TheIronKnuckle
What the hell is this "ballin" thing?
Well hey, i'd LIKE to get into the industry, but i'm not serious about it. It's more like "My ideal kind of job". But I take what i get.
Epic Rumour Mill Churns
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One question I've been meaning to ask but was never bold enough to ask is how's the pay for LDs? If any of you in the industry want to post it in public could you perhaps PM me, because I seriously want to become a professional LD and I need to know as much as I can before pursuing a career in the industry.
Just some random responses after reading this thread.
Feedback from fans: Personally I always want to check the forums to see how my maps were received, or how the game is received. I love going online and playing the game and having fun.
Hearing fans are having a great time gives a huge boost to moral, hearing constructive feedback is useful too, something to put in the back of my mind.
Hearing bitching from the same few people in every single thread about the same stuff over and over and over again makes me stop reading all together. Which makes me sad for multiple reasons: I don't hear the fun stuff, or the constructive stuff. I leave with a bitter taste even though I know there are people out there having fun with it. Plus I am sure it chases away people that are actually happy.
In short, there is a time to give feedback, and than there is a time to just let it die if you are unhappy and move on to something else.
The one post listed all that was supposedly wrong with UT3 ... but it was a huge list of "I cannot get anyone to play the game with me". That sounds more like a community problem. Sure, perhaps not as many people like it .... OR more people like to play it offline or with friends.
The Community game: I started playing Unreal 1, my first community was the alt.games.unreal forum to ask questions on how to actually play, what FPS meant etc etc. We had a tight nit group of very happy people. Many people knew eachother by name, and there were tons of private servers with passwords and millions of downloads before you could join. The maps on some of these were horrible but fun to play, cause with friendly people it is easy to have fun.
Than UT99 came out, a huge influx of people joined it, many of the old skool Unreal1 crowd
hated it to no end. Their tight nit community was being ripped apart. In UT99 I was mapping, organising clan matches, being an admin of a league etc etc. Great times. Played mods and started doing contract level design work.
Than UT2k3 came out, again a huge outcry, the UT99 crowd hated it. Some moved over anyways, some left. Over time with UT2k4 more and more people joined in, and it became a successfull game.
etc
I love playing UT3, gameplay wise I think it is the most solid UT since UT99. The increased movement was tuned down a bit to make it easier for less skilled players to also have fun. But there are still plenty of crazy moves to learn and perfect for the hardcore crowd. Yes I personally hate the whole folder structure for cooking maps, and the friends list is hard to use too. But a lot of the other small bugs and problems only come up because the game itself is fun enough to play that people notice them.
My last remark or recommendation would be:
Maybe there aren't as many people playing anymore, well, try to band up together, enjoy the game, talk about the fun times too and more people will be interested in playing with you.
Feedback from fans: Personally I always want to check the forums to see how my maps were received, or how the game is received. I love going online and playing the game and having fun.
Hearing fans are having a great time gives a huge boost to moral, hearing constructive feedback is useful too, something to put in the back of my mind.
Hearing bitching from the same few people in every single thread about the same stuff over and over and over again makes me stop reading all together. Which makes me sad for multiple reasons: I don't hear the fun stuff, or the constructive stuff. I leave with a bitter taste even though I know there are people out there having fun with it. Plus I am sure it chases away people that are actually happy.
In short, there is a time to give feedback, and than there is a time to just let it die if you are unhappy and move on to something else.
The one post listed all that was supposedly wrong with UT3 ... but it was a huge list of "I cannot get anyone to play the game with me". That sounds more like a community problem. Sure, perhaps not as many people like it .... OR more people like to play it offline or with friends.
The Community game: I started playing Unreal 1, my first community was the alt.games.unreal forum to ask questions on how to actually play, what FPS meant etc etc. We had a tight nit group of very happy people. Many people knew eachother by name, and there were tons of private servers with passwords and millions of downloads before you could join. The maps on some of these were horrible but fun to play, cause with friendly people it is easy to have fun.
Than UT99 came out, a huge influx of people joined it, many of the old skool Unreal1 crowd
hated it to no end. Their tight nit community was being ripped apart. In UT99 I was mapping, organising clan matches, being an admin of a league etc etc. Great times. Played mods and started doing contract level design work.
Than UT2k3 came out, again a huge outcry, the UT99 crowd hated it. Some moved over anyways, some left. Over time with UT2k4 more and more people joined in, and it became a successfull game.
etc
I love playing UT3, gameplay wise I think it is the most solid UT since UT99. The increased movement was tuned down a bit to make it easier for less skilled players to also have fun. But there are still plenty of crazy moves to learn and perfect for the hardcore crowd. Yes I personally hate the whole folder structure for cooking maps, and the friends list is hard to use too. But a lot of the other small bugs and problems only come up because the game itself is fun enough to play that people notice them.
