Defrag

I'm still waiting to see the savings that were meant to be passed down to the consumer. Right now I'd say it isn't happening for a few reasons, namely the fact that most games on steam also have publishing deals with traditional publishers. I'm guessing that the existing deals guarantee the publisher x% of the sales revenue regardless of the distribution method, so after valve takes its cut, the consumer is still paying as much, if not more, compared to buying a boxed copy. I had a quick look through the steam games list and googled/froogled some prices and found pretty much all of the games like CoD2 & Civ were found cheaper on web sites that offer boxed copies. It was the same deal when HL2 was released, you could buy the bronze version in the shops for less than the bronze download package. Until I actually save some money via downloading, I'm not going to use Steam regularly. Right now my solitary steam purchase was HL2 silver which worked out to be £37. Not bad, but not great.

The great thing about steam is the indie and/or small developer stuff. Innovative & fun games like the ship probably would never have been released, or if they were, a lot more of the money would end up in the hands of the publisher.

The bad thing about steam is simply that it is becoming saturated (I used to leave my news updates on so I could see information about valve updates, but now I'm spammed with 29764 messages about some columns clone that costs £4.34... I don't care) and, as others have pointed out, it is not independent of Valve. I'm not sure what people are getting at when they say that Steam should be an independent company -- it'd just be like having Rupert Murdoch owning Myspace and Sky News. The two companies aren't under the same banner, but they have a common interest. If people mean that they would like to see a new and independent company taking steam's position as the market leader in digital distribution, I'd agree that'd be kinda good, but then again, who's to say that we won't end up with another publisher situation? Valve has a ridiculously sharp business operation (considering how urm.. naive a lot of games companies are -- it's still a very young industry) and it's fair to say they're doing the best for themselves, though others are benefiting. It's giving people options they didn't have before, but yes, it could be better. I'd be cautious about wishing it were replaced by a company unconnected with developing games, though.

Right now I bet the majority of the larger games companies (particularly EA ) are kicking themselves and saying "why didn't we think of that first?"

From what I've read, the people who get the best deal out of Steam = Valve & small developers without existing publishing deals who would have trouble releasing their game or would barely receive much revenue from the sales. For the rest, I think they're probably just jumping aboard because there's nothing better out there and, if they don't punt it via steam, they won't make any more money once the game falls down the retail charts.

you can exclude the material directories (mirv wrote us a little program to go through all of our FF directories and add the excludes to the hammer config automatically), but there's nothing you can do about the props & sounds afaik.

It's been reported to valve's bugzilla and is now assigned to Mike Durand, so hopefully it'll be sorted out eventually: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/cgi- ... g.cgi?id=3

"Meanwhile, dead-cert for number one this week has got to be 'Just Got Offed', that's Puffa Fat's tribute to himself recorded before he pumped 30 bullets into his own head in a studio last month in what many say was a gang-motivated attack"

Chris Morris is the man.

Goddamn that is amazing, Teddy

What's up with the heavy concrete wall being supported by corrugated metal?

Looks very interesting!

Yeah, soundscapes are best for sounds that are constant / random, whereas ambient_generics are better for sounds that are triggered by specific events.

I disagree. That modeling tutorial is bogus because it teaches you to work with NURBS which is not a standard tool most modelers use, especially for low-poly stuff such as this. If you have access to the HLMV, reference their topology. That's how I learned how to do low-poly organics.

It's actually a sub-d tutorial iirc, so the low poly mesh stuff is also applicable

about bolean operations?

About any and every modeling technique / tool available. Just run through some of the tutorials -- there's loads; look through them and find something that covers the basics of the type of modelling you're interested (likely polygonal). Every technique and way of working is ammo for your arsenal.

Just keep practicing...

Read the max tutorials and get a solid grasp of the basics before you ask people what you're doing wrong; there's not much that anyone can say to you other than "learn the basics".

viral advertising?

Need bigger screenshots. I tend to find that small screenshots are very hard to use for critiquing work / offering suggestions as:

A: they always look better than fullsize screens (not sure why, but they always do) so I find them to be a bit artificial

B: I can't see any detail!

I'm so gonna buy this. Can't wait!

Last time I tried to use the env_tonemap_controller (shortly after the big SDK update) it didn't work with the new engine stuff we use for our mod. Even loading the source sdk base (i.e. the app that does nothing but load the lost coast background map) would result in the message "unknown entity type: env_tonemap_controller" being displayed, and that was valve's stuff, not mine.

