KungFuSquirrel

Ok, so I guess this isn't really "finished" per se... heh... but over Christmas I packaged up some of my older unfinished works and released them for the greater good of the community, either for HL or Source. Someone might as well get use of them.

Pack includes:

co_sepulcher

dm_flatshade

dm_horizon

dm_lemmings

dmc_fac16

ns_aelin

op4ctf_lastword

op4ctf_rep6

op4pow_terminal

rc_glare

tfc_tortuosity

Sample shots:

http://www.kungfusquirrel.net/images/sc ... e1_big.jpg

http://www.kungfusquirrel.net/images/sc ... e2_big.jpg

http://www.kungfusquirrel.net/images/sc ... e3_big.jpg

There's a lot of missing textures, but I did put in what I could... some are more finished than others, and some are just little doodles, but you never know what might be of use to someone.

You can grab the pack here: http://www.kungfusquirrel.net/projects.php?i=28

Agreed. But I made the mistake of letting my wife play that one. And now she's waaaay further than me and I can never play it boo-urns.

My wife gave it to me for christmas along with a brand new PS2 (finally!), Katamari Damacy, and Ratchet 2.

I haven't played it yet, sadly, but I get the impression it's mostly killed by hype - half-decent game trying to live up to the mark of "Halo-Killer" bestowed upon it pre-release. Wasn't one that I was super eager to buy, but I definitely wanted to check it out to at least take some notes on it

Hopefully will have a chance to play it tomorrow, maybe. Will weigh in again then

Those new shots rock! Especially the second... great composition there

*high-fives all around*

Hooray!

You can do this in hammer, unreal and many other games. I was doing this with hl1 mapping in the past, but after repeated experience I learned I was just producing lower quality/less optimized models by doing so. I still did/would export bsp from the editor just to get scale correct, but I learned to never use the bsp as a base for a model.

That's why I comment on how nice it is in Doom3. Exporting retains texturing information and you can merge all the tris to the original quad faces with a single key press. And if you're just doing a straight conversion to a model prop, you don't even need to turn it back to quads anyway. With patch meshes exported out, there are no back faces, and if you build with a base texture or caulk before texturing it, you can select and delete all faces with that material, giving you a nice clean model in seconds. And once you save it, it's ready to go in the editor/game - no compiling, exporting, or anything else. You can go back and forth between LW (or any package that supports .lwo or .ase) and the editor, typing 'reloadmodels' in the editor console to have instant tweaks and adjustments.

This isn't something used for general modeling - that's still up to the art team to concept, do the high/low poly, paint job, etc. etc. But if I need a room that's blown to hell, pillars bent out of shape, or whatever else, I can export any geometry I need (entire rooms if need be), models included, and start cutting, bending, twisting, and doing whatever is needed. It's no revolutionary system, but in efficiency and usefulness it's a step ahead of the rest, and definitely bridging the gap between traditional level construction and all model construction. Combined with the strength of patch meshes, this gives a ton of power to a designer with even a slight functional knowledge of LW.

I guess to half re-iterate and half re-explain what I'm trying to say, general gameplay design is no walk in the park - layouts, combat/gameplay, events, etc. all do take time to get right, but with art content taking longer and longer in next-gen engines, levels included, the more a designer can do and the more flexibility is found in the editor, the quicker content can get out the door.

By being able to quickly and efficiently build pipes, wires, railings, curved geometry, torn up panels, and whatever other details are needed quickly and efficiently in an editor, I'm saving an artist time that would have to be spent on a very tedious task that is taking precious time away from other more important tasks.

(edit: and if you're not using any patch meshes to make an in-editor water tower in D3, you are a fool, no ifs ands or buts about it. )

Not if you use the lights from the flames themselves to fill in the areas behind the pillars.

If that's not what you're aiming for and you really want good lights on the flames, only extend the main fill light maybe halfway past the pillars, use an additional fill light behind, and then each light from the flame is only the second light pass on most faces aside of maybe part of the pillar (which would be at 3) if you size them well.

I don't expect you'll get it right on the first or second try, and neither should you. It's really tough to get the perfect balance of illumination and light count/shadow tris, but when you do hit the mark, the results really pop out at you... almost literally. hehe

So that means that, in the event of a full hostile takeover by EA, Gearbox could pull BiA from the EA machine and pitch it out to whoever else wanted it?

I was hoping that, if it came to it, that'd be the case. I've heard enough hints of the horrors of Nightfire to really feel sorry for you guys if you got pulled in under them again.

If 'Beyond Good and Evil 2' came because of this (EAs like of sequels) it'd be the only good thing.