My last remark or recommendation would be:
Maybe there aren't as many people playing anymore, well, try to band up together, enjoy the game, talk about the fun times too and more people will be interested in playing with you.
Good to see you Checker I dig your last recommendation!
UT 3 is a decent game and mod community is doing it's best to keep UT alive and kicking....
UT 3 is a decent game and mod community is doing it's best to keep UT alive and kicking....
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Well, you have to considder that alot of modders out there, like myself, are not looking to get into the games industry, we're doing it as a hobby basically.
And its probably this group of modders that suffers when the tech starts to get more advanced, we just want to make this cool thing we have imagined because it would be fun, we don't really have any ambitions outside of that, nor would thease be "usefull skills" for us in our dayli lives for anything other than making this mod, and then it gets alot harder to justify spending all that time and effort, not to mention getting your hands on any 3'rd prty modding tools that may be required all of a sudden.
Personally, i'd say that a truely great mod platform is one that appeals to both the hobbyist and profesional alike, if the game/engine can do that its allready a winner, but i'd have to say that UT3 has limited appeal to the hobbyist at best..
I'd frankly have to disagree.
I don't really think it's about getting a job in the industry or just being a hobbyist, what I really hear you saying is that you just don't have the time that you would need to learn all the stuff.
And that's kind of my point. It IS difficult to start modding on UT3 having no prior experience. It IS annoying to deal with some of the more advanced thing you have to do in UT3ed. And I'm certain that, to a certain extent, it will drive people away from modding.
However, I have two issues with that.
First, is it a bad thing? In previous generations of UT games there were HUNDREDS of mods announced, alphas released, and mod projects completely abandoned following that. These same people are trying to start with UT3 and failing before they even get to the alpha stage, because the problem originally was that they did not have the technical know how to take what they were doing any further and the increased need for that kind of thinking in UT3 quickly drove them a way. I really don't see this as a problem.
Second, some people are just not able to think through a process the way you do it in UT3ed, and as such are going to have problems making maps and mods for ANY new generation games. Some of them try to lessen the burden, but they all have the same core problem: they require technical knowledge that many creative people simply do not possess. I do think this is a problem, but I do not think there is any way around these people being weeded out.
So, I guess really I both agree and disagree with you. I don't think it's Epic's responsibility to make a map editor that is so drop dead simple that an 8 year old could make a map with it. They've made mapping harder by proxy and we still have tons of maps that look like 8 year old kids made them
Yeah, the Unreal community was pretty special to me too, Checker. Once the netcode was fixed, the people left playing the game were true fans and UnrealEd made for a massive playground of custom maps. There were a lot of good times. I was more of a RealCTF player, so I stuck to that group, mostly. There were problems with Unreal too, but the difference was that people didn't go on endlessly about its problems; they just played and enjoyed it for what it was.
I think a lot of the problems people have with UT3 are due to it falling short of their own expectations of how it's not something they believe it should be.
I won't lie. I know UT3 has problems that really annoy people that want to play it and like it, but they're mostly surrounding the interface. Very serious players get annoyed (understandably so) by small bugs that affect gameplay at higher levels. Other little bugs amount to annoyances (demoguy) and don't really affect gameplay, but just serve to exasperate. Onslaught players are annoyed because Warfare isn't Onslaught.
Still, UT3 has a lot going for it. I'd love to be able to use BU to rally the remaining few people that really do want to play it somehow.
I think a lot of the problems people have with UT3 are due to it falling short of their own expectations of how it's not something they believe it should be.
I won't lie. I know UT3 has problems that really annoy people that want to play it and like it, but they're mostly surrounding the interface. Very serious players get annoyed (understandably so) by small bugs that affect gameplay at higher levels. Other little bugs amount to annoyances (demoguy) and don't really affect gameplay, but just serve to exasperate. Onslaught players are annoyed because Warfare isn't Onslaught.
Still, UT3 has a lot going for it. I'd love to be able to use BU to rally the remaining few people that really do want to play it somehow.
It is, because there's alot more to it than newbies trying and failing because they reached for the moon and coulden't go the distance, most of us understand that we're not going to one-man a big mod project, so we make more realistic things within our reach, maps, player skins, mutators, gametypes, voicepacks, stuff of that nature, which makes for a constant trickle of new content that keeps people interested.
