butternuts
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- Joined
- Sep 23, 2004
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I keep seeing posts every day complaining about the time it has taken to develop Half Life 2, and my answer to those posters is: get used to it.
The days of producing a game and getting it on shelves in a year or two are over. Can anybody guess the reason why? Graphics.
Sorry, but it really pisses me off when the same people that point out that the shadow of a picture frame hanging on the wall isn't just right, also complain that it has taken this long for HL2 to come out.
Adding things like real-time shadows, somewhat accurate real-time physics, eye candy, medium-poly characters with normal mapping, etc., takes A LOT OF TIME.
In fact, if you look at game development time vs. graphics/engine complexity, you'll see an exponential curve.
As a 3D artist myself, I know that modeling a high poly character can take a couple of weeks. Getting a low poly character mapped and baking that normal map from the high poly version, and getting it to look right, takes even longer. That's a few weeks for ONE CHARACTER.
So please, for the sake of the developers who spend 70+ hours a week working on this stuff, only to have somebody point out that a shadow is wrong, or the game has been in the works for 6+ years, either get used to it or demand less in terms of game complexity. Nothing is worse than having somebody point out that all your hard work has boiled down to a shadow error, and I have a few friends in the industry who would back me up.
The days of producing a game and getting it on shelves in a year or two are over. Can anybody guess the reason why? Graphics.
Sorry, but it really pisses me off when the same people that point out that the shadow of a picture frame hanging on the wall isn't just right, also complain that it has taken this long for HL2 to come out.
Adding things like real-time shadows, somewhat accurate real-time physics, eye candy, medium-poly characters with normal mapping, etc., takes A LOT OF TIME.
In fact, if you look at game development time vs. graphics/engine complexity, you'll see an exponential curve.
As a 3D artist myself, I know that modeling a high poly character can take a couple of weeks. Getting a low poly character mapped and baking that normal map from the high poly version, and getting it to look right, takes even longer. That's a few weeks for ONE CHARACTER.
So please, for the sake of the developers who spend 70+ hours a week working on this stuff, only to have somebody point out that a shadow is wrong, or the game has been in the works for 6+ years, either get used to it or demand less in terms of game complexity. Nothing is worse than having somebody point out that all your hard work has boiled down to a shadow error, and I have a few friends in the industry who would back me up.
