Steppenwolf

What's the difference from 500 million to 2bi?

1.5 billion

if had only 500m i would buy a nice house and travel the world. If i had 2b i would buy an F1 team or a football club for a hobby.

I like the color scheme and the wood. The only problem with it in my humble opinion is that ther's just too much of the wood eveyrwhere. Think it would look better if the plastic would dominate more.

And maybe you could add another color tone to add more variation. Look at these ugly ass 70's patterns. That green would fit for example or some more yellows and oranges, tho the lighting already does a good job with that.

I don't get it. Maybe it's a glorified Marmoset but for whole Environments?

Resolution is important. For the OR consumer version you are probably looking at 1440p at 90 fps and that actualy will be very important to allow proper gameplay in the first place. Consoles will not even stand a chance to play a role in that market. Times are changing. 5 years from now we will talk about 4k for PC gaming and the discrepancy between console and PC level gfx will be larger then ever before. Xbone and PS4 are not future proof. I think that's the biggest issue.

Cardboard has no head tracking. It's only good for watching some 3d movies/pictures. Enjoy your motion sickness trying to play something on it.

Nah nothing to do with strenght and dexterity. it's just that my sense of balance gets all messed up. Can't tell if i'm standing straight or tipping over.

I can't play standing with the Rift. Makes my legs shaky.

Video should catch my attention within first ten seconds or i click it away.

Good point there about the parameters and recompile. Didn't thought about that. It's a new way of thinking about how to texture my stuff after having worked for so long on source engine and only briefly on cryengine.

I read on Unreal forum they plan to raise the texture input limit to 32. That would solve most of my problems.

Yes you can tweak pretty much everything in parameters. Don't really see what's the point. It's not like you will reuse that material a hundred times in the same level. The reverse engineering is pretty difficult because the material is so complex that it takes a minute to recompile after every change. That whole material setup feels like it's going a bit against the trend of making things easier for artists. I mean i've spent a couple days now already to work out a workflow from world machine to ue4 and i'm still kinda stuck at the basics inside ue4. I don't remember exactly but how long did it take me to figure out terrain layering in cryengine. 1 hours, 2 hours maybe? Granted there is a shitload of control in UE4. It's just that in my opinion it's complete overkill for basic stuff.

does the material editor not have presets for basic material types like terrain blends? even when I used UDK i had to make the basic shader graph for a terrain setup, surely this could be a preset of some kind.

It's easy to set up a very basic terrain layering. The fun starts when it gets a little more complex. I managed to get my layers in from WM and the albedos also blend well from a distance. But on close up there was just one normal for everything. Adding more meant i went over the 16 texture input limits. So now i first have to scale down from WM. Reduce it to 3 maybe 4 layer outputs. Then figure out in UE4 how to blend everything nice and crisp on closeup, make different materials for close and near distance using the same texture inputs and also how to create a couple more diverse extra layers for level designers to work with (also via the same texture inputs and magic).

The material setup for this new landscape demo is just nuts. Wish the material system was a bit more straight forward and intuitive. Or at least if the nodes had tool tips or the demos were commented properly

Valve added DK2 support for Half Life 2 today. This is like the best shit ever. The game is extremely fun in VR. And that's coming from someone who never even was a huge HL fanboy. The VR just adds so much to the experience. Interacting with life size NPC's, shooting at life size stuff, seeing the huge citadel in the backdrop etc. The dated gfx are no issue at all with the current screen resolution. It looks actualy pretty good.

The biggest surprise is how well it works already despite it being highly experimental. Everything is functional and can be played perfectly fine. I didn't expect fps'es to work well in VR due to motion sickness. I played for around 1 hour straight, only feel a tad dizzy and have a slight headache. No comparison to the Tuscany demo that makes me feel queasy instantly as soon as i move. VR is the future! You heard it here first.

You are right about that. But as much as the internet helps us to get together it also helps idiots to build networks. It's a force for good and for evil. I don't see it moving just in one direction that helps improving the human condition in the bigger picture.

Look at all the Europeans fighting for Islamic State. That wouldn't be possible without internet and propaganda spread via internet either. Or the way how twitter has deteriorated the quality of journalism. Even on more serious news outlets it's all just "some random guy said this or that on twitter. we don't know if its true but we will report on it anyway just in case".

Sounds like it's time you work on your own game Pogo or for a small company.

Me, i still enjoy my job. I started as a level designer when i had my first freelancing gig then moved onto environment art, doing simple props and textures. With more experience the things i got to work on got bigger and more complex. Nowadays i also do weapons and vehicles. Ther's always new challenges ahead. What i like is that i have the time and freedom to learn and experiment with new tools and workflows. I'm also now at the point where i'm something of a senior figure to some of the other artists, helping them with my advice and learning stuff. It's feels a bit strange because no matter how much i've improved my own skills over the years i never can shake the feeling that i have to learn tons more stuff to feel proper confident about myself.

