some people might have heard something about ION storm closing maybe possibly perhaps. 

How come I press submit and the form clears without making a post? 

Those are his three attempts at posting we see (or rather, don't see) above here. 

RPG, did you get my email? 

Only include your best works or put more focus on the best and downplay the others but leave a link to them so that the one looking at your portfolio can look at them IF they want to but not having them take much space and detract from your recent stuff. 

what's the deal with that?
iirc, it started with morrowind -- you can't actually build any geometry, only place in prefab meshes for corridors and such.
and farcry is like this as well. no brushes no nothing, just prefab objects.

and then painkiller. you can't even build maps with the editor at all, you need to use a 3rd party program to create the geometry.

what happened to the good 'ole brush? is it better the make games without brushes?
but d3 and hl2 still are brush based... so what is going on? 

1) A lot of companies prefer to use a industry standard like Max/Maya/whatever so they don't have to maintain an internal editor and train people for it. It also allows an artist and designer to work concurrently.

2) Older engines (and some new ones like Doom3) preferred a solid representation so that they could generate a bsp and other things. Most modern engines just use trisoups that any package can generate.

3) Arguably, brushes are more trouble than they're worth for high-poly environments, especially ones with lots of organic detail. 

Necros: Brushes were hacks to allow quick building of 3d by people who didn't know 3d modelling. It's really only a few steps above building Doom maps with 2d shapes.

Newer games more and more often require more detail and with 3d modelling programs like 3d Studio Max and Maya becoming availible for even hobbiests, brushes are slowly going the way of the dino.

From experiance, I can say working on a game and having modelers do all the architecture bits in 'prefabs' while I build gameplay is a very quick way to build maps rather than having me build damn near everything and having modeller's skills be put to use only with a few neat objects here and there and characters. 

i'm just really annoyed with the lack of freedom in these games.
i'm not bothered by the fact that PK requires a map to be built in maya or 3dsmax since everything is built in there, but i couldn't understand why some games used brushes while others used poly modelling. 

Scampie: if brushes are hacks, why do HL2 and D3 still use them? is that just laziness on id and valve's part (which i find unlikely)?

From experiance, I can say working on a game and having modelers do all the architecture bits in 'prefabs' while I build gameplay is a very quick way to build maps rather than having me build damn near everything and having modeller's skills be put to use only with a few neat objects here and there and characters.
but doesn't it bother you that you don't get to do any of the geometry building anymore? 

In the words of Tyler Durden, "It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything." 

d3 is just an extension of id's older engine, I suspect they just got grandfathered in. I'd bet if Carmack were to make a fully new FPS engine, everything would be built with models rather than brushes... though id may then also with that go ahead with a new editor that does model editing directly in the program and they're instanced from the .map. It just doesn't make sense to make worlds out of blocks when most often, you only see one face of the block.

In terms on what I do here at work, no it doesn't bother me I'm not making geometry. Then again, I'm not working on a FPS game. I'm working in a tile engine, this is just a natural evolution of old 2d games that used only small sets of 10x10 2d graphic tiles to build the world from. I still build the layouts, and get to put input into what things should look like, and what objects I'll place around the level. I'm still the one who gets to decide alot of how the level will look and feel and play, just the responsiblities are broken up in a smart way. 

long ago, BSP was useful for a whole bunch of reasons, like fast tracelines for physics and lighting, visibility management, sorting polygons for correct draw order, dividing world space for various culling operations, etc.

Most of these aren't necessary anymore, but if you get rid of BSP, you still need a solution for each of these -- octrees to divide world space, manually setting up the showing and hiding of world chunks so you don't draw everything, z-buffer to handle draw order problems, etc.

It's possible that dev teams that still use BSP in their engines do so becuase the team is used to it and it still works. 

talking about func_submit buttons...

[19:34] <metlslime> and there should be a "spell check" button
[19:34] <ProdigyXL> Yes, add that. 

goddamn die already 

Fuck You Preview Button

yesyesyes 

I downloaded the source just to take a gander, not that I'll completely understand it but I'm curious about the AI and can't yet find any AI code, or at least any file that is obviously AI. So if anyone knows, where is it stored? 

so... AI.QC wasn't obvious enough for you? 

anywhere. 

so you downloaded the quake engine source looking for the game code? 

Expecting to find everything except for art/media assets. No big deal anyway, was only curious what the code was like. 

there are two parts to quake. the engine code and the 'game' code, or QC.

engine code does all the complicated stuff and pathfinding, and qc handles behaviour and pretty much everthing else concerning the game that's not in the engine. 

once you get a hold of the .qc files you may want to take a look here
http://www.planetquake.com/minion/tutorial/main.htm 

 

ergwerg