KungFuSquirrel

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...)

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. 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.

I do not want to think about the pain you went through to texture that curve. hehe Seriously, though, looks nice! Very much a UT style; looks very cool in-game.

We get to do both We get a lot of trust put into us. We document our own levels from start to finish (coming up with most of the ideas ourselves, aside of basic plot points and specific scenes, and the construction of those is still entirely up to us). Using Radiant is another plus here - with patch meshes, we can also build most of what we want to build without touching Lightwave. We do model terrain manually, which I feel gives much stronger control than any heightmap terrain does, but it can be a little tedious at first. We do use modeled props, most of which are concepted up, built, and textured in the art department. However, some of our designers also do their own textures and map objects - we can build a quick low or high poly model in LW, clean it up, and let the artists take over. Or we can build the normal maps for a texture, render it out, plop a grey swatch over it, and leave it to the artists to paint. Generally we just let them do the prop work, as they have it scheduled and we don't. Scripters curently do all event scripting, though a couple designers can do some scripting as well. They're also doing stuff like monster, item, and trigger placement right now, too, as a time consideration (that's stuff they can easily do while we work on construction for another map). Eventually we'll have more of a hand in this and learn basic scripting all-around. They'll still be doing the really crazy scripted stuff, though, as most of us designers don't have much of a background in programming. I do hope to learn a lot about this and over time do more and more of my own scripting (but not enough they bump me out of design, heh), and I'd recommend you guys looking for jobs in the future dabble in scripting for unreal or doom3 or something. We pass maps around a lot, too. Sometimes it's because the person who originally made it is busy with something else, sometimes it's just to get another set of hands on it. We also steal from each other all the time. Load up a map, take a section you like, adjust and re-texture, and poof! It's just another thing that helps efficiency as well as consistency within the game world.

One of the more recent additions to our staff is Max Aristov, who was (if I recall correctly) lead artist on this production. Frie, did you ever meet him, or did he leave before you started?

The Company: Raven Software is an award-winning computer game software developer based in Madison, Wisconsin. Our focus is on graphic excellence and superb gameplay. As avid gamers, we build the kind of games we enjoy playing: games that are visually engaging and enjoyable with high-level, intense playability. We remain dedicated to pushing ahead the level of quality in electronic gaming. Job Type: Full Time The Position: Level Designer Responsibilities: Raven is looking for an experienced level designer for a game built using the DOOM3 engine. The applicant will be responsible for various aspects of design: creating a concept of a level on paper, building in Radiant, lighting, enemy placement, and some scripting. The applicant must work on site and be a team player. Qualifications: • Previous level design experience preferred but if you’ve made your own great levels, we’ll take a look • Familiarity with Radiant a must • Familiarity with Lightwave a plus • Experience with scripting a plus Posted from the new Gamasutra entry. Contact info available there, or PM me and I'll give you the appropriate e-mail address/addresses. As I mentioned in the previous thread, my short time at Raven has been absolutely incredible. Whether you like Raven games or not, Raven offers one of what many of us feel (most with much more experience than me ) is one of the best jobs in the industry. Security is good as an Activision-owned studio and the average length of employment is something like 6 years. You only have something to lose if you don't apply, so if you're even remotely thinking about it, give it a shot.

Textures don't display until you have a map open... I think technically that shouldn't be possible

Content is deleted from/changed in games all the time. There's tons of stuff I remember seeing in original Half-Life shots that never made the cut into the final game (as well as the unused AI models). Look at how Ravenholm evolved from the TrapTown E3 demo into what it is now, for instance. Schmung and Jynx make a good point - some of the content may have been not good enough, but other bits may just have taken too much time to do. They have the content already, so provided none of it sucked (which is also entirely possible - no one's perfect ), they could easily fix it up and use it for an expansion. I really would like to see that boat level/chapter...

Phew. We just get yelled at when a few people leave it running and updating and we lose our bandwidth for 'important' things like sending builds Fortunately our bandwidth upgrade should leave plenty of room for HL2 and WoW.

Times like this I hate no-compete clauses. Would be in in a second otherwise. I guess I'll stick to just making unplayable scenes instead.

Well, I'm an uber-nerd and live as much for the boxes and cool collectibles as the games themselves, so I ended up getting both Steam gold and retail collector's. *hides*