Posts by Mr. Happy

Procedural rocks I did following Sascha Henrichs' tutorial:

[Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9300049/FINALs/lo-high-compare_rock.png][Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9300049/FINALs/lo-high-compare_rock2.png]

The textures are an absurd resolution for now. Working on a set for a scene.

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WIP fathers day present. This will be printed in 3D.

[Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9300049/WIPs/turtle_wip_clay_nurms.png]

Todo: connect limbs/head/tail with webbing/skin, shell "cracks", adjust eyes/face and claws, creases in Max. Then, sculpt detail, texture, 3D print. Maybe also put it in a little 'diorama' scene with plants and whatnot.

There was a pti contest? what? I should check these forums more often.

Downloading pack....

Quote from shawnolson

In fact, I had just finished the world geometry and level design (at that point) but suddenly stopped on it when I started building the models. The tedium of exporting/compiling models at that point is why I threw my arms in the air and started on Wall Worm.

But really, I've learned so much about Source since I started that redesign, I think I may simply scrap it and start from scratch.

Throwing maps away and throwing the arms in the air is something I know all too well lol. But I dunno, if it's a decent map there's really no reason not to finish it off and release it asap and then make something else new from scratch. Then you've got two maps in nearly the same amount of time. I used to be a big believer in not releasing anything until it was perfect, in incorporating every new thing I learned into the map I was currently working on and continuously expanding the original vision or scrapping for new ideas. I've released almost nothing.

I like the dynamic mapping idea of de_tension, in fact that's really really cool. Funny thing I just had a discussion with someone else about trying to do the same thing in TF2. Were there any gameplay problems? Did players get confused? I don't know if you ever played TFC but there was a map called darkness that did something similar.

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[...] I personally think that Valve should simply provide some of this. But that's just my opinion.

Absolutely of course they should but it's been so long...maybe, MAYBE they will. Ideally they would just ripoff all of UDK's best ideas lol. It seems like they focus on what is barebones necessary, the most bang for the buck so to speak, and stop there. In the short term, if your only compiling a few models and your used to it, it's not so bad and the extra effort put into a nice shiny gui / pipeline have hugely diminishing returns, but when you scale that across the entire modding community and all of their internal modeling the returns are incredible. Anything they can release helps so long as it's fully functional, like the Hat compiler or Portal 2 puzzle creator, great stuff! At this point though it might be best if everything was revamped all at once for fully editing integration.

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I can probably redesign anything I've done in Hammer inside Max with a fraction of time... and I don't have enough old maps I'd want to do that with.

Convexity looks really nice for what it does although the entity dialogs look TBH worse than Hammer. BUT I have not tried it. There's something about spending a LOT of money for a plugin that does what I already do easily in Hammer that bothers me especially when Microbrush exists and UDK is calling my name lol. BUT I will get it one of these days.

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If enough people donate and ask for that, I'd be more apt to do it. But that is unlikely.[...]

If I do implement it, I already see a lot of problems. First, getting the UVW info from brush geometry will be really difficult. Going from Max to Source was beyond my math skills and took a lot of help from some of my smarter friends.[...]

You heard him guys, support awesome! Even if Source is outdated. But if you don't get alot of donations maybe I can convince you to do it anyway.

That's understandable, it is really complicated isn't it. Just trying to go from planesides to faces is complicated although I would think that going from faces to planesides would be easier, can the triangle defining the plane simply use the coordinates of three vertices from the face?

If I can't convince you to support vmf importing, maybe I can convince you to create a sort of project manager to store multiple game configurations for WWMT. You've said you are only mapping for CS:S, and that you are focusing on things you need, but I think that would be really useful and has to be simpler to program than the other features. People are going to be using Wall Worm's for as long as it work's with the current versions of Max unless something better comes along, which is unlikely.

sorry if this is too old for a bump, the proxies video reminded me to reply to this

I also like talking/corresponding with people that share my interests I can understand the desire not to program anymore after getting burnt out, hopefully the inherent reward of working on wallworms will refresh your programming spirit: alot of people use it, alot of people want to see it continue to improve, and obviously your programming is expanding what you can map and model. I'm curious what projects you are developing this for? Do you have a wip map thread I'm not seeing somewhere?

