NarfwakJoin Date: 2002-11-02Member: 5258Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica PT Lead, NS2 Community Developer
A lot of the prop artists are contractors and not in-house employees of UWE. Not everyone at UWE owns the company, either - keep in mind that most of the boys in the office could easily go get jobs at Google or other high-paying technology firms with their skillset and pedigree, but they choose to work at UWE instead. Again, if you want great people working at your company you have to pay them what they're worth. Good will alone does not create great companies or great products.
And before anyone says anything about playtesters - we're the exception that proves the rule.
Good will alone does not create great companies or great products.
Indeed it does not, though NS has a tremendous amount of good will contributors in its history. The problem with the expense evaluation, as I see it, is that it would loose a lot of merit if it somehow turned out that a big factor in development costs being so steep is because most of it is sitting in the pockets of the one evaluating.
Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that everyone should be compensated for their hard work and expertise. Everyone that works in UWE or has contributed by selling their time and skill deserves every penny they get, I have absolutely no issues here. After all, that's what you go into business for in the first place.
My query is about the evaluation, seeing as it was brought out as an argument.
@Squeal_Like_A_Pig
You see, that's the problem. You (as part of UWE) give arbitrary numbers but don't break them down into actual costs, which you probably should when asking for donations to compensate for development. Now, I realize that making a map requires knowledge of several tools and a lot of work, but $100k is still a rather steep figure for a single piece of content, especially since a sizable chunk of your contributors are volunteers (like the testers). Care to go into a little more detail? Believe it or not, I'm not trying to troll you or call you out on a bluff, I'm genuinely interested in how you came up with that number.
Give me 100k and Ill be happy to make you a map. Heck, I'll go one better and do it for 50k!
Ooh, 50K, that's a bargain. Sounds good, but in addition to learning the editor so you can put a map together, you'll also need to learn a 3d modeling program to create some high quality models, and also Photoshop for all of the texturing. And then proceed to do the work of a team of artists to create all the custom art content to fully theme out an entire map, the way Eclipse was done.
Call me so we can discuss this further.
Honestly, even if I didn't know how to do any of this, I'd be willing to learn if I was promised a sum close to $100k per map.
You'd have a pretty awesome career in game dev if you learned to do all that on your own, and was good at it!
@SteveRock
I'm actually dead serious Steve, if someone was willing to pay me that kind of money to make maps, Id be all over every tool needed, working my ass off to polish my skills.
Yes. Yes, we probably would. (LEGAL DISCLAIMER: I have nothing to do with the budgeting/production of levels, so I kinda have no idea what I'm talking about :P)
Now, realistically though, you won't have all those skills. Most people specialize, from concept art to texturing to modeling to animation to environment art to level design. They usually take some chunk of that spectrum. And even within those tasks, there are sub-tasks, such as lighting, mo-cap, etc. I don't know a single person in the industry who can do all that stuff at a large scale, that quickly... even if you did have those skills, I doubt you could finish an Eclipse-quality map in 3 months, with all the new art that's actually in the map. If you could do it in a year, then yeah, you could easily pull a $100k annual salary. I don't really think it's humanly possible though, at least for the AAA quality type of levels we're talking about.
Squeal_Like_A_Pig
you are saying making assets and 1 map cost 100 000 dollars? but to put that it in perspective:
if u pay lets say 50 induvidual mappers 1000$ each - (i bet they would cough up better maps then eclipse) and 50 guys making assets that is receiving a 1000$ paycheck once 1 map is final and completed...it all adds up but sounds like fantasy numbers and is completely unrealistic. how many mappers did u have for eclipse 2,3,5? then thats 50.000 to split, they would have to take 10.000$ each i doubt that is what happend, so maby u got 1 person making the trailer? did the 5 mappers take the unrealistic 1000 dollar each and he the unrealistic 45.000 left for mappers just for 1 trailer? haha u have to be kidding here, also dont say its elictricity, u dont even have 50 mappers developing 1 map.
I...um...uh.... Wow, you completely overwhelmed me with all those fact based numbers and impressive math skills you were throwing around, I can't even come up with a response.
