Posts by Defrag

Quote from AllyMan

If it counts, you can stick me down at RealTime Worlds, I’m just on a placement, working on player visualisations, metrics and all that for APB. Go heat maps!

Hurrah, another RTWer.

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Then why did you already started on producing it? What happened to the research stage? Maybe it wasn't your fault and should your superiors and more experienced colleagues have guided you through the process better? Maybe you needed to have more meetings to discuss the challenging parts of the thing to make? All in all, this is something that can be avoided for about 95 percent of everything that is made.

I'm not talking personally about something I've done (I work in QA doing unit testing & tools, so I generally don't do the 'fun' stuff ). Basically what I meant is that you might prototype something and it looked good, but it ultimately ended up not panning out as expected. At what point do you give up on it, cut your losses and redo the work? In amateur stuff it's fine(ish) because nobody is paying us... In companies there's a bunch of publisher type people jabbing pens at you and pointing at deadlines

"You KNOW you need a cover sheet on your TPS report, Richard. That ain't new, baby!" -- they even jammed in an office space reference

It probably just does a binary diff on a load of files. It knows which bytes in a file it has to change to get to the desired state, so it doesn't have to store all of the information.

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I'm pretty sure they tried to plan every possible detail before starting production, because no one wants lose ends in a multi million dollar project. But the creative side of making games isn't a science.

I think this is a good point. The games industry is young and immature compared to a lot of business types so certain stuff is sub-par but it's very true that making something fun is somewhat intangible. If you spend ages working on something that is threatening to click but never quite does, at what point do you recognise the fact that it's a bit lacking and it's never quite going to work? I think everyone knows how gut-wrenching it is to work on some aspect of your design (be it a level, an application or a texture set etc.) only to realise that it's just not the right way to do it, or that you have figured out a much better way to go about it.

If someone asks me to write a tool to do tasks x, y and z, then that's fine. Chuck it in a requirements document and then let me at it. However, if someone wants some fun gameplay, that's a bit looser. There's more things that can go wrong.

As for where the money goes: Just take a look around at a large developer. There's a lot of staff, hardware, software, facilities etc. to be paid for. The bigger the company gets, the more people have to be paid to manage the people that make stuff. It's pretty much inevitable. Like anything, as people do this more and more and gain more experience (assuming the experienced staff are retained), companies will likely become better at managing projects. In the space of a couple of decades, we've gone from bedroom programmers (who also did the art & levels) to 100+ man teams working on blockbusters. Is anyone surprised that things sometimes go awry?

It is very much like the film industry imo -- a script can look great, you can cast all of the right people and a great director etc. but it can all go pear-shaped because it's not like we're making Generic Spreadsheet Package 8b.

If you don't want to go through that:

AFAIK Valve are OKish with people using & distributing CS:S content in HL2 mods as long as they don't take the piss. i.e. if it's just the odd model/texture, I doubt anyone is going to care. If you use lots of stuff then you should definitely do what madgernader said.

Jim White. A strange man who makes great country music. I'd highly recommend "Drill a hole in that substrate and tell me what you see"

I thought it was pretty interesting , cheers.

Quote from ReNo

Didn't Steam add paypal support? At the very least you should be able to use your card through paypal and get the game that way, but I don't know if you already have/wish to get paypal.

Aye, but that would involve using PayPal...

Played it a bit more and, once you actually get some cars that don't spin around 32 times when you press the accelerator, it's much better. Still can't really say whether I'd recommend it -- your mileage may vary (ho ho).

The most annoying thing about it is its menus, though. Every time you do something you have some self-righteous UI team jizzing in your eyes. You need to have flying graphics slamming into a board to represent how much money you earned from your sponsors (and you can have about 3286 sponsors), which place you got, which place your team got, how much money you made, how much RESPECT (aii) you earned and how many times you scratched your balls during the race. It literally takes about 10 seconds just to mash the return key and get through all those screens... infuriating.

It looks great, but in practice it makes me want to hit something...

This is hilarious and sad at the same time. It's a game mashup. It's a cut and paste game! And yet it... got published.

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What makes me sad is that he actually got a degree in this....

Yes I agree, but what is a degree worth? Who is it dished out by? Is the course recognised by any games companies? etc. If it's some backwater place with no real recognition, then that probably explains it.

Analogy: A lot of people have black belts in martial arts but don't know the first thing about how to fight because their instructors are talentless money-grabbers. The students pay their money and 'progress' quickly to black belt (under two years, sometimes much less). The moment they enter the real world and need to call upon their 'skills', they get a reality check in the form of having their heads kicked in. In both cases, you really ought to check up on who is teaching you and look around before committing to it. I feel this is exactly the same thing, but in education-form. At least he's starting to realise that his work leaves a lot to be desired. Even his portfolio site is riddled with spelling mistakes

Even on more respected courses there exist people who churn out average to poor work; that includes technical disciplines, too. Sadly it's a fact that you can generally cruise through many university courses, put in a cursory amount of work and still expect to get a 2:2 in the UK. Other places can be even worse. I guess it's no real surprise that the art degree students can churn out bad work and still pass on certain courses; after all, someone that gets 40% in a university maths exam will scrape through with a degree award. The main difference is that crap technical folk have drab CVs with unimpressive numbers which is not exactly jolting. On the other hand, an artist's work has to stand alone and if it's not good, it's extremely obvious.