I wouldn't want it from EA. They probably wouldn't even let Ancel & co. do it

you realize this isn't funny at all, don't you ?

Seriously, I hope this works out for the best for you guys, i.e. falls through. Right on the heels of this NFL exclusitivity thing, this starts painting a potentially very bleak future...

I mean, if EA can go for a company as large as Ubi... Yikes.

/me pets

Try a big fill light in the middle going out past the walls on the side for the pillar shadows, then light/lights as appropriate behind the pillars to fill it in. You should be able to get away with that little overdraw; shouldn't go over 3 to get a basic scheme down.

umm... Eep?

http://www.forbes.com/business/feeds/ap ... 20133.html

(well, 19.9, technically, but still...)

doom 3 is very low detail and simply would not work in those games. Take an average room from doom 3, take away the normals, fog and steam effects, and make it full bright. Now compare it to the same thing in hl2 and that's what I mean.

I find it interesting you're saying that from one game on the engine, and it's not like HL2 doesn't have plenty of extremely simple design in it, either. Sometimes less is more, you know. Not every room needs 8 million polys of in-game or high poly source material to look right. And just wait until the crop of licensees starts pushing things for higher minimum spec hardware.

However all the fine details, columns, computers, wires, lights, power plugs, shelves with books, pens, phones, foliage, etc. Those need to be modeled, and regardless of how cool patch meshes are, they simply can't go there. If you could even get that much detail in, getting the UVW map right would be insane, and let us not forget ANIMATIONS. A pipe or railing or thick wiring is ok, and even terrain, but I think going anything beyond that is asking a way too much. Programs like max/maya/etc. have focused on this for years, and artists train on those programs for years. To build an editor with that power would take lots of dev time and training time when it’s really not needed.

Well, most of those objects I want models for anyway. I'm not denying the strength of modeled props by any means, but some of those examples I would rather do myself. Wires and pipes can be so variable from room to room that I'd much prefer the control of manual construction.

Really, Doom3 is already very close to what I described. I can take geometry that I've built in the editor, export it straight out to LW, tweak it, and save it right back in as a model in maybe a minute at most. If it needs animations, I give it to an animator. I'm not talking about building a new editor, I'm just talking about merging functionality.

I'm not trying to say that things won't change, nor argue that they haven't yet, because they have, and very rapidly at that. Teams are growing to larger than ever before - Raven used to have 2 designers and maybe 10 people per project, now there are at least 10 designers alone, it seems. And to me, that's almost more reason to hold on to designers who both construct and design. Why should there be more and more work on the already greatly extended role of the artist when I can do some of it just as effectively or efficiently myself, and often quicker? Need a torn up wall panel? I can build that in the editor. Railings? Build it in the editor. Pipes? Build it in the editor. Wires? Build it in the editor. Even a twisted mangled beam, I can build in the editor. For me, that's the bat of an eye, and for an artist, it's more time to spend on the assets that really need it.

Oi, this is probably horribly thought out. It's too early to be discussing something online... I wanna go back to bed...

Actually, id is a bad example - their team is VERY cross-talented and a lot of them did all kinds of work across multiple areas of the game.

I'm very pleased with the workflow that the Doom3 tech allows. There's no comparison to patch meshes in any other editor, and with those you might as well be modeling. I would love to see a company either a) take the fine control of details from a modeling program and toss it into a level editor (such as with Radiant and patch meshes, particularly texturing), or b) create more effective plugins or add-ons for a 3D package to allow quicker and easier texturing for

I mean, imagine building a set of pipes or a railing. right now, I can plop down a brush, turn it into a cylinder, and rotate and bend it every which way to my hearts content, all with perfect texturing the whole way (or easily tweaked and fixed within seconds if I throw it out of whack). Now imagine an editor where you could not only do that but, by grouping, weld points together and define them as their own model and instance, then plop it around like a model itself.

The thing I love the most about my job is I really do get to do it all - I've documented levels, blocked them out, and am soon getting into a lot of enemy placement and gameplay stuff. Only thing I don't or won't do is the advanced scripting, which is beyond my tiny little programming knowledge anyway. But I also build mostly from scratch (well, when I'm not on someone else's map, hehe). It's really cool as a designer to be able to keep the ideas to a smaller group of people - more hands is good for productivity, but it's sometimes disheartening to lose the control over some of the things you really aimed for.

I definitely agree that designers are getting more and more involved with the really important stuff, like what tom mentioned of the gameplay/flow, blocked out stuff, scripting, and fun in general. But I don't think that means that you have to take all the fun construction work away, at least not just yet.

EDIT: Tequila, you rule.

There are two ways you're going to sell the normal maps:

1) multi-directional lighting and

2) good texture alignment using the edges well.