@Squeal_Like_A_Pig
You see, that's the problem. You (as part of UWE) give arbitrary numbers but don't break them down into actual costs, which you probably should when asking for donations to compensate for development. Now, I realize that making a map requires knowledge of several tools and a lot of work, but $100k is still a rather steep figure for a single piece of content, especially since a sizable chunk of your contributors are volunteers (like the testers). Care to go into a little more detail? Believe it or not, I'm not trying to troll you or call you out on a bluff, I'm genuinely interested in how you came up with that number.
I'm sorry, but we aren't going to go into extensive detail regarding salaries of each UWE employee and hourly costs of contract artists. But I can break this down a bit further for you.
--Eclipse was about 7 months of development time, from greybox testing to final polished map. Probably longer, counting time spent fixing stuff even after release.
--This included anywhere from 2 to 4 of our UWE employed mappers (fewer at the beginning, then pretty much the entire mapping team by the end in order to help get the map out the door
--A good chunk of my time was spent creating concept images for the map, as well ad doing paintovers and giving feedback to the mappers and environment artists
--There was another contract concept artist who also helped out with a good amount of landmark area designs and prop designs (this stuff isn't just made up by the modelers/texture artists, they need lots of concept art to work from)
--One in house fulltime UWE environment artist employee, and 2 - 3 additional contract environment artists. I'm not going to count out every single art asset in the map, from small props and textures to large landmark props such as power generators and energy weapons, but trust me, there's A LOT. Almost every floor texture, wall texture, railing prop, landmark prop, etc. was created specifically for Eclipse, but with the intention that it would add a lot of new assets for community mappers to make use of, as well. Just this simple hallway http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/files/2013/12/EclipseHallway.jpg has multiple floor textures, trim textures, wall textures and props, crate props, and other props like benches and computer terminals in the far background
--FX artist. There were a lot of FX, from the cool rain falling outside and running down the glass windows, to energy beams shooting out of experimental weapons, and more.
--Sounds. Our sound guy had to make a sound pass for the whole map.
--The new main menu that shipped with the map release. An new room was built specifically for the main menu, which took a mappers time and my time working closely with them to get a look that worked well, along with animating camera movement, adding all the FX, and animated characters, etc.
--Hugh's time to make the trailer (yes, those things take a good amount of time as well to both film the footage and edit it all together)
Of course there is all the amazing unpaid work that went in on testing and bug finding done by the PTs, but that doesn't count towards the final amount.
Anyway, this is by no means an exorbitant amount for an entire level/map for a typical game. But most people who are not game developers have no idea how much time, effort and money goes into every aspect of game development. I hope this has been a little enlightening.
Yea, I think people didn't take into account the main menu and such. Just the map. The concept art would take some time. Fx and sounds.... yeah I see it. Idk the industry well, so 100k just sounds like a lot to me
I'm glad some devs chimed back in here again because when I read @radimaX's post, I think a few of my own brain cells died... And your response is a lot more civil than I can imagine mine would have been.
@Squeal_Like_A_Pig
You see, that's the problem. You (as part of UWE) give arbitrary numbers but don't break them down into actual costs, which you probably should when asking for donations to compensate for development. Now, I realize that making a map requires knowledge of several tools and a lot of work, but $100k is still a rather steep figure for a single piece of content, especially since a sizable chunk of your contributors are volunteers (like the testers). Care to go into a little more detail? Believe it or not, I'm not trying to troll you or call you out on a bluff, I'm genuinely interested in how you came up with that number.
I'm sorry, but we aren't going to go into extensive detail regarding salaries of each UWE employee and hourly costs of contract artists. But I can break this down a bit further for you.
--Eclipse was about 7 months of development time, from greybox testing to final polished map. Probably longer, counting time spent fixing stuff even after release.
--This included anywhere from 2 to 4 of our UWE employed mappers (fewer at the beginning, then pretty much the entire mapping team by the end in order to help get the map out the door
--A good chunk of my time was spent creating concept images for the map, as well ad doing paintovers and giving feedback to the mappers and environment artists
--There was another contract concept artist who also helped out with a good amount of landmark area designs and prop designs (this stuff isn't just made up by the modelers/texture artists, they need lots of concept art to work from)
--One in house fulltime UWE environment artist employee, and 2 - 3 additional contract environment artists. I'm not going to count out every single art asset in the map, from small props and textures to large landmark props such as power generators and energy weapons, but trust me, there's A LOT. Almost every floor texture, wall texture, railing prop, landmark prop, etc. was created specifically for Eclipse, but with the intention that it would add a lot of new assets for community mappers to make use of, as well. Just this simple hallway http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/files/2013/12/EclipseHallway.jpg has multiple floor textures, trim textures, wall textures and props, crate props, and other props like benches and computer terminals in the far background
--FX artist. There were a lot of FX, from the cool rain falling outside and running down the glass windows, to energy beams shooting out of experimental weapons, and more.
