Castle wrote:
Another thing I have been observing is a decline in the usefulness of 2d windows in game development with higher poly assets. I want to do a video talking about this this weekend, I have to get my copy of UE4 working again to show proper examples.
That already started with Radiant and Q3A. As soon as you start adding many models, e.g. I did that with plants in AEdm7... your 2D views become so cluttered that working on brush geometry becomes very difficult. The trick, hide stuff you need not see presently via "hide" or entity filters. QuarK was one of the first editors that actually used a grouping feature... e.g. group all skybox brushes, and then hide them with one click etc. But the grouping never really got added to Radiant... so we all learned to live without them. A more recent addition was face select all, i.e. select a texture face, then shift+a and then all brushes with that texture are selected. In the skybox example that was really efficient.
I am probably very old school but I really think a top-down view (XY) and a (Z) view are fundamental. And then for the rest you fly around in 3D and get things placed and textured.
In Reflex... the real time features are nifty... but when trying to create something more complicated, I really wonder how efficient the 3D editing alone is. Presently I think from the user power there are modelling tools that can do really complicated 3D editing that is *not* grid based (stencil in edges of a box e.g.), then there is Radiant with quick grid-based brushwork, and then Reflex... and I feel from what I have seen that Reflex is on the "dumbed down" side.
The latter I mean, it takes huge amounts of effort to get more complicated geometry "just so". This will lead to a dumbing down of maps, since only the really talented or dedicated will try to get more out of such an editor. Seen it in GTKradiant... some really complicated geometry was done in models, or by a really talented mapper in Radiant... but even in radiant one does tend to stay boxy.
But I was not trying to bash the Reflex editor. Much like with your Voxel videos... this is the beginning... and it will probably require a different way of working, and probably a different form of creativity to get something interesting out of the Reflex. I would presently compare Reflex with the "simplified" editing seen in the Portal 2 editor, that only worked in blocks... quick to get something out there... but difficult to get something interesting done... maybe.
The whole multiplayer mapping thing, is nifty, I'll admit it, but I sure as heck would hate having someone mess into the map I am presently working on. For tutorial real-time help this is great though. And if you have a team of gamers, the players could enter the map, and test it with the mapper, and the mapper could fix and change things, that the players could instantly test. That could be interesting, massively shortening the feedback loop. Or if the maps are all accessible and you hate something, just open the editor and fix the map right there.
On a positive note... I like the lighting system that seems to bounce back light from walls. This should lead to interesting looking maps, that do not require a huge amount of trickery and fiddling to light properly. At least I hope so.
Will continue to watch your videos on Reflex... might motivate me to get it... and play around some myself
) to ask for or about more stuff early on, in the hopes these things will be added. After "release" such things usually tend not to get added, since the priority then is to keep everything working and not break anything.
