerful hardware to make this thing a reality. Imagine having a game of Half-life, but in addition to the servers required to just run the main game logic, each client connected has to have hardware set aside to actually render its view of the world. It sounds extremely expensive. While it's an interesting model for crap PC users, imagine you've bought a powerful PC that could do much of the work itself; are you going to be happy about having to pay more just so that they can duplicate effort that could be palmed off to your own PC?

Moreover, since all of the rendering is done on the server, how on earth is it going to support interactive games and applications? Ever play quake in the pre-quakeworld days when you had to wait for your keystrokes to be acknowledged by the server before your client would update your position? It was horrible. Unless you were on a LAN, it was basically unplayable. You can skip around network problems when you have a predictive game client code, but if you're rendering the actual IMAGE on the server and the client is a dumb display, then I don't think they can predict much at all, if anything. For latency of anything over tens of milliseconds, it'll probably be horrible for anything that we would consider to be an interactive game. This is going to be a serious constraint in terms of what they can actually do with the technology and the sorts of games they can support. On rails and social sorts of things are doable, but things like driving games or first person shooters? I really doubt it.

Finally, imagine the bandwidth this will take. Even using optimised image difference algorithms & some sort of compression, I'm betting it's going to take serious bandwidth to do, especially at normal computer resolutions, let alone the upper HD resolutions.

It looks really cool, but unless they have amazing solutions to all of these problems, I can't see how it can work. There are a lot of very smart people out there, so I'm not saying it's impossible, merely ... very, very difficult. I will look on with interest!

I'd actually say that design is overrated in many circles (by design I mean having a more or less ideal paper design and then trying to implement it). Jeff Atwood's blog has some nice bits and pieces, and this is something I wholly agree with. I generally write down a load of ideas/constraints and bash out a rough design, then get going. By the time I'm done, I've usually iteratively diverged from the original design in response to unforeseen problems anyway.

I'm very interested in design patterns or looking at how other people tackled similar problems, though Just not a huge fan of very formal design.

The GPU is specialised hardware, so it makes sense to load some stuff onto it, even if it means there's less available for graphics processing (i.e. by dedicating only 10% of a specialised GPU, you can perform certain types of calculations that would require a significant amount of CPU time, even with multiple cores available ).

The full 3d bionic commando is looking incredible. RPS link (sorry if this has already been posted).

Nope; lights.rad is used at compile-time only.

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It combines programming lessons, art lessons, marketing and design

Sorry to potentially dampen your expectations, but the diversity of the course's curriculum is setting off alarm bells. It takes a lot of time and dedication to get a solid grasp on any one of those listed disciplines, so I am rather sceptical as to whether the course will make you employable; it sounds fun, but I'd be worried.

I've programmed for about 6 years in total now (C/C++, C# and some scripting languages), and although I'm competent, I've got a long way to go. I've level designed for 8 and I still feel like I have a huge amount to learn; same deal goes for design & modelling. If your course touches on all of these disciplines, then you may not get much further than dipping your toe in the water and getting a flavour of what you might like to specialise in -- something you could potentially do at home in your own time.

I would look into the course's content and, crucially, the percentage of graduates who secure jobs in the games industry in a technical discipline (programming, art, design). If they cannot answer your questions or the results are not encouraging, I would look elsewhere. Sorry to sound so pessimistic, but there's a lot of crap games courses out there. A lot of them basically just take an existing course and jam computer games content in there to get bums on seats without actually making the graduates employable.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/i ... tream-news

http://www.edge-online.com/blogs/david- ... rites-edge

That site looks cool but, like most overly-flashy sites, it's totally horrible to navigate and practically unusable.

I don't see why it would be considered rude to follow up and make sure that they actually received your application. I can see why a phone call might be bothersome, but in situations where you really would like a response (a response as in nothing more than a message saying "yes/no we did/did not receive your application"), email is the worst possible medium. At least when you speak to someone you are usually able to get a straight answer.

I'm sure we've all had a few emails in our time that we didn't deal with, even when we really, really should have... (forgot/lost/filed under todo list and constantly relegated to last place). That's why I like the phone for stuff like that. It's also the reason why my spidey sense starts tingling when I see an online shopping site that does not have a phone number for customer support...

Even companies with dedicated HR people won't necessarily get back to you very quickly. If you know someone on the inside who can take your CV & portfolio directly to the lead/producer/whoever is in charge of arranging interviews for that position, then you will tend to get results much faster. By results I simply mean things move faster and you will know where you stand rather than seeing your email sitting in an HR person's inbox gathering dust, or filed in the "maybe" folder. Or lost in the system. Or, like Hessi said, spam-filtered to oblivion!

You just need a small break and you'll be on your way. Valve don't fly just anybody half way around the world Anyway, I'm sorry to hear you didn't get the job, but it sounds like you had a really great experience regardless.

Congratulations; that's some lovely stuff!

If it is Valve, then good luck! I remember seeing one of your HL2 maps ages ago and thinking "yeah, so that's what source is capable of"

My path to getting a job was very similar to ReNo's.

I also started level design in my spare time after reading the very same PC Gamer article. Anyway, I got into TFC mapping and really enjoyed that, so I kept going and making more and more. At that time, I had no real ambition to be a professional level designer, but I knew I wanted to work in the games industry. I took the same course (Computer Games Technology BSc -- all programming & maths) and kept doing level design stuff in my spare time. At university, you have a lot of spare time. In that time you can either mess around and have fun, or you can spend a bit (or a lot) of it on creative endeavours that will make you stand out from the crowd. IMO if someone is talented and focusses on a discipline with the mindset of "I WANT A JOB, GIVE ME A JOB", they are sure to get a job out of it eventually.

I chose to spend most of my spare time working on the mod Fortress Forever. Again, it was more of a fun thing and I didn't really plan to have it on my CV -- it was just something I wanted to make. It took many years and got stomped by TF2, but it was an invaluable experience. I can't recommend modding enough because learning how to work as a team is one of the most important things you can do. You learn how to make stuff, but most importantly, you learn to constructively deal with other people. You also learn very quickly that people who do their own thing and listen to no-one are absolutely useless, no matter how talented. You make a lot of mistakes along the way and learn from 'em so that you don't have to make the same mistakes in your first job, too It was a major part of my job interview and it's something I find I can go back to and say "look, I finished this", too.

Equally importantly, mod-making gives you a lot of contacts, same as these forums. I've had a few job postings prodded my way (nothing definite, just people I know via FF sending me a message saying 'company X is hiring and I can put in a word for you'). Even if you only get a few opportunities like this, you may only need that one break.

Anyway, I graduated and applied to one place as a level designer and got knocked back, but I had also applied to the same place as a programmer. In the end, I decided I was more employable as a programmer so I went with that (currently a junior software test engineer, which is a bit of a weird job title ). I enjoy both disciplines and I think my art & ld knowledge will give me a good middle ground for communicating between departments, too. I would generally recommend against doing a games course unless you know it has a proven track record in terms of graduates breaking into the industry. A recent study in the UK showed that something like 95% of games courses are 'not fit for purpose' -- that's an eye-opener indeed. The one I did was one of the few accredited ones, but even then it had a lot of areas that could've been better.

Basically, it may be a safer bet to take a non games related course and just do your games stuff in your own time (though it depends on the content & quality of the games degree course you are considering). Tread carefully!

Looks stonking

Keeps on getting better and better. Definitely going to get this.

Just look for the tall guy with stupid hair.