--Sounds. Our sound guy had to make a sound pass for the whole map.
--The new main menu that shipped with the map release. An new room was built specifically for the main menu, which took a mappers time and my time working closely with them to get a look that worked well, along with animating camera movement, adding all the FX, and animated characters, etc.
--Hugh's time to make the trailer (yes, those things take a good amount of time as well to both film the footage and edit it all together)
Of course there is all the amazing unpaid work that went in on testing and bug finding done by the PTs, but that doesn't count towards the final amount.
Anyway, this is by no means an exorbitant amount for an entire level/map for a typical game. But most people who are not game developers have no idea how much time, effort and money goes into every aspect of game development. I hope this has been a little enlightening.
@Squeal_Like_A_Pig
By no means did I expect you to give me exact numbers, especially regarding salaries.At best percentages of specific segments of development costs that made up the total.
Despite what it may seem, I do actually have a vague idea of what goes into making one of these, but its nice to see it broken up into smaller pieces. I'm also pretty sure that I'm not the only one that will find it interesting. So thanks for breaking it down a bit.
I still think the sum you came up with is a bit fluffed, especially since the map was developed over a seven month cycle so its a good bet that some of the costs you included overlapped with other tasks, rather than being map specific (mostly talking about full time team members).
I still stand by what I said though, if someone offered me $100k to make maps I'd work my ass of to learn every tool needed and start cranking them out. Its quite a deal.
I still stand by what I said though, if someone offered me $100k to make maps I'd work my ass of to learn every tool needed and start cranking them out. Its quite a deal.
Nobody was paid or offered $100K, but many people, over quite some time. Go to school. Learn piece by piece. You'll soon learn developing a map like eclipse is not something you could pull off in 7 months on your own.
Hope you're not holding your breath waiting for a $100,000 offer to come up.
I still stand by what I said though, if someone offered me $100k to make maps I'd work my ass of to learn every tool needed and start cranking them out. Its quite a deal.
Nobody was paid or offered $100K, but many people, over quite some time. Go to school. Learn piece by piece. You'll soon learn developing a map like eclipse is not something you could pull off in 7 months on your own.
Hope you're not holding your breath waiting for a $100,000 offer to come up.
@2cough
Sure I am, I've already started on my map and hope to seal the deal by next week, I'm so sure It's happening that I've quit my job in preparation (because I don't have time for it anymore plus I won't need it once I start cranking out these bad boys). Just waiting for Cory to send me that number he promised!
You missed the point of the whole conversation, and a bit of the joke.
wow, $100k for a map? that seems so out of this world when you consider it's just a remake of an older map. i can see why the game wasn't considered "sustainable" now with that type of figure.
i never understood what the obsession is with wanting and pumping out new content content all the time. a lot of older games have very limited content and have huge playerbase nearly a decade later. i personally don't care about new maps, new weapons, new skins, i want the existing problems fixed, but i think it's clear they're here to stay. i wish that money went to more important things like improving the server lagging issues and late game performance issues. focus was on the wrong thing IMO.
Counter-Strike is a good example of a very successful game built on gameplay and not tons of content.
CS is case and point @ creating good gameplay and performance and implementing more content and skins / customizables down the road after it is dubbed sustainable as has been done with CS:GO and the skins system.
If only the gameplay was the focus in NS2 and performance as well.. rather than adding more content.. which in some cases.. worsens both of those things.. This has always been my biggest concern.
If performance and gameplay were focused on the entire time up to this point and we had something comparable and THEN added this new skins / customizable stuff I think we would be in a much better place.
I personally think Sewlek did a great job doing that with B250 but didn't really follow up on the great changes with tweaks until months later.
