You people are crazy!

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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby Gary on Sun Jun 16, 2013 8:31 pm

back when I used to mod halo2 on the xbox it was all community made tools as well. Though we couldn't build custom bsp or lightmaps. Custom levels were maps with the bsp usually nulled and the map geometry was usually just a bunch of props. (stock props since we couldn't import custom collision models )

I wonder why that new titan fall game is on the Source engine. ..
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby mazman34340 on Wed Jun 26, 2013 6:29 pm

As part of the pros and cons of the editors, Raven's editor is a bitch to navigate but it has a great terrain tool that I want to rip from raven into Hammer.

Oh, and it even has example maya files and simple ways of importing files.
Last edited by mazman34340 on Wed Jun 26, 2013 6:38 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby Kosire on Wed Jun 26, 2013 6:37 pm

Gary wrote:back when I used to mod halo2 on the xbox it was all community made tools as well. Though we couldn't build custom bsp or lightmaps. Custom levels were maps with the bsp usually nulled and the map geometry was usually just a bunch of props. (stock props since we couldn't import custom collision models )

I wonder why that new titan fall game is on the Source engine. ..


Because the Infinity Ward guys really liked IWEngine and how Source is very much like it?
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby nub on Wed Jun 26, 2013 10:43 pm

Kosire wrote:
Gary wrote:I wonder why that new titan fall game is on the Source engine...


Because the Infinity Ward guys really liked IWEngine and how Source is very much like it?


That's precisely why. Both engines have the same roots and use BSP and such, so it's no wonder why these guys would choose Source. It's a type of engine they're very familiar with. Not to mention they purchased a license, meaning they probably have full access to the code, as well as all the tools that Valve uses. I'm sure Valve has their very own tools that make the pipeline much more manageable, but they just choose not to release them to the public. The tools could be incentive for developers to purchase a license. If they released these tools to the public, then they'd have no commercial value I suppose. Just guesswork, though.

But yeah, Source is very capable of looking pretty, despite how out of date and wonky it is. I agree that something needs to happen, mainly Source 2. We can only guess at how much more advanced it will be. Considering how long it's been, I'm speculating it'll be as ground-breaking as Source was back in 2004 when HL2 released and such. I hope, at least.
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby Gary on Thu Jun 27, 2013 4:29 am

nub wrote:'m sure Valve has their very own tools that make the pipeline much more manageable, but they just choose not to release them to the public. The tools could be incentive for developers to purchase a license. If they released these tools to the public, then they'd have no commercial value I suppose. Just guesswork, though.


Probably uses third-party(non-Valve) software for important parts of the tools. Which prevents them from releasing the tools publicly.
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby nub on Thu Jun 27, 2013 4:43 am

Ah. That makes more sense.
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby Sathor on Thu Jun 27, 2013 5:07 am

nub wrote:But yeah, Source is very capable of looking pretty, despite how out of date and wonky it is. I agree that something needs to happen, mainly Source 2. We can only guess at how much more advanced it will be. Considering how long it's been, I'm speculating it'll be as ground-breaking as Source was back in 2004 when HL2 released and such. I hope, at least.


Something that is developed for a too long time becomes outdated while being developed. Let us say the engine was really awesome until 2011, but then suddenly, Frostbyte 2 is out there, and Source 2 can just keep up with it.

A bit like Duke Nukem Forever ... they had to change engines very often and basically start from the scratch, because even if you have some really cool stuff (I remember the proud presentation of shattering glass a decade or something ago), it gets outdated really soon.
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby Botolf on Thu Jun 27, 2013 6:01 am

3DRealms' problem wasn't a relentless, overpowering graphics technology arms race, 3DRealms' problem was continually changing goals and throwing out completed work on a whim. Culprit numero uno? Management's inability to be satisfied with the given graphics technology, and an appetite for bleeding edge future tech that meant delivering milestones and a given stable of features continually was tossed into the river. Say what you will about Valve developing Source for a long-ass time, but they deliver games within a reasonable time frame and don't mortgage the company's future on a tech fetish.
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby ReservoirWOLF on Thu Jun 27, 2013 6:36 am

mazman34340 wrote:So, I came here to develop a couple maps to learn level design and environment design. Not as easy as I thought it would be.


Speaking from my own experience, you should get used to working with tools that are not perfect.
Being creative within the limits of that tool will help you grow as a designer.
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby Kosire on Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:35 am

nub wrote:
Kosire wrote:
Gary wrote:I wonder why that new titan fall game is on the Source engine...


Because the Infinity Ward guys really liked IWEngine and how Source is very much like it?


That's precisely why. Both engines have the same roots and use BSP and such, so it's no wonder why these guys would choose Source. It's a type of engine they're very familiar with. Not to mention they purchased a license, meaning they probably have full access to the code, as well as all the tools that Valve uses. I'm sure Valve has their very own tools that make the pipeline much more manageable, but they just choose not to release them to the public. The tools could be incentive for developers to purchase a license. If they released these tools to the public, then they'd have no commercial value I suppose. Just guesswork, though.

