Posts by Defrag

  • Get a degree or not ?

    Quote from ginger_lord

    I take it your an Englishman lost in Scotland then else Uni should be free no?

    free-ish. I had to pay the fees for the last couple of years because I did two years at Dundee University doing Applied Computing but then changed to my current uni to do games tech. They fund something like four years total (max) so I was two short as this is a four year degree. Not bad (compared to England) but it meant my summer job funded bugger all (I saved up for a 2407WFP and then had it cruelly snatched from my grasp ).

  • Get a degree or not ?

    I totally agree with what you said. If you look at the likes of Valve's job pages nowadays, there is a tendency to favour people with academic backgrounds (and by that I'm not talking about formal programming qualifications, I'm talking about people who have art/design/architecture degrees for positions that have traditionally been filled by people with little to no required qualifications).

    Something John Carmack said also rings true with me. Carmack went to university and then quit because he felt he wasn't learning anything as he was already smarter than his professors. However, he then realised that he didn't make the most of his learning opportunities when there. At university you have a wide array of lecturers and students who have varying levels of experience. If you just treat university as a closed situation (in that you are given a task, then you go away and do it by yourself, only asking questions when you get stuck on something) then you won't be making the most of it. Now, I'm not smarter than most of my lecturers and fellow students like Carmack was, but I can appreciate what he means. Even a really gifted person can learn from people who've been around the block and faced many of the challenges that person will face in future -- it's a vast source of knowledge just waiting to be tapped

    I've found that quite a few of the lecturers I perhaps thought were out of touch turned out to be the people who have been able to give me a new perspective on things I'm doing due to their vast experience. They may not be up with the latest programming techniques etc. but they are very useful when it comes to analysing something and offering some great advice.

    A degree also proves that you can stick at something and see it through. In general employment (in the UK at least), degrees are more important in getting a job; by this I mean employers aren't always looking for a specific degree, they are just interested in whether you have one and what the classification is. A degree isn't for everyone, but if you can get one while broadening your knowledge / skills and making yourself more attractive to employers, then it's a good bet.

  • 3d Studio vs Maya (for game development)

    What Philip said. I find Maya to be a lot more clunky, but it is more logical & consistent. Max has everything I could possibly want (almost) and I can work faster with it, but it has some stability and usability issues (namely the famed "what the fuck key did I just press?" issue when you turn on/off some random option then spend eight days trying to find out how to re-enable it...). Overall I prefer Max, but I've not really used Maya enough to get proficient with it, plus I just ... dislike the hotbox.

    If they rebuilt max from the ground up and sorted out the stability and consistency issues it'd be 100% bliss.

  • So...how do you go about getting a job.

    I'm just going to spam CVs at people until they can't take it any more and give in. The more you ignore me.. the closer I get. I'm in a situation similar to ReNo when he was leaving university.

    Best to worst abilities:

    Level design (need some SP experience I think and to do some non fortress work soon [i've done way too much TF mapping of late, need to get back to doing some nice simple DM maps etc])

    Programming & a bit of shaders

    Model, unwrap (not done much beyond prop modelling, but I feel I can rise to the challenge when I get a bit of time to practice)

    Image editing (I know the tools, but I'm currently fairly limited at this)

    I think, like Lee3dee said, it's very important to know your limitations and what you need to focus on to give yourself the best chance of getting employed. I know I will never be able to cut it as a full time modeller / art guy, but I have a better chance as a level designer or, if I work a bit harder at it, programmer. As long as you are willing to work hard on whatever it is you need to improve on, you can likely make it. That's my mindset anyway.

    Also, the average games industry career lasts something like 6 years according to gda (or something similarly short). Those people quit and must be replaced by fresh blood. So while it is true that most jobs list "x years blah blah experience", unless they are a well-respected developer they won't always get someone with those pre-requisites due to the amount of people who are leaving the industry.

  • It's alive... alive!!!

    It must be really goddamn annoying to work on that game.

    Imagine hearing this conversation every two years:

    "Sorry, Steve, but we're going to have to can every section you worked on for the last two years and start over with next gen techniques."

    Two years pass.

    "Sorry, Steve, but we're going to have to can every section you worked on for the last two years and start over with next gen techniques."

    Two years pass.

    "Sorry, Steve, but we're going to have to can every section you worked on for the last two years and start over with next gen techniques."

    Two years pass.

    "Sorry, Steve, but we're going to have to can every section you worked on for the last two years and start over with next gen techniques."

    ...

    I wonder how many iterations of the game's models they've been through? "Here's the shotgun version 3854c., boss"

  • Is there a good way to rescale textures...

    There's no real quick fix when doing something like that because you're trying to create high detail from low detail. It's a bit like taking a 96kpbs mp3 file and recoding it to be 320kpbs -- it won't sound any better just because it's got more data in the file because the data is just the old stuff but padded out to fill in the blanks.

  • Mobile Gaming Categories

    Check out John Carmack's blog if you haven't already. He's been writing some fairly indepth & interesting things about mobile phones and game development. Not sure if it's the angle you're looking for, but it's worth a look as he talks about what is hard/easy to do with mobile phones and whether it's purely down to hardware or handset constraints.

    http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/