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 And that’s true, Modo is by far the easiest to use modeling program I’ve ever used–besides Wings, but that’s a bit outdated I think.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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