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typhus posted:Out of left field, but: anybody with experience at Zynga they'd like to share? devilmouse posts in this thread and works at Zynga. He seems to like it.
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Sep 24, 2011 05:03
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Black Eagle posted:After the awards at GDC, I was chatting with Peter Molyneux, who won the Lifetime Achievement Award. I asked, "So, Peter, is it all downhill from here?" He laughed, lit his cigarette, and replied, "I'm not done yet." (I'm paraphrasing.) I'll pay  for such a book.
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Sep 24, 2011 06:23
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Yeah, I'd buy that. It'd be better if he worked at one of those slave-driver companies, EA_Spouse-ish, and the dev faked his death as a way to jab a posthumous finger in the eye of his old employer, which served as a nice red herring because the AAA game he was working on was turning into a money pit...
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Sep 24, 2011 06:26
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This sounds like the most boring book I've ever heard of...
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Sep 24, 2011 06:40
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Nothing personal guys but I'm with mutata on this one. I'd rather rub my face on the wall than read that.
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Sep 24, 2011 06:54
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Aliginge posted:Nah, if you can't get an artist, don't try to do anything artsy. Stick to what you know and make something visually abstract but technically competent and more importantly fun. I probably won't do characters. But I will try and do props and whatnot. Already started on a few.
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Sep 24, 2011 10:52
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Torabi posted:I probably won't do characters. But I will try and do props and whatnot. Already started on a few. The key point is don't be overambitious in the design for a student project. If your visual design requires an artist to produce stuff that exists in real life or in a cartoon world (Ships, Characters, Cars, Bosses) and you don't have one, consider an abstract visual style instead, or even a 2D game. It could well work out all the better for it as long as it's complete and fun. And aim low, my old University team-based game dev project in third year wanted to do a flashy, 2D art-heavy Metal slug clone and it was beset on all sides by feature creep and oh wouldn't it be awesome if we did this if we have time. We didn't have time and we basically came out nothing but fancy concepts, a bunch of animation frames and half baked design docs, half baked because I, not being trained in writing design docs, had to rewrite what we had in a rush so our sole, unlucky programmer could make sense of anything we wanted to do. Yeah that project probably lost me a few friends and put me off leading any project or designing anything forever. One longtime friend still blames the project's failure on me. 
GeeCee fucked around with this message at 11:57 on Sep 24, 2011 |
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Sep 24, 2011 11:48
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Aliginge posted:Yeah that project probably lost me a few friends and put me off leading any project or designing anything forever. Admit it, you love it.
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Sep 24, 2011 11:54
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Aliginge posted:The key point is don't be overambitious in the design for a student project. If your visual design requires an artist to produce stuff that exists in real life or in a cartoon world (Ships, Characters, Cars, Bosses) and you don't have one, consider an abstract visual style instead, or even a 2D game. It could well work out all the better for it as long as it's complete and fun. Yeah I kind of predicted that happening. Thing is, we would have to do something completely different if we want to have abstract visuals. It is just a generic fantasy theme with Wizards. I can do props and stuff like that just fine as soon as I learn proper UVW mapping. Characters is my biggest issue. If we can't find anyone for it (assuming that my teacher allows it) then we will just keep the stock UDK robots. Robot Wizards!
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Sep 24, 2011 12:02
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Torabi posted:Robot Wizards! As an artist I wholly approve of this approach. It's less spangly and artsy but it'd probably be funnier and you can spend more time coding wazzy poo poo or whatever it is you coders do  Roll with it.
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Sep 24, 2011 12:55
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typhus posted:Out of left field, but: anybody with experience at Zynga they'd like to share? Been here for a little over a year as the principal/lead designer in the Boston office and we just shipped our studio's first game, Adventure World (http://apps.facebook.com/playadventureworld/). Any questions in particular you're looking to get answered?
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Sep 24, 2011 13:21
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Aliginge posted:That actually sounds like a neat little idea. Make a wizard hat mesh, a few textures for it, plop it on the NEXXXXTGEN Unreal bots and call the characters done. Haha. Guess we'll see what happens. I will probably make a futile attempt before giving in to the robot idea though.
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Sep 24, 2011 14:37
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Amrosorma posted:I'm actually on a plane to LA as we speak ( Barely, haha.
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Sep 24, 2011 15:19
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) for an interview in a totally unrelated field and I just realized something, can QA testers in LA even make a living wage?
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Yeah, for certain definitions of "living". I hope you're comfortable with hour-plus commutes and bars on your windows if you want to live anywhere affordable.
