Don’t look back
It’s been a long road, a lot of detours… But I’m finally here. I’m a senior! Yaaaaaa–wait, that means I’m going to college next year. Wait, where am I even going… Oh no, this is bad. But I’ll finally be done with school! Yaaaaaaaaaaay! I know I haven’t done a blog post in a while, and a lot has happened, but I won’t be covering it all. Do you want me to write a novel?!
Lots of work on Espionage Inc lately. LOTS. We’re making more progress than ever. In fact, we’ve completely restarted production from scratch and we’ve nearly completely rethought the concept in a lot of places. We have 5 developers: Two programmers, one mapper, one modeler, and one skinner. You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to coordinate all that, but when I’m dabbling into everyone’s work it gets a bit crazy. I’m incredibly happy that we could find another programmer, who’s actually good even. It makes the whole thing so much easier on me. I thought I was going to be the only programmer, and I thought I could handle it. Now that we’re pretty much fully head-on into production and we’ve got everyone working at once, I can definitely say that I WOULD NOT be able to handle it. I’ve barely been able to program at all, and I don’t think I’ll be able to. I’m modeling props and characters, animating characters, programming, and coordinating everything. I don’t think I’ll barely even have time for all that. And we still don’t have a sound guy… Okay, I’ll get off the soap box.
We’ve pretty much finished the general shape and layout of the first level, now we’re just adding detail and making all of the content to go in it. The concept of the whole game is pretty much 100% solid at this point, and unlike before, we’re completely planning out our levels and gameplay before we do anything towards them. I think that’s the main reason for our massive amount of progress at this point. I expect to have something playable by maybe even the end of this year. I’m hopeful. Maybe just even the first level. We’ll see.
I don’t want to spoil too much (if anything), so I’ll just stop there and not go into detail about exactly what we’re doing. We’ll do a media release at some point, I’m sure. In other news, I want to do a 3D animation but I’m not sure what. Or when or where to start. I have the skills, I have the motivation, but I don’t have the time. I even have over 9000 ideas to make it of. There need to be more hours in the day…
Also Batman: Arkham Asylum is amazing. Best singleplayer game ever right there. If you haven’t already played it, GO GET IT NOW. Or else.
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.
04.21.09I 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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WAAAAAAALL-E
I saw WALL-E today, and it was great. And by great, I really, really mean GREAT–and I don’t say this about too many movies. Sure, Iron Man was great, but it didn’t really play with your mind or touch you emotionally and philosphically, giving you a fresh new view on things. Basically, it’s about a robot (WALL-E) who compacts trash on Earth for a living. If I told you anything else, it’d be a spoiler. The concept of the movie is small, yet with the emotion Pixar (somehow) put in all their characters, it just makes the movie so much bigger. I applaud Pixar with that in mind. So, you’re making a movie with robots that can’t talk. Okay. Now how do you show what they’re thinking? How do you show emotion? By having rather extensive and highly movable limbs and eyes that can rotate multiple ways, Pixar was able to put in a lot of emotion into their characters. Robots with effective emotion–who would’ve known?
With that said, the robots don’t exactly behave like robots. They have a certain personification to them that gives them all a distinct personality and attitude. For example, WALL-E is very curious. His lady friend EVE is very directive, as she tells us multiple times. A cleaning robot named Mo is very… Well, cute. The list goes on and on for each character, of course. When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought there would be no humans or talking at all, and that it’d be rather kiddie because of that. I mean, if you can’t talk or anything, why not just do a lot of kiddie humor like bash into walls and stuff? Pixar did a good job of avoiding this. There are humans who talk and play a big part in the movie, and the robots do talk in their own way. Imagine how those voice synthesizers on guitars talk, make it 8-bit, and there you go. To give you a bit of an idea, WALL-E has a lot of trouble saying EVE’s name.
Overall, this was a really good movie. The plot was nice and original enough to be very enjoyable. The humor was really good–maybe a bit better than usual, considering these robots show a lot of emotion. (More than other Pixar characters, as the robots’ emotion was a big aspect of this film.) The character design was just amazing, as is the soundtrack. And as always, breaking their previous record, Pixar’s graphics and rendering are better than ever. Would I recommend you see this movie? Of course! 10/10! At times, it seems a tad bit uninspired with not too much humor, but the majority (being 98%) is absolutely amazing. WALL-E is a great contender for a best animated feature film Oscar–as if there was any competition. Elaborating on the soundtrack a bit more, Thomas Newman is a genius. I’m listening to it right now and especially with this new sound card, my ears are in complete bliss. Now back to the movie, it really has a big philosophical side to it that gets you thinking. What if we really had AI like that? What if what happened to Earth in the movie really did happen? What if we all got fat an immobile!? The main idea is AI that is self-aware, that can think for it’s self, and can have emotion. With that in mind, WALL-E may just be my favourite movie this year.
