I think that to be a good level designer you need both because you want the players to be in awe of what there looking at because they use games escape reality, they don’t just want to see some dust bin in the corner they want to see massive towers like the citadel from half life two visible to the player throughout the level

But they also need the game to flow there is no need in having great scenery if the game is too choppy from the low frame rate

You can’t have enough flow in a level but yet you need to be immersed in the game

Sometimes you won’t even notice the amazing scenery in the game because your fighting through all the enemies and exploring the level

Also the level should never annoy the player like putting stupid jumps in that the player dies a lot at or hard to find takes or quests anything annoying to the players should be removed because if you have difficult jumps hard to find items and over the top enemies the player will die too many times get annoyed and curse the game never to play it again. it ruins the flow of the game

In conclusion to make a good level designer you have to get it bang on in the middle because too much scenery high frame rate and slows the game down in overall game play.

But on the other hand people need something to look at otherwise they don’t get immersed.

What is a digital architect?

A digital architect is someone who designers levels for games they use there skills in levels so much that they need to think like an real life architect

They reason there called digital architects is because they make amazing buildings scenery and the whole 3d environment just as a architect would make a cathedral or an opera house in real life

But they create it in virtual reality so they are called digital architects

Moore’s law means for future digital architects is that they will be able to make even better landscape than crisis ever dreamed off they will get better and better until they are life like

Moore’s law mean they can make everything on a whole new scale meaning more of everything

Also the more people will be needed to make a level meaning that there will be a lot more digital architects meaning that the need for digital architects will be a lot less so they will get paid less and wont get work as easy as they used to as the market will be flooded

Also there will be a need for prop designers to make things in barren space they used to use ‘clutter’ to make environments more life like chairs and tables and so on.

Level designers are glue chefs because

They are like chefs because they will get all there ideas together getting all the ingredients and make something special whilst following the guidelines of the design document ‘recipe’

They are glue because they make everything come together they make the ideas of the maps come together in the end

They are the glue because they are considered some of the most important people in the design process

The level designer take everybody’s hard work and puts it all together they take the texture made by the artists and places them in his level or asks the artist to creat a custom piece of work for his level he will figure out where to place the enemies of the level that was created by the programmers and the 3d artists while everything is being rendered by the engine programmer

Peer criticism is great if the level designer ask someone for criticism they tell them what they think is wrong and thus making the level better they could be told something by the criticism that puts everything into a new prospective and give the level designer new ideas on how he is going to make the level

Criticism is good because it makes the product better

i think that for a good level design they need to plan everything before hand but when they come to the level design keep there mind open for things that could be improved or completely changed you never know when your going to get a enw idea whilst making a level so why restricted yourself to what you thought up 2 weeks ago

good things can happen in the spur of the moment

so I think they it should be planned because they will make the level better get rid of a lot of bugs and make the level a lot more fun for the player but keep some improvisation in as well. Because they could just have an epiphany and realise how to make the whole level better

Renderers are very important in games because without them you wouldn’t see anything. They use up 50% of the CPUs processing time so it takes up a major part of the users processor

APIs are 3d accelerator card, API stands for Application program interface

It is harder to make a renderer for the pc because the PCs hardware is constantly improving so the developers don’t usually know the spec of the PCs the players are using

It is easier to make a renderer for the a console because the consoles hardware stays the same until the next console is out they are a ‘frozen snapshot in time’

So they know the specs and what they should aim for

Vertices are 3d objects stored as points in the 3d world these points make up the things in the game like chairs guns dinosaurs and other things

They are all points that have a relation with each other kind of like a vector but 3d

In big complicated games like half life 2 they have thousands and thousands of vertices

In a good games engine the renders are replaceable so that it is very easy to make ports of the game to play on other platforms like releasing a game on Xbox ps3 and pc

Pong 

2d Games Pong was the very first mainstream game ever made it was basically a form of table tennis recreated with two virtual bats and a ball.The object of the game is the same as ping pong hit the ball past your opponents bat. 