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Sep 24, 2011 21:50
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Black Eagle posted:There's no such thing as "just business." Business can't be divorced from its purpose, its motivations and product, its community and organization, and its culture and people. Business without any of these components is not business. Too many people have ideas about the corporation that are at odds with the reality. Read The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management. The publicist sent me a free copy a few years ago. That book is quite frankly the best book I've ever read, excluding my own! An excellent companion book would be The Board Book: An Insider's Guide for Directors and Trustees. As someone who has been at OEI a while now, I can say that this is a balancing act for Fearg as it would be for any CEO who came from a development background. It's not impossible to balance Development and running a company, but it's absolutely something to do some serious thinking about before/as you are starting up a company. A lot of how you handle it will depend on what you want your role to be. Again, you can do it, but it's not easy. You also need to make sure you have people you can trust to deal with the details of development since you can't micromanage development effectively as a CEO. I think maybe the best example of a CEO who had influence on development was Steve Jobs - you can tell he was a vision guy both for the companies and products, and he was making clear and precise demands of the products and/or letting people know when they weren't good enough. And even he totally blew it when he tried to step back from the CEO role in the 80s. djkillingspree fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Sep 24, 2011 |
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Sep 24, 2011 23:12
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Realistically what do people think the likelihood is of studios sticking with the next iteration of Unreal next gen?
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Sep 25, 2011 11:12
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I think they'd be mad not to if they're already invested in it. Constant reinvention of wheels costs a lot.
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Sep 25, 2011 11:22
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Monster w21 Faces posted:Realistically what do people think the likelihood is of studios sticking with the next iteration of Unreal next gen? High. When a studio is redoing it tool-chain after a major project, they'll need a pretty major reason to change their core platform. Unity offers no obvious advantage over it apart from that it's easier to learn. And the Crytek engine, Gamebyro or whatever don't have a killer feature to warrant changing.
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Sep 25, 2011 16:57
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I'd imagine that it'd be high. There's a lot of developers out there with Unreal experience, which makes it easier to find talented people that can hit the ground running when you hire them. For sequels though, I'd imagine there will be a lot of studios that will just stick with Unreal 3 and upgrade the tech, since realistically, upgrading to the next iteration would mean starting their game again from scratch in Unreal 4. There are still studios out there with games based on heavily upgraded Unreal 2 tech, after all.
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Sep 25, 2011 19:33
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Besides Unreal tech constantly being revised, it's also made for cutting-edge PCs, which are well ahead of consoles in terms of power, so it's not like you need to worry that your Unreal game is going to look dated (or at least it won't be Epic's fault if it does) Neatly sidestepping to: when a job listing for a design role asks for 3DSMax experience, what are they going to want you to do with it? Do they want you blocking out levels with it, because I would have thought using Hammer or UDK would be at least as useful even if they don't use those tools? And am I the only one that pronounces that package "ThreedeeSmacks"?
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Sep 25, 2011 20:30
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BizarroAzrael posted:And am I the only one that pronounces that package "ThreedeeSmacks"? Yes, at least on the west coast. I've never heard it as anything but "Three-Dee-Ess-Max" when said aloud, though a lot of people just shorten it to "Max", as in "Is your studio Max or Maya?"
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Sep 25, 2011 20:44
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BizarroAzrael posted:And am I the only one that pronounces that package "ThreedeeSmacks"? East coast, everyone seems to call it that here.
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Sep 25, 2011 20:48
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: Hey Gimbal, funny meeting you in this very crowded metro station with impressionable people to listen into our conversation. How's work going? : Not that great. With our assistant being swamped, I've been helping with the stuff I'd rather not do. For example, today, I'll be skinning a dog. 
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Sep 25, 2011 22:08
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BizarroAzrael posted:Neatly sidestepping to: when a job listing for a design role asks for 3DSMax experience, what are they going to want you to do with it? Do they want you blocking out levels with it, because I would have thought using Hammer or UDK would be at least as useful even if they don't use those tools? I'm not an environment artist, but my understanding is that most developers use 3DSMax to create levels, rather than tools like the UDK editor. As far as I'm aware, no one creates BSP brush geometry in Unreal any more, they just use it to place geometry that has been created in modelling packages.
