• Gears of War development 'previews'

  Mark Sowden • 2017-07-12 • Game, Gears of War

  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.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

• Unreal Warfare Soundtrack, or portions of it

  Mark Sowden • 2017-06-07 • Game, Gears of War, Unreal Warfare, Video

  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...

  Mark Sowden • 2017-04-05 • Game, Gears of War

  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.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

• Half-Life 2's Evolution : aaron/canals_01_15 (2002/12/12)

  Mark Sowden • 2017-03-28 • Game, Half-Life 2, Video

  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.

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  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.

• SiN Emergence things

  Mark Sowden • 2017-03-20 • Article, Projects

  A long time ago now, one of my many hobby projects was looking at how feasible it would be to produce an open-source reproduction of SiN Episodes, so that work on it could essentially continue (or to just otherwise bring it over to Source 2013). I decided to return to this today and felt it would probably be interesting for a few to share how this is going right now.

  I actually ended up revisiting the project as a result of an article I was working on to explain how you can get the SiN Episodes SDK functioning again. Unfortunately it seems that the steps I used previously will no longer work as Valve has changed how Steam’s config is set up, which was part of both the solution and the cause of the problem to begin with.

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