I think LUAJit was a great step forward for performance.
But then there was barely any follow up with that as well.. with a performance decrease that came with Reinforced.
I like radimax's idea of paying each artist and level designer $1000 for 7 months of work though OMG SO MUCH MORE MONEY FoR ME HAHAHAHA
This is why it pays to make games for adults. Kids think $1000 is a lot of money, and $5 for DLC is half of their monthly budget. Adults care more about spending their limited time on quality experiences, and the money basically doesn't matter.
Now, realistically though, you won't have all those skills. Most people specialize, from concept art to texturing to modeling to animation to environment art to level design. They usually take some chunk of that spectrum. And even within those tasks, there are sub-tasks, such as lighting, mo-cap, etc. I don't know a single person in the industry who can do all that stuff at a large scale, that quickly... even if you did have those skills, I doubt you could finish an Eclipse-quality map in 3 months, with all the new art that's actually in the map. If you could do it in a year, then yeah, you could easily pull a $100k annual salary. I don't really think it's humanly possible though, at least for the AAA quality type of levels we're talking about.
@SteveRock
Don't you dare back out now, I've already sold my flat and quit my job!
Seriously though, if I ware to fully commit to something like this and build on top of the skills I already have I would assume I would probably be able to produce a fairly decent quality map (in "jack of all trades, master of none" fashion) in about a year, give or take a few months depending on the problems I would run into (assuming sleep deprivation and a coffee overdose wouldn't drive me insane somewhere along the way).
Money is a magnificent motivator for both learning and working, but just to be clear, I was making a hypothetical statement about a fictional situation.
Is 100k really considered a lot for creating a map?
Considering something like angrys birds, which is just shiny looking flash browser game, cost more than 100k to create. I really don't see 100k being all that expensive for a map.
Is 100k really considered a lot for creating a map?
Considering something like angrys birds, which is just shiny looking flash browser game, cost more than 100k to create. I really don't see 100k being all that expensive for a map.
Always depends on who creates something and in which timeframe. If you hire DICE to churn out Angry Birds: Bad Company for christmas 2014 it's going to be a lot more expensive than if you hire some Indie developer who happily works on it in his free time after work for the next two years.
100.000 is what developer said
i said a hypothetical figure in order to even come up to that astronomical sum so i doubt there woul ever be 50 mappers or 50 asset makers but if there ever was, they would each get 1000$ for 1 map, now if we take a more REALISTIC figure like 10 people making the content of 1 ENTIRE MAP. (based on how few it took to make the entire game)
i dont care if game is AAAAAAAAA title becouse even battlefield would prop not put 50 people on the task of making ONE map so we will use 10:
lets say eclipse patch team was even as big as 10 people/ 100.000$ even if it takes 7 months to make 1 map - the people involved would get a total of 10.000 once its done or est 1482$ PER MONTH. the concept artist could be a part of those 10 people
i doubt people would see trailer for cosmetic menu and go OMG i MUST buy this GAME and dlc for that matter. i would quote u on paying for map dlc´s but that would mean id have to watch atleast 3 trailers to find it.
Not only did u have to make 0 assets this time but u also go the best looking map in ns2 free from loki. As the creator he should atleast get 99% of every sale this entire month or 2 depends how fast u will fix the broken-ness of the patch, Just hand him over the 100k haha now that is putting things in perspective.
also this img: http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/files/2013/12/EclipseHallway.jpg
every single texture u see in this picture i could have made over the weekend, all trims are same color and hallway very repetative that alterra corp looks like its made in ms.paint.
dont get me wrong i LOOOOOOVE eclipse towards alien hive rooms and all the olive-green metal panels. just the 2 paths to marine spawn looks repetative and falls flat in my eyes
Fair enough that it was to pay back reinforced, BUT if it is as the devs say, and they haven't spent it on other projects, then why did Hugh say on another thread that they couldn't
release hotfixes for these issues because of time/money
Which is bull, because samus fixed them in less than a day, AND they should have had money from reinforced if they arent spending it.
There are still many many bugs in this game, and i would like to see the money being put into fixing them if it is indeed not being spent elsewhere.
