I was just playing Doom 3 this morning. What's up with all the detail? Why does every damn room need to have 500 pipes and vents coming out of the walls and ceillings with grates and angled support beams? It's annoying, and it gets really old. Whatever happened to good old boxy rooms.. you know, like in real life. Sure, you need to have more than squares and rectangles to make the level design interresting. But you need flat surfaces. You need plain walls. Take maps like Dust from counterstrike. That's a perfect example of a great map without excessive detail. Does it look bad? Hell no.

Even more annoying is that now it seems that no one will accept maps that don't have these ridiculousely excessive ammounts of useless detail. That's part of the reason I quit editing. You can make something great and people will criticize is if it has any less than ten thousand polygons.

Do you know how many polygons my room has? FOUR. And guess what, it looks real.

Four polygons? How do you type while falling into an infinite void??

Ok 6

My desk is a 3do. :p

/me looks at my room.

I see more than four. I see a computer, bookshelf, a clock, clothes, poster, a plant, ....

The world is very detailed to me.

You live in a triangular pyramid?

Sorry. Back to topic. I agree. Thats one of the things that has kept me from taking up editing.

My room has far too many 3dos for it's own good...

I also don't like the fact that a lot of games that aren't fantasy take place in environments that could never exist in real life. The environments are such that no human could ever actually use them for anything. Half-Life was fairly good about making their levels make sense. The maps may be linear, but thats just because you haven't opened a few doors when you go through an area the first time. The game companies try to pass off having "detailed" environments to distract you from their impracticality.

Woah, are you saying corporations have set up a base on Mars, are experimenting with teleportation and opening up the gates of hell!?!? I didnt realize Doom 3 was so realistic!

Game's aren't fantasy now? Wow. Didn't know that Half-life was real life! Same with the sims! You mean I'm actually controlling a family that speaks gibberish?

EDIT: In case you didn't catch that:

ALL GAMES ARE FANTASY

I was referring to Flexor. Any relation my post has to yours is purely coincidental.

Talk about excessive detail. I meant games that, in the plot, are set in the real world. Half-Life has offices and labs, locker rooms and lounges. The environments in a lot of games would be uninhabitable. Maybe thats why the monsters like them so much...

but only one bathroom, in the anolalous materials area.

The lines must normally be terrible....

It's a good thing there are no women in the game.

But they are fun to play in. And holds the gameplay for awhile.

I don't see why this aspect would "keep me from taking up editing." Many of levels and mods people make don't fall under the "realistic" category.

How is that an excuse for having too much useless detail?

I made the editing comment before I made the realism comment. Thinking about making the maps that Flexor was talking about originally is rather intimidating.

Take a screenshot. Doom3 actually isn't composed of terrible amounts of archi.

We must have hit a pivotal point in computer games.... the point where someone complains that something it too detailed.

But in all honesty, I see what you mean. There's a difference between detail and useless clutter.

Detail is good, but silly pointless detail is not. Pipes coming out fo everywhere is BAD, unless there's a damn good reasonf or the pipes to be there. Look at some counterstrike: source maps, they are EXCELLENT. There are little mats under some of the doors, shutters on the windows...in cs_office it really does look like an office building. A lot fo the levels are somewhat weirdly layed out, for gameplay purposes, but beyond that, they are great. Coffee mugs, filing cabinets, boxes full of files, computers, papers scattered around desks. THAT is good detail.

Theres those assassin women who can cloak and always shoot me in the back.

[edit] please delete this post[/edit]

Because it's a sci-fi/fantasy world...an evil corporation with no morals and infinite amounts of money is researching hell portals on Mars. Nice try.

Emon, how did you get so smart?

three squares meals a day, 9 hours of sleep, no TV, etc.

Actually, there's no such thing as a plane or a polygon in real life.

Take a closer look at your wall... it's not flat at all.

Cloak? They never cloaked when I played... They just ran around insanely fast.

You criticized his low-poly count.

Irony.

Wolfy: That was the wittiest observation I've heard in a while. Thanks!

Games are like movies... people want something like real life only with the boring parts removed i.e. fantasy. There is also a parallel with detail/special effects -- we see alot of movies made on the pretense that if you have alot of expensive special effects everyone will enjoy the movie. We might enjoy the special effects on their own merits, but it gets tiresome after awhile if that's the only thing of value. I think its ok for game art to be focused on impacting viewer with myriad details, so long as this an artistic device employed to help perpetuate immersion in the fantasy world and not merely an end in itself. High budget art in games and movies can become just a cheap thrill that may be worth your money, but leaves you wanting something more substantial (at least occasionally).

Oh, and don't forget, we can go in the opposite direction and end up equally unsatisfied. Minimalism is a nice thought: use the least amount of strokes necessary paint a picture. It calls attention to what's most important by getting rid of non-essentials...the results tend to be very calming to minds that are bombarded with too much information. On the other hand, it can be abused if taken to excess (how can you have an excess of minimalism?) or done thoughtlessly....um, for example, lets use the current level of the week. We could pass that off as minimalist art because there's nothing to it... and maybe the abusurdity of that very truth propels our minds towards some deep philosophical insight into the nature of art. But come on, artists have already gone there... it's not clever or inventive after a certain point ...gets very tiresome unless used sparingly and at the appropriate time.

Whether you use a few strokes or alot, you still have to say something. I think we need a balance of approaches. I like Japanese and Chinese minimalist painting, but I'm sure glad there's realism and impressionism etc to balance out my diet. (yes, I do eat priceless works of art)

Just thought I'd hi-jack this thread