Jon Jones

I've just stumbled across this site about working as a freelancer in the games industry, improve your portfolio - loads of useful info really

http://www.thejonjones.com

Week 24 - at last...

Jesus gawd i suddenly realised today i haven't updated me blog in aaages and with me paying so much attention to the art and 3d side and with a dead laptop - found out today EVERYTHING has died ram, motherboard etc i've finally had an oppurtunity to update the old gal.

Okies end of the first year, im still here and i hope im saying this again the next year too. I've certainly learnt alot about drawing something which im sure i'd have to apply for a specialised fine art degree to learn and moy modellings improved leaps and bounds.

I think im naturally better at modelling than i am the 2d requirement but im planning on doing lots of practice over the summer to improve myself and hopefully tie all the techniques i've learnt together. Im hoping to concept a charaecter(sp) then model him/her/it in 3d.

Im looking foward to the next year specifically working in teams producing content - hopefully it should give us an idea of how working in a development studio is and the challenges it presents.

Okay yeah i've realised i've not got any ideas to improve upon the course alot of things have already been said and im not a person to say 'do this do that' im a sheep not a uh do'er but from what i've heard the course certainly is going in the right direction

Cya next year!

Next gen asset creation

Okies i've choosen Cross Application Asset Creation for LAIR (Catchy) flicking through the number of articles this is the one that stood out for me most of the gameplay articles seemed too 'what if' for my liking rather than concentrating on the near future direction is taking, plus this lecturer raised questions i had been wondering about myself, how has the timespan increased for the completionof assets for a next gen game to a current gen one? Are more specialised people needed with a greater knowledge of packages? Are games shrinking in scope as it becomes harder and slower to produce all the assets required?

Gameplay quibbles aside Lair does look pretty good and seems to be throwing the entierity of the latest and greatest graphical effects at the screen to give it that next gen sheen, i was recently privy to a Art R&D talk from Volitiale games on how there approaching asset creation for the next gen - the major thing between the current and next generation certainly in consoles at least dosen't neccasirly seem to be polycount it seems to be more the number of maps being displayed at once, luminance maps, normal maps, specular maps as well as several other maps were shown designed for a specific purpose all being displayed at once interacting with each other and giving everything that lovely glossy sheen.

So if you consider that current gen games use typically a diffuse or colour map and perhaps a luminance map at once thats an increase of around 5 maps that have to be created to push an asset as far as it can currently be taken plus polycounts have to be taken into consideration as well as creating a high poly version for proper normal map extraction and you've got a huge increase in time, i don't feel like dragging up the quote but Epic said it used to take them around a week to create a new charecter for UT2004 from concept to running around in the engine in about a week now for a Gears of War charecter it took them around 6 weeks to do a single charecter. Thats a huge increase in time invested and it makes you wonder if the tools currently available for creating this content is as streamlined and compatible as possible. Indeed there dosen't exist a model viewer free or not that can display all the maps at once for a next generation model - if the tools don't even for you to preview your models before they have to be tagged and imported into an engine your left with feeling a tang of sympathy for the people currently trying to wrestle all of these new techniques and approaches into a workable solution

Week 19

Some game companies want highly trained graduate artists and programmers. Some claim they really prefer creative individuals with a good Liberal Arts background. They can't both be right can they?

Uh well yeah they can - games by there very nature seem to tie together both the technical aspects of creating an engine, tool set etc as well as the artistic side of story lines, conceptual art, modelling etc because games are getting more and more complex with ever increasing specialist jobs i can see these two divides one of institulationised - arghhh spelling, I'm an artist not an writer etc artistic skills and the other a more free form creative individual.

Can you teach creativity? No of course you can't and it should be more of a requirement to gain further education rather than a incentive to produce apparently 'creative' pieces of work which ultimately in most people's eyes look like pretentious drivel poop. Higher education courses and even internal development studio courses should be teaching how to learn a new tool or equipment, much the same way your taught how to use a new medium such as watercolour learning and mastering something like a modelling app inevitably leads to bouts of creative expression and i don't know flair or something i guess, something which ultimately cannot be taught.

Essentially you cannot tell an artist exactly what to draw/model whatever and seriously expect it to come back exactly as you states he's gonna slip in his own creative processes whether you like it or not.