And yes, some of the stuff that gets released is not exactly awesome, but it is a bad thing to loose this constant activity of little mods, and the interest and sense of community they create, and UT3 makes alot of thease "little" mods into big projects all of a sudden.
TheIronKnuckle
What the hell is this "ballin" thing?
I don't want to play UT3, i want to play the expansion. I believe that it's going to fix enough bugs and introduce just enough new content to be a good game and much more fun then UT3.
I also don't get this big fuss over onslaught and warfare. They are practically the same except war has the orb and 6 new vehicles. The only bad thing about warfare is that we have 5 versions of torlan taking up space which could be filled up by actual maps that are fun to play. The only problem with WAR is the lack of maps (Actually, that is just a problem with ut3 itself; lack of maps). WAR itself is awesome. Much better then onslaught because we finally have a way to get rid of those endless battles over choke points.
I also don't get this big fuss over onslaught and warfare. They are practically the same except war has the orb and 6 new vehicles. The only bad thing about warfare is that we have 5 versions of torlan taking up space which could be filled up by actual maps that are fun to play. The only problem with WAR is the lack of maps (Actually, that is just a problem with ut3 itself; lack of maps). WAR itself is awesome. Much better then onslaught because we finally have a way to get rid of those endless battles over choke points.
So how do you suggest that it gets improved? My second issue dealt with what you're talking about, and that is just that the creative people don't have the technical know-how needed. How do they get this knowledge? Or how does Epic make it un-necessaary?
Prefably, people much more knowledgeable about the technology than i am should be answering that one
But i do have a few ideas, like getting rid of the whole cooking process, as i understand it, this way of doing things is very usefull on the Consoles, but doesen't really make alot of sense on the PC, thus, its fine that we can cook content for the PS3, but why do we need it when making mods for the PC? it just makes things harder and more troublesome to share assets.
I would also love to see player skins and voice packs return, without the need to cook them into a package containing a new 3D player model with anims, lots of people could be contributing good skins and fun voice packs if we could do this like we used to.
It would also have been a good idea to provide more and better information on the tech, and not just for owners of the collectors/special edition of the game, we'd want modders having easy access to this stuff if we want mods.
But ultimately, there are people out there much more capable of answering thease questions than i am, all i can do is look at this and say "well.. this is a bit of a problem".
![[SAS]Solid Snake](/data/avatars/s/30/30541.jpg?1424422840){kind=avatar}
Hmm my comments about modding has sort of turned into a technological argument, even though that wasn't my intention. What I meant was, the way things were implemented in Unreal Tournament 3 make it especially hard to modify things.
For one, let's have a look at the user interface. It's difficult to extend it for your own needs, particularily if you just want to make a customization interface for your mutator or for your gametype.
Second, some things were cooked and are hard coded into maps, such as the main menu. In UT2004 this was a config parameter, but now it sits inside a map. Why?
Voicepacks are almost impossible to do properly due to way Unreal Tournament 3 assigns a tonne of these variables when the match starts.
Large amounts of native code is frustrating, as it just hides the implementation away from people. This is particularly true in 100% native classes, that often would describe what we wanted done. This is mostly prevelant in the user interface.
Multiple implementations for a single features. When I was doing the player model customization, I discovered at least two different implementations within Unreal Tournament 3 for that feature. Why is there two different implementations with glue to stick them both together?
There are just lots and lots of little inconsistencies that make the game much harder to modify because either the intention was there but unfinished, or there was never any intention to allow modification.
Majority of people want to extend the game, not rewrite it.
For one, let's have a look at the user interface. It's difficult to extend it for your own needs, particularily if you just want to make a customization interface for your mutator or for your gametype.
Second, some things were cooked and are hard coded into maps, such as the main menu. In UT2004 this was a config parameter, but now it sits inside a map. Why?
Voicepacks are almost impossible to do properly due to way Unreal Tournament 3 assigns a tonne of these variables when the match starts.
Large amounts of native code is frustrating, as it just hides the implementation away from people. This is particularly true in 100% native classes, that often would describe what we wanted done. This is mostly prevelant in the user interface.
Multiple implementations for a single features. When I was doing the player model customization, I discovered at least two different implementations within Unreal Tournament 3 for that feature. Why is there two different implementations with glue to stick them both together?
There are just lots and lots of little inconsistencies that make the game much harder to modify because either the intention was there but unfinished, or there was never any intention to allow modification.
Majority of people want to extend the game, not rewrite it.
