Posts by Lacabra

  • The user experience of Level Editors

    Wow... these are some insane observations to me! I kind of get where you're coming from, but it's such a completely different way of looking at a thing.

    Yes, taking your time is a good thing - being forced to take your time because your tools are slow is not.

    A lot of what you're saying seems to be... that if you improve your efficiency, your efforts are probably going to be undermined by bad project/office management and you end up no better off... so you're better off not trying?

    Improvements to tools aren't supposed to make you lazy because things are taking less time, that saved time is time you can invest in the other stuff you're doing.

  • The user experience of Level Editors

    I have been summoned! Awesome to see more people talkin' about this stuff.

    I made some videos called Level Editing In UE4 Kinda Needs To Catch Up To Quake 1 and Hypothesising Negative Effects of Ubiquitous Modular Mesh Based Level Design, latter of which was discussed at length on the UE4 forums (I'd be interested in whether you saw that, @2d-chris). These days I'm working with UE4 but making my maps in Hammer, because modular mesh based level design is only a sensible idea for large studios with lots of artists, and Unreal doesn't have good level design tools for anything outside that situation. I do love Unreal though.

    Quote

    Quote For example, I don't know any designer who crates (pun intended) a new brush (bsp) for everything that they add, instead, you modify existing ones or duplicate them, and work from there, just that one change in workflow produces drastically different results for UX (for example in unreal you hold alt + drag mouse to duplicate anything)

    This is totally a thing, but compare the UX of alt+dragging a brush to clone it in Unreal to shift-dragging a brush to clone it in Hammer. Same thing, except with Unreal, you have to click-drag on the pivot, (why does it have a pivot?!?!), which is a tiny target for your mouse, which is probably not in the center of the brush, or might be nowhere near the brush if you've resized that brush a lot, and then it drags really laggily across to where it belongs, and then either you've got to manually hit "rebuild geometry" to see the result, or you have automatic rebuilds on, and now you have to deal with a potentially-very-long hitch while Unreal rebuilds the entire map's geometry because you moved one brush...

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    Quote some of the tricks I picked up at Epic make the hammer BSP method seem slow by comparison, it just requires that knowledge to be shared

    Epic's BSP implementation is so slow I don't know if I could come up with a method that didn't make it feel slow by comparison :P But that's because it's a bad BSP implementation.

    I'd be super interested to hear some of your tricks, and see if they're applicable to a smaller-scale operation than you have at Epic.

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    Quote Flow is also important, but the realities of being a level designer in a studio pretty quickly ruins any chance of that, since you'll be interrupted or asking questions constantly, on the rare occasion it happens though, it's a wonderful thing

    This is interesting. To me, if you're in a studio that ruins any chance of you getting a flow going, that... sounds like a pretty bad work environment? Shouldn't that be a priority?

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Hmm, good points. Context is it's a late afternoon scene (also has to be, couldn't change my mind on it at this late stage). Really good point about the foliage all being basically the same size. I'm using UDK's foliage system which means that the foliage is all non-solid and non-interactive, which isn't a bother when it's that all that size or smaller, but gets to be annoying on a large fern or bush. There's also interactive foliage actors but they'd be a bit more expensive and a lot more hassle to set up and place. I'll just add a few of 'em.

    Heyyy posts while I'm typing. blackdog: There is some yellowish fog on there, but the start distance might be a little far out for it to actually feel foggy/dusty. I feel like I want the yellow-dusty-afternoon look even though a forest might not ever actually look like that. Come to think of it this actually might be something I fuck up on since we don't really have this type of forest at all in Australia, but it's not super important as long as it feels good.

    The game is set on an island (two, technically) but the environments vary pretty wildly just because we like varied environments. Decided pretty early on not to give too much of a shit about making consistent geological sense between levels, we have a lot of improbable rock formations etc.

    Rocks on the ground totally are too dark yeah. I'm not sure if I'm going to lighten them or darken the larger ones.

    Here's an older screenshot. I definitely prefer the lighting/haze situation now. I think. I think I might be indecisive.

    [Blocked Image: http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8295/7934014016_29bbba95f7_b.jpg]

    Thanks for crits everybody, bedtime for me

  • The Art of the first game job.

    Also, this is the Chet Faliszek talk JeanPaul was talkin' about. Definitely watch all of it.

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    I know so many motherfuckers who do the pencil-sharpening thing he talks about. I have also met this guy and can testify to his being rad

  • The Art of the first game job.

    They're not even that low res, it just shows them tiny for some fucking reason. I got lucky fucking around with the URL to get to this which would have been a far better portfolio to link me.

    I don't really have a problem with having a shitton of shots necessarily as long as it's not a pain to navigate.

  • The Art of the first game job.

    I sorted through about 100 applications recently when I was lookin' to hire a modeller (not a big deal company or anything, just an indie that got some funding), and yeah, relatively few of them showed their work ingame, which made me faaaar less likely to give them the work.

    This is maybe kind of a weird suggestion (I'd hope an obvious one) but for the love of god don't use one of these awful slideshow preview things for your images. I want to just middle click a thumbnail. Probably I'm a huge asshole but I skipped most of a guy's portfolio on account of this shit.

    That guy's portfolio is pretty good though.