Posts by AlexM

  • How to break in the games industry - an insiders' guide

    Ok so here's the deal :

    I've been doing some 3d work for the last few years but it's nothing special. Usually it's just simple models for Google earth, nothing really that would push me to improve my skills or anything, I would work on that on my own time modding etc.

    Anyways some bad financial stuff happened and I'm living with the family rent free. For the last few months I've been working on modding and my portfolio and thanks to a few friends I got my foot in the door a couple places but it didn't pan out. My guess is 2 reasons, I live in Vancouver and know a few people who have been doing game development for up to 20 years who are having trouble landing jobs because of the 2000+ worth of layoffs between the smaller devs, EA, and Radical. Considering I have next to no commercial game development experience and there are quite a few more skilled and experienced people than me out there looking for work it seems pretty unlikely I'll find work until things really begin to pick up again.

    So anyways at this point I figured I can do a few things:

    1) keep working on modding and the portfolio and try to get a job eventaully

    2) go to art school and get some classical training

    3) go to college for programming

    anyways I've decided to go to school for programming with a specialization in digital processing and then rendering programming for the following reasons

    1) in a recession where the entertainment industry is the first to feel it, I can apply for non-entertainmetn jobs

    2) In my previous job, even though i was an artist I was constantly doing scripting and some light programming. I tend to join projects as an artist but always end up gravitating towards more technical tasks. Mainly because no one else is willing to or can do them.

    3) I have to go live in Japan in a couple years. I've heard while they have no lack of artists they do hire a lot of programmers from the west because they tend to lack the right type of programmer locally.

    4) Level design these days tends to benefit from someone who knows how to script. Learning programming kind of helps in that area.

    5) Considering I've already done computer game art for the last 6 years I understand a lot of the programming and math concepts. A decent head start

    Anyways I'm just about to finish my application. Seems a bit odd to switch to the other side in my mid 20's but ultimately it feels like the right decision.

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    finished up the little XNA akuma game. Was a fun project, looking forward to doing something with original artwork.

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  • Unreal engine 3 for consumers? WTF ?

    Quote from Ginger Lord

    Time to port Ham and Jam!Or not.

    haahah I feel our pain

    but on the topic of lightmass, I'm surprised it took this long to get a proper GI render into a bake in an engine rather than code their own RAD/GI/Whatever solution. I always thought going to someone like the VRAY guys and just using that bake to texture would be the better way to go about it. I can live with a gorgeous vray render baked into my lightmaps

  • Company leaks game on purpose for pirating

    Quote from Skjalg

    I agree with sentura on this.On a related note, I noticed that steam now remembers your credit card info so its practically just click-and-buy now just like on xbox live.

    thank god, I'm the first to admit the old system has lost Steam a purchase from me on more than one occasion...

  • To PS3 or not to PS3

    I play my ps3 the most out of my consoles, but that's 50% because it can emulate ps2 games. Otherwise i just prefer a console for a few types of games: 3rd person adventures, platformers, beatemups, sports, jrpgs etc..

    Many of the xbox360 exclusives I really want to play are on PC, I cant play FPSes without the mouse/keyboard. I do want to get one for a few XBLA titles and the community games section though, that could get rough on my wallet quick though.

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Quote from Lord Ned

    I'm afraid it does load them all, even if you don't use them. There was a discussion somewhere a while back... might be on the hlcoders mailing archive.

    oh man seriously? This could mean I have an entire weekend of prop recompilation ahead of me

    Eh not really. Just take the qc, copy, change it's name to a letter different, strip the skinfamiles, etc.

    Then open CMD and do "cd %sourcesdk%\bin\orangebox\bin" (Or Ep1?), and do "studiomdl.exe "%sourcesdk%\..\sourcesdk_content\mymod\modelsrc\tree\tree01_a.qc" and then let it compile, hit up, change it to b, etc.

    Or see if there's actually a preformance hit/use the skins

    yeah it's a few cases where we have like 6-10 texture variations for vehicles and containers, some for winter environments, some for desert etc.

    Thanks for the info regarding that though, I was scratching my head on some tex memory usage stats on that map.

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    lot of updates on various things I got feedback about here, figured I'd consolidate them into one post

    The tree model, I redid the whole thing, this time taking into account the crits here about the trunk. It's no longer a repeating base texture, the whole thing is one continuous mesh. The texture is still a little off for me, a little too bright brown I'm guessing. I'll play around with that. Overall it's an improvement IMO. I need to fix the shadows at the junction from the trunk to a branch though. $constantdirectionallighting dosen't seem to work with episode 1.

    [Blocked Image: http://mahwebspace.levelism.com/fasstuff/endowment/wildernesstest/ps_forestpass0070000.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://mahwebspace.levelism.com/fasstuff/endowment/wildernesstest/ps_forestpass0070002.jpg]

    Next up is derailed, I made many of the lighting changes mentioned earlier, added for etc. I have to step back and do a bit of optimization. Anyone happen to know if the source engine loads all skins on a prop model or not? I'm hoping it doesn't (have a few props with 6+ textures on them).

    [Blocked Image: http://mahwebspace.levelism.com/fasstuff/derailed/ps_derailed20060004.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://mahwebspace.levelism.com/fasstuff/derailed/ps_derailed20060005.jpg]

    Finally I'm planning to go to school for programming and have spent the last couple months brushing up on my math and learning programming in my spare time. This is a little 2D game I'm working on mainly just to get the feel for what it's like to complete a simple game. It uses a game library I made called LemurLib which handles cel animation (linear and a snap type of animation that locks an object in it's state until the animation completes), set up for a player protagonist, enemy management and user input.

    Still have to finish the final gameplay (akuma defends his stash of comics and food from waves of enemies) as well as sounds, some UI stuff, enemy death states, more enemies, and Akuma's special moves

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    ^^^ if the youtube embed isnt working here's a direct link

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