Posts by AlexM

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I think I own that game though PSPlus. I'll have to give that a shot.

EDIT : Shit you are right. The visuals do look a lot the same. Although mine are basically greybox since I'm trying to focus my time on programming rather than too much art. I was just in the process of writing a system that controls the sun's position based on how far you are through the level too

Oh well. The one solace is I'm going for a arcady shooter style of gameplay and that's a bit of an infinite runner. Hopefully once I flesh out both the level and enemies it will have more differentiated visuals.

Gorgeous game. Playing it with my partner watching. Sort of like the summer blockbuster movie of video games.

Gameplay is ok. Not very deep or anything.

I think ultimately I prefer Until Dawn since it was gorgeous but since they didn't even really attempt to push any real combat gameplay the story was a lot more gripping. We played it in a single 7 hour session. It feels like Uncharted might be on the line between third person action game and story driven game and therefore isn't excelling at either one. Ultimately it's still gorgeous though!

Playing around with an arcade flight shooter game. Afterburner/Starfox influenced.

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and a video of that same gif here

Quote from Sprony

4 hours ago, Sprony said: Updated the list.

@AlexM, I need to remove you?

From UFG. I start at Relic in July.

Quote from (HP)

On 6/20/2016 at 2:40 PM, (HP) said: Lucio has a number under his crosshair, this number represents how many people you're buffing at that exact moment.

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Because of the plus sign I thought that had to do with the health bonus applied. Maybe if they used a silouhette of a person or something it might be more clear.

I"m finding this game has some of the most fun to play support heroes.

Fuck this game (for taking up all of my free time in the last 5 days).

I'm not involved in this dish but my family lives on a small island and we have a friend there with 3 smokers. He gave me some bacon that he made himself in the smokers.

My partner then made ramen noddles using the bacon and some noodles & seaweed she got from Japan. It was phenomenal.

Definitely. Working shitty jobs makes the boring parts of being a programmer/level designer seem a lot better

1. The 2 screenshots in tormented souls looks extremely dark. I can barely see anything. Needs some ambient light or general lighting improvement.
2. A bunch of those games look interesting. It would be great if I could see some youtube videos of the gameplay

Now the next one is highly subjective and my opinion so take it with a grain of salt.

I would change "Personal Projects" to "Level Design" if the content is going to be all level design. If you have other types of projects in the future you can make a new section for them.

I would also put game jams and student projects into one section called "Games" then order them by which project you are the most proud of. As an example on my site I mix all my AAA, indie and game jam projects in the same section but I order the AAA and published games first.

http://levelism.com/games-2/

I'm not sure if this is actually considered good design but I based it off the following :

1. When visiting a portfolio site, too many sections can be mildly confusing. A problem that is exaserbated if I'm in charge of hiring and have to look at many portfolio sites in a single sitting. If I see 2 sections called "Level Design" and "Games" then it's very clear.
2. I don't like clicking around a lot, especially if I'm on a tablet. So I try to minimize the number of sections you have to jump around to.

Quote from (HP)

On 5/20/2016 at 10:46 AM, (HP) said: You fuckers should ALL get glasses while working on the computer, you only get a pair of eyes and it's not like your monitors will care if you look like a nerd, just do it!

Stepp, good luck with that stuff man. I'm willing to bet it's your wisdom teeth, Many doctors recommend you just remove all 4 and get it done with. It's better if we do it now.

I swear I landed a couple jobs thanks to my glasses. I don't usually wear them unless i'm reading or at the computer but I always put them on for job interviews. I look pretty goofy when I don't wear them but when I do wear them I look like a goof who might know something (jokes on them!).

Quote from FX

On 5/21/2016 at 11:15 PM, FX said: Trying to find an apartment and a job in Austin TX, Currently living in Los Angeles. Going through a divorce, so I need my own place, LA is just too expensive! And I also need to keep mapping!

Sorry to hear that buddy. I was just in San Francisco looking at jobs and decided to stop looking there when I found out rent for a place like I have in Vancouver is over 5000$. I heard LA is pretty expensive too when I was down there.

Why Austin?

Quote from Vinca

On 5/23/2016 at 8:44 PM, Vinca said: Very down in the dumps as of recently, I have no job as though i'm searching for anything to fill that void and i'm building my portfolio and resume to become a better level designer so i can find a position as a level designer in the future. Every day I feel i'm not putting enough effort in as a level designer as my parents say I don't put enough effort in as a level designer and want me to find a part time job so i can pay off my debts. Its very hard, every day I dream about becoming a level designer but I feel like i'm one step further from becoming a good designer. I lost my girlfriend because she thinks I won't find a sustainable job and she thinks i'm good for nothing, and every day i hope everything will get better but I just end up hoping for nothing. I don't expect any pity. I deserve it, whether or not i truly do or not but i hope things get better from here, I want to work for a triple A company and make a living for myself so i can make my parents proud, but deep down I want to make myself proud. Knowing i went from a gameplay programmer as i studied in school and learned to create and understand maps as a level designer. For anyone who listened and felt no empathy, thanks for listening, hopefully i only improve from here.

