natestah

[natestah]

Story time

Adam brought to my attention in the last article some of the early goings on at 2015 with MOHAA, We didn't really get to sink our teeth in for some time. He reminded me that we spent time doing a prototype for a second game, which went no where. It was, Scrappy, but I did eventually get to settle in on some work. Trying to Jog my memory a bit by googling Screenshots lead me to this great walk-through Blog, which I am going to borrow some things from (Super Adventures In Gaming Blog)

Out of the gate, when you get past the training you are treated to some of my "fine" terrain work. Couple of things about this, We had developed a dynamic terrain system for the game that was rich in features but could not draw this darned road that curved and bent like this, not without us Flagging a lot of the vertices around the road to not LOD, which subsequently created a ton of polygons and also left terrible lighting artifacts and z-fighting where the curved road and the on-the-grid terrain met.

Only an insane person, would ever go these lengths. If you're keeping up on my articles, you'll recall I had a "Blob" Method in Unreal for creating organic shapes (Story Time About Unreal PSX). That wouldn't apply here but with only convex brushes it looked different! So how do you paint an organic terrain shape using only convex brushes? The secret is in the Cylinder brush, three sided cylinder. It produced the triangle that would be the the terrain surface that you see here. That top triangle could bend and go anywhere I wanted it too, the other surfaces were simply discarded as "No draw" textures.

This would become my bugaboo during MoH:AA and later games too, I worked on many levels but every one that I was assigned to would get a framerate treatment. I wasn't a fan of sub 60hz framerate. Anyway, this guy's commentary on our 2001 game from 2013 is spot-on if not hilarious. He mentions the music early on in his walk through, which I could say was one of the highlights of all of the games I would work on. That first drop of the music, a single line of script placed and suddenly it was "Go time".

During MOHAA times, a level designer was responsible for EVERYTHING in the level. The initial focus was creating the Geometry, and then you had to make it go with some scripting. Mission 2 consisted of 3 levels (some were broken down to a,b,c sections ), they were all my work.

M2L1 was the infiltration of the German Sub-pen, everything was covered in snow and needed some fancy texturing work. The snow was created with No-clip so the feet could go beneath. This area was challenging the engine for me. 60Hz was hard to do on this very "open" space. Once again, insanity led me to a solution where an engineer gave me a technology that we had no term for other than "Manual Vis'ification Technology". I would connect spaces and declare them not visible for the compiler. I remember the engineer coming to my desk, with a grin when He saw how I was breaking the space up,it was a grid of blocks that would get smaller as needed for details, Dude you're basically creating an OctTree.. Huh.. k. Whatever smarty engineer dude. Not much else to say about this space other than there being a time when I wanted to try and introduce some 3dsMax modeling chops and do better rock formations, Quake3's curved patches were very limited. This game had an in-house developed Continuous LOD (Level of Detail) that fought me, On a scale as big as a rock-wall the Rocks would slowly and very visibly morph in. I ended up throwing out that Idea.

M2L2 was a place where I got to exercise some scripting, It was the first place where any kind of programming would take a foothold. Another designer had a very complex state machine setup for managing the interactions. I ended up throwing it out. All the area needed was some dudes patrolling around that would simply ask you for your papers if you got close, In certain area's you'd have to get close. If you didn't comply, the alarm would sound. It was an opportunity to set up unique scripted animations, We had these dudes at a card table, then we had a guy welding one of the docked subs. The ambient sound did the rest, there were all kinds of details in the sound to suggest more was going on in here.

This U-boat was created for me by the art team, Unfortunately we'd hit by the fact that the engine kind of just took one point as the receptor for the lighting, Submerging the boat too much meant the whole thing turned black. There was a lot of Jiggling the boat to get it to take the light just right ( or right enough )

The entire inside of this boat was donated by the art team. Really cool stuff, unfortunately it was hard to move around in. Players in these games are bound to a box, We had to cheat a lot an make certain things ( the door ) non-clipping. I made sure the scripting inside here was brief.

The sub is pretty basic but I wanted to have some details and I didn't get the full attention of the art team, I don't think we had created map "Prefabs" yet, looking at those wires and things on the ceiling has me recalling a lot of painstaking copy-paste operations, and Re-wiring when I wanted to change the style. The lamps on the ceiling might just be curve brushes. Even when things were simple I wanted go hard. =)

M2L3 isn't captured here, but I remember starting in a ventilation system, We had a cockroach run away at the start that was scripted. the rest is simply set up as shoot-em-up cover is blown escape. Nothing to it.