But yeah, Source is very capable of looking pretty, despite how out of date and wonky it is. I agree that something needs to happen, mainly Source 2. We can only guess at how much more advanced it will be. Considering how long it's been, I'm speculating it'll be as ground-breaking as Source was back in 2004 when HL2 released and such. I hope, at least.


For those expecting "normal" Source engine - don't. Those super smart coders (like Calen in this thread!) have re-written a massive amount of the codebase. The renderer is completely new (multi-threaded, DX11, 64bit, etc.), along with all the sound code, netcode, input code, etc. There's a lot of cores on the Xbox One, and the coders are actively working on utilizing them as much as possible.
Source: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread. ... st63944906

It's gonna be crazy :shock:


Also http://www.polygon.com/e3-2013/2013/6/1 ... ll-respawn
Respawn started pre-production on its then-untitled game back in 2011, originally for current generation consoles. As the team tried to pinpoint what their first project would be, they searched for a technological foundation to build on. They found it in an unlikely place: Valve’s Source engine. While few titles outside of Valve’s own games and independent mods have used Source this generation, a number of factors made it a good fit for Respawn.

"We were kind of interested in Source early on because it’s very familiar to our designers," said Richard Baker, a software engineer at Respawn who previously worked on Call of Duty 2, Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2. Source also suited Respawn’s desire to hit a constant 60 frames per second on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, where other third-party engines weren’t up to the task. "The ironic thing is that we wanted an engine that would work on PS3, because that’s the riskiest platform in current gen. When Portal 2 came out and it seemed to be a pretty decent PS3 game, that was the point when we decided to go with Source. And then we stopped supporting PS3."
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby Stormy on Fri Jul 12, 2013 5:54 am

nub wrote: Source 2. We can only guess at how much more advanced it will be. Considering how long it's been, I'm speculating it'll be as ground-breaking as Source was back in 2004 when HL2 released and such. I hope, at least.


Have you seen Naughty Dogs engine? HAVE YOU SEEN IT?? It has realtime radiosity. UE4 is still spruiking about how impressive that is and here is Naughty Dog releasing it with no fanfare. There is nothing an engine can do anymore that is more groundbreaking than what was possible in the old days. Realtime radiosity is impressive and all but it's nothing like the leap from shitty faux-physics to realistic physics (goldsrc to source), or the invention and widespread use of shaders in realtime graphics (remember when normal maps popped up?).

Engines are no longer about the amazing features the devs can pack in and are now about useability and accessibility, reliability and optimization. Sure, there are still graphical enhancements to be made but they aren't going to make incredible differences to the viability of the engine. Realtime engines have come far enough for artists to focus solely on art and almost not at all on hardware limitations (within reason, we still need to use normal maps to fake detail etc but that's more to make the entire pipeline easier - can you imagine rigging/animating a million poly model?). The only thing I can think of that is completely new and amazing is the Euclidean engine, point cloud data/voxels. And maybe true volumetric lights/particles (Since The Division already has pretty-as-fuck properly lit particle systems).

But I digress. Source 2 is either not happening or will just be a pretty good engine by modern standards. It's impossible for an engine to blow the competition out of the water after Frostbite 2, UE4 and the Naughty Dog engine. Source 2 at best will just have all the latest features and a few nice but ultimately unnecessary new ones. As far as the layman is concerned the engine doesn't matter anymore, it's purely about the skill of the developers.

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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby Epifire on Fri Jul 12, 2013 8:12 am

Sorta reminds me of when cars were new, to the point now where they are mostly concerned as to how good the mileage is. Like when cars were the new thing they were rushing to make a bunch of new features for them, where as now it's just optimizing what's there.

I'm just a fan of using Source, so having a nice upgrade with a better optimized workflow would be great I think. We know they are working on Source 2 due to leaked group info, but little else besides that. I think I just have a good grasp with Source (or at least over any other engine I know) so with my understanding it still grants me a better workflow from the rest.
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby MrTwoVideoCards on Sat Jul 13, 2013 4:30 am

Black_Stormy wrote:A big wall of text


Naughty Dog doesn't have realtime radiosity. The Last of Us features what looks like dirty shadow mapping, or a generic no shadowed light that traces the color of the surface through some world space to texture space shiznizz. So it's not really realtime radiosity.

UE4's global illumination is a pretty big deal though. Their method not only allows you to intricately light and shadow geometry at a finer point, but it also allows you to get realtime reflections out of everything, because you're already tracing the environment at a specific voxel density. There are some really nice videos on youtube that show off Voxel GI that others have made and it's pretty impressive.

With that being said I don't think anyone really expects source 2 to be the next big thing. Anyone that does is crazy and that's not how new engines should work. I think it would be nice if valve just concentrated on solid tools that allow for fast iteration and nonrestrictive barriers. Having a shader editor is a pretty big deal and that would meet the criteria of nonrestrictive. For example: A lot of fancy UDK features come out of the fact that you can just do a lot with the tools already there, so if someone wants to go and make some ocean shader, bam; new feature. No need to go off and learn hlsl and go through the hassle of setting up visual studio to compile the shader.