Furyo: Those are some great points; especially regarding general skills / conducting yourself. I've heard some horror stories about candidates turning up for interviews with a great chance of getting a job, but then basically shooting themselves in both feet due to being a horrible interviewee (e.g. not knowing anything about the company, or just saying things that are totally unsuitable). Considering a lot of companies pay first jobbers poorly, negotiating skills are an extremely good thing to have, too.

I've never liked unreal because the movement has always felt really floaty. Quake based games always feel satisfying and solid to move around in -- I enjoyed Q3 a lot so I will play this

It looks utterly average in every department. On second glance the environments look ok, but some of those character designs are really ... ugly. Also, the adverts did a terrible job of selling it.

I'm not sure what the point of his article was. Firstly, he's not got a games job, so how can he make assumptions about the state of already-hired artists and assert that companies should take a chance on untested artists who have "base skills"? (read: uncompetitive portfolios.) He complains that there should be companies that offer folk with "base skills" the chance to get more experience on low risk projects. That's what university and modding projects are all about, surely? Unless you work to support yourself while in further education, you generally have a lot of spare time to develop your skills above and beyond what you can achieve just by following the course curriculum exclusively. It looks like he just did the bare minimum and then got a bit down about the reality of his situation. Most of the folk on this forum didn't do design or art degrees, yet they have taught themselves to model, texture, map etc. -- many to a professional standard -- and yet this guy is complaining that he can't get an interview despite completing a dedicated degree course.

More to the point: Why on earth would a company give a graduate job to someone like him when there's literally thousands of better candidates? I'm not trying to be overly harsh here, just realistic, but I've seen better models pumped out by people who picked up 3ds max and start showing their work a couple of weeks later. Some people are naturally gifted or have training; others just work really hard at it and get good very quickly over a short space of time. If he was really that passionate and really wanted it, then he would have a much more impressive portfolio. Maybe he should just accept that he's not willing to try hard enough or that it's a field in which he will never excel. He complains that companies won't even let him have a phone interview so that he can explain his passion for the medium, and yet he demonstrates very little passion in his portfolio. Art is an intrinsically visual medium -- you can't paper over the cracks with 'enthusiasm' and sound bites if your portfolio tells an entirely different story.

If you apply and get rejected, then you got rejected for a reason. Either you weren't experienced enough for the role, or your portfolio was not good enough to get their attention. I had two knock-backs from the same company. Instead of writing a woe-is-me article about it, I spent several months working on FF while also improving my own portfolio website. I asked people what I could do to improve it and, when a friend of a friend who has performed recruiting duties shredded my CV, I took the advice on board and improved it. I got hired the third time around and, it was only then I realised just how piss-poor my initial applications were when contrasted to my new stuff. Why? Because the newer applications had a lot more effort put into them -- it's as simple as that. Feeling sorry for yourself gets you nowhere.

The antithesis of that guy is someone on this forum (can't remember the name) who posted about how he wanted a level design job but wasn't good enough. So he started learning UnrealEd for months on end until he finally achieved his goal and got a job out of it. It's inspiring to hear somebody say something like that -- that's the kind of attitude and passion that puts other candidates in the shade

That being said, I do sympathise on two points:

1. If he was told by his course leader that the degree makes him a shoo-in for a job. But then again, you should always thoroughly research prospective degrees and try to maintain realistic expectations. As someone else said, there's a lot of bad games degree courses out there that try hard to get your attention (and money).

2. The games industry is hard to get into as a newbie. You sometimes need a bit of luck to get the first job. However, you know what they say: the harder you try, the luckier you get

I got about 20 minutes into STALKER and was struggling to stay awake. It runs fairly poorly on an 8800GTS and the combat did not feel at all tactile. I had no idea if i was hitting people or doing damage or losing etc. Maybe I should give it another go, but life is short..

I went to buy it, but it turns out that Steam still doesn't accept Maestro / Switch debit cards. They said they were trying to sort it out when HL2 was released all those years ago, but there's still no support. What gives? D: I HAVE MONEY AND WANT TO BUY GAMES!!1

I bought it for the PC. It won't run because of the securom protection (currently downloading the 1.1 patch to see if that fixes it).

Note to publishers: Next time you put this piece of shit copy protection on a game, I'm not paying for it. I wouldn't have cared if I still had most of my week to dick about and do what I want, but nowadays I don't have as much time for gaming so when I do want to play a PC game, I don't want to scrabble around on the Internet looking for solutions instead of playing the fucking game I paid for.