Really, I wouldn’t mind working for them. Game development being a hobby and Pixar being work would work out perfectly. At Pixar you get to ride scooters and stuff through the halls, they have talent contests, and parties in the lobby whenever a movie opens. You also get to use whatever operating system you want on your computer, and there are no internet filters. If that isn’t already amazing, you get to paint your office whatever colour you want. Sure it’s not that big an office–more like a cubicle in terms of size–but it has walls and it’s own door. Niiiiiice. Now, lets compare that to the gaming industry: You can work for EA or Valve. EA’s working conditions would obviously treat you like utter crap, so I’m not even going to go into that. Valve is more of the “prime realestate”-type when it comes to game development jobs I’d think, and even there I’d think it’d be a bit boring. Sitting in an office all day with internet filters and everything, forced to use Windows. Then you don’t get anything new, it’s just munging around old, probably poorly written code written by someone else. I’ve done a lot of coding myself, and I know that I hate working with other peoples’ code. Therefor, having Pixar as a job and game devleopment as a hobbie, as it is now, would be perfect. That’s my goal/plan, at least. I’m trying to get back into Maya, so hopefully with a little amatuer experience I’ll be ready for Pixar University.
Anyway, other stuff: EXRP’s meeting was moved to Monday because some key members couldn’t come, and that’s fine. It would’ve been nice to have it today, but then I would’ve wanted to see WALL-E today anyway (which I didn’t realize on Thursday when I scheduled the meeting originally) so that would’ve conflicted and screwed things up. On monday my family has to take our car to the shop ’cause the wheels are squeaky, one of the side doors doesn’t lock with the remote, and someone keyed the driver’s door in the theater parking lot today. The latter problem probably isn’t on warranty, which sucks. I wish I had more non-movie stuff to say, but I don’t. WALL-E just blew my mind–go see it, and it’ll blow yours too.
06.22.08Ideas? Ideas.
I’m not quite sure what I’ve been up to lately. I would say nothing much, as I usually do, but that isn’t quite the case. That and I’ve used that as the beginning sentence to 9 out of 10 of my posts, so I think it’s about time to get creative and use something else. EXRP is going good, we’re getting a lot of new players recently. Still having a few server problems, but they aren’t as noticeable as before now. I haven’t really added anything new to the script, just a lot of bug fixes and minor tweaks. I’ve been meaning to set Ubuntu as my default in GRUB for a while now, but I’ve never gotten around to it. I even installed an IFS for Ext3 partitions in Windows so I can change my GRUB config without having to wait for my computer to shut down and boot to the GRUB screen again, but I never have. No idea why–I’m not doing anything really important now, so I don’t know what’s keeping me.
I’ve been exploring a lot of things, recently. My 6 months of coding have been a really eye-opening experience. Yes, that sounds really lame, cheesy, and unbelievable, but it’s true. It was the first time I’ve finally sat down and coded something from scratch. Sure, I do this quite often with my PHP work, but nothing on such a large scale as EXRP. It’s really opened my eyes to coding–allowed me to think about the future. And of course, that’s just what I’m doing now. Recently, I’ve been trying to think of ideas for games. To do so, I’ve been playing a lot of them. The past week, I’ve downloaded a lot of game demos and bought a lot of games. X3 Reunion was nice, but very complex and hard to get into without being a total geek about the game. Star Wars Republic Commando was an extremely good game, nice graphics, story, gameplay and all, but it was very neglected by the media in my opinion. My only problem is that it’s a bit repetitive, but I still think it’s a great game. In terms of FPS games, Republic Commando had the same thing going as CoD4 had with it’s campaign, with the whole team that you love that gets killed at the end. Good story, with that in mind. Of course I don’t know if they really do die, but whenever a writer gets you attached to a bunch of characters like that, especially ones you fight to your last breath with, you know they’re gunna die eventually. What I liked was that it was a lot darker than other Star Wars games I’ve played. It brought with it a whole new view of Star Wars games–it’s a shame LucasArts didn’t follow through and make more like this. Then again, The Force Unleashed may be darker as well, so you never know. Not until it releases, at least.