I'm excited about the next couple years because thers lots of cool new tools and intersting things to work on ahead.

I kinda see us going in the opposite direction even if we hit some bumps on the way. Internet gives humanity unprecedented access to information and education, which in the long run will generate more "great people", or simply just more people doing the right thing.

That's just a nice vision you have there. In reality internet is full of bigoted shit, conspiracy theories, esoteric crap and people figuring out things to be offended about. The plebs have no interest in scientific or humanistic stuff that's available on the internet. The intellectuals are fascinated by political dogma and sideshows.

 

This is only a horror scenario in a world of unregulated capitalism. In an ideal world the wealth generated by the robots will be taxed adequately and distributed to the population. Maybe then 20 hour weeks will be the norm and lots of vacation days.

Im losing confidence in our ability to arrive at this kind of a solution. It seems like income inequality is just growing, and government is more and more carrying water for the same businesses it's supposed to regulate. In other words, what were dealing with really resembles unfettered capitalism.

Yea we are steering towards a dystopian future with all the oligarchs ruling our societies instead of the people. I think there will be some second wave communism or fascism eventualy overthrowing this system. And maybe when that is over mankind will look into a brighter future.

This is only a horror scenario in a world of unregulated capitalism. In an ideal world the wealth generated by the robots will be taxed adequately and distributed to the population. Maybe then 20 hour weeks will be the norm and lots of vacation days.

spence, with just 4 layers from a world machine terrain you have: 4x albedo+ 4x normal for sub materials, 1x splat map for layer maks, 1x albedo+1x normal for macro terrain, 2x landscape coordinates (which seem to count aswell for some reason) and you sit at 13 inputs already. Throw in some detail normals, blend mask for sub materials, rougness maps and it gets really tight. Add a fifth layer and you can pretty much forget about any fancy extras. (and i was silly enough to work something out that spits 7 layers from world machine out)

Sure ther's ways with some trickery but that's quite a shitty solution for something so in the face of the player. I don't remember the landscape layering to be so restrictive when i did something similar in cryengine couple years ago. And here i thought epic had catched up with the landscape stuff. I guess ther's a reason why they used meshes for the backdrop mountains in their demo levels. Something tells me their landscape demo is gonna be super hacky aswell, some overlapping terrains, lots of meshes, some complicated material trickery etc.

The landscape system seems to be really fucking hacky. 16 texture inputs limit so realisticaly you get 4 maybe 5 somewhat basic layers out of this for the whole terrain without a lot of trickery/magic. And there doesn't seem to be a way to feed material functions into the landscape layer blend so you have to make your submaterials directly inside the landscape material wtf. So no easy way to switch out sub materials and it's a node mess galore on top of it. I hope Epic releases their landscape demo soon. Want to see what magic they use to get around these limitations.

Kickstarter was a great idea initialy but they are losing so much credibility with money grabbing schemes like this and all that potatoe salad crap. Eventualy people will just lose interest and stop caring altogether. And the ones who will suffer most from this are the small teams who actualy have some good ideas and talent but no budget.

Steppenwolf, look at unreals documentation and then look at their content examples, user created tutorials arent really up to par yet. For terrain you can check out the vehicle game in the game library.

Ah yes good point about the vehicle game. Haven't thought about that. The documentation could be better imo. Ther's lots of different documents for the same topics cross linking each other. It's rather confusing. Wish they had official tutorials for intermediate and advanced level materials. I learn best from step by step videos. The basic tutorials are good at least albeit the guy talks a bit too much and often doesn't get straight to the point.

Yea i'm currently in the same stage of learning UE4. It's a bit of a bumpy ride with ups and downs. That comes mostly from never having worked with Unreal properly i guess. The level design basics are easy to pick up but material system and blueprints can make my head spin. I feel like it takes me way too long to figure out some basic stuff with it when i don't have a tutorial that i can follow step by step. I guess in time it all starts to make sense but the initial learning curve is steep. For instance i try to make a layered material for terrain from world machine right now and that puts me right into a mess of nodes and a plethora of contradicting tutorials from people who are still learning themselfes.

I don't understand this whole f2p plan. Crytek was always such a cutting edge technology driven company. For the best technology and best gfx you need the best people. But i don't see how f2p would tempt anyone to move around half the globe or even within Europe. It's not very interesting from my perspective.

Aweseome. Thx a lot for sharing!

Carmack is a really good speaker. I could never just stand there for two and a half hours and keep talking and talking non-stop.