I think it's the polish. Danlab's care for what he does is really amazing. So many of us feel content to simply focus on the code (myself included).

I would like to see one of his games, I bet there great, even though I dont think the graphics are what makes the game.

Silent_Darky Wrote:I would like to see one of his games, I bet there great, even though I dont think the graphics are what makes the game.

Well here you go: http://danlabgames.com/

>even though I dont think the graphics are what makes the game.

See? you will never be a good developer then

I love Carlos's assessment of the situation, and I agree that further research/writing should be devoted to investigating danlabg.

The artistry factor cannot be overestimated. A traditional 2D artist or graphic designer has an occupation that consists of details. Everything is in the details. An artist cannot simply think, "I want to make some art. How about a landscape? Yeah! I'm gonna make a landscape, woo hoo!" and then rush to finishing a landscape. He has to put thought into it, about where things will go, what this patch of light means, why the pool of water is there.

Game creators like many of us here will think like that, too... but usually on the underlying code, the stuff that the user never sees or could care less about. We think, "okay, we'll have a class for the race car, and I'll get the OpenGL calls to be optimized..." We should probably be thinking more about where that patch of light is hitting, where the pool of water is.

More later...

yes... it simply comes down to:

Most programers think not about what the gamers are seeing, they think: How fast can this be running? can I successfully load that .mov instead of a crappy avi?
The gamers think about what they are seeing. Dan thinks about what they are seeing, then thinks about what they could see. If he like what he sees, he impliments it (easily, too easily methinks... )

Nayr Wrote:If he like what he sees, he impliments it (easily, too easily methinks... )

His garden gnomes are just that good.

Hmm, with all of these good posts, I think I may have an idea, although I have never done such a thing before. I know that Dan has done a few online interviews, but maybe we could turn this thread into something that can ask him a broad spectrum of pointed questions regarding his design philosophy and such, and then he could answer them, in this way we could start gathering information for Camancho's Develper Spotlight feature for iDG. I don't mean to have Dan answer the questions in the forum, but wait until we have a good set of questions. It's all up to him of course!

Cheers!

That sounds like a good idea, Jericho. Danlab, Carlos, are you up for it?

im awlays answering questions

but..
i posted a lot of pictures of my currenct WIP
did you notice no one asked me technical information about the game ?
how the terrain engine work, what type of app im using for making 3d model, how many time im working a day

What d oyou use for the models? I've always wondered about that...

Danlab Wrote:ii posted a lot of pictures of my currenct WIP
did you notice no one asked me technical information about the game ?

I'd settle for the source code

Nayr Wrote:What d oyou use for the models? I've always wondered about that...

im using .obj files
im working with Cinema4d for making lowpoly model and photoshop for the textures

Holmes hacked the obj loader to make it autoload textures using material name
if a part of the 3d model use material "bois2" the code go to load "bois2.png" and use it in the opengl code




i go to write a new obj loading from scratch and add bones animation support, now all models are static and stored in opengl displaylist to boost frame rate

with the callist the frame rate can be x5 or x8

>did you notice no one asked me technical information about the game ?
>how the terrain engine work, what type of app im using for making 3d model, how many time im working a day

Go on, tell us, how many time yur working a day?

more than 10h
someday its 18h working on the computer