Sound in games

I had never really considered music in games to be all the important and for a long time designers seemed to think so too, the music track simply being plunked into a level giving nothing to the beat or flow of the game.

That was'nt until i played the original Call of Duty theres a specific level that tasks you with manning an artillery cannon and destroying a series of incoming tanks as the flow of tanks ever increases and the game becomes more and more frantic a steady orchesteral score is introduced increasing not only in granduer but also in volume so by the time the tanks are piling up you can barely hear the weapoons fire.

What striked me about it was not the sudden introduction of the music but the way i did'nt notice it until it was over, the sudden silence making more of an impact upon me than the actual score,

Rather than games simply following linear forms of narrative such as films where the changing events trigger a score change i think games have to try something a bit more dynamic, games are by there very nature non-linear so trying to force an approach to music that is suited to the linear, pre-defined world of film is a bit foolish. However go back far enough and this simply did'nt matter the old 16 bit platformers of yore presented the player with a level the player working there way from left to right until they reached the end where the next stage was loaded, the choice of music was reflected in the type of stage if it was an egyptian looking level Egyptian inspired music would start to play and so on this music would play much like the level in a linear fashion from beginning to end, you could backtrack but what would be the point? There were enemies up ahead.

Also due to there technical limitations the music and sound effects of the time could only playback primitve midi tunes, this gave them a distinctive sound signature so thats part of why if you were to play the Super Mario Bros it would instantly register as a piece of videogame music.

Jump foward to the 90's and the advent of the cd-rom and faster processor speeds meants sound could be reproduced in much higher fidelity and was more akin to movies - but instead of epic sweeping orchestral music or even a soundtrack in suiting with the style and charecter of the game they swamped them with trashy dance mixes i don't care if sony made gaming 'cool' with the playstation by dumping it in nightclubs and slapping *shudder* 'clubland hits' into the games it just made them shallow, two dimensional - gamings equivalent of MTV. The music did'nt reflect the game or the mood the games were trying to set. It was like rolling past idlyic awe inspiring hills with some boy racers mix tape blaring over the top - grr rant over

Anywho jump foward to the nowish and sound and additionally the music in games is taken alot more seriously, designers now realising that using a linear form of audo presentation simply dosen't work for all games mixing in dynamic music that shifts between action and dynamic reflecting the events in the game and also relying on prescipted events such as a boss fight to further emotionalise the action

Would you like fries with that?

This is mighty interesting its an article i've discovered on gamasutra about the marketing and creation of all these Blitz / Burger King games - pretty interesting as it covers the original reasoning behind approaching Mr King in the first place and the effect its had on the company.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20061113/sheffield_01.shtml

Trinigy engine is a serious games engine *frown*

Lookie here!

Been looking more into game engines more spefically the more exotic ones, found this its a game engine developed not only for normal games but actually mentions its application for Serious games so i guess that guess lecturer chap was'nt completely mad.

Some of the things the developers can promise it can do is 'Automotive testing simulation, Virtual ship training simulator' among many other simulations but my personal favourite has to be 'Conference visualisation'...i get the feeling they were scratching there heads when they put that one in

Game engine task

Game engines are the invisible glue that seems to tie together all the assets that create a game -a decent engine can literally make or break a game long before the user gets to sample any modicum of gameplay. At its most basic level a game engine ties together among other things a 3d renderer, collision detection, sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking among many other things. Creating a link from the base level of a computer to the inputs of the user, often via a graphical api like DirectX or OpenGL As far back as Wolfenstein, engines by way of my nerdy legend John Carmack have written ever more and more complex engines adding in feature after feature as the power of pc's have increased the feature set of these engines has in turn increased - in fact game engines and 3d accelerators have an almost symbiotic relationship with the increasing speed of pc's linked to the ever increasing feature set of the engines.
A engines key engine technologies are constantly being updated and up hauled for a new faster technique in fact its rare for an engine to have a feature in one iteration but lack it in the next - game engines seeming to take a kitchen sink approach to features trying to pack in as much as possible.

Nowadays game engines are some of the most complex pieces of software written tieing together countless features to ultimately display and run a game. Because of there overarching complexity and the time it takes to program engines are often licensed out to third parties, the most significant of these are the Unreal and Quake engine games of which the licence for a single game can cost upwards of one million dollars for the latest Unreal 3 engine. These engines now include an entire suite of features and tools to better implement and create there game – merely having the engine is nowadays not enough, developers expecting an entire suite of tools to better implement and create there game.