Here we, good old YouTube! There's actually a lot more detail in this than I remember doing, it really did turn out good: Have a walk down memory lane in this walk-through of Mission 2.

I was NOT involved with DDay, It was glorious. This is where the artists went. My first E3 had us demoing this to people in a bunker with a long line. Too be fair my memory of E3 blends with Call of Duty so I'm not sure which, but it was awesome to be the surprise hit of the show. I also remember Snoop-dogg himself walking right by. How cool!

There are other missions that I had a hand in, There were some non-technical Level Designers that I would go offer some scripting to and some missions that I would help create destroyed buildings for.

I helped with the Gas Mask sequence of this mission, Creating a timer, overlaying the gas mask, scripting the fog ( gas ).

I don't know which one's but I got involved with some of the war-torn missions and helped bust up a lot of buildings. If you see a rubble pile, there's a good chance I was in there.

I can't remember, if I was involved with Tanks, I think I may have helped with the geometry for the missions with tanks. Not to reveal too much about CoD, but tanks were my missions there so things are murky, if you remember please do chime in. I'd love to hear.

I think that's it for MOH:AA stay tune for more stories!

[natestah]

I never knew in a million years that I would get to become a game developer.  I didn't see it back then.  There were ingredients that came together almost miraculously to jar me into action.

I was a kid working on something like my 3rd or 4th year of Burger King, I worked hard to afford myself a Gaming PC, one equipped with 3dfx graphics, Celeron 300a (I think mine overclocked all the way to 450!), and a good-sized monitor (19Inch Beast of a CRT) that I would lug to a local LAN party club. 

I was pretty good at working software. I gravitated towards programming and CAD/CAM classes in high school. The curriculum was generally too easy.  In a Basic programming class, I did my own thing and created a program that would bounce lines like the screensavers of that time would.  In another class I created animations using HyperCard transitions and entertained the whole class.

An AutoCAD teacher gave a File cabinet of work to do at your own pace. I finished the work in 2 weeks and used that class as my sleep class. (stayed up too late playing Quake). I nearly failed this class, the teacher wanted me to reach higher “You should be designing Rocket Ships, not sleeping”.  He allowed me to pass on the condition that I helped him draw up a plan for his friend at my Lunch Hour. I was strained on my credits, so this was critical for me to pass high school!  The circumstance of my low credits in high school was that I missed a year for bereavement so I couldn’t afford any missed credits. It was truly a difficult time.

Another teacher teaching CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing?) did the same, working through all the curriculum in a short amount of time. Having nothing left to do, the question came up, What Do you want to do? There was a small opportunity there to leave my Kush job at Burger King to work at a Computer Case building plant drawing plans, but I did not get the job.

At my LAN party, a friend had a surprise announcement.  HE was doing LEVEL DESIGN Remotely for a company in the UK.  He showed me his Unreal demo that he used to apply for the contract, it was a pretty basic challenge to which I don't remember much of the details but surely, I could create a one room area and apply for myself.  I had an answer to the question my CAM Teacher had asked me.

This teacher heard my plan and allowed me to lug my own Personal Computer into the classroom to try and learn how to create Unreal Levels so that I could apply myself to this job. I was working right out of Highschool after I submitted my own demo.  A lush organic Cave that had water in it, and mosquito’s buzzing around.  A button down beneath the water opened the door above inside the cave to allow you to escape.

The contract I was on was paid per-level and the game was to be Unreal on the PSX. That’s PlayStation 1! I was zipping through “stages” and getting paid. How awesome! Unreal back then, was all about CSG operations.  There were a handful of primitive shapes you could use to carve out the world. Wanting more organic terrain with the limited number of polygons we had to work with I came up with a tricky method of creating terrain that didn’t just look like skewed boxes and primitive shapes carved out (this would rapidly increase the polycount).  I could the technique the “Blob Method”, this involved taking a 3-sided pyramid (all triangles) and duplicating it until I had a cube made of triangles, from there I would duplicate the cube and union it so I could get more triangles, then each vertex would be pushed out to create organic terrain.  This madness would persist throughout my career as a Level Designer.  I did things that nobody in their right mind would do.  Maybe I’ll talk more about that in future story time.

The project was ultimately cancelled, while disappointing it gave me a ton of real-world experience.  Recently I was approached about this for a “revival project”.  You can visit the moddb page here, it features some of my stuff, though I was unable to provide him with anything (there was much more stuff).  See here