[update] Turns out yesterdays problems may have been associated with a high volume of traffic and/or data requests from a couple of search engine website crawl spider bots; in particular "yandex" from yandex.ru and "dotbot" from dotnetdotcom.org. If you admin a site keep and eye on those two, especially yandex which has a bad habit of using up several gigabytes of data doing what it does to index sites for Russian Internet users. Thanks to the support chaps at Heart Internet for helping sort this out quickly.

I've yet to find out the exact cause for this but yesterdays downtime was an automated response by the sites host, Heart Internet, to 'unusual activity' which results in a site lock down as a safe guard to its integrity.

Right now it seems likely that either the sudden influx of spam bots hitting the forums are sending too many requests to the server or search engine page crawlers are causing the problems. Stay tuned for more info...

Apologies for any inconveniences

kat

Hourences recently conducted a survey of level designers just to see exactly what's what in that field of content creation. Well, the results are in and it does make for some interesting reading; mainly 'proof in the pudding' of previously held notions about level design and designers...

"There were 1004 participants in this survey, of those, 58 percent were level designers or artists. The remaining 42 percent were gamers and developers involved in other aspects of development. Of the 58 percent, 27 percent were professional level designers (151 professionals). Only the professional level designers were presented with the more in-depth questions regarding commercial level design. The survey was posted in a few dozen level design and gamer communities in an attempt to gather a varied demographic that accurately reflects the community as a whole. The survey was posted in Unreal, Quake, Half Life/Source, Crysis, and indie game development communities."

Read the full results of the survey at Hourences web site here;

• Hourences' level design survey; the results

Added a new tutorial to the site that covers getting Google SketchUp files into Blender. Because SketchUp is a little feature limited it often means doing additional editing in other 3D applications, and as SketchUp won't do this directly it has to be done using a work-around of sorts.

• Importing Google SketchUp files into Blender 3D

SketchUp to Blender 3D tutorial

Other news - Unearthly Challenge

GameArtisans and Polycount have just started the first ever competition for environment artists, some good prizes on offer and a lot of experience to be gained. Have a read through the page below to find out what's what...

• Unearthly Challenge

I managed to catch up with MrLycon not too long ago and quiz him in a bit more detail about working on Funcom's "Conan" we had to cram a lot of topics into the conversation, but he gave an interesting and personal insight into the game development itself, from the process of making assets to what it was like working at Funcom.

• Conan: Hyborian Adventures, the making of - interview

Conan: Hyborian Adventures, the making of

Computer & Video Games (CVG) got a chance to preview of the upcoming Wolfenstein game from id software which is being developed by Raven, sounds interesting... Kevin Cloud (id) and Eric Biessman (Raven) gave Tim Edwards of CVG a run through of the idtech 4 powered Wolfenstein - hands off of course, look, see but no touch.

• CVG, Raven & Wolfenstein