Posts by Defrag

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a big rug

Does it tie the room together?

Not much this year, mainly because I couldn't think of anything I wanted other than PC stuff (which always annoys my mother -- she likes to buy me stuff that I can unwrap ).

* Flight of the Conchords DVD (win)

* Couple of t-shirts

* Usual odds & sods like chocolate, socks, deodorant, razors etc.

* Some money towards a monitor (probably £50 or so)

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Something must be afoot in business land.

Don't worry GL, someone will even it out by punching you in the balls

The game would be a lot better if they were to base it on antique collecting and call up the real duke.

Art: Hardly jaw-dropping. Compared to the best stuff around, it looks decidedly poor.

Voice acting: Sounded like Duke has been attending anger management classes and is now in a "good place". I expected better.

I agree with some of the previous posters. Duke is now (sadly) looking like an irrelevance. If this is meant to get people excited, I don't have any expectations for the game whatsoever, and that's coming from someone who played some of the original games. What will gamers who are new to the Duke series make of this? It'll probably just look like uninspired dross to them. Oh well, here's hoping the game is immeasurably better than the teaser.

Me three. High five.

D3: If you want to get a job as a level designer, you've got to let HL1 go and move with the times. Ultimately, it is 8+ year old technology -- in employment terms it is largely irrelevant unless you did something amazingly significant with it. If you don't want to be a level designer / artist / whatever in the games industry and just like working with HL1 as an unrelated hobby, then I don't see how anyone can moan at you for it. If you want a job, you seriously have to drop it, though.

Back to the topic: Pretty up and down year for me.

Work-wise: I got a great degree award and helped to finally launch FF, but then spent the next ~6 months jobless. I got bored after about two months, but I've always been upbeat so it didn't really dent my confidence at all. Anyway, I put a lot of work into my portfolio, listened to the advice I was given by my friends and, eventually, the effort paid off. Now I've got a job in the games industry working in a team with two of my best friends (plus a few other people I already know to be nice people), so I'm really pleased about that.

FF kinda bombing sucked. I say kinda bombing because a lot of people enjoyed it and we got plenty of positive feedback, but our player retention rates weren't good. Launching a week before TF2 wasn't ideal, but the mod doesn't have enough new & interesting features or maps at the present time. TF2 being outstanding didn't help us, but that was always a risk

Personal-wise: Pretty much a non-event this year. I spent so much time on my uni work that I didn't have time for anything else, and then I spent the next six months without any income, so it wasn't exactly a great time for going out & meeting people etc. Grew my hair long(ish) and I like it this way, so that's going to stay.

Next year: My hope is to do well at my job, get new contract & a step-up and then see where I go from there. Hopefully I will meet someone nice, too. I also hope to do something else sport-wise. Been doing martial arts for four years now and I would like to do something on top of that like 5 a side footie (I'm proper rubbish at football but it's fun ). I hope we can improve FF and add a lot of new content, but I don't know how much motivation I have left for it after 3+ years.

T3 was so bad that it didn't even try. It was like a parody. It had quite a few funny moments, but not enough truly scary stuff. When I watched T1, Arnie was a bad ass. When I watched T2, Robert Patrick (in all his streamlined running, pointy-fingered glory) made me shit bricks. T3 was just a shambles with the odd decent action bit thrown in.

I've got no idea what the hell is going on in LBP, but it looks ... fun. The music is great.

I just got hired at Realtime Worlds as a programmer/tester type person. It basically involves writing unit tests for the code to make sure everything is A-OK, plus there's a few other things I potentially get to do while learning the ropes. My foot ist in ze door!

Their offices are really cool and the people interviewing me were really nice. Feels like a good place to work. Not exactly a mapcore occupation, but I'll still keep up with level design / modelling in my spare time

Wear shades. (I also do the visgroup thing.. it's annoying.)

From the Consolevania boys, there's a handful of online shows and a couple of TV specials on the way. I personally enjoyed the first show; for 11 glorious minutes, it stopped me thinkin' about... about...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/videogaiden/

You can also use func_brushes to act as invisible texture lighting sources. The trepids did this to make vending machines illuminate their surroundings realistically.

ta

3ds max 8

I've tried both and I think you will be satisfied with either. I find max has a more agreeable interface for jumping in modelling stuff, but it also handles like an application that needs a complete interface re-write. I've lost count of the number of times I've inadvertently hit an obscure hotkey or accidentally clicked a menu option and then had to spend hours trying to figure out what I've done and how to undo it.

Maya is a little more clunky, but many of its features like pivots & snapping are more logical / easier to use and it doesn't have max's infuriating "what the fuck did I press?" problems. Regardless of this, I don't particularly like Maya's UI. The hotbox is an RSI inducer and while it can be more logical, you sometimes have to go through multiple menus to access something you use a lot. With max, most of the modelling functionality is right there on one menu.

There's a load of other stuff too, but it probably won't interest you unless you're doing stuff other than game art. E.g. Maya has a significantly better material system and the MEL scripting stuff is apparently excellent.

Both programs have their strengths and weaknesses. I probably stuck with max primarily because I tried it before Maya. Last time I looked, Maya was catching up with Max in terms of games industry usage, but you will find either application to be more than satisfactory IMO.

I'm sure someone who has delved into it more (i.e. used both packages professionally / extensively) will have a more concrete answer for you. This is just the opinion of an amateur pleb

Yeah you do need to signup for Gamasutra, but it's free & well worth it.

D3ads: There's an interesting level design article @ gamasutra that deals with scale & accommodating different camera positions in Max Payne. The bottom of the second page has some comments on third person versus first person design. It might be of some use

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020 ... tta_01.htm

Sounds pretty random indeed, GL.

When I was about 16, some guy came down the main high street in my town and proceeded to kick in a huge shop window. It was surreal. He then asked my brother for his hat (my brother politely told him "no") before sauntering off as if nothing had happened. Bizarre. When the police turned up we drove around trying to find the guy and point him out, but he'd already done one by that point.

Awesome stuff, Zaphod. My only criticism is that the frozen section (where the road looks like it's iced over) blends in with the snow on the side of the tracks quite a bit making it hard to see where the track is.

Cool stuff. I just messed about with the original and discovered I'd lost half an hour

I think there's a nuclear blast in that photo