Posts by PogoP

  • Alien: Isolation

    Quote from (HP)

    http://www.pcgamer.com/how-authentic-is-alien-isolation/


    lol


    lmao


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    One of the most memorable sets in the film, and beautifully recreated in the game. The pods look great, and in the Torrens you can open and close the lids, which do so at the same speed as those in the film. Yes, I compared them. The major difference here, though, is the lighting. The shadows on the padded walls in the game are much harsher, which doesn't capture the clean, white feel of the film set. That aside, great work.


    The art director told me to make them a bit more grungey! FML. Still 9/10, not bad... not bad.


    Also.. I'm sorry guys but I failed on this one:


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    One of the most memorable sets in the film, and beautifully recreated in the game. The pods look great, and in the Torrens you can open and close the lids, which do so at the same speed as those in the film. Yes, I compared them. The major difference here, though, is the lighting. The shadows on the padded walls in the game are much harsher, which doesn't capture the clean, white feel of the film set. That aside, great work.


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    The instructions for the self destruct sequence are identical. Capturing this image from the film, I realised that you can actually see the paint marks on the red parts. Alien is very much a handmade film, and everything was constructed from scratch. Ripley’s finger, in both the film and the DLC, traces across the directions at the bottom, which is a nice reference. I could moan about the ‘SCUTTLE PROCEDURE’ text being aligned slightly too far left in the game, but I’m not going to. Even though I just did. Sorry.

  • Long timers and new comers, your Mapcore history

    Quote from Pete_H

    I´m basically a massive noob.


    Love ya tho Pete (in a bro kinda way)! Glad to have you around here


    So I came along in around 2006 when I first started getting into Source mapping. I spent about a month trying to get my account verified, and everyone was really unhelpful so cheers for that!


    I remember porting a load of NS1 assets into HL2 and using PhilipK's textures to make some shitty mockups of what NS2 could look like.. It was one of the first things I posted up here.


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  • Alien: Isolation

    Spoilers:


    Quote

    Finished the game earlier. I knew what was gonna happen anyway, but to me it just felt so rushed and slightly anti-climactic. I really didn't like the exterior sections where you walk at a snail's pace. It doesn't build any tension whatsoever, it just gets a bit annoying. The worst candidate for this was going out to the communications array thing..


    Also, the ending in the Torrens is a bit cheesy I always thought, and it's lame to end on a QTE!

    The nest part was cool though, and the reactor core bit. I remember seeing that whilst at CA and being blown away by the amazing VFX. Also.. Poor Ricardo! I liked that dude.

    Overall however, I'm pleasantly surprised by the final product! It feels a lot more polished now, and it's a fun game. I think CA did Alien proud.


    Also! The Dead End Thrills guy has taken some shots of Alien, including the Cryo room! This guy is amazing at hacking games to take screenshots!


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    http://deadendthrills.com/#/

  • What's going on with your life?

    Go post up on a 'Lawcore' forum and people will tell you you're squandering your law career for some silly games job This is probably a very biased place for career advice


    I'd recommend just sticking it out. It can't hurt to have a degree in something completely different to games. I sometimes wonder what I would do if I were to leave the industry.

  • What's going on with your life?

    Get more sleep, honestly you'll feel a hell of a lot better. Also maybe put less pressure on yourself to do CSGO maps. I know it's fun but you need to focus on your studies. Your family is still gonna be around after law school so just try and persevere and it'll be worth the effort

  • Alien: Isolation

    Quote from Mazy

    Love the atmosphere so far, looks and sounds absolutely brilliant, but I haven't been particularly impressed with the pacing and the first bunch of human/android encounters (the very first one where you grab the tuner was pretty terrible to be honest)......but then I finally got the the

    , and man now I'm totally hooked. They've totally nailed the feel of sneaking around with the motion tracker, shifting focus between that and what's in front of you, even if it ended up with me staying under a bed for like 5 minutes at one point D:


    Yeah I felt like it really started getting good after that Hospital section.


    Quote

    I think the middle portion of the game is the best. I'm at the end now, just about to get to the Towing Platform I think which is the level I worked on, so I know exactly what happens... And I know that from now on it's just gonna be a bit of a letdown.

    The bit where you go out onto the communications array was cool but the walk speed was so, so slow.... That was a bit annoying.

  • Alien: Isolation


    We had a script made by the wonderful mr Andrew Oakley (lead tech artist), who is a maxscript scripting genius and the nicest guy you'll ever speak to. Very easy to iterate upon models and then edit the custom normals using his script, and it was all saved in the max file so other artists could run the same script (not sure exactly how much I'm allowed to divulge). Whenever you want to edit a model, I usually just reset the normals, did my changes, and then re-applied the script, telling it which faces I wanted flattened. In general it was a super fast workflow, but you struggled to get a massive amount of detail on stuff because you had to chamfer everything. I noticed when playing that some of the Engineering assets (which were the oldest assets, made very early on) look very low poly.. But the lighting/atmosphere/vfx etc more than makes up for it and you don't really notice.


    We did use vert AO in most materials, not sure about the SSAO solution though. Mark would know more about that. I did know we had some really cool dynamic GI tech though which I'm sure Mark could explain in more detail. We


    I did a lot of the unique normal map decals when I started at CA. There was already a load that were used, but I made some more based off Ron Cobb's concepts which seemed pretty well used throughout.


    We did have a big library of materials though which did use normal maps, but the average tiling metal/plastic didn't use a normal map.


    Damnit I miss that workflow!

  • Alien: Isolation

    Been playing a lot more tonight. The Nostromo DLC stuff is pretty cool, if a little short. But I don't know what else they could have done with it really! The voices of all the old cast is exactly that; old. They sound like a bunch of OAPs now, and the voice actor that did Ash sounds like he's got some kind of weird lisp. Fun seeing those guys reprising their roles though!


    I'm currently at the Systech spire, and I feel the game is kinda coming into it's own a lot more now. Started out fairly strong, then got a little weak during the Hospital area.... But now it's picking up again. Really enjoying it so far!


    This is one of the areas I worked on, the Cryo Room from the original film and also the Torrens variant! This was a fun little task!


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