Burned out? try this...

thundercles

Got the bug to download the free unity software and tried created a world just for fun. After a couple days I built something decent (it even had an animated horse). Placed my avatar and loaded up the game. Walked around for a few steps and promptly feel through the group. I could not figure out for the life of me why some ground was "solid" and some was not. I watched a bunch of videos and  learned about collision detection and all that.

After going through all that I know look at games differently. When I look at terrain now, most of the time I am in awe of the creativeness. Often times I think, I the crap did they do that or how much work must have gone into just that single asset.

I'm really pumped about revisiting some games that I haven't been interested in in a while and just see what the developers have done. Anyone else who is currently burnt out I suggest trying the same thing I did. It Atlas have given me a better appreciation of what it takes to make an mmo.

 

Here's a link to the unity site if you want to try to design your own world:)

 

http://unity3d.com/get-unity

 

 

 

Quizzical

Congratulations.  You have started the unexpectedly interesting thread of the day.

As much as I'm normally against licensing off-the-shelf game engines, this is one use of it that I'd approve of.  Unless it leads to people thinking that they know how games really work and become obnoxious as a result of it.

For bonus points, try to use the engine to do something that it was never intended to be capable of doing.  Then you'll understand why some bugs can be around for years and never get fixed.  But don't spend too much time banging your head against a wall; it's quite a bit easier to fix such things if you built your own engine around whatever it is that you want to do.