Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2

[Chabo]

I did a project and wrote a paper last semester for my "Data Visualization" class, based on Jason Mitchell's paper Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2.

My write up can be found here, and the other files related to my project (demos, the map, etc) can be found here.

I know I'm not the best writer ever to grace the planet (or even the best writer to grace a Computer Science department), but a little while back I sent an e-mail to Robin Walker about the paper (because Jason's e-mail address isn't publicly available), and Jason sent me a reply back!

Thanks for writing. It's interesting to see the rigorous approach
that you have taken to evaluate the effect of silhouette and various
visual cues such as rim highlighting on player identification. We
haven't performed this style of scientific user testing but tend to
observe users playing our games first-hand to (hopefully) identify
issues of character/class recognition. For example, you'll notice that
some of the classes changed color between the release of the very first
TF2 trailer and the final game (notably the red soldier and engineer
changed clothing colors). This was done as a reaction to the daily
playtesting that we perform on TF2 here at Valve.

-Jason

Valve is so cool; I love how reliably e-mails to them get responses, if you write coherently and are patient in getting a response back. I'm quite honored that Jason read my paper and spent the time to give me feedback.

 

[Planetary]

Congratulations.

Valve is pretty nice that way, unlike so many other developers.

 

[Lizardizzle]

^^^*cough* Bungie *Cough* Oni *cough*

I agree, I love how Valve keeps they're loyal slav- er- fans up to date with all their games. And consantly play test with REAL people to judge how the COMMUNITY reacts and NOT the Box Office. Which is why so many of their games are late. They don't rush. If a playtester doesn't understand or doesnn't feel its as good as it could be, Valve'll take the time and mony to make their games as best as possible.

Thats the problem with the other 80% of game producers, they MIGHT playtest a game once or twice, then hastly "fix" their bugs, only to get caught in their release date, and instead of waiting to fix it, they send out a huge pile of bugs, with a game tied in, just to make it somewhat tolerable.

I <3 Valve. :E