Looking Up
…And looking down. I was playing some TF2 today, as I have been seemingly 24/7 since the Spy/Sniper update came out, and I was greeted by a rather unpleasant black screen while the sound of a heavy dieing looped over and over again through a frozen TF2. I manually rebooted the computer to find out that my graphics card was running at 112°C. Ouch. So yeah, my graphics card’s fan isn’t working anymore. Doesn’t spin at all, no matter what I do. Gunna call the manufacturer tomorrow to see if they can replace it VIA warranty, and if so ask if I can upgrade to a two-slot card, out of my own pocket of course. In the mean time, I’m gameless and renderless. Anything remotely graphically-intensive will shoot me back up to over 100°C, and I have to have all my case fans on high or else it’ll just slowly climb up on it’s own. And if they do allow me to send back my card to get a new one, I’ll be graphics cars-less until I get my new one. The mere thought of that brings chills down my spine. Maybe I’ll just get a new one off Newegg…
Up
Anyways, I saw Up on Friday. Amazing movie, really, just like every other Pixar movie. However, this one nearly made me cry, so I’d say it’s way up there on my arbitrary list of favourite Pixar films. Got the soundtrack on Amazon too, and as always Michael Giacchino is one to impress. If you haven’t seen Up yet, go see it now. I saw it in 2D due to my natural feelings that 3D is gimmicky and deteriorates the cinematography, though I may see it in 3D later. My short review: Story is extremely touching, just the right amount of humour and action, never a dull moment. Did I mention that I nearly cried?
05.20.09Woosh.
Wow, I’m bad at updating things. All my projects for one, as well as my blog and now my Twitter. And I was supposed to update my Twitter more than my blog… Well, I suppose I have, but still. Perhaps it’s because I’ve just been doing the same thing since the last Tweet that I have nothing new to talk about? Maybe, *sniff* maybe. I have yet to see one who can outsmart me.
In other news, lots of TF2 playing lately. I’ve been becoming a lot better than usual, especially as spy and soldier. Pretty cool, I think. Finally got around to putting the EXGN TF2 server back up too, this time better than ever. I’ve finally found the perfect balance of SourceMod plugins! Bwahahahahahahahaha!!! Anyway, check it out on exgn.ca, always good to see people playing; new and old faces alike.
Progress has been slowing down with Espionage Inc, and I worked on ToH for a couple days but got bored. Everything seems to happen in short spurts, so don’t worry; I’ll get everything finished eventually. Note that the key word here is “eventually”. I work on semi-Valve time, just a tad bit faster. But how much faster? It’s impossible to tell. As for EXRP, I’ve been working on it here and there in my spare-spare-spare time, but at least it’s progress.
Today I recieved a USPS package from the Neatherlands. The postal worker just practically dropped it on my doorstep and ran away, not even ringing the doorbell or anything. That’s why UPS is better, they have these RULES all workers have to obligue by, detailing everything from how to carry the package, place it on the doorstep, mandatorily ring the doorbell, walk away, and even scratch your ass properly. Seriously, these guys are like the badass militants of shipping–you don’t wanna mess with them. Although to be fair, I don’t think they have UPS in the Neatherlands, so moving on… I got a couple books about character creation and (mostly) animation in Blender. Should help a lot, I plan to make my first short in the summer hopefully. We’ll see how that goes.
Anyways, stop by the TF2 server if you have the time. I need to Tweet more.
04.28.09Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Looks like we’re going to have some new Espionage Inc media real soon. Son’s pretty much finished up the first training map, and we’re going to be working on the second one real soon which is where the fun really begins. Bricks will be shat. As you can see from my Twitter ticker to the right, yesterday I set up the intro video for Dvondrake Studios, as well as the menu screen for the actual game. I’ve also put in the icons and everything–music too! I found some royalty free music that you can use for noncommercial things, and really it’s great.
Anyway: Twitter. I really hate the concept of using it for things like “12:32 AM - I took a shit” or “2:12 - I ate a cheeseburger” and whatnot (I can go on forever), but for development purposes I don’t think it’s that bad. We’ll see, I may or may not keep it. It’s useful for posting one-liner type things you wouldn’t bother making a whole blog post for, though, so chances are it’ll stay.
Stay tuned for some Espionage Inc media in the coming days/weeks. (I work on Valve time.)
04.21.09I was wrong?
