Kinn's name is short for Kinnschmerzen, which is german for "chin ache."


... NOW YOU KNOW. 

You're such a chin-head.

:P 

have you been doing some internet detective work? I haven't gone by that name since...well, since a long time.

It was my schoolboy nickname fyi :)

(Where did you find out?) 

Lunaran, in true slacker form, decided that rather than WORK today, he'd read the screenshots thread from start to finish.

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=3&start=849 

So, I was reading this today;

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19272

Seems somehow relevant ;p 

Look at the games they're making -- trivia games and karaoke shovelware. You can work 35 hour weeks when you're churning out shit like that. I mean if that's what you want to do as a company more power to you, but crunch is inevitable when you're making a game that strives for visual fidelity, compelling narrative, etc. etc. There's simply too much you can't plan for. 

We're crunching on Gears2. There's just too much to do at the end of the project. You have to crunch at least for a few weeks if you're going to get a product of any kind of scope completed on time.

Granted, I don't LIKE crunch - but at least we're compensated well for it at Epic. I understand that it sucks a lot more at companies where they crunch you mercilessly and then give you a hearty handshake at the end. 

Keep crunching 'til you get that PC port out, buddy ;D 

Is it worth getting for 19 eur from the bargain bin? Now that I am getting into UE3 tech a bit, I am somewhat curious about dabbling into UE3 singleplayer mapping since I've always generally found SP mapping to be more interesting than making multiplayer maps and I really loved the console GoW which I had finished before I sold my 360.

How well does the game run compared to UT3? I am playing UT3 on a C2D E6600, 2gb ram, 8600GT at 1280 x something at maxdetail and it runs pretty damn well, with only noticable slowdowns happening on DM-Deck. Should I expect the same level of perfomance from GoW PC or is it better/worse?

How big/small is the GoW editing community? I understand it wasn't that popular of a game on PC, since anyone who really really wanted to play it, had already played it on the 360, but just how popular is it? Smaller than say, Q3? Smaller than Quake? 

Game development will start resembling real industry.
Although, software industry in general should start that first. 

Yes and no. There's something about a creative process that requires an extra push at the end. It's generally what happens during that final push that makes the difference between an OK game and a great game.

As I said, I don't LIKE crunch, but I accept small amounts of it. A few months is fine. If it goes on longer than that, that's when you start hurting your product.

If games were produced completely crunch free you would very likely have an industry of cookie cutter safe games with nobody trying to push limits lest they overshoot the schedule. 

And I know the obvious snarky comment is coming regarding cookie cutter safe games but believe me ... things would be FAR worse if, say, we had unions that made sure nobody crunched or worked over time. 

Why do you think crunch is required to produce a great envelope-pushing game? 

"things would be FAR worse if, say, we had unions that made sure nobody crunched or worked over time"

Or maybe, just maybe, game companies would have to start hiring managers capable of doing their job. 

. . . would have to start hiring managers capable of doing their job

That's it, for me. A manager who actually knows how his company works.

I reckon most games are able to be made with very small crunch times - less than a month - but with bad communication and stupid planning crunch becomes a necessity. All too often some tosser in management hands down a decree that's taken as gospel, when it turns out it was an idea he had over his morning coffee and he's never worked in dev.

Then months later when the team is struggling with Multiplayer and Physics, that unfeasible idea has been agreed to and set in stone, and must be addressed.

Which hurts morale and leads to the team sitting around chatting, playing stupid flash games and not being very productive. 

"Crunch" is a synonym for "extra effort and working more than you are scheduled for". It doesn't have to happen at the end of the project but can happen many times along the way.

Any creative endeavor takes iteration and iteration takes time. Thinking that you can plan every single detail ahead of time is to be naive about the process.

Often times, things need to change. What you planned to do turns out to not be fun or it needs revisions or something new needs to be done instead. That's the sort of thing that throws a carefully laid schedule out the window.

Look, I'm not arguing FOR crunch. Do I want to be sitting here on July 4th hooking up shit in my level? No, but I'm here just the same. The work needs to get done. 

What exactly is so special about the game development process that warrants crunch? There are fucktons of other fields of work which involve long creativity-based projects (movies come to mind) where somehow, people manage to do without. 

I well realise that some crunch is present in the movie-making industry, but not on a scale anywhere close to that of game development, where having crunch periods is more of a rule, rather than exception. 

To do with the type of people that tend to work in games than, say, movies - I think.

There's always more to do - and nobody wants the final result to not be up to their own standards. 

software industry and games industry especially have lots of young people who don't have families or enough knowledge or self confidence to demand better so they go with the crunch culture.

Of course, it's not easy to avoid "crunches" from the top down either. You get delays and cancellations. You have to have a lot of slack in the time tables and still tolerate them going over. 

Uh, crunch in movies is probably just as bad as in games, for CG anyways. Pulling all nighters, and sleeping 5 minutes with an alarm clock while a test frame renders isn't so uncommon in post-processing jobs (post-processing is always the worst obviously since it's at the end of the chain).

I don't think crunch is in any way necessary, but yeah it's unfortunatly really hard to avoid, even with good management. 

"software industry and games industry especially have lots of young people who don't have families or enough knowledge or self confidence to demand better so they go with the crunch culture."

This is, again, somewhat naive. I mean, sure, you can say, "Yeah just stand up and leave." But when the project is over and they can afford to replace you with any one of the 1000s of people lined up outside the office - they will. That's not a threat and I'm not saying that to be mean, but it's the truth.

At the same time, there needs to be something at the end of the crunch for the employee. At Epic, we have an amazing profit sharing plan and that more than covers my pain and suffering. But at most companies, crunch is a pretty raw deal because generally at the end - you get laid off or the company closes or whatever. It's a harsh industry if you're not employed at one of the top players. 

There's something about a creative process that requires an extra push at the end.
That's the sort of thing that throws a carefully laid schedule out the window.

Seems to me, extra time needed is pretty predictable and easy to plan for. You just have to live with the fact that you can't account what you use that time for yet. Isn't there this rule: "take what the programmer says how long it takes, double it, and make it use the next larger unit" ? ;) 

in terms of performance it runs a lot faster than ut3, my guess is its less visually complex from its 360 origins, so I would not worry about performance.

The added single player segments are nice too :)

Single player co-op is great fun but you need games for windows live from microshaft to able to play online, and you guessed it. games for windows live BLOWS ASS CHUNKS :) 

Yes, it can be read as naive since it's a very short and simplified description of one hand of the whole affair.

It's one of those things where the whole unions, strikes, worker safety and an eight hour five day work week and communism started, ie that you can't just grab the next guy off the street.

Besides, in more complex jobs, people are actually worth something and it takes quite a lot of time to bring new guys up to speed. Not that management would often understand that though.