Posts by JamesL

  • De_Forest

    I had a run about on the map at lunch hour today with some colleagues and got the following impressions.

    First off, the map is obviously a skilled piece of work so I won't bother giving you nice to hear but ultimately worthless praise, rather I will concentrate on the things that I think need attention.

    --------------------------------------------

    In no particular order and likely half of this is covered previously in this thread...

    The map is overly large. Takes too long to get around and I had no idea where I was most of the time. You need stronger telegraphing of position to the player, communication of where the bomb sites are, and how far it is too them from where ever the player is currently stood. This is something that is probably going to be extremely difficult to fix at an RC stage since it needs designing in at the early layout stages of mapping. However some kind of prop or colour based signifiers could still potentially be added guiding the player to and from each site.

    -------

    The map is very campy. It's pretty easy to hide just off one of the tracks and catch people unawares as they run past you. This compounds the problem of the map being very large, since players are already forced to sprint between sites, and to have to worry about every nook and cranny along the way whilst covering a large distance will likely conspire to make Gameplay predictable. Once a bomb is planted I expect that most of the time a defuse will be extremely difficult, resulting in the map generally being played as a straight CT bombsite camp, since otherwise they will likely lose.

    -------

    This has definitely been mentioned previously, and is part of my first point. The map requires more landmarks. Not just large visible from a distance type ones, but also small scattered along the route kinds of thing. I would suggest taking an overview of the map, drawing a grid over the top of it, and making each square of the grid themed in some way to give it a unique identity.

    • A small clearing with a burnt out campfire and tent.
      A grove with tree stumps and some logging equipment scattered about
      A widening of the path flanked by brightly coloured flowers.
      Et cetera

    All these will help players orientate themselves relative to the other areas and routes in the map and create a more navigable environment.

    -------

    Another point that has been raised already, is that as you mention, bots can see through the alpha’d foliage. This is a particular sore point for me as all the servers I run have bots on them, which effectively stops me being able to run this map. Perhaps it would be an option to model up some wooden fences to tighten the routes, adding player clips to prevent players, and particularly bots from accessing them. I don’t think this style of map is ever going to be especially bot friendly, but it could certainly be improved.

    -------

    A trivial point, but one that struck me the moment I loaded up the map, was that the overall colour pallet being used for the greenery was rather monochromatic. The detail props (the stuff that grows randomly up out of displacements) was very much all one shade of green. A forest floor generally has a range of greens and browns that seems to be missing here. Its probably just me but this really stuck out throughout the time I was running about the map.

    I'll stop there as you are probably already calling me a cnut

  • Original Game: 1944 D-Day : Environment & Texture Artist

    Quote from harefort

    Why is everybody bashing this?He is offering to pay money for building game-assets, right?

    That's a chance to actually work under close-to-industry-conditions and it get's you an extra buck or two.

    QFT. Who gives a fook about the genre, its valuable experience on offer here FOR PAY. Hell, I'd do it if I wasn't already employed.

    Quote from Psycho

    Well, it's been 5 years in the making which indicates to me that it's poorly organised and he also says that loads of contractors left which tells me that they didn't like something about it...

    Are you speaking from experience Psycho, or is that just an opinion? I think its far more a reflection upon the quality and commitment levels of people contracted to work in semi-professional games dev and mod projects. I.e. there are a great many timewasters out there. Likewise 5 years of dev as a reflection upon the organisational ability of the team could just as easily be taken to, once again, show that there are a lot of twats out there who will make your project take nigh on forever to get to gold.

    I'm not trying to troll here but your point of view is very polarised. From my experience projects struggle as often from the reasons I describe as from those you assume.

    Give the guy a chance he's posting up a fantastic opportunity for those folks who want to break into games dev. Paid work based on your demonstrable skills, not on who you know or which studios and projects you have worked on previously.

  • Buying new computer (This time for real)

    Take the time to learn how to build a PC yourself mate. It's really not very hard and you will save a truckload of cash and get a better machine.

    You can pick up matched bundles; motherboard, ram & cpu from many good suppliers and simply add a power supply, case, HDD & gfx card of your choice to this. Et voila, kickass PC for considerably less cash.

  • Team Fortress 2 beta!!!!!

    Quote from Zyndrome

    I gotta say playing Scout is more fun that I expected! Especially on 2fort! You can quickly get up behind them and smack them with the bat

    I was doing lots of this last night. I haven't laughed out loud so much playing a multiplayer game for as long as I can remember. Even the purile "Huh huh huh you got pwnd" samples after dishing out bat to head action made me laugh, and I normally hate that leet BS.

    Great game. Worthy successor.

  • Game Developer looking for Level Designers

    ProjectSyn, if you want to get some interest from these forums you will need to provide a little more than just asking for some level designers to work on an undisclosed project for an undisclosed company in an undisclosed location, for undisclosed pay ... you get my point.

    With many high profile mods and Professional employers advertising positions on this site, you'll need to add a little more information and encouragement to get people interested. That said, best of luck with your project and securing some capital.

  • Modelling Software for Level Creation

    The PS3 title I am currently working on is being created entirely in Maya and Java.

    The environments are built as a world mesh that defines the space you play in and all the significant geometric structures in it. All detail in the form of props are instanced into this mesh to build up the detail in the world. The collision is created as a low poly version of the world itself and havok is used for the collision and physics system.

    Locators (points, regions, volumes) are positioned in maya where we want events triggered. In terms of the entities you talk about (logic timer etc) these are written from scratch in Java using an editor package called Eclipse, by the designers as they require them. All enemies the run under a bespoke AI created specifically for our game.

    A comparison to HL2 would be Maya replaces Hammer in terms of the building aspect of things, Java replaces the entities and game logic systems.

  • Crisis Core

    Been playing this on PSP at work this morning. It's quite simply staggering, the visuals, gameplay & controls are all awesome, as are the Advent Children quality cutscenes.

    It's thick with the atmosphere of FF7 and my first impression is that it's the best game yet on PSP, and one that's going to shift a lot of hardware units. Not out here till Q1-2 '08 though

    http://%7boption%7d