Creating Quality ages

[Justintime9]

As a beginner at age creation, I have a few Ideas for making beginner ages better, and making it easier to learn.

1. Mentors: We should have a sign up sheet for writers who have the time, and patience to help a Newbie in need, rather than answering forum posts, they might talk over skype, or IM. A beginner can follow the tutorials, and use what they know to learn blender, but if there ever comes a confusing post in the tutorials, or something that doesn't match up with blender, the apprentice can ask their mentor about it, who, in turn will answer their questions to the best of their ability.

2. Age Polishers: When someone who's not an expert writer, or simply someone who wants their age to be better, can submit their age, completed to the best of their ability, to age polishers, who will polish it up, make the lighting look right, get the materials right, sky, textures, and generally fix it up.

What do you think? Are these good Ideas? Do you think they would help make ages much more spectacular?

[Lontahv]

They sound ok.

The only problem with the IM thing is that they'd have to "be" there. With the forums people can come and help as they check them. Maybe I could write an IM bot... ... let's not think about that.

~Lontahv

[andylegate]

Your ideas have merit. I do know that over at ModsOnline they have quite a few video tutorials that make doing mods for the most popular FPS games a LOT easier to use. There's something about audio/visual as compared to reading and pics. Many people find video instruction a lot better as they actually see it happening. The other plus of it, it's like having the Mentor there, even if the communication is only one way.

Part of the problem, is that many of the expert writers you are referring too, are up to their arm pits in work already: working on the plugin. Working on fixing the plugin. Working on testing the plugin. Working on their own Ages. And working in real life. Most of them have little or no time to help in the way you're suggesting.

Many of I guess what you could call, very knowledgeable writers, are also very busy with real life, or working on their own Ages. Worst, a new plugin comes out, and they suddenly find themselves at the same level as a noob, having to relearn over again something that they had down pat before.

Then you have people like me: I hate Plasma. You look around at all the many other games of Myst, and you see how much better everything looks. Realizing that they are not true 3D enviorments makes you pause, but then you take a look at a lot of the other games that ARE 3D enviroments and at just how damn good they look compared to Uru, and you get a sinking feeling in your belly that you're working with something obsolete, and that we the fans could have a hand in making Uru look and perform so much better.
Like a friend of my PM'ed me and said: "Easier to modify the engine (and these would be actual improvements, not just bringing the engine up to a less substandard level!)"
So that's why I fully advocate a group to find a different, better performing engine that would allow for much better and easier Age Creation.

To me making an Age should be fun to learn. Not make people give up because its way too hard to even light the place up!

[Lontahv]

Let's get this straight, Andy. You think that water:

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looks better than this:

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Where are the ripples around the edge of the pool? It looks to me that the Oblivion engine is Ill written and they're trying to cover it up with magic-effects. I mean, why have a mesh so low-poly unless you don't want to kill your engine with the load. If Plasma wanted to look like that... it could. It CHOOSES not to have the "grease on the lens" look. If you've played "PrinceOfPersia Sands Of time" You'll see that it has that Oblivion look. And it's from the early 2000's AND it now runs on a game-boy type thing. It doesn't take much to look like that.

Ok, let's compare another one:

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Look as the clouds of black in the first one. Have YOU ever seen any black clouds in dark places?
Then look at the DynamicReflections and dynamic-vertex lighting and advanced avatar models in the second.

Speaking of avatars...

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Ain't he rubbery looking.

But hey, it looks better than WoW. But to try to blame Plasma for the badness looking of the fan ages... that's just crazy. The people who make Oblivion get PAID, they do it for a living... and that's the best they can do?

In my opinion, Plasma is the one who's ahead even though it's old(it was WAY ahead of it's time). Oblivion is lame by today's standerds--it's so easy to code that people are give engines like that way for free. Just like the original Myst and Riven, I don't think it'll feel it's age... it has a good framework and is expandable if need be. They had to be mighty thrifty when it came to memory... THAT's why it can run huge pretty ages with good effects.