I know it has been said before, but UT3 shipped with just about as much maps as any other UT did (yes, this also includes the original UT, before the maplists grew fatter on the four bonus packs that were released later on). I guess the total amount of content UT2004 had raised a lot of people's expectations.
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Yeah I dont have a huge choice since we are working on a not for profit project. Itd be nice to pick and choose and choose only the people with the skills I require but thats not easy even when you have the funds behind you.
Kismet is completely UE3 specific though, I dont see how that would help to improve your chances over learning less engine specific skills. Flow charts are certainly a skill alot of people looking to get into the industry should have though so it could help their exposure to that.
Myself though I worked with flows in Max and other programs long before I was exposed to them in UE3. As I said I dont really design maps but I know what kismet is for infact I know well enough to know its fairly limited.
There are things I would like to see happen in regards to kismet and the material editor, specifically boxing commonly used operations and allowing modification of only certain user selected exposed variables (much like orbaz particle flow tools). This way a common shader technique could be boxed and used numerous times in other materials.
Its funny you mention this though about level designers because I see a bias towards maps especially in regards to the MSUC, the news, everything the levels just get alot more coverage. I dunno why that is either, if its just a visual feedback thing or custom maps are just more popular amongst the UT community.
Anyways I wont be using kismet a great deal past setting up level streaming because I feel there is more control at the script level and it allows a much greater compatibility not only across maps but also other mods. It might mean I have to rely more on programmers but if its a choice between finding more programmers or trying to pull technical artists away from their current projects/jobs then I think Id choose the programmers and hope they can explain the intricacies of things to artists.
[SAS]Solid Snake;2228160 said:
Agreed!
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TheIronKnuckle
What the hell is this "ballin" thing?
yeah i've heard it all before
. Just because UT3 has the same amount of maps as previous UT's does not excuse it imo. I say that UT lacked maps, ut2003 lacked maps and ut3 lacked maps. The only game with lotsa levels so far has been 2k4. Yes my opinion is flawed and i'm not going to bother defending it.
Okyeah i've heard it all before
Yes my opinion is flawed and i'm not going to bother defending it.
I think the biggest "flaw" in the map design in UT3 was the attempt to make them all more cohesive. Yes, it made a lot of sense in light of the single-player campaign, but the lack of variety in between the environments brings on the feeling that the maplists don't have much to offer. But that has already been said, too, right?...
So the fact that every UT game, on average, has like 10 times the amount of maps of other games means nothing to you?yeah i've heard it all before
Yes my opinion is flawed and i'm not going to bother defending it.
I agree that the main menu is a big[SAS]Solid Snake;2228160 said:
in UT3, and I don't understand why it was made the way it was.Well obviously one enhancement in UE3 was to make it easier for the designers (aka the people who should have control over that) to make the main menu with little programmer involvement. Still, the implementation in UT3 is confusing at best.
And it mostly is a problems with technical knowledge. I'm sure UIScene is great if you know the ins and outs of it, but coming by that knowledge is not very easy. The same could be said about a lot of things in UT3.
Granted this is coming from a level designers view. The trigger system in UT99 was broadcast. Just call out an event, and whom ever had that tag could do 1 thing. Than you got the scripted trigger in UT2k3 / UT2k4. Here you could set up some condition stuff, but it was hard to find them in the map and get a good overview.
Sure if you have the knowledge to use UnrealScript, kismet is just too limited, but Unreal script should not replace a levels trigger system. Triggering doors, elevators, traps, lights, special effects. You could add classes for all of those, or just use kismet.
Kismet is THE place where you will find everything that is being manipulated in the world. It is easy to read and super powerful. Yes you need programmers to give you specific things, but if you love prototyping kismet is for you.
Want a top down shooter? No problem. Attach a new camera to a box, and attach that box to the player when you want to switch, now play a matinee with a Director group and a camera group that is set to looping and you have a new game camera. Oh dear when you attach the box to the player, it rotates with the player, no problem. Just teleport the box every frame. Hacky? For sure, but we are talking about prototyping right ?
Want to make an avalanche? No problem, use some interp actors and trigger some particle effects and sounds at the right time, attach a physics pain volume or dynamic trigger volume to it that will do damage, and done.... These things you could never do without knowing unreal script. Now Level designers have that power to change the gameplay a bit, add big events. Make people mouth fall open the first time they see it.
At one time I would like to learn unreal script, I tried my hand at Lua and that was a ton of fun. Kismet helped me think more like programmers, learn what bools and variables are but most importantly how to use them. When is it better to use a bit of logic for a task, and when is it better to just have more data? etc etc.
Can you tell I love kismet?