Defrag

Rab actually wrote for "Chewin' the Fat", which was created by the guys behind Still Game As far as I know, the big man was one of Rab's credits

Unless your name is Mino..then you're just a natural....pro.....guy. You can't legislate for teh minos, tbh!

You have to be pragmatic IMO. It's one thing to chase a dream when you have a strong portfolio for your chosen vocation (or are at least 'nearly there'), but it's a totally different thing to do it when you realistically can't apply for those jobs until you have gained skills and built up an impressive portfolio. Do you have the time, energy and money to build up a portfolio in the interim period if you drop out? Most people don't. This may sound harsh, but it doesn't sound like you are anywhere near ready to start pitching for level design jobs. I went through exactly the same thing about ~5 years ago when I quit my first university course. I thought, "I want to be a level designer", but the truth is that I didn't have the time or money to get to the level where I could start applying for jobs in the short term. As a result, I went back to university and did another programming degree shortly thereafter. Ultimately, I grew to love programming and now that's what I do. Frie hit the nail on the head regarding your ideas sounding vague and unfocussed. Your situation sounds awfully familiar to me, so be careful not to end up in the same mess I did! Regarding programming: At some companies, you do not need a degree to be a programmer. However, if you don't have a degree, what you definitely DO need is a demo that sets you apart from the competition. Coursework from your school projects will not impress unless it is really top drawer stuff (in hindsight, this is a mistake I made with my portfolio, but I also had the degree to help secure a job). A small, polished game demo is enough to show your mettle, but again it takes time to do this stuff. If you want to compromise, you could possible switch university courses to take up programming full time (I don't know how far you are through your degree, so it's hard to offer any concrete advice). The best advice I can give is not to make any rash decisions. If you drop out and then find yourself in a bad situation, it can take a year or more to recover from it, or maybe not at all depending on how the funding system works (I had to pay two years of my tuition fees due to dropping out the first time). I think the most important thing to realise is that "passion" is bandied about a lot. Talking about your passion doesn't really help when applying for jobs -- you have to be able to demonstrate your love for games through doing, and that means building a good portfolio. I'm not trying to kill your dreams or anything here, but I think you need to look at your situation in the cold light of day and then decide whether it is viable. If not, then you need to work on your skills and build a portfolio while studying, or figure out whether you have the time and commitment to make it happen if you drop out. I would definitely recommend doing mod work because it helps you become a team player and understand the commitment required in creating and releasing a project. You may find that you work as a level designer on a mod and can't be bothered, but you really enjoy the programming side of it (or vice versa). As klein said, it is also a great help when it comes to building up industry contacts. I also pretty much fully agree with Hessi's opinion on a degree. The average games industry career lasts ~6 years, so you need to be prepared for life after games *edit -- Also regarding technical artists: Where I am, it's a senior position. They have to make a lot of big decisions about workflow and asset creation / technology, so it's a position that is not open to juniors -- you have to work up to it

Just put the picmip up really high (r_picmip iirc)

They're apparently moving away from 'full' episodes for the moment and, instead, are posting shorter clips more frequently. Consolevania For those who have never sampled CV's delights: It's an internet based games show that features a blend of reviews and comedy. There is nothing else remotely like it.

Congrats

Is that because you're already fat?

Bought Mafia, Hitman Contracts and Thief Deadly Shadows for £10 all in (circa ~2002-2004 called and wanted its games back, before anyone says anything ) Started playing Mafia and just reached "the race." Now I realise why everyone fucking hated that mission and banged on about it. I've got the patch which allows you to select the difficulty and, after having a go on normal and getting raped by 12 rabid drivers, I put it on very easy. I then got to the last corner and tipped my car and had to redo the whole thing, so I quit in disgust. I really don't understand how their designers got so much right but got that section so badly wrong. The driving mechanics feel/are poor, the camera makes me nauseous and the mission lasts for about 10 minutes. Grrr.

I was under the impression that it's just done via the actual colour values in the texture. I.e. brighter textures reflect more light during RAD. I could be wrong, though.

Looks good, but I'll trot out the things I always say after reading Your portfolio repels jobs. [*:31z1yjf1]You need a career goal / mission statement. E.g. "I am looking for a level design position / entry-level level design position / level design contracting work including x responsibilities" (delete as applicable). [*:31z1yjf1]Brand your images to include your name and website url so that, without context, people can find your website if they stumble upon your work or forget where an image originally came from. [*:31z1yjf1]Add more information to your information page and/or make a full CV document that is downloadable. You should definitely include your location and email on the information page (I know it's implied by the .co.uk that you're in the UK somewhere, but it's still better to state it explicitly). [*:31z1yjf1]Make the images ~1024 x 768 minimum. IMO there's no real reason to have smaller images these days. [*:31z1yjf1]Add download links for all standalone maps; add mod links to all mod maps. You could also elaborate a bit more on what your responsibilities were for the projects you've worked on and how you worked with the people etc. That's all I can think of. GL!

Really, really slick trailer. Loved the music and the level design & attention to detail is impressive. I will be downloading this Best of luck!

Early(ish) Reeves & Mortimer. Legendary.

Yeah I hate that shit too, Hessi. Reminds me of the bad old days of Packard Bell PCs and paying £3726937634 for 4MB of proprietary RAM (instead of half the price for generic).