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It always seemed like the Softimage partnership was marketing/business. Any mention of it was usually in ad form...I think that was the same time as the ATI partnership. I learned Softimage because when I started it was the only one with a free version and until recently all versions of Max I tried, trial or otherwise, were simply broken for me. To me certain things in it are unintuitive But has some very nice things...have more time to dedicate to Max now, getting used to it and liking it.

I wonder if there are no 3DsMax exporters because Wunderboy's and CannonFodders do the trick? The idea that someone got snubbed personally... I hope that's not the case, seems sort of passive aggressive since its the audience, not Autodesk, that is affected by the decision. The Source XSI exporter though, is really really awful. According to the Source code it was made by Softimage and Valve never maintained it. It's also closed source, everything relevant is locked in a DLL :-/ I haven't tried the Maya one, but the Sketchup exporter isn't that great either. It doesn't work with 8, only works with solids, cloned solids instance edits to the clone source on export, empty vmf's if you start in plan view, other issues that might have been my fault. It also only works with Portal 2 Hammer, but that's ok. People have been aching for a better pipeline for a long time. People will be using WallWorms for a long time.

It would be neat if you had a vmf importer as well, then you could make your csg in hammer or microbrush, and bring that into max on a seperate layer for meshing. I think it would be nice to have Max recognize and go back and forth. Maybe even keep the csg and the meshes in seperate, instanced, vmfs. But I'm not quite good enough with Max yet to really try and build a map and all assets from scratch with it so I dunno.

Very cool, I like the results it gives. Could make things alot less tedious for alot of people

Can the map filename and settings be passed as command line parameters? That would allow full integration into the Hammer run map advanced dialog.

Fantastic as always

You say you aren't finishing projects, but dude, wall worm's IS a project

Perhaps give the hospital room some shape, the gurney's could roll into "bays"

It's very square, and there's only so much you can dress up a square, dressing up a shapelier shape in the same way you'd dress up the square may inherently look better.

You could perhaps think about where the doctor's would stand, make that part of the floor different. etc. Sometimes if you think about how the room is used the details flow naturally.

I agree with that. Craftsmanship is important, but when I say games are a craft I don't think of the craftsmanship in quite the same way you'd think of it for wood working (are the mortises tight / are the vertex normals right), but rather in how well the art functions for it's purpose (purpose including pretty), the Crysis vs. Portal 2 being a good example (though Crysis' tech and superior realism does convey "island" very well). There are plenty of examples of "bad craftmanship" in Portal 2 (sloppy brushwork, gaps in geometry) that don't get exposed to the player which a high end watch maker would find unacceptable, that stuff doesn't matter. But older mediums don't need to convey anything well to be considered "fine art."

First, congrats,

Second, Don't worry dude, games aren't art anyways

lol jk, but seriously it is more of a craft, like birdhouses. The art tends to have a purpose, even in super artsy games there is still more purpose and clarity driving it than in say, a painting, since they are very different. Guernica makes no sense and hurts to look at but conveys the meaning well, but a game can't hurt because you are driving the action and no one wants to hurt themselves.

IMO what makes it good is how well each element conveys what its trying to convey and do all the elements work well together. how well the direction drives the themes of the game, show the characters personality, etc, is it consistent, suprising, original etc....

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":tsdrcbtx]What looks good, looks good. Period.

It's not easy to make a pretty game but there are a ton of talented people that do it very well...they'll all look good (I hope).

Quote from Rick_D

in that light i would say it's something that pushes the boundries of our current tech understanding....

I think what matters is how the boundaries are pushed to support the themes. if it's current tech with bazzillion pixels who cares. if its a bazillion pixels of "this is what our fresh new idea is" (like crysis) then thats amazing.

fuck it doesn't even need to push tech boundaries at all.

Games that do this...Amnesia, Portal and old-TF2 (obligatory mention), Journey (not out but look at how people stand out from the isolation...., and yet the desert is bright and happy yellow and the people are dark.....), Super Mario Bros., Everyday Shooter, Minesweeper, World of Goo...probably all obvious examples but hey.

"Art" is all about interpretation, but too much so today. Today's art community has made the word "art" meaningless with canvas painted entirely black, the idea that the experience can be separated from the artists intention of that experience, and rehashed acoustic music set to time lapse videos of a rehashed "experiment x without y contextualizing z with a flash mob." The best art is never random but has some clarity, and just calling something art never makes it "higher" than anything else. They say you can't define art, and then they say "art is higher than all" and it's basically just a circle jerk of circular logic.