Space invaders

Another revolutionary 2d game is space invaders. space invaders was designed by Tomohiro Nishikados and started off as an arcade game, it was first seen in 1978 in Japan and is considered one of the most influential video games of all time. Tomohiro Nishikados baised the enemies in space invaders on his own interpretations of war of the worlds by hg wellsspace invaders consists of the player being the last defence of the earth put inside a robot that is able to shoot down the aliens space ships
the player has 3 shields in front of them to protect them from the enemies bullets
the player must shoot down every enemy on the screen and every time the player shoots down one of the ship the fleet of space crafts speed up. the enemy crafts get drop a row every few seconds so this adds a time limit, when the last space craft is alive it moves very fast and is hard to hit this is made harder because the player can only fire one bullet at a time, although they have unlimited ammo.When you do kill the last spacecraft you are rewarded with a new set of enemies but they start one row down. making the game harder and harder, The player gets a score for every successful shooting of an enemy and players compete for the high score.
sometimes bonus spaceships fly across the top and give the player certaint amount of points if they manage to get it downspace invaders is still at arcades and is still played today showing the power of the gameplay and the fun in this game.
Proving yet again that gameplay is better then graphics

Mario And Shigeru Miyamoto

Shigeru Miyamoto born November 16, 1952 is considered one of the innovators of 2d games and overall games itself he broke the ground of games by making the first ever saving rpg game legend of zelda meaning that you could go back and play from where you left off this changed how people thought about games meaning that they had to find a suitable place to save and also had to save regularly other wise if they died they had to start from where they last saved. This was a change from most 2d games before because if you died you had to start from the very beginning. This also he his games ideas have made Nintendo what they are today with his non stop innovation Donkey Kong was made in 1981 by Shigeru Miyamoto is one of the very best 2d arcade games you where a Italian Plummer and you had to rescue the princess from the top of the tower whilst Donkey Kong threw barrels at you to stop you, these could easily be dodged by jumping them or skipping them by going up one of the levels Donkey Kong was the very first appearance of Super Mario Bros who would later be used by Miyamoto again but this time in his own game.Super Mario brothers was the first of many Mario games made by Shigeru MiyamotoThis game was the first game to have what is called play control because of the way you could build momentum from running and slide under boxes or slide off the edge of something if you are going to fastThis changed games because of the way you could use your character and people still go back to play this game on the nes because of all of the secrets and bonus levels and sadly because most games do not have that kind of game play anymore  

3d and the start of 3d games

Although wolfenstein 3d is considered one of the first 3d games it actually is lots of 2d content. This is the game that brought the world f games into the 3d generation as this was the father doom

Vector Graphics (geometric modeling, Object-oriented graphics)

vector images are similar to jpegs and bitmaps but they are different and much more useufull because vector images can be streched and twisted and the stays the same. vector images can also be edited alot more for example. the detail of the images can be removed to make an images for a leaflet or sign.

vector images are different to raster images because they record points on all of the picture just like star constellations and this means that the images can be remembered. they are remembered because of lots of mathematical equations

Raster Images

Raster images are usualy made a very a large group of rectangles called pixels each of these pixels have a colour this makes up the picture and how the picture is colored and looks.

Unlike vector images when raster images are stretched the squares become bigger and because further squares are not added the images becomes very very blocky giving the picture less definition therefore ruinening the picture.

On the other hand raster images are very small in size compaired to vectors so you sacrifice quality for quantity. As you can store more raster images then vectorsthis means raster images are more practical in everyday use than vectors but vectors have better quality overall.

So in summary raster images should be used for everyday purpose and vector images should be used for the specalist jobs like graphic design for websites or concept art for games.

In todays lesson we have been discussing all about audiences and how media producers think about their audiences. i need to know about audiences because it tells me what group of people I should be aiming my product.

Also in todays lesson we have been talking about social grade, which is what the companies use to catorigise the audience they are aiming at

Grade Social class Typical  o ccupation
A upper middle class doctor, solicitor, barrister, accountant, company director
B middle class teacher, nurse, police officer, probation officer, librarian, middle manager
C1 lower middle class junior manager, student, clerical/office workers, supervisors
C2 skilled working class foreman, agricultural worker, plumber, bricklayer
D working class manual workers, shop worker, fisherman, apprentices
E underclass casual labourers, state pensioners

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_grade

As well at social grade we have also been discussing Demographics, which is like the social grade but it doesnt give people a straightforward label, it catorigises people by their income, race, home ownership and more.