Subtractive and additive could mean one of two things I’m not too sure which so I'm gonna detail then both – woo! Subtractive and additive editing is relation to how game levels are created, subtractive takes away a predefined block from the ‘void’ while additive editing means adding features to a featureless 'void', such as walls, floors etc much like space. I could write entire essays on why subtractive editing completely sucks simply because of my Quake engine knowledge but they fall on the unreal engine devil side so i'll ignore them. Simply having subtractive editing seems to rely more on blocking out a level then falling back on predefined models to populate the level while additive mapping rely's more on adding further details still in the level editor and allows quick and easy eidit and manipulation
(Think im gonna write a blog about all this actually)

Now the other Subtractive and additive doodad could have meant adding and taking away features of an engine depending upong its end use.
The most obvious examples i can think of are the Doom3 and source engine lighting implementations, the Doom3 engine uses a per pixel lighting engine meaning all lights in the game can cast shadows depending upon the objects surrounding it and is automatically updated if the objects move around, the shadows lenghtening and shifting - this is very demanding on most pc's so the Doom3 engine is limited to a few lights each time and refined to traditional corridor based enviroments while the Source engine relies upon precomputed lightmaps, the map creator places lights around key points in the level editor before compiling it which works out how each light would react and illuminate the surroundings. This is much faster and more suitable for larger expanses of surroundings the only problems is the lighting is entirely static - shooting a light would certainly not have the same outcome as if you shot it in Doom3 and moving or editing a light in the level editor would mean you would have to recompile the entire thing. A game like far cry which features both indoor and outside expanses relies upon both precomputed lightmaps and per pixel lighting to achieve the desired effect, i think developers will be dropping lightmaps almost entirely in future titles as the hardware becomes more powerful and fall back on stuff like soft shadows and the like

Blogger you curr

Goddamnit i hate blogger that or im an idiot it seems not to have posted aload of blogs i wrote mostly over the winter break - ah well there up now all posted on the same day(!) - guh, thats gonna look weird

Machinima hate

So judging by the views of many in the lecture today nobody likes machinima, i can kinda see why in some parts but i disagree with many others. Using stock animations and models for something outside of the scope of the original game is foolish yes - seeing master chief in an embarrasing yet apparently humourful (not sure if thats even a word) social situation as he goes through a looping reload animation is so metally jarring it hurts, but when there used to further extend a games story or ethos it can only be a good thing, right? Much the same way fans write fan fiction for there favourite film or book machinima could be used for games.
Alot of the machinama out there at the moment is based around comedy and lets be honest all of its crap, its about as funny as you'd expect from a 14yr old living in Texas i can see parelles people draw with comics many people expect comics to be funny have some kind of punchline at the end of the three frames, raised on the sheltered antics of the Beano and the Dandy its hardly surprising - i struggle to think of any newspaper cartoon that isnt marely shallow humour and im including those shameful daily mail strips about footballers and girls with there tops off. But dig deeper and comics are a serious genre as grave and adult as there big brother, literature. Anyone who's read through Holocaust inspired Maus will testify to that - all monochrome and tiny frames crammed onto the page the thing oozes depression and dispair.
So why can't machinima try this approach? Get rid of all the damn linkin park music video covers and making something truly dark almost artistic? It was also mentioned in the lecture how using compuer models will never be as good as the real thing, well no they won't, thats uncanny valley territory there humans are very good at identifying a real human from a fake be it a real model or onscreen , even the very finest pixar models which take days to properly render look stiff and wooden which is why they often go for a more stylised cartoony look, think Incredibles. Look at the latest iteration of team fortress its clearly take a leaf out of the incredibles design book somehow the models look MORE realistic when they follow the design rules commonly used for more traditional cartoons.
If someone would take the time to create custom models for a given role, never seen before only used for the role in which you first see them with the props and enviroment matching the same design and visual look with an intelligent story and direction would it still be crap? I can see machinima becoming gamings equivalent of claymation - some of the more arty one's you never see in the mainstream are positively evil, brief visions that takes months sometimes years to create rather than constalty trying to twist gaming and the tool set that comes with it into something its not, in this case mainsteam films why can't they be something on there own?