Microsoft are insanely generous when it comes to replacing faulty mice (or they were back in the day when I had one). Having said that, I've had an MX510 & MX518 for years now and they're far better than anything I've used from MS

Apparently a similar/the same clip was on some artist's portfolio page, so I'm sceptical as to whether this is realtime. Furthermore, I'm not really banking on their business model. They need powerful hardware to make this thing a reality. Imagine having a game of Half-life, but in addition to the servers required to just run the main game logic, each client connected has to have hardware set aside to actually render its view of the world. It sounds extremely expensive. While it's an interesting model for crap PC users, imagine you've bought a powerful PC that could do much of the work itself; are you going to be happy about having to pay more just so that they can duplicate effort that could be palmed off to your own PC? Moreover, since all of the rendering is done on the server, how on earth is it going to support interactive games and applications? Ever play quake in the pre-quakeworld days when you had to wait for your keystrokes to be acknowledged by the server before your client would update your position? It was horrible. Unless you were on a LAN, it was basically unplayable. You can skip around network problems when you have a predictive game client code, but if you're rendering the actual IMAGE on the server and the client is a dumb display, then I don't think they can predict much at all, if anything. For latency of anything over tens of milliseconds, it'll probably be horrible for anything that we would consider to be an interactive game. This is going to be a serious constraint in terms of what they can actually do with the technology and the sorts of games they can support. On rails and social sorts of things are doable, but things like driving games or first person shooters? I really doubt it. Finally, imagine the bandwidth this will take. Even using optimised image difference algorithms & some sort of compression, I'm betting it's going to take serious bandwidth to do, especially at normal computer resolutions, let alone the upper HD resolutions. It looks really cool, but unless they have amazing solutions to all of these problems, I can't see how it can work. There are a lot of very smart people out there, so I'm not saying it's impossible, merely ... very, very difficult. I will look on with interest!

I'd actually say that design is overrated in many circles (by design I mean having a more or less ideal paper design and then trying to implement it). Jeff Atwood's blog has some nice bits and pieces, and this is something I wholly agree with. I generally write down a load of ideas/constraints and bash out a rough design, then get going. By the time I'm done, I've usually iteratively diverged from the original design in response to unforeseen problems anyway. I'm very interested in design patterns or looking at how other people tackled similar problems, though Just not a huge fan of very formal design.

The GPU is specialised hardware, so it makes sense to load some stuff onto it, even if it means there's less available for graphics processing (i.e. by dedicating only 10% of a specialised GPU, you can perform certain types of calculations that would require a significant amount of CPU time, even with multiple cores available ).

The full 3d bionic commando is looking incredible. RPS link (sorry if this has already been posted).

Nope; lights.rad is used at compile-time only.

Sorry to potentially dampen your expectations, but the diversity of the course's curriculum is setting off alarm bells. It takes a lot of time and dedication to get a solid grasp on any one of those listed disciplines, so I am rather sceptical as to whether the course will make you employable; it sounds fun, but I'd be worried. I've programmed for about 6 years in total now (C/C++, C# and some scripting languages), and although I'm competent, I've got a long way to go. I've level designed for 8 and I still feel like I have a huge amount to learn; same deal goes for design & modelling. If your course touches on all of these disciplines, then you may not get much further than dipping your toe in the water and getting a flavour of what you might like to specialise in -- something you could potentially do at home in your own time. I would look into the course's content and, crucially, the percentage of graduates who secure jobs in the games industry in a technical discipline (programming, art, design). If they cannot answer your questions or the results are not encouraging, I would look elsewhere. Sorry to sound so pessimistic, but there's a lot of crap games courses out there. A lot of them basically just take an existing course and jam computer games content in there to get bums on seats without actually making the graduates employable. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/i ... tream-news http://www.edge-online.com/blogs/david- ... rites-edge

That site looks cool but, like most overly-flashy sites, it's totally horrible to navigate and practically unusable.

I don't see why it would be considered rude to follow up and make sure that they actually received your application. I can see why a phone call might be bothersome, but in situations where you really would like a response (a response as in nothing more than a message saying "yes/no we did/did not receive your application"), email is the worst possible medium. At least when you speak to someone you are usually able to get a straight answer. I'm sure we've all had a few emails in our time that we didn't deal with, even when we really, really should have... (forgot/lost/filed under todo list and constantly relegated to last place). That's why I like the phone for stuff like that. It's also the reason why my spidey sense starts tingling when I see an online shopping site that does not have a phone number for customer support...

Even companies with dedicated HR people won't necessarily get back to you very quickly. If you know someone on the inside who can take your CV & portfolio directly to the lead/producer/whoever is in charge of arranging interviews for that position, then you will tend to get results much faster. By results I simply mean things move faster and you will know where you stand rather than seeing your email sitting in an HR person's inbox gathering dust, or filed in the "maybe" folder. Or lost in the system. Or, like Hessi said, spam-filtered to oblivion!

You just need a small break and you'll be on your way. Valve don't fly just anybody half way around the world Anyway, I'm sorry to hear you didn't get the job, but it sounds like you had a really great experience regardless.

Congratulations; that's some lovely stuff!