This is something that is good to know:

Just because it needs advanced video-card shaders doesn't mean it's any better than something that does not. Most of these new(lame) games need these shaders for effects such as dynamic reflections(Plasma does not). The reason they have them like that is so they can rake in money for NVidia and Radion.


I don't have any problems with not-so-great-looking action games. But It REALLY gets to my nerves when someone tries to claim they look better than Uru.

The reason I posted this was because Plasma needs defending. And just because you're fading from the age-writing community doesn't mean you have to bring others with you(please don't try to sell the noobs on Oblivion).


~Lontahv

[Grogyan]

From memory when Uru came out in shops, it was up against titles like Unreal Tournament 2004, sure Plasma has lots of nice effects, but they are very hard to implement, its very laborious manual labor, on the other hand titles like Unreal Tournament, were catering for user created content as one of its mantra's and in doing so means some effects were hard coded.

I saw then and still see known that using a pre-existing high end engine like Unreal Engine 2.x, and code elements to work as an adventure game would have been much more ideal.

But no, Cyan decided then and still does to go with its Plasma engine, using IMO horrible Python code to do anything pretty, two totally different engines to cater for totally different game developers to work on.


AlcScript is a refreshing simple script that we can use, that hope does away with alot of Python code.


The water in Uru looks fake, closeup and far away, no account for wind, tides, rolling random waves or swirls made by fish and bugs, then again no engine can do better, but I have noticed that UT3 has very good enviromental effects, water in Crysis is better and is enviriomental effects, but yet they still took shortcuts, mainly because present hardware CAN NOT deal with "video real" (yes thats what the Crysis developers call it).

If you want realistic water and other viscous liquids including air and land (yes earth is a very dense liquid, when you deal with tectonic plate movements), in a video game, wait for nVidia's line of GeForce 10 or 12, when they integrate physics onto the same die.


Creating quality Ages is to know where and when you can take shortcuts, and no tutorial can help there.

I have read several tutorials and articles, that suggest that with the right texturing, low poly polygons will appear to be high poly, thus you gain significant benefits.

Edit: By the way Lontahv, water in real life doesn't have such bright white ripples when it brushes up against something

[D'eux]

As I said before in the other Oblivion thread, using the TES Construction Set was a hell of a lot easier than working with PyPRP/Plasma... especially when it came to things like texture painting directly onto the terrain. But that is only a matter of tools and input, for a game that was designed from the start to have user-created content and modifications.

But whatever data input/creation tools you use, whether easy or convoluted, a simple fact cannot be changed: In order to create a well-designed, quality Age you have to be an artist.

You can take whatever technical, scientific and logical approach you want, but unless you are able to 'see' the world in terms of light, contrast, tone, colour and texture, you won't be able to create convincing and engaging Ages - the engine you use to do it is irrelevant. It's the same as if you sat two people down - an artist and a non-artist and gave the non-artist a wealth of expensive materials - pens, paints, sable brushes, the finest cartridge paper and you provided the artist with a biro and a Post-It note. The artist will always come up with the better end result. Why? Because the artist doesn't need fancy resources and technical features - the artist sees with the mind's eye and uses whatever is available, no matter how limited its use to produce art.

If you've read "The Book of Atrus" you'll appreciate this fundamental difference between the Ages Gehn writes and those of Atrus. Gehn takes a slap-dash approach, wanting immediate results and therefore cuts corners to do it. The end result is poor and unstable Ages. Atrus however takes care, ensuring the Ages he creates are both well-written and well-thought out. But this takes time, something Gehn fails to appreciate.

Now back to the OP... I would say that while I'm all for folks providing assistance and help on this forum, I believe it too much to ask for them to dedicate their personal time to provide one-to-one tutition when they are ultimately the ones who suffer from the arrangement. What your asking for is FREE bespoke training, something which organisations and individuals normally would make a healthy living from in a commercial marketplace. On top of that, as already said, the 'mentors' end up spending their time for other people's gain, when their own progress and Age-writing suffers or becomes non-existant. Therefore, what do the 'mentors' get out of the deal? In order to become a 'mentor' in the first palce, they've had to spend large amounts of time, study and often money to gain the skills and knowledge they have... and you are asking them to provide that to others for free?

