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Part I ✦ Attacking gmax Hard and Fast
When you begin interviewing with game companies, you’re going to need a port-
folio of your work, so as you build levels, be sure to save images of your best work
to show off later. Chances are the interviewer will not fire up Quake to see your
custom level, but they will take time to look at your images. You can always take
screenshots of your game in progress using the Print Screen key on your keyboard.
Another avenue that leads to the game industry is to choose one of the many
schools that offer degrees in game development. You can find a good list of schools
that will prepare you for the gaming industry at
www.gamedev.net.
Every year there are several conferences and events that bring the gaming industry
together. Attending these conferences gives you some valuable exposure to the
industry. For games, the big one to attend is the E3 Expo. This conference takes
place in the spring and is the place where all the new games are announced.
Another good conference that is more technical is the Game Developer’s
Conference (GDC). For computer graphics as a whole, the place to be is Siggraph.
You can usually volunteer as a student to get into conferences free of charge.
You can find out about these conferences online. E3 Expo is at
www.e3expo.com,
GDC info can be found at
www.gdconf.com, and Siggraph info is at
www.siggraph.org.
gmax Enabled Games
Just because gmax is out there and available doesn’t mean you’ll be able to use it
with all the games that you want. Discreet is making money on gmax by licensing its
use to the game companies. These game companies need to pay Discreet for the
right to tie their game into gmax, so the list of games that you can use gmax on is
short, but growing.
As part of licensing the right to use gmax, the game companies can develop their
own interface pieces that work within gmax; these pieces are called game packs.
These game packs enable the stuff you create in gmax to be loaded and used within
the game.
Quake III Arena
When Quake was initially released by Id Software, it shook up the gaming market
and single-handedly defined the first-person shooter genre. As Discreet was looking
for a game to use to prototype gmax, Quake, which was up to version III by then,
was a natural fit.
The Discreet engineers created a Quake game pack for gmax by pushing and poking
all the functionality of gmax. The result was called Tempest, shown in Figure 1-1,
and it was released alongside gmax as a proof-of-concept.
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