I was wrong: Cinema 4D is actually really good, especially due to it’s interface being so easy to learn. You don’t have to go read the help menu just to figure out what all the buttons do, as they’re clearly labeled as simply as possible. The materials editor is really, really nice though. I don’t know why people don’t do it like this; just put everything in plain english. You want your material to be reflective? Well then just head on over to the reflection tab and change the strength and blurryness. No need to figure out what a fresnel is and how it affects your reflection, just the basics. And really, that’s just great. They also made it really easy to create procedural materials, including bump maps. Just apply a noise filter to whatever aspect of the material you want, change the settings, and you’re good to go. I’m really going to miss that material editor…
Yes, I love it so much but I’m moving to something else. Something else I was terribly, terribly wrong about: Blender. This will be my final destination. Although I was right about the UI having quite a big learning curve, after playing around with it for a while you start to get the hang of it. Plus it’s so easy (and I highly recommend you do) customize the UI to suit your quirks. I for one hated the trackball rotation on the viewport, so I changed it to the traditional ‘turntable’ you find in other programs. I also added a list of objects to the right of my viewport, similar to the one in C4D, and I changed the selection bind to my left mouse click instead of my right–I really don’t have much use for that 3D cursor thing, nor do I really mind what button I use to select stuff, it just annoyed the crap outta me when I accidentally moved it. I could never recenter that thing perfectly. I also made the transform properties window open up by default, as well as changed the colour scheme of things. It looks kinda like a mix between Modo and C4D now, with the blues and dark grays and whatnot. I remember reading somewhere that the colour blue makes you more productive… Ah well, good thing it’s my favourite colour. (Extra “U” for additional Canadianness)
Made in C4D
Well then, just another boring ol’ novel of a long overdue blog post, as usual right? Nope, I have pictures! Yeah, you remember those right? I used to post them a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The first one is of my robot made and rendered in C4D. The materials were made in it too, procedurally of course. The second picture is of my remake in Blender, just playing around to see what I can do. I probably won’t completely remodel him, I just wanted to see how things are. I’ll just export him from C4D to Blender, then I’ll be rigging him to animate sometime soon, which is actually the reason why I switched. C4D is really nice for modeling and rendering, which I said above, but when it comes to rigging and animating it just isn’t as polished off as Blender or Maya are. I tried Maya once but I found it quite glitchy when it came to modeling, so really for me it’s Blender or nothing.
Remade in Blender
C4D’s not lacking anything, it’s just a lot more quirky than Blender. For example: C4D automatically places weight maps. This can be really annoying, as you then have to go around removing it all then adding back just what you want. Then in C4D you have to add all the IK chains yourself–Blender has a neat little “auto IK” button do automatically do all that for you, even without you seeing them. And speaking of clutter, in C4D you have to add controls for all your IK chains and set up their hierarchies to tell it that when you rotate the shoulder you also want the elbow bone to move with it. If you ask me, that should just be assumed. Anyway, C4D is a really nice tool, especially so due to it’s amazing material editor, but I just don’t think it makes the cut for animation. Anyway, back to the images; I know that’s all what you care about. I do know that the C4D one may look a bit more polished, but to be fair I did the remake in Blender in about 5 minutes. Even so, the one in Blender looks happier. However, I’m really going to miss that damn material editor… I’m really feeling the love for Blender, but…. Gahhh, please excuse me while I dry up my eyes here, I have uh… Allergies. Yeah, it’s allergies….. Damn I’m going to miss that editor….
Update:
Happy robot.
Shocked robot!
