My personal library

[FrostNova]

Hi, I've played tremulous more than 10 years ago.

I made a site full of level design articles in hopes of breaking into the industry. I began with google sites, but now I've migrated to mediawiki. I still want something better than mediawiki, but for now it was the easiest solution to publish text and have more freedom to format than google sites. My plan is to work in the industry. My long term goal is to make that site a professional resource and refactor everything. But that won't come until after some years of professional experience.

For now I've stopped adding more articles because it's a futile endeavor. The reason is pretty much this article of mine: https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php/Envi ... e_me_blind

https://www.henry-ym.org

[illwieckz]

Hi FrostNova. That's an interesting library of articles there! (Let's pour in more validation for the ego, hehe ).

I've read some articles, and I found some useful, like this one about “Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them”, especially those two points:

• It's easy for them to notice a problem. Solving problems is another matter. The players don't know how the game was made, the process behind it. They don't know what restrictions were in play. They don't know what, how many and how decisions were taken.
• Players are usually more biased in seeing a problem in a game because they value their tastes first, their personal experience.

The first point is something we experience as a game project, as some players may spot problems and then, have hard time to understand that identifying a problem is not fixing it yet, and that is in fact the easiest part. That's why the second point about identifying biases in problem finding is also useful, especially the paragraph about “How to differentiate a personal taste from a mistake” which I find insightful.

I may have an answer to your first question here: https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php/Inco ... chitecture

You wrote:

I don't know why they made the elevator's exit / entrance be oriented towards inside the building, not the outside. I have no idea if there are buildings in the world that have elevators like that.

It may be intentional as part of an optimisation process, by making the elevator on the other side of the entrance, the level designer ensures that when being on the second floor reached with the elevator, the game doesn't render the outside of the first floor (where the building entrance is). See this article: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wik ... timization and https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Hint_brush
Here is an image from the Valve wiki, see the “No hints needed”:

You can find such kind of “incoherent architecture” in classic Tremulous/Unvanquished maps like ATCSHD or Plat23, where the corridor goes around a very large pillar making sure you can't see (and then render) the outside from the inside, even without elevator.

Code: Select all

           //////////////////|
           //|‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾|//|
           //|    ____    |//|
           //|   |////|   |//|
        /////|   |////|   |//|
        ‾‾‾‾‾    |////|    ‾‾
inside  _____    |////|    __  outside
        /////|   |////|   |//|
           //|   |////|   |//|
           //|    ‾‾‾‾    |//|
           //|____________|//|
           //////////////////|

Was this article moved to the new site? https://sites.google.com/view/leveldesi ... 6-analysis

You said there you redid the blockout of Unreal Tournament's Deck16 in Unreal Engine 5, did you released any map (whatever the engine/game)?

[FrostNova]

I made this: https://www.moddb.com/members/frost-nova/addons

I have made maps for Open Arena before. If you ever seen maps called Lego + something. Plus, a colorful map with too many colors at the same time, circular arena style, called RGB. I made it too. I deleted them from moddb because I was going to rename to remove the "lego" trademark, but I guess I forgot to upload them.

[FrostNova]

New section dedicated to game reviews. I published so many in backlog sites that after I reached 100 I decided to copy in my own site.

It may appear strange, but I have nothing about multiplayer.

[FrostNova]

How to suspect charlatans, scammers and criminals?
I wrote this list to prevent people from falling into traps.

What to not say to a person with depression
I wrote this because it's too common for people to provide wrong advices.

They are not related to gamedev or gamedesign, but how often do we see people falling into depression? How easy is it for a person to fall in depression after being scammed for ex? Not uncommon among gamedev or gamedesign communities

[FrostNova]

https://i.postimg.cc/q4Gh4RVG/cloudflare.png
I registered a free cloudflare account. For some reason Amazon bot is generating a lot of traffic in my site.

[illwieckz]

Make sure to not go out of topic. We don't need to know that Cloudflare is filtering Amazon bots on your site.

In your previous comment, only one link could be useful. The first link is useless there.

What is said in the second article is somewhat useful there. Not because of depression (which isn't the topic here) but because some things said there also applies to common mistreatment that can occur in free open source volunteer projects, for example those two points at the start:

• Don't pressure […] the person;
• Don't deny […] the person's emotions;

First point is about not building-up harassment, and when the emotion is caused by the pressure, the second point is about not denying that harassment.

They're common things people involved in open source project can suffer from. This other article specifically talks about open source developer burnout:

• https://itsfoss.com/news/open-source-de ... exhausted/

Depression and burnout can often be linked. Whatever the effects, and there can be other effects than those ones, like discouragement and other things. Causes are often the same: misplaced expectation, illegitimate pressure, denial of the humanity of the doer in some way (denial of the cost of the effort, denial of the way it is experienced, etc). This is linked to what I call « expecting someone to be god », expecting someone to be able to provide, always, even when attacked, and the fact that even slowing down to take a rest would be considered as failure and shamed.

When sharing a link make sure that your intervention sticks to legit sharing of it when discussing a topic that fits the context (here, the Unvanquished game itself, game development, mapping and modding, human behaviour in volunteer projects, things like that can be considered in topic), otherwise it will be just considered as spam.