The long and short of it is this: There IS NO quick and easy, fast-track way to learning to write Ages using PyPRP/Plasma, nor any other engine. If an individual is determined enough and committed enough to learn, they will learn it soon enough and enjoy the journey in getting there. If not, then they will fall by the wayside. Such are the harsh realities of life. We live in an Age (pun intended) where people think they can dabble in whatever they want with little or no effort to get the results they want, and if they are not getting them, they expect someone else to do it for them. However, asking questions is how we all learn and there's nothing wrong in that, but there has to be a sharing of knowledge - not just the vampirism of knowledge by some off of others.

I'm sorry if this seems harsh, but I'm afraid there is just no easy and quick way to success.

-: D'eux :-

[Zander]

Leaving the engine dispute aside (you use what you've got) I can see D'eux' point, but I don't think Justin was looking for "a quick and easy way" to Write Ages. I have often thought when struggling with an Age that it would be nice if I could just TALK to someone about it, rather that squealing for help in the forum and hoping someone in another time zone will see the message before it gets pushed off the bottom of the list by others. I can understand that feeling. Sadly, I don't think the suggested kind of talk-support is practicable, for the reasons stated by others...but the support available here is excellent.

As for the rest...the Art is an Art, yes. If great painting were easy we'd all be Michelangeloes. The upside is that with time and patience we can all acquire enough craft to support whatever talent we have, and become, if not great painters, at least good ones. The medium we use is difficult and temperamental, but I agree it produces the best results, and I'd rather wrestle with it than settle for a paint-by-numbers kit, at least till a better and easier one comes along.

[D'eux]

I have often thought when struggling with an Age that it would be nice if I could just TALK to someone about it, rather that squealing for help in the forum and hoping someone in another time zone will see the message before it gets pushed off the bottom of the list by others.

Well, those things come in time in online communities. It's about building up trust with people. If someone who is in a position to help sees a concerted and genuine effort being made by another to try and achieve something, they may feel motivated to provide more personal, more tailored assistance by voice-comms or otherwise. But that should be left to a personal decision. Inevitably, and I've seen it happen before, although it starts with good intention, people who take a mentoring role always end up being saturated with requests for help, bugged on MSN/AIM etc. and generally never left alone - usually because a wide variety of time zones means that they are pestered around the clock.

There is also the danger that by following someone else's way of doing things, you end up producing Ages that are not really your own. They are someone else's in thought and style. That's the problem with 'polishing' Ages. Why would someone want to polish someone else's Age when their own is probably in need of such? And then who does the 'polished' Age belong to? The original writer or the polisher?

Sadly, there is also no straightforward answer to some questions and that puts additional load on the mentor. For example, someone might ask "How do I paint great looking textures?". The mentor replies "Use Photoshop." The student asks "How do I use Photoshop?" - at what point does the mentor stop training and be able to justifiably say "Go and learn it."?

I know this sounds like an overly-dramatic example, but it is realistic of what can happen. But Zander is right, sometimes you just need to talk to somebody about what it is you are trying to achieve. In that case, I still say that it is about forming friendships with individuals, finding common interests and taking it from there. It shouldn't be about a formal arrangement to provide free training and guidance.

-: D'eux :-

[Lontahv]

Ah, about the water... it has a wind vector and every control you can imagine(I agree it look kind of dorky--but pretty--think Teledahn). I can quite put my finger on it but something about Oblivion looks wrong. Plasma has it's own problems.

Also, I'm pretty sure Justin's looking for something to sink his teeth into--not an easy way out.

~Lontahv

[D'eux]

Yes, I agree and I didn't mean to insult Justin's suggestions, nor shoot his ideas down in flames.

-: D'eux :-