Whoa, lookit awl dat joos
Lots of stuff has been floating about lately. I’m officially completely off my SWG addiction (seemingly I wasn’t after last post for about a week or two). I’m kinda in that stage where I have all these projects to continue, all these games to play, and all these things to do, but I don’t know which to turn my focus to right now. There’s ToH, EXGN/RP, Espionage Inc, and the periodically reoccuring 3D modeling and animation thing. I know I said I’ve made plans for the new updated EXRP script, and I will get around to that sometime soonish, but I think for now I’ll try to focus on Espionage Inc. Thing is, with such a small team of developers, we all have to do our part–And in some cases, we all have to do multiple parts. Especially me, for some reason. While coding and design are probably enough to keep me occupied, I’m still aiming for a pretty quick development cycle. I’ve started to model again, this time with Modo. It’s really amazing compared to anything else out there. Max was alright, but I didn’t like the way that the modifiers worked. You never really had any real geometry due to them, and when you come down into the technical stuff (and even trying to export things to Source) that was a real pain. Maya was a lot better, but I found it really glitchy. It absolutely loves to bugger out and go completely batshit insane when you hand it some backfaces. Now I’ve started looking into other things, like Blender for instance. Pretty powerful, stable, well-rounded tool, however I just horribly dislike it’s interface and viewport controls. Waaaaaay to complicated and unconventional. Houdini looked nice as well, but it’s node system is just completely unnecessary in my opinion. Lightwave is nice too, but it feels like just more of the same. So eventually I came across Modo, which has this whole philosophy about every concept and control just coming naturally and working how you’d expect them to work. And that’s true, Modo is by far the easiest to use modeling program I’ve ever used–besides Wings, but that’s a bit outdated I think. It’s pretty good at other things to, like texturing, sculpting, and rendering. It has a pretty primitive pivot-based animation system, which is great for smaller things, but for organics I just can’t see it happening. You can, however, animate in an external program and import the MDD. I’ll be doing this if I ever want to do animation (which I will) with another nice program called Messiah. Very very nice animation tools there. Anyway, in addition to modeling I’ll also be taking on the daunting challenge of creating a soundtrack of sorts. I’ve been looking into Reason, which looks really good actually, but the only problem for me is that you really do need a MIDI device for that. Actually, not too big of a problem as I already have a very nice keyboard, but it’s rather large and I’ll have to find a lot of space for it. Plus I’ll need a MIDI input card for my computer, and frankly I know nothing about those. I’m sure it’ll all work out though, I honestly can’t wait until we start getting some more content out.
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Game Over
My addiction to SWG has ended, I’m pretty sure. I got level 90 yesterday, and while that’s all fine and peachy I’ve now found myself asking the age-old question: “What now?” It doesn’t seem like there’s too much to do after you hit 90 besides the odd quest you haven’t already done and PvP, which I’ll get into in a sec, and RP which is nice every now and then but peoples’ definition of RP in SWG tends to be somewhere along the lines of “waste as much time as possible by sitting down and just talking to people, which you can do in guild chat anyway”. Oh boy, so much fun. There are also heroic instances, which are actually really fun, but you NEED a rather large and experienced group for all of them, so that’s a bit out of the question most of the time. As for PvP, I’m a bounty hunter so I’ve tried a few missions–first one was on Mustafar, so I couldn’t use my droids to track him. Second was inside the Deathwatch Bunker, which I really can’t be arsed to get a group to go through with me. Third was in Restuss, which is a PvP zone that forces you into PvP whether you like it or not–hooray for getting ganked by every single Imp on the server. Rinse and repeat this several times for about 15 targets. Finally I found one that was just sitting on their speeder in some town, and I started to attack them but they just ran away. Okay, don’t want to fight me? I’ll just destroy your speeder, thank you very much. Then I tried another one which was in the Mos Eisely cantina, and without armor! Looks like I scored big time, right? At first, I’d say so too. I dropped their health down all the way in like 30 seconds, but to my amazement there was no dieing involved afterwards. They were just running around shooting rockets at me while they had no health. At all. I kept mashing my specials on them that should’ve rolled them right there on the spot but no, they just didn’t die. After ranting over guild chat, I’ve found out that my target had activated a special officer buff that makes you invincible for some seconds. Uhh, great–WHO’S IDEA WAS THIS!? I know SOE wants to get rid of SWG, but honestly is shitting down PvP really the way? Well, I guess it worked for me. I’ll continue to play every now and then I’m sure, but my addiction is over.
That said, back to coding and whatnot. I’m trying to get EXGN started up again. The other day I set up a CSS server for a friend from Facepunch and he’s got a “Zombie Escape Mod” server running on it, and it’s actually got quite a steady amount of players going on it. I tried it out myself, and while I’ll never be too big a fan of zombie games (besides the occasional L4D) I like what he’s done with the place. I’ve just finished updating Wine and reinstalling a GMod server from scratch, but there’s still the weird “I DON’T FEEL LIKE LOADING THE SURFACEPROPERTIES PROPERLY” glitch. At least the surfaceproperties files came installed by default this time, but they don’t seem to make a bit of difference. Perhaps they do, as the problem appears to be fixed in *some* areas, but it still exists in others so that’s where I base my assessment on. Not until it never happens again will it truly be ‘fixed’. Also, for now I’ve removed the CSS and TF2 servers, but if there’s a demand for them I’ll surely bring them back–just ask.