Do you feel like you aren't putting enough in because you are only logging a couple hours a day or because you haven't been able to find work?

Considering you are a level designer who already knows how to program it seems like you could be pretty useful to a lot of AAA companies. I was involved in interviewing a few level designers in the past and I personally gravitated towards the designers that had a technical background. That's of course my anecdotal personal preference but I think the notion that technical inclination on a level designer is a good this is pretty widespread.

If anyone wants to play some games today or later this week let me know!

I forgot to mention I stopped working at UFG about a month ago. My plan is to take a good portion of the summer off for my own personal projects as well as some good old fashioned lazy goofing off.

I'll be starting work again mid-july.

EDIT : Nothing to do with infinity. I left well before that news.

Hey Mapcore

I've been studying the Unreal engine on and off the last year or so and I've been learning about plugin development lately. So for my first plugin project I wanted to make something for architecture visualization or environment viewing. The idea to be able to create an interactive application that is very easy to use in regards to input and UI. I've been testing on my computer hating father so far.

The UI works on desktop, tablets and phones. In fact my initial vision was that an interior design firm could show a client a tablet and they could tour the project rather than look at static renderings or pre-rendered video files. There are 2 major features so far :

The interactive tour The environment author simply sets up some cameras (known as vantage points) and then links them together with some custom tools and a interactive tour is generated. The UI is built up dynamically based on how the vantage points are linked together.

The plan view The environment author selects the static meshes they want to contribute to the plan view. After that you can transition into a topdown plan view and the selected geometry will be rendered as an outline to look like architechtural plans. Selecting a vantage point from here will transition into the point.

Here is a video showing off a scene I setup with the plugin.

If you are interested in trying it you can download the plugin here. I put installation and usage instructions inside the zip file. Also if needed I can package up a small 4.12 project that people can look at to see how a scene is put together if the instructions are adequate.

Downloads

Version 001 - http://mahwebspace.levelism.com/unreal/LevelVi…zRelease001.zip

In regards to the development. Please let me know what you think. Any feature ideas would be greatly appreciated. Even if you think it's just generally a bad idea don't hesitate to let me know

Here is a rough outline of what I have planned for the future.

1. UI fixes. Right now it has issues on mobile devices. It works but the icons can be in the wrong place.
2. Consider a third rework of the UI where I use billboards in the scene rather than UMG widgets projected from worldspace
3. Front and Side plan views
4. Color and line styling for the plan view
5. Support for adding brushes to the plan view without converting them to static meshes
6. Make the plugin much simpler to use by eliminating all the initial asset linking steps.

Devlogs

• LevelViz 001 Introducing LevelViz
• LevelViz 002 Vantage point system first version review
• LevelViz 003 : Adding a plan view and a custom editor
• LevelViz 004 : First version now available, creating a plugin and making a new UI

I also recorded some streams of me setting up an environment for with the plugin. I didn't realize my video capture software was also capturing the music for the videos so apologies for the music. Unbelievably, youtube doesn't seem to have a way to remove audio from a video.

Quote from 2d-chris

22 hours ago, 2d-chris said: FYI - the cooking process is only used externally (for modders, mappers etc) we don't use it on the dev team, the actual map building is quicker than ever, cooking the resources automatically is not something most games even allow you to do, so even though it's far from optimized, normally you'd have to carefully add every single file yourself, which takes considerable time and is prone to errors.

Additionally, the game and engine is very much in progress, which makes working it a lot harder, and it surfaces all the kind of issues that developers have to deal with that are usually invisible when working on games with only minor updates every now and then. Developers slow down fundamental changes the closer a game is to completion or post launch patches/updates because of the knock on effect to custom content, right now, your all in the thick of it, which I consider great experience, developing games is frustrating and hard for all the reasons you are not expecting.

Unreal's stability while being "in progress" is a lot better than most complete engines I've used

No worries. I sent them my logs. Thanks for being so responsive

Recreating the assets was no big deal. I updated my submission. It looks like the liandri stuff has either been moved or removed. I guess when the editor updates it doesn't remove/update changed assets.

Did the UT update remove a bunch of Liandri assets? I recooked my level and suddenly it was missing textures for anything from Liandri.

I'm going to try to make some of my own really quick for submission.

EDIT : It looks/plays fine in the editor. I just lose everything when I cook the map.

Name: Alex McGilvray

Nickname: AlexM

Map Name: DM-Purification

UPDATED Link for new UT version: http://mahwebspace.levelism.com/unreal/DM_Puri…tor_Updated.pak

I agree that this content constitutes a Submission under the Unreal Engine EULA ( https://www.unrealengine.com/eula ).[/i]