/badmood

* edit - got it running by starting the game with the disc drive open and then closing it when prompted by securom, so it definitely is a securom problem by the looks of things.

As for the game, I have mixed impressions.

The presentation & graphics are fantastic, but I find it all a bit too slick and annoying for my tastes. Also, having some annoying moron constantly jabbering 'advice' at me is an instant no-no. I turned down the speech volume after the first race to preserve my sanity. The driving feels merely OK -- it feels like the car will do a donut every time I corner hard at low speed. Not really liking the shunts too much, and the flashback menu is horrible. Why is it horrible? Because it always puts you in some useless camera mode by default, so you have to waste 10 seconds to flip the camera mode to something useful THEN find the point at which you want to resume the race. It just knocks me totally off my stride and interrupts the game flow, plus you have to sit through the camera flash screen for another 3 seconds. It's a nice idea and I would've liked it a lot more if they had integrated it seamlessly so that if you make a mistake, you can rewind and get going again without breaking off. IMO it should've just been to enter flashback in the camera mode you were using when you crashed, then your left and right steering keys to rewind/advance and c to change camera if needed.

Also, there's a load of courses that have trucks and obstacles all over the place (e.g. docks circuit). Seems totally pointless to me and it just makes things frustrating.

Not really impressed so far, but I will give it another play later.

cool

I did my degree fully expecting to try and break into the industry as a level designer, but in the end I enjoyed programming more :bananawrench:

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Below degree education definatly isnt that important, but its always good to have it there. Having a degree shows you have many abilities and qualities from day 1 that you don't need to be taught or can be proven in an interview such as the ability to work with others. The vast majority of degree's here require a few modules of work where you work in groups on projects or with other courses.

While I agree somewhat, I wouldn't go so far as to say that having a degree proves all of those things. Having a degree shows basic competence and staying power. I found out to my cost that employers really aren't that bothered about what your degree award is -- they are mainly interested in what you can do. I didn't get a look in until I improved my portfolio a great deal; fortunately I actually learned a lot during my time at uni, so I was able to get a programming job.

Furthermore, I've seen people exit the same degree course as me and struggle to get a job due to having mediocre skills or personality that isn't conducive to teamwork. Scarily enough, it is possible for lazy folk to pass degree courses by copying out of books for four years without understanding any of it... I saw a few people do it; some of them failed, some of them didn't. Anyway, there were quite a few arrogant people I knew and a few of them still don't have jobs despite being undeniably talented. One works in a pizza place and I saw another guy working as a railway steward. This is why I think games companies really aren't that interested in degrees. They're certainly a great thing to have on your CV and, if you study the right way, they are very useful. However, I'd imagine a lot of companies treat degree awards with a little scepticism, especially if an impressive portfolio is not forthcoming.

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Its not required for some areas of the games industry but it certainly helps your application go to the top of the pile before the interview. Some areas such as programmers definately require a relevant degree more often than not and if you're planning to work abroad it can also be key to getting visas and what not.

I think it depends on the company and position. I've seen some amazing stuff on the likes of the gamedev.net forums and a lot of the people on there are hobbyists. If you send a company an amazing demo and they actually look at it, it will probably grab more attention than any degree award will.

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if you learn coding yourself, chances are you wont have expertise on algorithms and optimization that you will need in many positions.

Depends on the degree you do. Computing degrees tend to come in two flavours, or somewhere in between.

1. "Here's some programming basics, let's go and make stuff as we learn"

2. "Here's some conceptual stuff you learn for four years, learn programming languages & general programming in your own time. We might learn C++ or Java a bit in the meantime."

The first course I was on (Applied Computing at Dundee Uni) leant towards version 2. It was more conceptual and there was more thought about designing things. The second course I joined (Computer Games Tech. at Abertay Uni) was more like option 1. However, you had plenty of room for doing your own thing; they would give you an assignment with a general checklist, but you could add things that interested you or take it as far as you wanted. This is both good and bad because it's more fun, but there's less guidance when it comes to structure and good practice. Other than the PS2 architecture and extensive mathematics, there really wasn't much theory involved. I didn't mind so much because I liked going off and learning stuff pertaining to style, structure etc. through experimentation and research, but I doubt my programming skills are up to par compared to someone who took a proper software engineering degree. What I'm trying to say is that a hobbyist can most likely match what you get taught on course 1, as a lot of it comes down to figuring out what to learn by yourself and reading books. I'm not going to say whether that's good or bad, just that it can be done imo.

Personally speaking, I'd always go and get a degree if the option is there, though. If you put everything into getting up to speed and either fail to get a games job or it turns sour, you don't have much to fall back on without a degree. With the benefit of hindsight, I probably would've stayed on the Applied Computing course and just toughed it out...