Sorry if someone misunderstood me, i don't care much for new content, i care when they release serveral broken patches. which is all we've had since reinforced. (until 265)
The cost of making eclipse is less than I would bid in a grant application for one full time post-doc for 1 year to do lab research, even before counting consumables costs and overheads. It seems entirely reasonable to me and not an "astronomical sum" as radimax would have us believe.
Regarding the new map vs. fixes/perf thing, that is actually a fair point. Yes, we chose to spend a lot of the donated money on a new map. Maybe we should have spent it on contracting one programmer (probably fsfod) to optimize the game for 2-3 months? That's how long it probably would have taken to get a significant bump in perf - it would basically involve changing 50% of Lua code, everywhere. But, that still would've been risky - would the perf actually get much better after that? How much better? How many MORE bugs would it introduce? It would certainly break ALL mods. So, at the end of the day, you can see why making a new map is a much safer bet than a complete overhaul of the code.
We have definitely learned from the performance woes of NS2 (yes, we absolutely acknowledge it as an issue), and for future projects that use Lua, we will architect things from the ground up with LuaJIT in mind. As for NS2, unfortunately, it's hard to make those kind of changes this late with a gigantic code base.
I sell models made in 30 minutes for 50$.
Also, check how much freelancer modelers charge for their work, so you get basic idea of artist salaries.
And then, consider that running business has it's costs as well. Office is not free.
Knowing something about this market, I can tell that 100k is pretty realistic.
On the other side, I don't think that those prices are right. Software is overly expensive, but it pays off really quickly. Then, when I make a simple scene in one day and charge 300$ for it, I don't feel like it's worth it, but if they are willing to pay... whatever! Then again, they are going to make a lot more on project they used models for...
Regarding the new map vs. fixes/perf thing, that is actually a fair point. Yes, we chose to spend a lot of the donated money on a new map. Maybe we should have spent it on contracting one programmer (probably fsfod) to optimize the game for 2-3 months? That's how long it probably would have taken to get a significant bump in perf - it would basically involve changing 50% of Lua code, everywhere. But, that still would've been risky - would the perf actually get much better after that? How much better? How many MORE bugs would it introduce? It would certainly break ALL mods. So, at the end of the day, you can see why making a new map is a much safer bet than a complete overhaul of the code.
Just to add to this, while we fully acknowledge that many people have performance problems with the game, there are also at least an equal amount of players, or more, who either do not have problems or they at least don't notice or care, and it doesn't keep them from having an enjoyable experience. Those people would likely have felt cheated if we spent that much time and money on ONLY performance fixes (that might barely have been noticeable) instead of new content that really makes a big gameplay difference.
And, when it comes down to it, we do have to consider the cost vs impact of the updates to NS2. Sure, performance improvements are nice, but does that bring in new players? Does that bring back players who have gotten bored of playing the same maps over and over? Can you make a high impact trailer that gets the attention of people with just performance improvements? When we spend that kind of money, we want to make sure it makes a difference in keeping NS2 alive.
Which is bull, because samus fixed them in less than a day, AND they should have had money from reinforced if they arent spending it.
There is a huge difference between publishing a mod outside of everything, than modifying an element in the 'pipeline'.
If you go the official way it takes much more time and effort, and there is way more steps than just publishing a simple mod.
At least it is that way in my work, and I don't see why it wouldn't be the case at UWE. And I am not talking of the other bugs it could bring.
Assuming UWE was in not the best financal situation during and after the reinforcement patch (taken from reinforcement thread), you could say the only real income after reinforcement were those donation (apart from a few purchases). => ~17% of Reinforcement donations went into NS2WC which in the end generated less publicity than a f2p weekend.
I for one think it was a good decision to make the map. It's obvious it had a high cost since it has so much new art. A common map reusing existing assets (at least by far most, to make rooms that feels unique and interesting without any custom assets could be challenging) should be much cheaper and can realistically be made by community members, but unfortunately it does seem UWE really is needed to do most of the shipping of quality maps, NS2 never did see that much action on community maps.
Also, it would be great to see more UWE people post when you're not being trolled! This thread was an interesting read, but the setting isn't the best...
Just to add to this, while we fully acknowledge that many people have performance problems with the game, there are also at least an equal amount of players, or more, who either do not have problems or they at least don't notice or care, and it doesn't keep them from having an enjoyable experience. Those people would likely have felt cheated if we spent that much time and money on ONLY performance fixes (that might barely have been noticeable) instead of new content that really makes a big gameplay difference.