But ya, I guess HP is right, don't think too much....but still, just....look at it deeply.

And look at the sound!

Well, to answer your question, in XSI it is Modify -> Poly Mesh -> Polygon Reduction. There is also filter polys/edges/points but that is different and not as general purpose.

As for pirating, Autodesk does not give one shit whatsoever. They intentionally make their copy protection easy to crack so that you CAN pirate it and learn. The ONLY reason for the copy protection is to remind companies that they have to pay.

Finished it last night with a friend (taking turns not coop). Gotta say very impressed, still love this series. Naughty Dog is still making incredible things that I've never seen before. Like the first two there is a constant stream of new and unique areas and ideas and nothing ever really get's old or repetitive. No it wasn't as good as Uncharted 2 and it was a bit shorter, but there were some sections and aspects of UC3 that are much cooler.

There are some problems, pretty much everything has already been covered by D3ads or someone else. The new fighting stuff which is pretty great but there are some basic problems that have existed from the first one. I think the problem is that there's just some areas where they spent less time on everything and all the flaws are exposed. Places where the combat is less polished they just spam enemies, especially the dumb grunts, who still have horrible AI, and some jilted animations, add to that sulley running around randomly and you just get all the flaws exposed at once. But the most polished areas are very smooth, and the more powerful and unique enemies have better AI and animation, so there's a big disconnect between the epic parts and the random corridor parts.

Also, the worse you do, the more the flaws are exposed, for example the cover stuff.

I find that if I assume I'm always in control and just keep hitting the buttons I want to the transitions between the different kinds of fighting, semi-scripted parts, cutscenes, and everything are well done. Except in those few places where they didn't put as much effort in the scripting. A few places where you have to hit your marks exactly or whatever feel mangled. It also shows up in the puzzle sections where your buddies will get to the marks before you tell them to, or you are being constnatly told what to do (way more urging in this one!), or sulley does his robot ladder climb. Really it just seems like different areas had more or less attention than others, which is fine.

All in all a great game.

I was just talking to someone about enemies that haven't been done before, how there are all these well armed conservative militias in the united states that would make a cool new terror threat in games.

And now this.

Awesome!

Sounds really cool!

I wonder if the scent color wafts through the water?

I haven't played Dear Esther either, I'm waiting for the remake. Is it best to wait?

very cool,

interesting stuff about narrative in there.

thumbs up for fringe theme

Why does all the stuff that will never see the light of day have to be so awesome

holy schmoley this has come a long ways (this was zig right?). its looking really good im looking forward to playing it again soon.

the trees in the last screenshot are all facing the same direction, all of them!

Uncharted is great fun and I really enjoy playing it. Who gives a shit if it's like indiana jones, that's just cause it's the only thing like indiana jones besides indiana jones. The actors/writing is really funny too. The experience of the game is fucking awesome and it's really easy to be immersed in and enjoy. These games make me giggle like a little girl.

Quote from Thrik

I think the gunplay in Uncharted 2 is amongst the finest I've played this generation. While you can certainly play it Gears of War-style where you just go around attracting a hail of bullets while shooting shit up, it's infinitely more satisfying if you make use of the extensive stealth mechanics added to Uncharted 2 (and seemingly extended considerably in Uncharted 3 which excites me a lot) to approach combat in a more strategic and tense way.

Being careful to avoid enemies is useful and fun, but I tihnk that 'adding stealth' to make the combat 'more strategic' is a trope or cliche worse than cover shooting. Stealth and strategy aren't the same thing.

I've been playing it on PS3, wish I had gotten it on PC. But I'm loving it. Rage is really awesome, lot's of fun. A bit lacking in story in some places (wtf was the intro) but I am enjoying it alot.

Quote from Bunglo

Regarding the textures them selves, from a distance, especially the canyon rocks and concrete structures, the game looks absolutely stunning. Overall, the guys at id nailed the art be it color, lighting, composition, it's absolutely stellar. Though the color grading is a bit much in some areas for my taste. My only disappointment is how low res everything looks when up close. It's not a huge con for me, I think it helps me focus on the game as well as the art as a whole, instead being amazed at how I can see the wood grain or whatever. Still, prior to release, I wasn't expect such low fidelity on these distances.

I tottally agree with this.