A couple other games I’ve tried are flight simulators. Flight Simulator X was nice, but the AA was quite awful–even at the highest setting. I don’t know, maybe it was just the demo. Hopefully, at least, because I liked that game. I built a jet fighter in EXRP a couple days ago that used the fin stool for wings, creating realistic lift. Thrusters were only used for acceleration and steering. I’ve always loved aviation and aircraft–even just the idea and thrill of flying–but to be honest, I’ve never really realized how much I have loved it until I made the RP character Thomas McCloud to make a caricature of aviation lovers. Midway through, I just stopped and thought to myself, “Hey… This is exactly like me!” Now I want to get some pilot training at my air port, get a license, and start flying. My dad was in the Canadian Air Force when he was young, and while I won’t join any military myself, I wouldn’t mind flying a jet fighter or two. However, that’s not the point. Throughout my whole life, I always remember my dad looking up at the sky and pointing out what model every plane he saw was. Watching programs on TV about planes, playing flight simulators, marveling over different planes at a museum. I guess that almost inspired me to have a certain love for aircraft as well. Then there was also Soarin’. It’s a ride at Disneyland/Disney World where you sit on a row of chairs that gets lifted into a big dome and moves around like a motion simulator, and on the dome is footage from a hang glider accompanied by some really relaxing, brilliantly made music. I really liked that ride, and it also had to do with aviation–this could’ve possible had an effect on me too. Also, the music is great.
As I said before, I really don’t know what I’ve been doing lately. In addition to the above, I’ve been trying out different 3d modeling programs (the contest is between Maya and Cinema 4D right now) to use for my games. I don’t know, I like having some help, but I find it easier just to do things myself sometimes. I would find someone to model stuff for my games for me, but it’s just so much easier to argue with yourself than with someone else. I got the Spore Creature Creator (who hasn’t?) and I really like the way that you “model” things in that; it reminds me a lot of ZBrush or Mudbox. ZBrush was alright, but it’s the type of thing you have to go through hours of training before you can do anything with it. I tried a demo for Mudbox, and it was a lot better, but unfortionately way too expensive for me. Plus I don’t know what the practicality of making a space ship in there would be.
I really like the look Will Wright is taking on gaming. I’ve really only noticed it now that Spore is the main talk–now that we know everything about Spore, and it really makes sense. At first I thought Will Wright’s games were simulators. Sim City simulated a society. Then The Sims simulated personality. Now Spore is simulating evolution. It just gets bigger and bigger each time around. Then I realized: These aren’t sim games, these are philosophy games. Evolution is still very much a theory (although I believe in it), so there’s still a lot of “what if” and “but then…” included whenever you think about it. Really, that’s philosophy. Sim City contained the philosophy of how a society grows. The Sims had the philosophy of of how peoples’ minds mature. Now Spore is about evolution? I applaud Will Wright in creating games that really make you think–regardless if they did when they were released, or now that Spore has surfaced to spark your memory. Really, Spore has gotten me thinking about a lot of things more philosophically now. Religion, emotion, psychology (partially), life in general, etc… It just has endless possibilities. Although it’s probably not something I should admit, it’s quite relaxing to take a crap at about 4PM in my house’s big bathroom. The way that the light reflects through the small window and how the birds in the trees directly outside it sing songs for me, it creates a very nice ambiance. Perfect for relaxing and thinking, really. And pooping. The mood is completely ruined once someone comes out with their weed whacker, however.
With that said, my post comes to an end. I haven’t posted in 10 days, and while I could definitely say I was busy enough to not have any time to make a blog, I wasn’t busy with anything really important. Later today I’ll be getting a summer haircut (read: summ’er better than others), and maybe I’ll watch Get Smart. Again, nothing important, but that’s what a vacation is all about; just relaxing and doing random, unimportant stuff you never had time to do before. Call me crazy, but I’m just enjoying my summer. Are we there yet?
12.17.06CGI and stuff
So, does anyone remember when I was trying to make realistic-looking CGI Lego bricks? Well, I’ve finally done it–After months of procrastination and failure.
Feel free to tell me what you think via contact page. 
Also, the forums have officially gone bye-bye. Bots were somehow exploiting the insanely out-of-date SMF that was installed to spam, so I’ve backed up the database and replaced the subdomain with some excuses for my procrastination of getting a new forum up. 
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