I think you're being a bit generous in your assessment when you say "also at least an equal amount of players, or more, who either do not have problems or they at least don't notice or care". And people do care, but there are only so many times the topic can be brought up before it's exhausted. You learn to live with it in trade for the unique experience that is NS2, or you move on to a new game. If you really don't think people care or notice, go and read your game hub discussion page on Steam and tell me what the #1 complaint is from new players there.
And, when it comes down to it, we do have to consider the cost vs impact of the updates to NS2. Sure, performance improvements are nice, but does that bring in new players? Does that bring back players who have gotten bored of playing the same maps over and over? Can you make a high impact trailer that gets the attention of people with just performance improvements? When we spend that kind of money, we want to make sure it makes a difference in keeping NS2 alive.
Well, it didn't do a very good job of keeping NS2 alive, as focus had to be shifted to a new game to bring in revenue. And guess what? Those players that left from being bored of a few maps, they will leave again after they get bored with the new content a few days later. And the sales to bring in new players? That always seemed like an artificial boost in the player base. It always returned to where it started after a couple of weeks.
The core gameplay experience is far more important than a little new toy everyone will play with a few days and then throw into the old toy bin. At the end of the day, I get it though, money has to be made. It's easy for us to sit here and criticize the moves after they've been made. You guys still did an awesome job with this game, I just wish certain areas of the game got more attention. NS2 is still one of the best PC games I've ever played.
Comments
And before anyone says anything about playtesters - we're the exception that proves the rule.
Indeed it does not, though NS has a tremendous amount of good will contributors in its history. The problem with the expense evaluation, as I see it, is that it would loose a lot of merit if it somehow turned out that a big factor in development costs being so steep is because most of it is sitting in the pockets of the one evaluating.
Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that everyone should be compensated for their hard work and expertise. Everyone that works in UWE or has contributed by selling their time and skill deserves every penny they get, I have absolutely no issues here. After all, that's what you go into business for in the first place.
My query is about the evaluation, seeing as it was brought out as an argument.
Yes. Yes, we probably would. (LEGAL DISCLAIMER: I have nothing to do with the budgeting/production of levels, so I kinda have no idea what I'm talking about :P)
Now, realistically though, you won't have all those skills. Most people specialize, from concept art to texturing to modeling to animation to environment art to level design. They usually take some chunk of that spectrum. And even within those tasks, there are sub-tasks, such as lighting, mo-cap, etc. I don't know a single person in the industry who can do all that stuff at a large scale, that quickly... even if you did have those skills, I doubt you could finish an Eclipse-quality map in 3 months, with all the new art that's actually in the map. If you could do it in a year, then yeah, you could easily pull a $100k annual salary. I don't really think it's humanly possible though, at least for the AAA quality type of levels we're talking about.
--Eclipse was about 7 months of development time, from greybox testing to final polished map. Probably longer, counting time spent fixing stuff even after release.
--This included anywhere from 2 to 4 of our UWE employed mappers (fewer at the beginning, then pretty much the entire mapping team by the end in order to help get the map out the door
--A good chunk of my time was spent creating concept images for the map, as well ad doing paintovers and giving feedback to the mappers and environment artists
--There was another contract concept artist who also helped out with a good amount of landmark area designs and prop designs (this stuff isn't just made up by the modelers/texture artists, they need lots of concept art to work from)
--One in house fulltime UWE environment artist employee, and 2 - 3 additional contract environment artists. I'm not going to count out every single art asset in the map, from small props and textures to large landmark props such as power generators and energy weapons, but trust me, there's A LOT. Almost every floor texture, wall texture, railing prop, landmark prop, etc. was created specifically for Eclipse, but with the intention that it would add a lot of new assets for community mappers to make use of, as well. Just this simple hallway http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/files/2013/12/EclipseHallway.jpg has multiple floor textures, trim textures, wall textures and props, crate props, and other props like benches and computer terminals in the far background
--FX artist. There were a lot of FX, from the cool rain falling outside and running down the glass windows, to energy beams shooting out of experimental weapons, and more.