As for coding, I haven’t done anything yet but I’m planning on getting back to ToH. Like I’ve said before, all the hard stuff is done; all that’s left are all the details. This has got to be the shortest paragraph about coding I’ve ever written…
It feels kind of weird not being addicted to anything anymore. I kinda liked the joy of getting up every day to go directly to playing something; always knowing exactly what to do. Not that I don’t know what to do now, but I do feel a bit disoriented without knowing what I’ll be doing all day anymore. Somewhat related: I really just can’t wait for The Old Republic–you know, the new Star Wars MMO coming out sometime next year. I know I was kinda bummed about it earlier, but now I’m starting to welcome it with open arms. SWG is great, but like I said, not too much to keep me occupied after level 90. I’m pretty sure BioWare will take care of the “what now” thing after you hit whatever level cap they set, as their whole philosophy appears to be about PvE story telling–which is ideal. My only problem is that they seem to be focusing a lot on Jedi, which makes it seem like every single person in the game will be a Jedi. Hopefully not the case, and probably not the case since they’ve announced the BH class, but still something to worry about. Another thing that worries me is loss of features–will there still be space combat? Will there still be crafting? Player cities? One thing that was both annoying and great at the same time were the vast landscapes in SWG. Really, biggest playing fields I’ve ever seen in an MMO. Most of them (meaning NOT Mustafar or Kashyyk) felt like massive planets; you know, the way they should. It gives you a really nice feeling of adventure and exploration when you travel around in SWG. I’d like to see that kind of massive playing area make a return, as well as player cities to take up some space. However, I’d like to see a bit more selection when it comes to houses. This doesn’t seem like it’ll be a problem though, as BioWare’s documentaries seem to emphasize how every player will be able to look and play their own unique way. So like pre-CU? Nah, hopefully better. Another thing that concerns me is the art style, as it does look a bit cartoony but I’m optimistic. Anyway, lots of things to bugger up my mind with regarding ToR, but unless you want to read a novel I’ll leave it off here. Off to watch some Clone Wars (meh it’s pretty good), ‘night.
…Damn, how cliche am I?
03.12.09A bit lost
I’m a bit lost at the moment. With everything. On one hand I want to continue coding EXRP Lite and ToH, as well as fix all the EXGN servers as well as put up new ones (I’ve had an itch to play DoDS lately), and on the other I’m stuck in an endless addiction to SWG. And then even in SWG I’m lost: I have a BH (bounty hunter) and a trader. I spent a lot of money from my BH grinding that trader. Structures require too many walls and structure modules (10 walls for 1 module, 10 modules for 1 small house), shipwright is kinda useless for me since we already have an excellent one in our guild, munitions is bloody impossible to make any decent weapons with as you need literally perfect quality resources, all the 100% perfect equipment attachments you could ever possibly get your hands on, maxed out assembly and experimentation stats, and extremely good crafting station effectiveness. It really is impossible. I mean, maybe if I had a couple million from my BH to spend on it, but I don’t. Next up is domestics: any piece of clothing that looks the least bit decent needs stuff from a factory crate, and I have no use for food buffs. My last choice is engineering, but that’s what Son’s alt is. Then again, I can always just respec to that and try to regain the money I lost from all that grinding and respeccing (yes, I’ve tried them all except engy). Engy can make some stuff that can be worth a lot of money if it’s 100%. However, I’ve had enough trouble finding good enough resources and yadda yadda to make even a decent gun with munitions, so maybe I should just not even try to afford the respec cost again and just try something completely new. Officer looks interesting, but I don’t really want to take the time to make a raise a character all the way to the top again just to experiment. Entertainer looks alright too, but there’s no benefit to me. I mean, all I’d do is just AFK dance all day and I have 90, then I give random people buffs. Yeah, soooooooooo much fun. Thing is, I’ve spent almost a million just grinding my trader, so it really does seem like a waste. I’ve always wanted a Jedi though, so I am considering making a new light Jedi character with an extremely similar name as my BH and get an ent to make him look exactly him, for the sake of RP. Then I could ’switch’ between BH and Jedi professions for essentially the same guy, as if he’s a BH with force powers. That’d be pretty cool, I think. Still, huge waste with the trader… On the plus, my BH is level 78 now and can take down a level 90 smuggler being brought down to about half health. Only due to shields though, which I guess is kinda cheap. Not if you’re doing a BH mission, though. Anything for the money.
Anyway, that’s my rant of mass confusion and rantness. I’ve been meaning to write a post for like two weeks now but I kept getting distracted. It was my birthday on the 28th, which was nice. I had to get up at 6AM to go to some stupid school thing for that class I have no interest in–I think I mentioned this before, did I? The rest of the day I was just way too tired to talk or do anything. That really sucked. Well, I haven’t been doing much else but playing SWG lately, so I guess that just about wraps things up. Ah well.
