KungFuSquirrel

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/bro ... 16276.html Brothers in Arms Xbox MP hands-on, for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. Sounds like it'll rock the proverbial balls. Getting even more excited for this one!

Heh, DD was right when he said you Gearbox guys loved Quake 3. Q3 is hands down my favorite (*cough*released*cough*) MP game. The speed, the mayhem, the fun... everything DM should be. Don't get me wrong, I loved the first 2 Quakes in MP and the UT series is top-notch, but Q3 is the one I always find myself going back to even after all the years. I wish looking back I'd jumped into the mapping community for that... So much crazy abstract off-the-wall design, not to mention the fluidity of the good stuff.

Umm... No they didn't. Was released late 2003 after a ~4 year dev time, if I recall.

http://www.beyondgoodevil.com/us/ Watch the flash intro, then watch the trailer.

Curse you! Ah well. I recall seeing something about Ancel and co. being on a King Kong game anyway, so it's all false hope. I demand BG&E promo goods you find lying around the office. Will trade for Raven gear

Please be BG&E2 Please be BG&E2 Please be BG&E2 Please be BG&E2 Please be BG&E2 Please be BG&E2 Please be BG&E2 Please be BG&E2 Please be BG&E2 Please be BG&E2 *ahem* I mean, ah... yeah.

Remember, this is all practice. I'm starting off low poly so I can get a solid base set of skills and build from there while making sure I'm doing it right. Next up is Empire State and Chrysler, and then another set with the Sears Tower, TransAmerica Pyramid, and Library Tower (which, even at low poly, will probably be the most difficult to construct). OL: there is a slight indent on the bottom. Had to kinda guess, though, didn't find any good pictures of the base of the tower.

They're states, not continents. 96%, 5 mi average error, 278 secs. I put delaware about 31 miles south and one of the other states my mouse jerked right when I clicked - I kid you not. Sad. Edit: ooh, gotta try advanced. That one stays difficult by only showing 1 state at a time. Europe Intermediate: 34/44, 183 mi. average error (damned little ones killed me ), 77%, 370 sec

So I'm working my way up the lines of modeling, with eventual goals to do some high poly work. In the meantime, I'm starting a series of low-poly skyscraper models as a chance to practice my basic techniques. Eventually I'll bump these up to high poly as well, but for now it's very simple stuff. First was the Bank of China tower in Hong Kong. It's a really simple shape and should be excellent exercise for both modeling and UV work. Model is 68 polygons, 135 tris. Built in Lightwave 7.5. The building: The model:

But it's weird to use because the motion is always registered relative to the tablet, not the mouse direction That still throws me off. But then, I haven't had much time to practice with it yet.

College football halftimes shouldn't be this lame choreographed shit. College bands are about as much a part of a gameday experience as the games themselves. And OU and USC have two of the top-tier programs in the country, no less. No wonder the crowd was pissed.

Yes, but it's also a knee-jerk reaction map, and for that it's quite good. All it would take, though, is a normal map on that rock texture, a second light (which would bring the grand total to 3, it looks like, perfectly reasonable), and the smoothing tweaks I mentioned earlier and it'd be some top-notch stuff. I really wish people would stop these knee-jerk maps. Yeah, people are sorely underestimating D3 (same thing happened with Quake, really, it'll take the licensees down the road to show what's really possible), but making a quick map in a big empty box doesn't solve anything. This is closer than most to making a point, but as mentioned in the above paragraph, still falls short of what it needs to really sell it. Of course you haven't - there aren't any yet. The content creation time and complexity has gone through the roof on this stuff, and on top of that there's enough people disappointed with Doom3 itself that what people are doing work for it are still trying to get their heads around it. Is it possible to make one? Hell yes! But the content work required is well beyond what most people in the amateur community have time and/or ability for. Give it time.

I might need that bucket to vomit in after that mental image... Looks great!

Oh, god forbid he maybe wanted to make it an evening-ish scene. It could be blindingly bright if he wanted it to be. That first shot looks really bad, but the second looks really good. If you were getting up close to that, you'd want to add some more poly detail and texture blending, but for background scenery or something it'd be gorgeous. UV coverage looks pretty good, even just a higher-res texture and scaling up the UVs themselves would help a lot. Doesn't even look like it's a normal mapped texture. I imagine this would be absolutely beautiful with a normal map and some improved smoothing.

Just saw this on Shacknews, looks like a step in the right direction: http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/041230/323/f9e6u.html Long story short, there's speculation the French government may step in to protect the interests of French developers, some 20% of which work with Ubi. Go France.

Hmm. I wonder if this might be the result of some of the files being created from a different version of Hammer? (i.e. 3.3 vs. 3.5 or something?) That's odd, though, if they all do that. I've had some problems with some of my maps not loading in 4, but some load fine. If you have a leftover copy of 3.5 or another older version, maybe try loading them there, saving out, and loading again in 4.0? I'm at a loss otherwise.

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!

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.

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