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Sep 25, 2011 23:16
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UDK brush tools can choke on a thousand cocks anyway. What they do have is really tedious to use compared to radiant/hammer/editworld
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Sep 25, 2011 23:29
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The Oid posted:I'm not an environment artist, but my understanding is that most developers use 3DSMax to create levels, rather than tools like the UDK editor. As far as I'm aware, no one creates BSP brush geometry in Unreal any more, they just use it to place geometry that has been created in modelling packages. Yeah, nobody uses BSP for actual level design anymore, but I would think that for the basic blocking out stage you would more likely want to use the editor and BSP for the orange-wall level of basic planning and testing rather than blocking out the whole thing in 3dsmax or making a bunch of box meshes and importing them into the editor to block out with.
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Sep 25, 2011 23:48
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Is getting stuff from max into uedit a smooth process?
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Sep 25, 2011 23:50
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Monster w21 Faces posted:Is getting stuff from max into uedit a smooth process? Usually. It's the intended content creation tool, so it's not like you have to reinvent the wheel with each mesh or whatever.
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Sep 25, 2011 23:54
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hailthefish posted:Yeah, nobody uses BSP for actual level design anymore Um...what? Call of Duty games, just to use one example, are still bsp. Yes, there are lots of models (props, vehicles, weapons, anything super intricate), but bsp is the majority of a level--not just some sort of planning skeleton, but the actual visible final level. There are in-editor created curve primitives and terrain meshes along with those, but the majority is still plain old brushes.
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Sep 26, 2011 00:45
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Isn't the CoD codebase still the same tech originally based on Quake 2 or Quake 3?
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Sep 26, 2011 00:49
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mastermind2004 posted:Isn't the CoD codebase still the same tech originally based on Quake 2 or Quake 3?
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Sep 26, 2011 01:00
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At Trion we use a heavily modified version of Gamebryo on Rift, but it's pretty much a complete overhaul.
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Sep 26, 2011 01:25
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Gimbal lock posted:
I'm trying to think of anything to put here besides  and I'm coming up empty, so there you go, I guess. Oh, wait, I've got one. I saw a similar incident once with a rigger talking about "boning a model" in the presence of a waitress and getting shot a dirty look.
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Sep 26, 2011 01:25
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Doesn't Source still use some code from Quake?GetWellGamers posted:Oh, wait, I've got one. I saw a similar incident once with a rigger talking about "boning a model" in the presence of a waitress and getting shot a dirty look. That one's even better.
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Sep 26, 2011 01:31
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Sam. posted:Doesn't Source still use some code from Quake? Yeah, Source is just built overtop of Goldsource. aas Bandit posted:Um...what? Call of Duty games, just to use one example, are still bsp. Yes, there are lots of models (props, vehicles, weapons, anything super intricate), but bsp is the majority of a level--not just some sort of planning skeleton, but the actual visible final level. There are in-editor created curve primitives and terrain meshes along with those, but the majority is still plain old brushes. Yeah, pretty much anything descended from Quake still uses BSP in some capacity. Does tech 5 still use BSP or has it shifted towards entirely CSG?
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Sep 26, 2011 01:36
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Sam. posted:Doesn't Source still use some code from Quake? If we're going to play that game, afaik every volition title since has included "descent_physics.h" which controls our slew camera (effectively noclip/fly mode). Our slew camera also fires rockets. A new designer in charge of vehicles playing with this resulted in the flyer missions in Red Faction Armageddon. I'm not a programmer but afaik code re-use is a thing that happens and it's silly as hell to give a gently caress about it outside of trivia.
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Sep 26, 2011 01:46
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Id tech engines are more brush heavy while unreal engine games are more mesh based. Probably because the brush interface in ue editors is terrible...
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Sep 26, 2011 02:30
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Sigma-X posted:If we're going to play that game, afaik every volition title since has included "descent_physics.h" which controls our slew camera (effectively noclip/fly mode). Every time Pat Wyatt at En Masse talks about how Blizzard hacked together WC2, SC, and Diablo, it makes my inner nerd squee. I love knowing that developer humans get just as frustrated as normal humans and often resort to hilariously simple stupid awesome solutions to serious problems.
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Sep 26, 2011 02:32
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mutata posted:Id tech engines are more brush heavy while unreal engine games are more mesh based. Probably because the brush interface in ue editors is terrible... My understanding is that it's more to do with the fact that BSP is outdated, than anything else. Using BSP to get a list of triangles to be rendered, based on the camera viewpoint, doesn't fit as well with modern graphics hardware as it did in the days before hardware transform and lighting. That and the fidelity of modern environments doesn't lend itself well to brush geometry.
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Sep 26, 2011 04:28
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M4rk posted:this is the kind of stuff players would love to hear about but never do unless they go to a billion conventions and liquor up developers. 
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