Happy Birthday Beyond Belief!

10 years ago today, Beyond Belief was released. How time has passed!

I knew that I wanted to make a Quake episode from the moment the game got released. I kinda had to, after all the Doom design work I had done before. And those were interesting times – the mapping and modding community was still in its infancy and a tight-knit group. There weren’t that many games to mod for, anyway – Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem. Quake was the only true 3D game. We’d hang out in the #Quake and #QuakeEd channels a lot, trash talk about various things and generally discover the exciting internet world that was out there. I’d clog up my parents’ phone lines the entire night, using a long phone extension cord that ran from my room to the lobby. It’s hard to imagine these days, but back in 96, talking to people from all over the world was something incredibly new and exciting.

Initially, I wanted to make two Quake episodes with 8 maps each, but eventually I settled on only one. Building these levels took a lot of time, and while I didn’t exactly kill myself with my university workload, I had other things going on in my life that also required attention. The tools weren’t quite up to par to what they are today – I made most of my maps in Quest. A very capable editor, but it lacked basic niceties such as shaded 3D view. All my levels were build in wireframe, and in the beginning I had to align textures by hacking the text file and manually typing in the UV offset. I’d compile the level, run it and see if the texture looked correct. If it didn’t, I’d count the number of pixels that I had to adjust for. Back then that was possible because the textures were low-res enough and there was no bilinear filtering to disguise the shapes.

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Lair Media Blowout

You can find all sorts of flashy new Lair media on the web if just look around a bit. The two videos I’d like to point to are the guided developer tour that Gametrailers posted. I think they show off the polished game in the best light and give you a good idea of the finished product. Enjoy!

God of War II

Wow. If anybody had been shown this game in 2000 and had been told “This is a Playstation 2 game. This is what this console is capable off!” they wouldn’t have believed it. God of War II looks and plays fantstatic. Of course the game doesn’t look as good as a true PS3 game, but who cares when one is so sucked into the experience? I think I’ll be ready to completely move over to PS3 after God of War II – if this isn’t the swan song for the Playstation 2, I don’t know what is. Awesome job, guys!

Clarification

Maybe, while we wait for the GDC downloads to get finalized, I should clear up some confusion. Various people, after reading summeries of my session on the Interweb tubes, seem to have gotten the impression that my session could be easily summerized as “Lair didn’t look good until we used normal maps – you should all use normal maps!”

I did indeed make that comment in the beginning – as a quip to demonstrate that if it really was that simple, I wouldn’t have anything to talk about in the first place. Normal mapping is a widely used (and not all that complicated) technique that has been been applied successfully in many of the greatest blockbuster games we have played over the past few years. My talk concentrated on the fact that in the end, normal mapping is not a big wonder weapon, as some people might think. Your visual results always depend on the quality of the normal maps that are applied to a game, not the simple fact that you can do it in the first place. I did the session to present a few ways to increase that quality.

I just thought that it would be worthwhile to point out the distinction. Keep in mind that GDC is a developer conference. It’s all about the behind the scenes stuff, and about sharing knowledge that will help our industry to become better at what we do – so that we can all learn, evolve…and get the fuck off this planet. I’m not sure about that last part. But hey, any chance to quote the late great Bill Hicks

There And Back Again

I’m back from GDC, with a shiny new copy of Motorstorm from the Playstation store Can’t wait to play the game online – my PS3 account name is “Matthias”, look me up in some online games!
I think the talk went well (and yes, it was technical ), and I’m incredibly excited for the future of the PS3 in general. Gonna get all downloads for my lecture ready in the next week or so. Thanks for showing up!

IGN interviews John Debney

John Debney, popular film composer and creator of one of my all-time favourite movie scores (that would be Cutthroat Island), is interviewed on IGN about his scoring work on Lair.

• Part 1
• Part 2

PS3 Pricing

Say what you will about the Playstation 3 price. Yes, I know that it’s nice to have options and that not every consumer wants the full package. But for somebody like me, who does want all the accessories (and just finished buying them by adding a shiny new HD-DVD drive), the Xbox 360 is indeed more expensive than the oh-so overpriced PS3.

60GB Playstation 3: $600.
20GB Xbox 360 + Wireless adaptor + HD-DVD drive: $400 + $100 +$200 = $700.

That’s 100 bucks more for the Xbox, and for that I get a significantly smaller harddrive and no digital (HDMI) output. So yeah, rag on Sony’s pricing scheme as much as you want. It’s not really that expensive.

GDC 2007 Session

Details for my GDC 2007 session finalized! It hasn’t been posted (or scheduled) yet, but if you’re going to be in San Francisco this year keep it in mind!

