[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I agree with half of your post, everything except the releasing soon and setting low sights part. I'm tired of the release soon argument though, or the comparisons with earlier mods like CS or DOD. The modding & gaming scenes have changed so drastically between the early halflife days and Source, if not only for the release of CS (and to lesser extent DOD) itself. The principles that were valid then are no longer now imho.
I agree that things are much more complicated for modders now than they were back in the days of QuakeC. 2D artists have to deal with bump mapping, specular reflection, diffusion and all kinds of shaders. Programmers and 3d artists have to deal with physical materials and different types of collision. Animators have to deal with more complex skeletal construction to allow richer character interactions. Everybody has to deal with having higher polygon counts and rendering more polygons in highly detailed scenes. It can be overwhelming for the person who knows nothing about what it takes to create a game. But still, a game doesn't have to have all of this to be fun. Look at the team that did Narbacular Drop. That game looks like crap, but it is fun to play. It's innovative and it can evolve into something like Portal. If you take a look around at some of the student projects that people at DigiPen or The Guildhall or other game development schools have done, you see some really interesting ideas that are hardly ever as beautiful as Half-Life2 or Doom3 or Far Cry 2. The point is your game doesn't have to always compete graphically with the best commercial product that's already on the market. If the gameplay is good, people will play your game even if the graphics aren't the best they could possibly be. Over time, you'll learn how other people do all the fancy graphics stuff and begin to apply those techniques to your mod. In my humble opinion, it's still better to get something out there that people can play and slowly build up your fan base over several years time than it is to hold back a mod for 2 or 3 years until it's "done" and then release it hoping that everyone will flock to it. -- Jeffrey "botman" Broome _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