02.23.09Mir’sheb
Lots and lots and lots more SWG lately. I haven’t worked on anything at all, to be honest. But that’s okay, I’ll get around to it anyway. SWG’s just a really fun game, what can I say. The Star Wars nerd I am, it’s just not possible not to play it. I’ve finished the Legacy quests on my main and bounty hunter, Ekzel, and levelling has gotten a bit slower, so I’ve made an alt trader. For now I’m structures as it’s supposedly easier to level in, but you need so many resources it’s really annoying. Engineering only needs metal, basically. We’ll see how it turns out once I’m a higher level, right now I’m not sure which would be more useful. Structures is nice since you can make people houses and make furniture for your own house, as well as random structures such as camps, but engineering seems useful too since you can make droids and vehicles. I guess it all depends on which has the higher demand for purchased goods–more people going to my vendor, more business, more money for me. Speaking of vendors, why can’t they let you change the physical appearance of them like an ent can with other people? I had to remake my vendor at least 60 times before I got one that wasn’t fat and ugly. Then after all that effort, she won’t even wear my slave Leia clothes. Keep in mind, I don’t mean to intend that they’re mine as in I wear them. Unfortunately, I can’t. Fortunately, you can make vendors wear specific things at a certain level. How you can force people to wear clothes just because you have more experience, I’m not sure. My initial dilemma is regarding why you can’t make them wear uniforms right off the bat. Just imagine if everyone working at McDonalds didn’t wear hair nets to wor–oh wait, they don’t,
02.18.09Allayloo ta nuv
Not much development recently, if at all. Espionage Inc is still in a bit of a hiatus, but really I can’t be arsed to pester anyone anymore–at least, not now. ToH is on a bit of a break too; I coded like 24/7 that one week that I’m all ‘coded out’ for a while. EXRP is about the same, as I’ve said in earlier blog posts I’ve just been really bored with GMod/Lua recently. Not to worry, everything will return to activity sooner or later.
So, what’s been going on with me? Both a lot of something and a lot of nothing. I’ve been really frustrated with school, since I was put in a class that I didn’t really want to be in, but was assured it was something completely different than it actually turned out to be, and now it’s too late to get out. Also, did I mention said class requires me to go to school on a couple Saturdays or else I fail–one being my birthday? Yeah, just brilliant. I’ve also been playing a lot of SWG lately, hence the post title. I’ve levelled up quite a lot since I last played, not sure how. It’s pretty awesome though, I have ~500+ DPS without using actions or buffs, a droideka, and I’ve done an assload of “higher-level” quests and instances–my house is full of trophies and crap. Really fun game, it’s a shame to see people leaving it. There was a free week of play last week that I was completely into that just ended today for me that I got really into, and I’m resubscribing when I get home.
One thing that I’ve been playing with lately is something called “theta brainwave meditation”, which is basically ambient music with a soft hum in the background at a certain frequency called ‘theta’ that somehow tricks your brain into becoming more relaxed and everything. You can find some here. If you’re going to go out and buy that track you hear in the video, it’s called Astral Journeys. Very nice easy listening if you ask me, great for getting yourself relaxed after a lot of stress. Anyway, just thought I’d share that with you. If you’re in need of a good game to play, check out SWG. Now then, back to school…
02.11.09No soup
Lots more progress, of course, however no soup. My stomach’s been really grumbly the past couple days, not sure why, but I’ve been really bloated and foul-smelling burpy. Seems to be getting better, though. I just think it’s coders’ withdrawal–haven’t coded as much as I did last week. Regardless, I have got some pretty cool stuff done. I’m nearing around 5000 lines of code, which is kinda freaky and kinda cool at the same time. Guess it just shows how much work has gone into this so far. Anyway, yesterday I implemented a map portal system for edge-based portals and tile-based portals to ‘teleport’ to different maps. The edge ones work by defining a map to switch to if you go beyond the upper, lower, left, or right bounds of the current map, and you appear on the opposite side of the map so it seems as if you’ve traveled to it. For example: We can have a huge field made up of several different maps, and you walk right to go to the next map, left to go to the previous map, etc… Instead of having just one huge map, which would be huge. The tile-based portal system was a bit easier in theory, as it’s basically just when you step on a certain tile you mark in the collision layer it teleports you to the specified X and Y of a selected map. I’ve also done a couple tweaky things to the map editor, but nothing specifically worth mentioning. Just look at the screenshots in the dump below and you’ll get the idea. Next up are NPCs and the sprite editor tab.
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