i guess he COULD work on gameplay after he did set up a small decent looking scene but setting up a decent looking scene isnt exaclty easy, atleast if he gets his content done correctly, an artist might see potential and be willing to help, care should be put into how the game feels.


sorry i personally dont believe in alot of this AT ALL, first off, if he doesnt use placeholders, what does he do until that miraculous day come when he finally gets that boat model he wanted, dont SHOW us your placeholder, use it to get a feel for your game, ofcouse we dont literally mean using a box, but he can use some lowpoly free boat model for now, personally i think he's already failed if he spends two days tweaking graphics and then all we see is some halfglory screenshot


not everyone has your potential
yes i was the one that said people come for eyecandy and stay for content but good gameplay falls under eyecandy also, ofcouse by placeholders we do expect it to have a basic look of the game:

for example, this is the start of scion using placeholders, first thing i do when i start a project is get it working, if your game can impress people using no shaders and placeholders then youre on the right path, someone WILL step forward to assist, artists tend to rather put their work in something that seems fruitful and i dont think a placeholder is necessarily ugly, as long as it provides whats needed to start working, a fully animated model can also be a placeholder, as in:


this is a few months later:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZNo51EIG8M

then few weeks:


then we got to here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4isYeoyw9c


your method works in some situations, i just dont see why someone with low resources should spend days/weeks trying to make eyecandy, some water, a terrain, skybox, free boat model and some sprites seems enough for him to make something that would appeal to people IF he did gameplay right

I think both methods can work well. But Fogman is right when it comes to the point of learning how far you can go until you reach limits. Because of that he already wants to use textues and shaders in a prototype to see how it works, how it scales, how detailed he can go later on.

I agree with that. You dont need the prettiest textures for that, but you need textures, normal maps, spec maps, maybe even displacement and opacity. You need all this for testing.
And when you texture everything with some kind of a measurement pattern displaying 1 meter or similar, then you will not see how many draw calls a final level will create. You will not experience how many draw calls will bring your game down, how you have to optimize, to copy several textures into one, to group models, whatever.

Because of this he suggested to work as close as possible to a final result. And it indeed makes a lot of sense.

hmm well i guess we all have our methods, though personally all that was stated above still seems to fall under 'placeholders' in my eyes

i do wish him luck

Yes, it can be done with "placeholders" of course. But I saw un-textured characters in your prototype. And a character or a weapon often needs the most texture resolution in a game. Without it you get a wrong impression of the performance of your game.

yes thats true and i understand your point, maybe i need to keep that in mind for

those stuff were untextured because i couldnt do any better at the time, couldnt have waited until i got textures and such, i just needed to prototype the gameplay which has been enough to get me some talented artists

You can always use an single colored 512x512 or what ever size you target texture for the models to get adequate impact on performance.

Single colored tga, 1024x1024 pixels: 32kb
Real tga Texture, 1024x1024 pixels: 3MB

Same goes for shaders, lights, polycount, AI behavior...

For protoyping / testing I use placeholders as well, but not for the final game because there are too much dependencies.

No. TGA does not use any compression whatsoever. Thus Single Color TGA: 3MB.

Wiki says:
"Image data may be stored raw, or optionally, a lossless PackBits RLE compression can be employed."

You can use compressed tga´s with gamestudio, Gimp has tga compression for example and I use it every time.

Even if you use compressed tgas
they are stored unpacked state in video memory.
Which means they could be 32kb (1MP) on the disk
and 3 MB (1MP) in video memory.
Btw, I haven't tested it, but it seems loigical to me.

probably we should have a seperate thread for this,
a summary of the points mentioned here might contain useful tips.