FMPONE

Already know exactly what I'm gonna make when that sweet, sweet Quixel drops. How about you all?

The alternative would be paying some individual to hand author assets based on photo ref There’s no fighting this so I didn’t want to sound too fatalistic or anything. UE4 is incredible, Quixel seems incredible. I just think that the whole Quixel suite in particular and similar tech generally speaking seem powerful enough to sharply lower the need for env artists across the board. I think it’s only “democratizing” if your definition of democratizing arbitrarily glazed over the likely job displacement caused by new technology. But, that’s pretty much where things are headed for most industries, so not a unique story there. Personally I can’t wait to load it up once it goes live. It’s very exciting

Yes, this is hilarious to me. Like when the guy recreated Dust2 and said Quixel was “democratizing environment art” it’s like, LOL. All you did was make making money doing environment art completely non-viable. Don't get me wrong, the tech is incredible. But it’s very much in line with the rest of the economy, automating jobs away essentially because computers are basically magical at this point. To call that democratizing seemed like a such a profound misapprehension of what was truly going on. A pretty good indicator of how tech companies will treat innovation that displaces human workers by putting their service jobs in the hands of computers and then handing that tech to customers directly: “hey, this is democratizing!”

Been meaning to try this, seems to make environment art pretty much legos that any goofball can do. So that's always nice

You can call it whatever you want, we have to do the work of designing objective rules. These are the ones we came up with. If you don't like the rules, there is no pressure to enter the Contest. Every Contest will have different goals, rules, etc. We want to provide additional encouragement to the mapping community. Sometimes people will spend a long time polishing something where, they may have been better off starting from scratch. Other times, they had something sitting around that was worth re-visiting. Both situations provide value to the community, and thus far the only winners of our Contests have been works started from scratch during the Contest. As long as entries conform to the rules, as written, we will not disqualify them. It's really that simple.

It is not "difficult" to catch people who are working on stuff they haven't released. It is impossible. Thus, we're not attempting to do it.

This summarizes my thinking. The problem with saying “you have to start from scratch for this contest” is that there is no way to enforce that. Someone could enter the contest with a near complete map which was never released or shown publicly and say “I built this in one day”. So, there is no magically getting around this problem. We would all know that’s BS but there would be no way to enforce it because as you point out, we’re not the CIA. We created objective standards so that we can apply a set of rules to them (no maps which were publicly released in a condition further than greybox).

This discussion seems to be getting a little, or maybe a lot, off track. This entry confirms to the rules. The only publicly released version prior to our Contest Announcement was a Workshop upload with custom greybox textures. Custom greybox textures do not violate our rules on prior uploaded work. As for criticism of maps posted on Mapcore, I’d like to remind people that there is always a human being on the other end of our forum. Constructive criticism is the central tenet of our forum. If you don’t have anything constructive to say, step away from your computer and go for a walk. Always remember the human being on the other end of your monitor. Thanks. edit: Off-topic posts (arguing about whether the entry conforms to contest rules) will be hidden/removed. If you have any questions, refresh your memory of the Contest Rules.

Last memory of Diablo 2: blaring Linkin Park in the background via my CD drive, skipping middle school to play online. Getting d/c’d every time someone used the phone. Losing all of my items and then desperately trying to find them again (futile)

That IS intriguing, the idea of a giant time-sink RPG also had limited appeal for me.

Show is enjoyable so far. Solid 8/10.

Oooh, that would be great.

I think this is a good example of where Blizzard went wrong with their Overwatch 2 promo. One of the talking points was an upgraded graphics engine, but this difference is subtle IMO. Plus, if you did want to highlight the changes to the engine, wouldn’t it be smart to keep the design the same at first, to allow for a 1:1 comparison? Without a direct before and after you have to just hope people like a completely different outfit more than the last one. I have total confidence OW2 will be a good game that’s noticeably better than the original, but nothing in the trailers showed that at all. The reason I’m confident is because apparently the game won’t be out for a while yet, and there’s plenty of time to really refine things. Focusing the cinematic on Winston the entire time was a weird choice as well, he’s just not a visually pleasing character design (IMO again) and he absolutely dominated the runtime.

Overwatch 2 trailer! Both Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 seem like they're iterations on the old engines, which is fine. I guess Diablo 4's trailer just wowed me a bit more, if I'm honest? Hopefully more stuff comes out that shows why people who may not have played Overwatch 1 that much should tune into the sequel. The co-op PVE stuff is nice, but the robots don't seem to have a ton of personality as villains, I can't get too excited about the prospect of fighting them.

ridiculously good trailer, over the top good