More Than Just A Pretty Map – Creating Next-Generation Materials for Lair
Presenter: Matthias WorchSession Description:
Next-generation materials are more than just an accumulation of color and normal maps. Join us as we take an in-depth look at the techniques that were used to create the highly detailed materials in LAIR.
The focus of this session is on the artist. It will present multiple ways to quickly and efficiently create color, normal and height maps for realistic materials. It will also demonstrate different ways of acquiring source data for these maps, for example by scanning real world surfaces. To address the bigger picture, we will look at the texture/material creation process from a technical art director’s perspective. We will review different approaches to a company-wide shader authoring system and discuss ways to spread material creation knowledge throughout the team.

Idea Takeaway:
Attendees will acquire techniques that help them to quickly and efficiently create realistic-looking materials for next-generation games.

Intended Audience:
Texture artists and art department managers working on next-generation 3D games.

This should be a really fun session! I have a lot of material and demos to share. As usual not many slides, mostly realtime demos that show how stuff is actually done in the applications. Some topics circle back to my GDC 2005 talk, so I can build on a lot of the concepts and ideas that I presented back then. I used similar material to educate our company, and I had various programmers tell me that it helped them to get a much more indepth idea of what the art department is doing. Even if you’re no artist, this would be a great way to broaden your horizon. Hope you can make it!

Update: Talk is posted on the GDC webpage now. No scheduling yet, though. And an outdated bio

TTP Prototype

My old room in Essen doesn’t bear much resemblance with what it looked like 15 years ago, back when I started making my first game mods on ye olde Amiga and DX2-66. I’ve been gone for 9 years – only to reappear once every xmas – and of course my parents started using the room for other purposes. But tugged away in one of the old drawers of my old furniture, there’s two boxes with 3 1/2 inch disks that used to host many of my (then) biggest treasures. One of the boxes bears an old “Amiga – European Computer of the year 1990!” sticker; the other one is still locked with one of those cheap universal keys that nobody has ever trusted to keep anything save – with the exception of Diebold voting machines, maybe.

The lock was busted open in a matter of seconds, and as I started digging around the content of various disks, the one that caught my attention was labeled “Lord Bane’s Playground”. LBP was an Unlimited Adventures module that I had sunk over a year of my life into in 1993. I really wanted to see that old module again, but unfortunately for FRUA fans, the disk had been overwritten with something else. Fortunately for Doom fans, the new file was NoName.WAD, which turns out to be an early version of what would become The Troopers’ Playground episode for Doom 2. Apparently I had a fetish for “playgrounds” back then. Or my English just wasn’t good enough to come up with other titles.

I don’t recall the minute details of my Doom editing career. I do remember that the first ever level I made was actually created in Heretic because I liked the art so much. It was nothing more than a simple room with a player start. Then of course there’s the TTP/MM2/Requiem phase, in which I also made the two deathmatch levels that would be released as part of TTP. But in between, there is a black hole. I guess NoName.WAD neatly falls into that hole.

The WAD contains four levels, of which the first one should most interesting because I don’t recall ever releasing it. The TTP status bar was done, and there’s also some enemy frames of a fishdude that replace most Hellknight animations (but not all – I guess I wasn’t completely done yet at the time). I had completely forgotten about that fish guy! Apparently there’s also some Dehacked work that’s more of less lost on me today because the archive doesn’t contain the .DEH file, just a patched Doom2.EXE that had been renamed to NoName.EXE. If you still have an original Doom 2 setup you can try to get it to run – but if you do, you’ll have to use NWT to merge the WAD with the main IWAD.
The fish guy never made an appearance anywhere, he would be replaced by the evil Doom trooper instead. He doesn’t look particularly good, either. But I’m sure back then, I though he was the greatest thing ever, even if just for the reason that I had replaced a monster in my favorite game! What can I say, this was 1994…

Here’s a breakdown of the levels:

• Map01 – My first completed Doom 2 SP level. As far as I can recall, it has never been released before. First map ever – of course it’s rough around the edges and if you choose to play this, you should save often to not get stuck. There’s various slime areas that can only be passed with enough health.
• Map 02 – I think this is the third SP level I ever made, and would appear as map08 in the finished TTP. Definite improvements in this map, and a bunch of custom graphics. I still have a soft spot in my heart for this one.
• Map 03 – I made this level right after the initial one, and it would become map03 in TTP (with a few touchups). Still early and rough, but it had some good ideas and a neat non-linear flow.
• Map 04 – Early version of map06 in TTP, with some missing areas. I also reused this level in Requiem.

Anyway. Without further ado, here’s the file: NoName.ZIP. I hope you have some fun with it, especially if you’re an oldschool Doom player like me.

Playstation 3 Network

If you have a Playstation 3 and would like to add me to your friend list, you can send an invite to “Matthias”. Remember that this is a 100% private account I use for recreation.