--Sounds. Our sound guy had to make a sound pass for the whole map.
--The new main menu that shipped with the map release. An new room was built specifically for the main menu, which took a mappers time and my time working closely with them to get a look that worked well, along with animating camera movement, adding all the FX, and animated characters, etc.
--Hugh's time to make the trailer (yes, those things take a good amount of time as well to both film the footage and edit it all together)
Of course there is all the amazing unpaid work that went in on testing and bug finding done by the PTs, but that doesn't count towards the final amount.
Anyway, this is by no means an exorbitant amount for an entire level/map for a typical game. But most people who are not game developers have no idea how much time, effort and money goes into every aspect of game development. I hope this has been a little enlightening.
@Squeal_Like_A_Pig
By no means did I expect you to give me exact numbers, especially regarding salaries.At best percentages of specific segments of development costs that made up the total.
Despite what it may seem, I do actually have a vague idea of what goes into making one of these, but its nice to see it broken up into smaller pieces. I'm also pretty sure that I'm not the only one that will find it interesting. So thanks for breaking it down a bit.
I still think the sum you came up with is a bit fluffed, especially since the map was developed over a seven month cycle so its a good bet that some of the costs you included overlapped with other tasks, rather than being map specific (mostly talking about full time team members).
I still stand by what I said though, if someone offered me $100k to make maps I'd work my ass of to learn every tool needed and start cranking them out. Its quite a deal.
Nobody was paid or offered $100K, but many people, over quite some time. Go to school. Learn piece by piece. You'll soon learn developing a map like eclipse is not something you could pull off in 7 months on your own.
Hope you're not holding your breath waiting for a $100,000 offer to come up.
@2cough
Sure I am, I've already started on my map and hope to seal the deal by next week, I'm so sure It's happening that I've quit my job in preparation (because I don't have time for it anymore plus I won't need it once I start cranking out these bad boys). Just waiting for Cory to send me that number he promised!
You missed the point of the whole conversation, and a bit of the joke.
i never understood what the obsession is with wanting and pumping out new content content all the time. a lot of older games have very limited content and have huge playerbase nearly a decade later. i personally don't care about new maps, new weapons, new skins, i want the existing problems fixed, but i think it's clear they're here to stay. i wish that money went to more important things like improving the server lagging issues and late game performance issues. focus was on the wrong thing IMO.
GAMEPLAY EXPERIENCE>MORE SKINS AND CONTENT
Counter-Strike is a good example of a very successful game built on gameplay and not tons of content.
CS is case and point @ creating good gameplay and performance and implementing more content and skins / customizables down the road after it is dubbed sustainable as has been done with CS:GO and the skins system.
If only the gameplay was the focus in NS2 and performance as well.. rather than adding more content.. which in some cases.. worsens both of those things.. This has always been my biggest concern.
If performance and gameplay were focused on the entire time up to this point and we had something comparable and THEN added this new skins / customizable stuff I think we would be in a much better place.
I personally think Sewlek did a great job doing that with B250 but didn't really follow up on the great changes with tweaks until months later.
I think LUAJit was a great step forward for performance.
But then there was barely any follow up with that as well.. with a performance decrease that came with Reinforced.
@SteveRock
Don't you dare back out now, I've already sold my flat and quit my job!
Seriously though, if I ware to fully commit to something like this and build on top of the skills I already have I would assume I would probably be able to produce a fairly decent quality map (in "jack of all trades, master of none" fashion) in about a year, give or take a few months depending on the problems I would run into (assuming sleep deprivation and a coffee overdose wouldn't drive me insane somewhere along the way).
Money is a magnificent motivator for both learning and working, but just to be clear, I was making a hypothetical statement about a fictional situation.
Considering something like angrys birds, which is just shiny looking flash browser game, cost more than 100k to create. I really don't see 100k being all that expensive for a map.
Enjoy
Always depends on who creates something and in which timeframe. If you hire DICE to churn out Angry Birds: Bad Company for christmas 2014 it's going to be a lot more expensive than if you hire some Indie developer who happily works on it in his free time after work for the next two years.
