Jean-Eric Khalife

If it was always that easy I wouldn't have a job

What is a "Technical Artist" @Obsidian ? Is that simply an Artist that can work within technical restraints (limitations/guidelines: like file sizes, pallets, and non-diffuse textures)? Or is there more to it? Not even my reddit account is safe from funcroc A technical artist is someone who assists artists with the technical restraints and issues that games have now. As games become more technologically complicated it becomes harder for artists to sort through everything. e.g. An artist may be able to sculpt an awesome model in z-brush and paint beautiful textures, but figuring out why an area is crashing or why our cascaded shadow maps are looking funny isn't really their area of expertise. So I help them figure that stuff and make sure they're attacking problems efficiently instead of randomly deleting stuff when something goes wrong. So I'm not only an artist that can work within technical restraints, but I show other artists what to watch out for and I develop tools and scripts that make it so artists don't even have to worry about technical restraints because the tools catch the issues early or fix them automatically. For those interested in becoming tech artists or learning more about the position I would definitely recommend checking out this website and the GDC 2011 talks on being a tech artist: http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1500 Hopefully that helps describe it, let me know if you have more questions.

You're close The engine can definitely draw skies if we included skyboxes in the areas, when you get to the causeways you'll see what I'm taking about, but we usually don't include skyboxes in areas that don't need it. Tilting the camera further would have an impact on performance, gameplay and art since the whole game was designed around the current camera angle. We have a debug camera here that allows us to tilt it further and it doesn't look or feel right, so I wouldn't recommend it.

I'll fly across the world and do interviews for you instead Who are you in the video by the way? Will check it out now. From left to right: Alvin, Andrew, me, Matt

I'll fly across the world and do interviews for you instead

Thought I would share this: http://twitpic.com/58v08o The custom headphones were pretty awesome

The blurriness on the textures is a bug that got introduced, but we were able to fix it in time, so by the time you guys play the full game the texture sharpness should be a lot higher and it will allow you to see a lot more detail in the textures. The quality should match what you've seen in the screenshots we've released. Thank you to those who pointed out the issue, you've been a big help.

Btw, those are giant poster boards. They're about 8 or 9 feet tall in our front office. It's pretty sweet.

Was there anything specific that stood out to you?

Glad you guys are digging this stuff. We've put in a lot of work making this look as good as possible

Gratz! Thanks guys!

My point is merely that it CAN be as simple as I suggest to reward the player. It doesn't have to involve heavy scripting, massive art resources, complex tools. It is possible to add detail that keep people talking about your game for years to come just by using a little ingenuity. I completely agree with you that it's important to reward the player in such a way, but in this next-gen world we have to do it in a way that looks good or else we get people going "OMGZ Obsidian r N00bs the playurs r walking thru teh vines!!!111" As you can see from the screenshots and trailer we've stepped up our game on the art side of things, but there's no point in having better art if it doesn't accentuate the design. A pretty game that isn't fun isn't a good game. So we have to come up with systems that still reward the player in a fun way, look good and make sense with the three T's in mind. The astute ones here should take a minute to not just think about what I'm saying it, but why we know so much about this subject.

It's still not that simple. In this case the player will just walk right through the vines as he goes up to it and that doesn't look right, so what you're asking for is that we implement a physics system that allows the player to push away the vines as they walk up to it. This requires programmer time to implement tech for it, another programmer then has to spend time developing tools to use this system, then an artist would have to spend more time to create vines that look good using this system and then it would have to be placed in such a way that it still obscures the passage and is rewarding for the player to find. All this just for one little offshoot with some loot in it. It all goes back to what Nathaniel mentioned about "The Three T's", we have to decide if this is something worth investing our precious resources on. That's not to say we have or have not done this, but just keep in mind that it's a little more complicated than you think.

Over here! Edit: Did I just beat Funcroc to it? Holy crap! I wonder what I should demand next... Oh, I know. Hey Josh, send me a NCR t-shirt! I'll pay! I can't even get one of those

Over here! Edit: Did I just beat Funcroc to it? Holy crap! You should totally make a new thread for this, yay!

A Cherry Edit: NSFW art.

Onyx is set up so that we can develop on all platforms simultaneously. I can literally hit a button and hop on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC at the same time and see the changes I made. We want to make the experience just as good regardless of which platform you prefer.

So if You are already here, where's our gameplay trailer? Beats me, ask funcroc

Yeah, we don't want the press seeing the same thing every time, so we've been trying to show off of some of our newer areas as well.

Thanks! I'm excited that these screenshots are finally out and you guys get to see them. Teasing you with how good the game looks is only fun for so long.

It took me a bit, but I think I know what you're trying to say The tech guys are dedicated to projects that need new tech. So something like FNV doesn't need very many tech guys since all their tech is established. (They might need the occasional person to figure out how to get something obscure in the game, but that's it.) Since Onyx is something we want to keep using in the future the tech is constantly evolving to become the best it can be and that requires more tech people. Does this answer your question?

Most of the team from Aliens came over to DS since we were already familiar with Onyx and the Tools, but a few of the content creators went to NV since they needed more people.

I'll write about some more detailed problems we encountered and how we got around them once the game ships, so you guys have a better idea of what's goes on behind the scenes. Already worked on Vegas or Aliens?

Yup, here's a good article describing what a tech artist is: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/sear...=clnk&gl=us Let me know if you have any more questions, I'd be more than happy to answer them. Could you give some specific examples of the problems you solve?(Brag man, brag! ) I've spent most of my time focusing on environment art and working with the pipeline. Alongside the awesome programmers we have we've sped up the time it takes to build levels dramatically since Aliens. Lately I've been focusing on performance. Make sure the game is going to run great, but still look awesome on the consoles and the PC. So I've been looking into optimizing the different levels and assets to make that happen. When I get some down time I'll write scripts to automatically do some of the more menial art tasks like setting up collision so the artists are spending most of their time making art, not debugging the tech.

Yup, here's a good article describing what a tech artist is: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/sear...=clnk&gl=us Let me know if you have any more questions, I'd be more than happy to answer them.