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Weekly Update
I’ve kind of realised that I’m not doing frequent enough updates. Perhaps it’s time I got into the habit of doing weekly updates just so you know what’s going on and that I’m not totally idle.
So yes, I’ve certainly slowed down with producing videos. It’s not intentional but I’ve kind of lost the motivation a little due to how long the last few videos have taken to produce and the amount of crap I’ve had to deal with when it comes to the Source engine.
Generally I just don’t look forward to launching Hammer, dealing with the crap content pipeline and essentially basically showing things that I’d imagine most of you have already seen; it doesn’t make me feel especially productive. I’m looking to do videos on other things, but I’m afraid I don’t have anything in the pipeline quite at this time.
I’m gradually looking at switching my format to doing more analytical works which is something I’ve always wanted to focus myself towards, primarily in written articles as I can cover more than I could in a video. There are two articles in the works at the moment, one focusing on Unreal Engine 2 and another that covers the last Half-Life 2 video I produced.
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Gears of War development 'previews'
Below is a collection of thumbnails that were generated for Epic Games’ Gears of War, which were packaged with the game, and preview several different levels that were produced during the development of the game.
It should be obvious why these are interesting in a lot of respects, especially as they show a lot of content that didn’t make the final cut. Each of these previews appear to have been generated either for levels that were produced purely for testing mechanics of the game but as well as levels that were used to lay out prefabricated areas.
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Unreal Warfare Soundtrack, or portions of it
Here’s something that might be interesting for a few of you, but here we have three songs used in the Unreal Engine technology demonstration from GDC 2002 and one additional song that wasn’t used in the demonstration.
These songs were packaged with Star Wars Republic Commando, among some other things which we’ll discuss at some other stage in the future.
For those that don’t know what Unreal Warfare is, Unreal Warfare is what eventually became the Gears of War you know today. It was also often used as the name to describe the second iteration of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, as it initially served as the driving force for many of Epic’s innovations at the time, and before Epic Games had dubbed their new technology as “Unreal Engine 2”.
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Collection of early Unreal Warfare screenshots...
Most of these are taken from Epic Games’ UDN, and there’s plenty more there I haven’t included so I highly encourage people take a look!
If you’re not sure what Unreal Warfare is, it’s essentially what became Gears of War. The screenshots below show content from the game back when Epic Games were still developing Unreal Engine 2, which should give you a good idea of how long this game was actually in development for.
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Half-Life 2's Evolution : aaron/canals_01_15 (2002/12/12)
It’s been an incredibly long time since the last video, but the next one in the series is finally here.
Keep in mind that this ended up getting a little rushed in the end, as I wanted to get it out of the way so I could move onto other things. Turns out moving to Source Filmmaker ended up causing the video to take longer due to a few technical faults along the way, and then work got in the way, and it’s likely in future I’ll be producing these very differently to how I have been previously to save myself more time.
As usual, keep in mind that this series is solely focused on displaying the geometry of the levels rather than playing through each one individually. If you enjoyed this video and want to see more in the future then I highly recommend supporting me on Patreon, as this goes towards supporting the website, the archive and videos such as this.
This is part of a video series showing the gradual evolution of Half-Life 2. It’s not intended to demonstrate gameplay, as most of these levels, in their original form, weren’t playable. Because of the number of levels to cover and the amount of time it takes to clean them up enough to be viewable, these will be kept as quick glances.
This level is produced from the VMF, canals_01_15. The level was likely created by Aaron Barber.
The original VMF can be downloaded here.