You don't believe this works? Look at Cave Story.
i said a hypothetical figure in order to even come up to that astronomical sum so i doubt there woul ever be 50 mappers or 50 asset makers but if there ever was, they would each get 1000$ for 1 map, now if we take a more REALISTIC figure like 10 people making the content of 1 ENTIRE MAP. (based on how few it took to make the entire game)
i dont care if game is AAAAAAAAA title becouse even battlefield would prop not put 50 people on the task of making ONE map so we will use 10:
lets say eclipse patch team was even as big as 10 people/ 100.000$ even if it takes 7 months to make 1 map - the people involved would get a total of 10.000 once its done or est 1482$ PER MONTH. the concept artist could be a part of those 10 people
i doubt people would see trailer for cosmetic menu and go OMG i MUST buy this GAME and dlc for that matter. i would quote u on paying for map dlc´s but that would mean id have to watch atleast 3 trailers to find it.
Not only did u have to make 0 assets this time but u also go the best looking map in ns2 free from loki. As the creator he should atleast get 99% of every sale this entire month or 2 depends how fast u will fix the broken-ness of the patch, Just hand him over the 100k haha
also this img:
http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/files/2013/12/EclipseHallway.jpg
every single texture u see in this picture i could have made over the weekend, all trims are same color and hallway very repetative that alterra corp looks like its made in ms.paint.
dont get me wrong i LOOOOOOVE eclipse towards alien hive rooms and all the olive-green metal panels. just the 2 paths to marine spawn looks repetative and falls flat in my eyes
release hotfixes for these issues because of time/money
Which is bull, because samus fixed them in less than a day, AND they should have had money from reinforced if they arent spending it.
There are still many many bugs in this game, and i would like to see the money being put into fixing them if it is indeed not being spent elsewhere.
Sorry if someone misunderstood me, i don't care much for new content, i care when they release serveral broken patches. which is all we've had since reinforced. (until 265)
1) Use proper grammar and spelling.
2) Stop making ridiculous assumptions in otherwise rational arguments.
3) Don't insult the devs.
1) Grammar nazi lol
2) Agreed
3) Definitely agreed, because that just rustles everyones jimmies and helps nothing.
We have definitely learned from the performance woes of NS2 (yes, we absolutely acknowledge it as an issue), and for future projects that use Lua, we will architect things from the ground up with LuaJIT in mind. As for NS2, unfortunately, it's hard to make those kind of changes this late with a gigantic code base.
I'm a 3d modeler.
I sell models made in 30 minutes for 50$.
Also, check how much freelancer modelers charge for their work, so you get basic idea of artist salaries.
And then, consider that running business has it's costs as well. Office is not free.
Knowing something about this market, I can tell that 100k is pretty realistic.
And, when it comes down to it, we do have to consider the cost vs impact of the updates to NS2. Sure, performance improvements are nice, but does that bring in new players? Does that bring back players who have gotten bored of playing the same maps over and over? Can you make a high impact trailer that gets the attention of people with just performance improvements? When we spend that kind of money, we want to make sure it makes a difference in keeping NS2 alive.
If you go the official way it takes much more time and effort, and there is way more steps than just publishing a simple mod.
At least it is that way in my work, and I don't see why it wouldn't be the case at UWE. And I am not talking of the other bugs it could bring.
Also, it would be great to see more UWE people post when you're not being trolled!
I think you're being a bit generous in your assessment when you say "also at least an equal amount of players, or more, who either do not have problems or they at least don't notice or care". And people do care, but there are only so many times the topic can be brought up before it's exhausted. You learn to live with it in trade for the unique experience that is NS2, or you move on to a new game. If you really don't think people care or notice, go and read your game hub discussion page on Steam and tell me what the #1 complaint is from new players there.
Well, it didn't do a very good job of keeping NS2 alive, as focus had to be shifted to a new game to bring in revenue. And guess what? Those players that left from being bored of a few maps, they will leave again after they get bored with the new content a few days later. And the sales to bring in new players? That always seemed like an artificial boost in the player base. It always returned to where it started after a couple of weeks.
The core gameplay experience is far more important than a little new toy everyone will play with a few days and then throw into the old toy bin. At the end of the day, I get it though, money has to be made. It's easy for us to sit here and criticize the moves after they've been made. You guys still did an awesome job with this game, I just wish certain areas of the game got more attention. NS2 is still one of the best PC games I've ever played.