Demographics refers to selected population characteristics as used in government, marketing or opinion research, or the demographic profiles used in such research. (Note the distinction from demography, see below.) Commonly-used demographics include race, age, income, disabilities, mobility (in terms of travel time to work or number of vehicles available), educational attainment, home ownership, employment status, and even location. Distributions of values within a demographic variable, and across households, are both of interest, as well as trends over time. Demographics are frequently used in economic and marketing research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics

Film, TV, Publishing, Music ,Games and Radio all produce different texts with different audiences.
I.E Music mostly upper middle class people will listen to classical music whereas middle class and lower class people are more likey to listen to dance music or rock.
The companies have to decided what they are going to aim their product so they can sell effectively and make money from advertising (in the case of radio, tv etc). 

Understanding how media producers think about audiences. 

BARB stands for broadcasters audience research board they monitor what people are watching on television so that the advertisers know which audience are watching a TV show.

I.E 18- 25 watch the Simpson’s on a Sunday on sky one. The advertisers then know that they can put there adverts on that appeal to the 18-25 audiences to full effect

 

 

   

RAJAR are very similar BARB but they monitor radio listeners instead of  television viewers

 RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research Limited) was established in 1992 to operate a single audience measurement system for the radio industry – BBC, UK licensed and other commercial stations.The company is wholly owned by the RadioCentre (the trade body representing the Commercial Radio stations in the UK, formerly known as Commercial Radio Companies Association or CRCA) and by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). RAJAR is structured as a ‘deadlocked’ company, Board decisions require the agreement of both parties.Whilst the Board debates and ratifies important decisions of policy and principle, more detailed discussion, and where relevant, decision-making, takes place in the Technical Management Committee (TMC) and the Development Working Group (DWG).In addition to BBC and the RadioCentre representation, membership of the Board, DWG and TMC recognises the interests of the advertising community, which is represented by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA). In addition a representative of the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) attends Board meetings.RAJAR’s non-executive independent Chairman chairs meetings of the Board. The day to day operations of RAJAR are the responsibility of the Managing Director and Research Director.From 2007, the RAJAR research contractors are Ipsos-MORI for fieldwork and reporting and RSMB for weighting and sample design. 

http://www.rajar.co.uk/content.php?page=about_organisation

  

They are mainstream audiences and niche audiences mainstream are products aimed at the general public that mostly everyone will like and the niche products are aimed at the small part of the public that will like and buy that product

I.E in films a big mainstream film will spend millions of pounds making their movie because they know they are going to make it back because most of the public will watch it where are the niche films have a low beget but skill make a profit because their target audience will buy it

Photoshop .psd .pdd

 This is the default save file format for Photoshop, these files may be big because they contain all the information about the layers channels and effects so that people can edit the picture more.The files can then be saved as a different format like a gif or an mpeg this reduces the size of the file

http://www.adobe.com/uk/

What is a games engine?

An engine is the base of any game it is the AI the models the sounds and physics everything needed to make the game work.

People can make brand new games by editing the engine in any way they want this is called a modification

Valve software made half-life but a Vietnamese American called Minh Le (Gooseman) edited the engine made his own modification called counter strike this game was so popular that valve bought the game from him and is still the most played online First person shooter today

Counter-strike is even considered a sport there are professional teams who get paid to compete in tournaments

The teams are sponsored by companies like amd and radeon

This would not have even been made if it wasn’t for wolfenstein 3d first person shooter game to have 3d mapping this engine was used again in the doom, Id software

John Carmack used bsp in doom to render the walls and the backgrounds in doom this is so the game could render the something that had been drawn and something yet to be rendered.

Cliff Blezinski

‘Bleszinski’s first game was The Palace of Deceit: Dragon’s Plight, a 1991 pixel-hunting adventure game for Windows PC. He is also known for the games Dare to Dream and Jazz Jackrabbit. In 2006, he served as lead game designer on the game Gears of War for the Xbox 360.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Bleszinski

 

 

Mods

Valve software made half-life but a Vietnamese American called Minh Le (Gooseman) edited the engine and made a modification called Counter-strike this game was so popular that valve bought the game from him and is still the most played online First person shooter today

hello world