Try compiling your map for CS:S / DoD:S and see whether it works as expected. If so, it's likely the new engine stuff that's not working.

Some other links regarding looping:

http://ambient-whisper.cgcommunity.com/ ... age-3.html

There used to be a great page here too, but it's down now

http://coldfusion.art.msstate.edu/camen ... setup.html

Hah, that's goddamn sick. Love it.

Procedural methods don't really offer enough flexibility right now -- you tend to find that most procedural textures are generated using similar methods (perlin noise [see the ubiquitous render->clouds in PS...] etc). There's not enough control or finesse available to make game textures as a replacement for hand-made textures imo. I mean, there's enough there to do some stuff and certain materials can be done pretty well, but how do you account for wear and tear, paint splashes, ripped paper, moss, water damage, scuffs and all that kind of thing? I'd say that procedural textures can complement existing methods, but they're a long way away from replacing them.

Sweet. I thank you.

Hey, I know what func_detailling means.

But, when half of the map is made of cylindrical tunnels, it's not really a good idea to shape it quickly inside cubic rooms. Especially when there's an insane amount of detail and expensive water.

I prefer waiting 7 or 8 hours (night compiling) and getting better FPS than doing a one hour compile and getting crapy vis-blocking.

You do realise that it isn't free to recurse the bsp tree during runtime? The idea that compile times and runtime performance are somehow disconnected isn't true -- if you have a million tiny little fragmented vis leaves then you also have portals connecting them, particularly when you have a local area that has a disproportionate complexity compared to the rest of the map. This slows down rendering, probably decreases the batching efficiency of the engine, collision detection and visibility determination. It's sometimes not a huge difference, but the assertion that doing it the way suggested will result in "crappy" visblocking and poorer framerates just isn't true. If you do it in an optimised fashion, vis won't suffer in terms of what is being drawn/not drawn. Furthermore, sometimes it is more costly to vis-block something than it is to render it! It's not a black and white issue really, you just need to experiment.

If it's taking anything approaching an hour I'd be concerned, even with a big map.

Well.. try to make a map with a large natural and irregular exterior with houses and a sewer network just under, composed of cylindrical rooms cut by cylindrical tunnels at 45°. The VVIS will pass a really hard time trying to figure out what's happening in there. And when compiled even if the compilation last 7 or 8 hours, it doesn't bug or whatever, everything's normal.

Like you, I think that for "classic maps", VVIS should not last longer that one hour. But in some other case, it seems to be inevitable.

Like SW said, there are ways to get around a lot of these problems. In many cases you use world brushes at right angles and make up the rest of the shapes using func_details while achieving the exact same visuals.

I wrote a dev journal on this ages ago, you can find it here:

http://www.fortress-forever.com/?a=devj (near the foot of the page).

Some pics along the same lines as SW's:

http://www.fortress-forever.com/~defrag ... e_full.jpg

http://www.fortress-forever.com/~defrag ... _empty.jpg

http://www.fortress-forever.com/~defrag ... ything.jpg

http://www.fortress-forever.com/~defrag ... etails.jpg

If it's taking anything approaching an hour I'd be concerned, even with a big map. Your goal is to basically make your base map geometry as simple as possible. Anything that is small or doesn't contribute to visibility blocking should be func_detailed. Slanted geometry can usually also be optimised.

The chances are that you've got some crazy BSP cuts going on somewhere and it's causing a lot of vis errors which creates a much more complex visibility set, causing the compile time to be vastly inflated. Run BSP and output to glview (check the valve wiki if you don't know what I mean), then open glview and look for the high-complexity areas where the leaf complexity / density is all wrong. This is the absolute best way to spot problem areas and oversights.

I use a .bat file to compile the map & run glview. I save a .vmf to "latest.vmf" then run this:

cd "X:\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\youraccountname\sourcesdk\bin"

vbsp.exe -glview "X:\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\youraccountname\sourcesdk_content\modname\mapsrc\latest.vmf"

glview.exe -portals "X:\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\youraccountname\sourcesdk_content\modname\mapsrc\latest.gl"

pause

Obviously change the paths & modname to match your own directories.

It's based on the FN-2000 afaik:

http://www.bf2benelux.com/page/bf2sf/wapens/fn_2000.jpg

You can see this gun in loads of games.

Btw, if you want to get some non-functioning links working, just click drag the URL into the address bar and it'll usually open when copy&paste fails.

Y'see, white zombies walk like this: A doodle dah, de doodle do...

That zombie is so playing air guitar. Great stuff!

Yeah that's cool, hessi. A tutorial would be nice