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Jean-Eric Khalife

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Posts posted by Jean-Eric Khalife

    Highly stylized, high profile role playing game.

    in Obsidian General

    Posted

    He's just been busy. :)
    I'm a technical artist working at Obsidian Entertainment.
    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.

    Some updates re: feedback

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    the reason you cannot zoom in further or at a better angle is because the game engine doesnt draw the sky. if you tilted the camera up like you want to, they would have to draw the sky in.

     

    i also want health bubbles to stay longer.

    and i also want health bubbles to be collected when you roll - at the moment rolling doesnt pick up bubbles.

     

    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.

    Reviews

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    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.

    New screenshots

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    sorry to be in the minority... i don't know what kind of screenshots you guys are looking at but honestly the textures are really bad. are there anyway to add high res textures to the game if you have a better rig and graphics card?

     

    i know gameplays is the main criteria but please spare those who likes to look at pretty things. honestly, even sacred 2 with elite texture packs looks 100 times better.

     

    Was there anything specific that stood out to you?

    There better be secret passages!

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    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...

    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. :rolleyes:

    There better be secret passages!

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    First, the kind of detail and "secret passages" I am referring to doesn't actually have to be very complicated. For secret passages, it might be as simple as having a small ravine winding through a rocky part of the landscape. The ravine walls would be pretty simple rock textures on relatively flat surfaces, covered with hanging vines for variety. An ordinary world builder would place a few rocks here and there, fill out the place with as much detail as needed and move on to the next area. No matter if the tools were weak and the technology constrained, the builder would have to work within the limits of both and still make the best of the situation.

     

    A great world builder would admittedly spend a few hours more on the same area, but he would trade away a few rocks, remove a man sized part of the wall halfway through the ravine and add a hidden cave entrance behind the thick vines (making the entrance invisible unless you happened to walk up against and through the vines). With a few less rocks lying around and a relatively small cave behind the vines (with perhaps one strong encounter and one chest), both the polygon and memory quotas would be quite similar in both examples.

     

    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. :p

    So who is working on this game?

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    Good to hear.

    Though, correct me if I'm wrong, but since Obsidian (I think I've seen Chris Avellone saying that, but don't quote me on that) now wants to work primarily on Onyx, doesn't that mean that the masterplan is that all the (forgive me for the crude definition, but I'm not a developer, and it's already difficult for me to remember the difference between a jr designer and a lead world builder :unsure: ) tech guys like you become familiar with the engine?

    Feel free to answer with a 'this is stupid' or 'I'm not sure what the hell you're trying to say', especially since the sentence structure came up much more confusing than I'd hope. :lol:

     

    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?

    So who is working on this game?

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    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.

     

    Just out of curiosity, but since at least part of the Aliens team went to work on New Vegas, how many of you already worked on that project?

     

    Already worked on Vegas or Aliens?

    So who is working on this game?

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    Tech artist?

     

    Also, I'm listening to the Dungeon Siege theme, I must admit it's pretty nice though I'm not sure where the Morrowind vibe is.

     

    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! :lol:)

     

    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.

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