The Relationship Between Engines and Tools

[keres]

Would you say that the game engines are too advanced for the current tools used to make content for games? I've just been thinking about this more and more. I find that when i first started mapping, the realism look wasn't yet achieved and it made content development much more easier.

Has anyone else here considered that photoshop is near obsolete for texture creation? I found it was when i started to work with it more recently. I find 3dsmax 10 increasingly difficult to produce "pretty" content anymore, whereas i could easily slop out a player model in 30 minutes that would have been revolutionary probably just a few years ago.

My opinion is that engines are coming out better and better, but we use essentially the same tools to make shit for them as we did years back. What do all of you big-time-pro-game-developers think?

[Wesley Tack]

I think it's still very possible to make whatever you want look good in current and also next gen engines. People imHo just over exaggerate with some of the work they make for small assets that in the end don't really add much to your level.

You can still make realistic stuff with a minimal amount of resources. About 3DSmax, again, I think people spend too much time building ridiculously high poly models for the simple assets that don't really need all that work in the first place.

It's not because a triple A company who has 50 to 80 people working on one game have the time and resources to do that that you as an individual have to go to that length.

So answer your question, the tools are most definitely good enough for all engines out there and will be for quite some time imo.

[keres]

Eh, i guess. It's probably because i try hard to make better assets for engines like quake 3 that i blame my work instead of the engine for looking not-as-good. Hmm, which reminds me, i need to make another thread about the borkiness of max's grid.

[Hipshot]

Has anyone else here considered that photoshop is near obsolete for texture creation?

I don't think there's any serious texture artist that would agree - I'm not saying you are somewhat less serious about it.

Think about it for a while, would you choose another application for creation of the diffuse stage, do you think a majority of all texture artists would use something else?

Eh, i guess. It's probably because i try hard to make better assets for engines like quake 3 that i blame my work instead of the engine for looking not-as-good. Hmm, which reminds me, i need to make another thread about the borkiness of max's grid.

Don't blame the Q3 engine, you can still make really good stuff in there even as of today and compared to many other games. An older engine should not be a show stopper for a good level designer/artist.

You just have to learn how to work with less =) And if you compare UT3 and QuakeLive - less is most certainly much much better!

[AlexM]

I hate to sound like one of those guys that rags on an engine but going from source to crysis was a mapping orgasm

I still love source though

[-HP-]

Oh... good old Photoshop and 3DsMax. Putting it simple, they are old applications with loads of patches on top of it. They just naturally evolved to the apps you see right now, which is not exactly a good thing sometimes.

Thing is, we got used to them, and we don't imagine ourselves using anything else, right? Even with all the useless stuff, over-complicated UI's, etc... Probably the only way we would change to another apps are if the companies that worked on those apps all this years, used the knowledge they gained with it, and build another app from ground up.

As 3d artists, our life is not easy, especially when things start getting complicated and you start adding another apps to your pipeline, like sculpting apps for example.

You can use 3dsmax, a sculpting app, a 3rd party unwrapper program, a texture baker (like xnormal), photoshop, etc. (not to mention the plugins that you may use for all and each of those apps) It gets messy, but you also get used to it... I don't see this life getting any easier for us any time soon.

[2d-chris]

To make good games you don't need cutting edge tools or streamlined art pipelines (I hate that word pipeline!!) What you need is the right people and long enough to do it. I've seen so many people blame bad tools for making a bad game, when there are plenty of developers who build better games with worse tools. My point here is a good workman never blames his tools ... it just takes most people a decade to realise this.

That being said, daily I use one of the most feature complete engines in the world so my perspective might be a little messed up Making the best use of techonolgy you have is an art form by itself

[AlexM]

That being said, daily I use one of the most feature complete engines in the world so my perspective might be a little messed up Making the best use of techonolgy you have is an art form by itself

That's true, it's always fun to see how much you can squeeze out of older engines.

[KungFuSquirrel]

To make good games you don't need cutting edge tools or streamlined art pipelines (I hate that word pipeline!!) What you need is the right people and long enough to do it. I've seen so many people blame bad tools for making a bad game, when there are plenty of developers who build better games with worse tools. My point here is a good workman never blames his tools ... it just takes most people a decade to realise this.

That being said, daily I use one of the most feature complete engines in the world so my perspective might be a little messed up Making the best use of techonolgy you have is an art form by itself

There's any number of ways to make great games, whether it be licensed tech or custom tools, and the best way is going to vary greatly from one studio to the next. There are, unfortunately, lots of situations where the tools and pipeline (as much as you hate the term, it's one of the most critical parts of efficient development) end up being a bottleneck and/or a liability, especially in large teams. Unstable tools are unacceptable. Tools with performance issues are unacceptable.

The bigger the team and the bigger the budget, the more critical it gets. If a team of 10 designers each lose an hour of work per day due to inefficiencies or crashes, that's more than a day of lost productivity... every day. I've been in situations where tool or build instability has resulted in far greater losses than that.

Everyone's complaining about teams being too big, budgets being too high, and games costing too much - With better and faster tools, you can build faster with fewer people. Built faster with fewer people, your budget drops. Your budget drops, you need less money to make a profit. Need less money to make a profit, maybe you can sell your game for cheaper. Sell your game for cheaper, maybe you luck out with more sales and end up with even more money to fund your next project. A bit of an idealist approach, really, but I believe in it.

Unfortunately tool development in itself isn't exactly cheap. I recall hearing that the budget for UE3 tools development was something like 3x a decent AAA title - and that was when Gears was about to ship. I imagine you guys at Crytek have put some significant time and effort into your engine and tools as well, with significant financial investment.

Now, there's another half of production that this ignores, which is planning and scheduling - if you can't properly prioritize, plan ahead, or commit to certain key decisions (the combination of which often leads to not even being able to properly play the game for months and/or years), you're hosed no matter how good your tools are. Way too many traps out there, heh.

[jal_]

I don't see how photoshop can get outdated, tbh. It's a great tool for a task that won't change. In fact, I guess the adobe people would love it to change so they'd have an easier time selling newer versions, because being honest, photoshop hasn't add any really new feature since around version 5. Most of their new features are compatibility bits between their different programs.

Modelling tools will probably start getting outdated when the voxel generation comes in, tho.

[fonfa]

I think engines made US obsolete. Now there's such a HUGE ammount of work to get a level done, that tasks are split between level designers, level artists, scripters etc. Back in the goldsrc days you could make a whole map by yourself in no time.

Photoshop is great but I think it lacks a bit on the texture creation thing. I remember using a program back on the 90's that was meant for texture painting. You'd specify your texture size, say, 256x256. Then it'd create a new document that fills the whole screen, tiling every 256 pixels. Anything you painted in one of those squares would be applied to the other ones too, so, seamless painting, without having to use that offset crap.

To me it seems like such an easy thing to implement, that would speed up texture painting so much...