Level Designer _first_?

Question

This question is intended for those who, in game development, may work in one of the main sweatshops .. :)

I am a programmer, not an artist. Until recently, I had this idea that level design was something that Maya needed to do as an artist. Then the programmer will download it and “analyze” this model and build a BSP or something like that.

The more I work with level editors, the more it seems unrealistic the whole idea of ​​building a level in Maya or 3DSMax. Parsing a huge world will be a huge job, and it just seems so foolish to export SO MUCH DATA from Maya just to convert it to your own game format.

So the question is, does anyone use maya or 3dsmax or milkshape for level design in general? Or is it like the first thing a game should create is a map editor?

Answer 1

Building game levels with a 3D designer is a viable option for many games (rumor: the God of War team does this). This solution is suitable for containment levels that have very detailed and variable environments. I am sure artists appreciate the use of familiar and sophisticated tools from their craft to make levels beautiful. However, this is not a viable solution for most open-world games, where most of the optimization work involves streaming the minimum necessary parts to memory. The designer will not do this, so downloading and exporting at this level will force him to scan. In these games, the standard approach is to use a modeler to create reusable pieces of a level and compose the rest using a custom level editor. In any case, you will need to parse the 3D modeling format, and yes, it will be a lot of work.

I am not a guru, but for two years I worked on a huge, recently shipped game, for which I wrote quite a lot of art conveyor :)

Answer 2

I am not in the industry, so I do not expect to get many benefits for this, but I thought I contributed my own experience. Using commercial games (the Unreal series comes to mind), map editors seem to be individual to the game engine. This creates an intuitive meaning since you are not transferring the world with Maya, etc. There will also be a ton of metadata that does not exist in Maya, such as element properties, appearance points, etc. I think that the developers of most games create a Map Editor, creating an engine so that they can use the engine. Perhaps they even have significant code.

In my own games (only for hobbies), I always develop a simple map editor as soon as I have a sufficiently complete engine to make a simple map. Then I gradually add functions to both. I never used a ready-made tool for a map editor, unless you could once make my "maps" bitmaps, where each color of the pixels indicates the type of tile (for RTS) - I used MS Paint as a map editor. Sometimes my “editors” on the map are just simple algorithms for creating random maps, since I want to work with the game engine, and not with the map editor ... It may be worth noting that only some of my games got far enough to be fun to play and I never finished them.

Answer 3

Many games use Maya or 3DS Max as level designers. Typically, design tools are supplemented with special scripts / plugins that help mark data for proper export to the engine.

Creating a good map editor can be a huge task, especially for a small team that will only develop levels inside, and not open the process for modders. The necessary set of tools for the map editor often has many overlapping functions with design tools (wysiwyg views, transformation tools, animation tools, etc.), and it makes sense to use them.

I'm less familiar with Maya, but take a look at the 3DS Max SDK ( http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7481355 ) to find out what you can do.

Answer 4

You need to get the level geometry somewhere, and make your own editor for complex level geometry pretty crazy. (Terrain / elevation editing or any procedure-based content is an exception to this.) You can overcome the bottleneck of analyzing geometry from a file by maintaining an intermediate view, so you only need to parse it once for export, and not every time you load it into your game. Although I have never seen a file parsing to be a real bottleneck to start with; most of the time is spent converting raw geometry into a game format.

If, on the other hand, you mean adding certain game metadata to the level, you are definitely better off serving either the Max / Maya extension or writing your own editor. This is the standard operating procedure for any large-scale gameplay. In addition, it allows you to carry out all kinds of fun editing workflows, such as in-place editing during the game.

Answer 5

It really depends on what a game is and what a team is. Max and Maya are certainly used, and the data is usually exported (via MaxScript or something else) to a format that the game engine can understand for each platform for which you are developing (M84 answer is completely correct).

Sometimes the level editor is written specifically for the game engine, but it requires a lot of investment, so it’s worth it. You will usually see this on middleware systems or large engines that can be used for 3-4 years and for several names.

One project that I worked on broke the game world into pieces that could be downloaded and edited in Max, then the whole batch would be exported and stitched together. In another project, game objects of the world were created (for example, houses, fences, etc.) created in Max, and then all of them were placed together with a world editor developed inside the company. I do not think that any of these approaches is especially unusual.

Answer 6

My friend works as a leading level developer for one of the largest gaming companies creating ego shooters. They create a whole chain of tools for creating levels.

Sometimes you can see tools when you buy a game. The sandbox for Crytek is one example, another example: Leveldesigner for Neverwinter Nights, Fallout 3, Morrowind.

Levels are created using specialized tools designed for the game engine on which they work. Artists use tools like 3DS to create models / entities / prefabs that can be used in a level creator tool (for example: doors, tables, ... for neverwinter).

The first thing you need to create is a graphics engine and a level editor using the engine to create levels.

Answer 7

Typically, a game engine is recorded, and then a level editor is created using the engine. I can’t imagine why you used one of these programs to develop levels for your game. They do not know anything about the game, monsters, the player, their size, environment (gravity, etc.), Items. These programs will not cause an error unless you add a spawn point. These programs will not cause an error when trying to call a player off the map.

I would suggest installing Quake 2 and tinkering with the game, as well as with the level editor, moving to Quake 3, then Doom 3 / Quake 4. It was a summer learning process for me, but I studied the workloads, not only about creating maps and game engines , but also about optimization, as well as about many small flaws and shortcomings that you would like if you tried to make your own. Even if you are not trying to do FPS, it's worth it. id knew what they were doing, and they made some damn fine engines.

I also suggest reading Masters of Doom . This is seriously such an inspiring book.

Answer 8

You can use Max or Maya, but not recommended. And this is a level editor for some companies. However, these specific companies generally do not rely on Max / Maya 100%. They will have their own tools for designing AI, battle formations, scenarios, etc. It is almost impossible to get away from writing some kind of custom tool.

Text files, although not so beautiful, can create good game editors and levels. I usually start with an XML-style text format to get the level up and down. While designers are playing with text files, we get the job of creating a graphical editor. After all, you want your editor to read and write to a human readable text file, so why not start with one?

Plus, the purchase of Max / Maya licenses for each artist, designer and programmer is getting more expensive!