Jonathan Skinner has the rare combined experience of working as a level designer on many top titles along with serving as a systems engineer in the mainstream corporate world. His decade of work in the game development industry began with level editing using DEU for Doom in 1994. From there he progressed to using BSP and QuArK for Quake1 and then on to QERadiant for Quake2. In those early days, he also gained experience with UnrealEd for Unreal.

More recently in his level editing career Jonathan worked with Artemis Software as a lead level designer, working on titles such as Mythica: Gladiator Arena, a total conversion for Quake3Arena. For this project he successfully broke away from traditional level design restrictions and created realistic environments for the gladiator-style game. Using Radiant he created an environment that emulates an actual Roman coliseum. This coliseum level was later revised for use in the Machinima film, The Battle of Xerxes.

Learn more about Jonathan at http://guildhall.smu.edu/about/Bios/SkinnerBio.htm 

The Guildhall at SMU has posted new Q&As from Richard �Levelord� Gray, Graeme Devine and Paul Jaquays. The three industry veterans share insights on their careers as game developers, including how they broke into the business, most embarrassing professional moments, advice to aspiring game developers and more.

Check out the complete interviews at: http://www.guildhall.smu.edu/News/developers.htm 

 

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I don't mind seeing interesting anouncements, but these lengthy posts border on forum spam. If I'm alone on this I'll just shut up. 

yeah, that seems more like a beta driver problem than a fitzquake problem. Though, i'm not sure why direct3D drivers should affect opengl rendering, but whatever... 

it's definitely forum spam. 

I personally didn't mind... I mean, at least it has relevance. Could've been 'ENLARGE YOUR DICK CLICK HERE TO CLAIM YOUR FREE SAMPLE.vbs' spam 

:( 

Some maps in #3588 are UT. UT+oldskool SP *is* Unreal SP but maps made using UED2 (much nicer) also work with it.

sbegin1 is UT, but Chicoverde's original ShamuQuest is not. I found the end level tedious in excess maze but it has good challenging combat and is overall impressive. Just played Invasion which also had some relatively intense combat, even if the architecture deserves some criticism. I also recc. Hexaphet. Tower of Shrakritha isn't very challenging and I didn't really get into the first section but I did find the fog section and the next very immersive and effective in the way Unreal was originally intended. If you do have UT, also add Excessive Unreal. I'll try star861. Any pointers on *challenging* levels?

If you never finished Unreal originally, start at Bluff or so and go from there, the end is excellent. Summon a translator and maybe a flakcannon and go (summon doesn't work in UT -- ??).

Of course my levels are also recomended (see news), but I suspect you may be looking for other levels after trying that and want something easier ;) . I am working on a easier map now, kind of a speedmap/trainer/chance to screw around with most of the weapons in a short level. Shouldn't be long (?).

Did find a problem with UT/oldskool: the default minigun is the UT one (only weapon it does that), which dissappears if you run out of ammo, potentially leaving you with hundreds of unusable rounds in Cats 2. The U1 mini is fine though.

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the rare combined experience of working as a level designer on many top titles along with serving as a systems engineer in the mainstream corporate world

I'm not sure that's a good thing
-- a hardware engineer

They also don't want to tell you up front what it costs for some reason. 

good choice to not approve them. They are level-design related, but read too much like press releases. And obviously, they are advertisements for the Guildhall. 

anyone notice that despite what the guy's bio implies, they don't actually list a single commercial game that he's worked on? It's all hobbyist mod stuff. 

With the exception of maybe Ortican, the others should be Unreal strictly. I do recall Illhaven needing a UT texture file, but it's fully playable in Unreal. sbegin 1 & 2 should be Unreal compatible.

As for challenging, Ortican's pretty good. 

Isn't Aardappel teaching on that course? 

Ad's an Ad. We'd feel the same if metlslime posted 'Look at all the new features in the game my company is working on, it'll be done soon for a MSRP of $49.99 bleh bleh bleh'. 

Yeah it was definitly the drivers, I played with every cvar, and command listed to no avail. I even monkeyed with the driver settings still nothing. SO... I uninstalled them and re-installed the original oem drivers off the 3dfx disk and everything is back to normal.

The drivers themselves are totaly rewriten versions, supposedly able to work with all the newer games in opengl, and d3d. My guess is the guy didnt spend too much time working on support for older games. 

He's teaching programming at the guildhall. 

btw what are the minimal system requirments for fitzquake? It's mentioned in readme that FQ is supposed to run if you're able to run glquake.

well, glquake runs with my 12 mb voodoo2 and fitzquake doesn't. 

it's supposed to work with the same hardware that runs glquake, but in practice its memory usage is a bit higher. What happens when you try to run it? 

Bruce Shelley, senior game designer at Ensemble Studios/Microsoft Game Studios, taught earlier this month at The Guildhall at SMU. The guest lecturer at Wednesday night�s practicum, Shelley pulled from his many years of experience in the industry to teach Guildhall students what he calls the �Guidelines for Developing Successful Games.� Shelley has worked on games including both Age of Empires and Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings as well as the original editions of Railroad Tycoon and Civilization (with Sid Meier at Microprose).

Read highlights of Shelley�s lecture at: http://www.guildhall.smu.edu/news/Shelley_Talk.htm

Visit Ensemble Studios/Microsoft Game Studios at: http://www.ensemblestudios.com


REJECTED NEWS 

Or is it someone c'n'p'ing text? Because if you are, please submit it as news then a moderator can decide whether it's worth our while reading. 

when a moderator rejects a news submission, it ends up here. 

[News submission rejected and entire content deleted by metlslime. It was an advertisement.] 

perhaps another option of 'delete' should be added to news thread approval?

in any case, if this continues, we should contact the webmaster of the site, all the guildhall ones have been coming from their ip (dns confirms), and this is pretty much a step below spam. 

It looks strange: the first second I see the console and then it turns red and strange pictures start to run (these pictures are large symbols that should be shown in the bottom of the screen - player's head, numbers etc)

I may send you a screenshot if you want