Another example is how some artists out there have made flowmap shaders for UDK water, which is a new feature source has touted.

Epifire wrote:
I'm just a fan of using Source, so having a nice upgrade with a better optimized workflow would be great I think. I think I just have a good grasp with Source (or at least over any other engine I know) so with my understanding it still grants me a better workflow from the rest.


I've spoiled myself pretty hardcore with deferred and the shader editor. I've just started working on a csgo map with a buddy of mine and I am shocked with how much I tolerated stock source back then. I don't think I would of picked Source for my indie project if deferred and the shader editor weren't a thing. It's just so easy to look at a problem and say "I can just make a shader for that".

Trees bending, flowmaps on anything, parallax mapping, animated water on surfaces, ashes/snow piling up on top faces of geometry: make a shader in the editor. It's been really nice to just go off and do that instead of waiting for valve to write that into an existent shader.
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby Epifire on Sat Jul 13, 2013 5:47 am

Yeah wish I knew more about working with Shaders. The thing that gets is me when the team and I wanted to use deferred we couldn't use it because we didn't want to drop radiosity support. Cause with the way we had it set up we could only have half the lighting systems we wanted. :?

Source to me feels like a work in progress and maybe I'm just old school, but still enjoy using it even in all it's oldness. With the recent advancements in engine versions and other improvements, I just would like to see all of the new features working in a single version. 2013 still has my hopes for being the version that could support a lot more of the fixes under one title. Only wish I knew something about code and shaders, but currently I'm just an assets designer.
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Re: You people are crazy!

Postby Randomm on Thu Sep 26, 2013 7:35 pm

First to answer some of your questions we have to step back in time, 2004? No, a little more, 1998? Almost there, 1996? Sure, sounds good. It all started with a game called Quake, back then people made engines specific to the type of game they were making and licensing was more of a who you knew, no one really advertised technology like they do now and modding was all about figuring stuff out for yourself, sure you might get some archaic documentation but most of was just you, a lot of free time and the will to not blow up your computer as you dissected a games data files. Quake was however more Modder friendly than Doom of course after the massive community that spawned in its wake but people were even modding Wolf3D, so with Quake came the specs to allow people to write level editors, source code was included, Quake C really opened the world in terms of what could be done in a mod, new monsters, weapons, and game types like Team Fortress were possible, but it was still geared towards an elite crowd who braved the unknown and all with simple dial-up connections to boot.

Anyway, fast forward a few years and the Valve that we knew and loved had released Half-Life, built on the foundation of the modding community established by Quake, but being from the community and knowing what it was like to be handed a bunch of tools and code and almost no documentation whatsoever they decided to change things up and offer more support, in fact early FULL SDK's required a signed NDA sent to Valve and you got a shiny CD mailed to you with a sticker on it, but the point is it was an SDK built on a framework that was built with a single purpose in mind and being a startup that purpose was: get it done, get it done well but get it out so we can start recovering our investment!

So while they supported the growing community, they also needed to make money, and being a limited liability company they were ready to fail too, but fate had other plans as we all know. Still though the technology as advanced as it was at the time was still based on a foundation of Quake code (with some Quake 2) but mostly Quake World or something like that, anyway the point is .QC files you edit in Source are a relic from Quake C. Compiling everything via the command line are also relics left over from Quake, and a program called QData or something like that I can't really remember but anyway it was all command line and fed one sort of data and parameters and spit out game ready content so it stood to reason that Valve just followed suit and made adjustments to the asset pipeline using command line utilities because that's the sort of system the company started out with and as with most companies, once they get a system in place for doing things, they are very slow to change. Also having different programs to compile your map? Quake.

So, why do you need to learn Binary Space Partitions? Well, technically you don't, but knowing how CSG is converted into BSP trees can, hmm, teach you why leaks are bad I guess. Oh right and why the particle editor is separate from Hammer was as before, Valve had a few options when it came to level design tools and thank f**k they went with Worldcraft, seriously, most of the editors available at the time were pretty shi*. Worldcraft was great, it was simple, did what you needed it to and had an easy to understand interface, seriously go use Radiant if you don't know what I'm talking about. Anyway, Worldcraft had no built in particle editor, heck world particles were still hard coded by the time HL2 was released, even EP1 iirc. It wasn't until the Orange Box when they built in all these extra editors and the reason they didn't do it in Hammer I suspect might have something to do with the fact that it's not tied into the engine like UnrealEd. It's the same reason the model viewer was simply extended to edit ragdolls and such, old tools with tacked on new features.

It again stems back to the old days of non-integrated editors that each specialize in their own thing. That's the big difference engines like Unreal made when they arrived on the gaming scene. And also what happens when you build the editor first.

The short answer I can give you is Unreal was built from the ground up to have all its stuff integrated together, just like Id Tech 4 (Doom3), or Crytek, but Source has its roots from a different time, an ancient time.
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