All the shots show what might as well be a giant noshadow fill light. It's difficult to tell there's even normal mapping on the textures.

In the second shot, the texture alignment is way off (and it almost looks like you're building on a weird grid ). When the textures get cut off away from an edge, things can look pretty bad. Use the natural edges and borders on the textures to your advantage. And break things up that way. Normal mapped edges on textures let you get away with brush/texture stacks that you couldn't get away with using only normal diffuse textures.

It's also not the number of lights, it's the number of overlapping lights. Don't be afraid to use small accents, projected lights, etc. etc. to bring out some detail and color. You're showing some good ideas and it's a cool texture set and whatnot; now just focus on making it work for you.

That guy's shirt reminded me I still need to buy one of those Op4CTF power-up icon shirts from that Gearbox store thing.

So I did.

No joke.

(PS: please also include free goodies.)

yarr, there be pirates in that thar rock!

Too bad the sunset photo got a little grainy, but it's still a cool shot Rest are superb!

I love a good game story, but that doesn't mean I want to see much of it in the trailer. The less I know about what will happen, the better. But I do want to at least know what I'll be playing.

1) I like a combination of the two, especially if the cinematics are in-engine. Generally I'll be more swayed to purchase the game by gameplay stuff, but the cinematic stuff I tend to find more impressive in a trailer.

2) All the time, if I think the game looks worthwhile.

3) Very. Though I think I'd be forgiving of a really short teaser without ingame graphics - that'd be a way to build some hype for unveiling the game or something. *shrug*

4) Action, Emotion, Visuals, Story, Humor.

I also would place audio at second or third - the sound quality, narration, and particularly music of a trailer is a huge selling point for me.

5) No reason it shouldn't if it's done right.

The trailers I've enjoyed the most are:

1) Beyond Good and Evil (only low-res versions online, but you can find it on the BG&E site)

2) Brothers in Arms

Very impressive productions. For game trailers.

I guess all I meant by the UT style was that in the ingame shot, the scene looks very much like the stuff in UT. The textures themselves, though, especially now that I look at them again look like they'd probably carry over pretty well to other applications.

Of course, I've not had a chance to download them yet, so who knows? Not I!

oof! Definitely a bad experience. I would say that splitting the work relies very heavily on a cohesive staff to pull it off. I very much trust the people doing the scripting right now to do things well, and we work very closely with each other to get the best results.

Man, 15 story apartment building... that's a good one.

Speed takes a while to get - the keyboard shortcuts drive everything, but once you learn those you can skip a lot of steps from other editors.

Independent window configs - check. Even my Q3radiant 202 installation does that. I've got a pretty mangled one across both monitors, which rocks my face.

Texture alignment is actually really really nice once you get used to it. You can do almost everything you need to do without even bringing up the surface inspector and the more UV-style scaling system saves the hassle of having to do most of the calculations you might have to do to figure brush size. And patch meshes, oooh... automatic texturing around curves = my best friend.

Anyway, I don't mean to turn this into an editor debate, but don't be scared of the tools! Wherever you may go/be interested in going, you will learn to use the tools very effectively very quickly.

Radiant is hardly the most polished of the editors, but it has no bloat whatsoever and a speed and efficiency unparalleled in any other editor I've seen. I used Worldcraft from version 1.5 until 3.5 (and have dabbled in the new one here and there), and even after a couple weeks of getting here I couldn't get over how slow and cumbersome doing anything with that is. Plus I'm still angered by the lack of wireframe rendering of models and displacements in the grid views of the new version... rawr.

Anyway, I was kinda scared by the prospect of learning Radiant before I got here, but within a week of my arrival I was starting to do my first production work. I think it would have taken a lot longer to get up to speed on another editor - half the problem isn't that the editor is hard to learn, but the resources available for it are nothing compared to the vast resources Epic has made available for UnrealEd and spawned from the insanely massive Half-Life community for Worldcraft/Hammer's latest incarnations. The Radiant manual is from Q3radiant v202, and is practically useless for D3 editing or using GTK, which is hugely different as well. Every version of Radiant included with a game is slightly different! But having a crew of people who have been using it for years at your disposal makes it incredibly accessible and quick to learn. And I now love it

You'd be surprised how quick it is, even on larger meshes. The same stealing idea can still apply - taking pieces from multiple meshes and carefully combining them lets you churn out huge sections of terrain with shapes still impossible with a heightmap system and a silhouette that still doesn't match anything else in the game.

Even if it does take longer in some instances, I find the results much more satisfying than heightmap stuff and you don't get the horribleness of jamming models into the terrain to make more complex rock shapes, which just looks silly in most cases.