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?
04.8.09Whoa, 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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Relaxing
You may have noticed that I haven’t been doing much lately–whether it be with EXRP or blog posts. Well, there’s a reason for that. And a good one, too! Well, not so much a good one, but if you consider the amount of effort I’ve been putting into things recently, you’d understand. I’m just relaxing. I’ve released MistCMS, I’ve made a new logging system called FireLog, and I’ve been administrating EXRP for the past year nonstop–whether that be coding or moderating. It’s about time for a break–and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I’ve been spending a lot of time playing CoD4, CSS, 1.6, and WolfET lately, and I must say, it’s good to be able to just get up in the morning and play something for once. Usually I have to deal with 20 things from EXRP and 10 things from work, but not lately. It’s a good feeling, although I think some people are starting to get the feeling I’m avoiding them. Well you know what? Forget them! I’ve been working my ass off 24/7 for them and get nothing in return, they should be the least bit grateful instead of giving me all the grief they always do.
I wanted to see The Dark Knight the other day, but everything was sold out except the latest showing, which I apparently would’ve had to wait 2 hours for to ensure I got a seat. Uh, no thanks. I’ll see it sometime during the week, then. I also went to a really nice sushi place this weekend. I love sushi, but I haven’t been able to find a decent place to eat some here until now. The only other place has the sushi coming in and out of the kitchen on a conveyer belt, which is cool, but you don’t know if anyone’s sneezed on it. Or how long it’s been rotating for. The waiter looked like Batman, which was cool. I didn’t tell him that of course, that would’ve been awkweird. “Do you like Batman? I like Batman.”
A friend of mine got Pirates of the Burning Sea a couple days ago, and he says it’s really good. The patch takes a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooong(cat) time to download, but it’s apparently worth it. I played the beta months ago and it was quite fun, but got old after a while. They’ve improved it a lot, except for the sword fighting. People say it’s a bit lame, but in that case I think the developer may change it sooner or later. They seem like the kind that care what their players want, unlike LucasArts and SWG’s combat upgrade. Boy, did everyone get screwed with that or what? Everyone agrees that PotBS suffers from one major thing besides lame sword fighting: It isn’t newbie friendly. People say that it doesn’t explain things very well when you’re new to the game, so you’ll get bored with it easily if you don’t have someone there to tell you what things are and what they do. However, if you can stick through the first couple days of newbness, people say it’s a great game. I think it’s worth a try, as I liked the beta, so I’m thinking I’ll get it sometime this week. Hopefully SOE doesn’t fuck it up like it does everything else.
Speaking of publishing giants that fuck things up, I bought Mass Effect this weekend for the PC. Although I’d just use a crack once this comes up for me, someone at EA thought it was an amazing idea to only let their customers install the game 3 times–then you can’t install or play the game again. A crack can get around this, as I’ve said before, but who’s bright idea was that? How daft do you have to be to think of a scheme as mentally handicapped as that? Oh well, it’s still a good game. I don’t really need to tell you about the game it’s self–everyone’s played it, I’m sure of that. Long cutscenes are long. (Cat? Perhaps not.)
Anyway, that’s all that’s up with me. I’m still in the process of redesigning Dvondrake.com, so don’t think anything is final yet. I like the general theme, I’m just thinking about changing the banner once Roggy sends me the logo he’s making me. Roggy pwns, especially because he hasn’t gone apeshit about us calling him ROJJAYYYYYYYYYY yet. I’m unsure about what to put on the front page, though. Something about what’s new or coming soon would be good, but I’m unsure about how to word it. Oh well, I’ll think of something sooner or later. Right now, I have PotC music to listen to.
06.28.08WAAAAAAALL-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.
06.27.08yyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmssssss
I’m still not knowing what I’m doing. EXRP’s general activity has died down a bit–I don’t know if it’s just the time of year, or if I majorly screwed up with EXRP-Script. Either way, we’ve having a meeting on Saturday to discuss a few “radical” ideas to gain more appeal. Who cares if it works or not, it’ll be a lot more fun for everyone. That is, assuming it is agreed upon. I’ll let you in on it after the meeting. I’ve surprisingly got a lot of important things to say and discuss this time around, unlike last, so a note to any staff members reading: Be there or I’ll rip your head off and shove an overheated AMD chip down your neck. Those things are sharp too, yowch!
A lot of game ideas have been coming and going, but mostly going. I really don’t know what to do. I’m at a point where I want to do something, I know exactly how to do it, but I have no concept at all. I want to make something simple, fun, yet somewhat innovative and fresh, but I have no idea what. It’s like I’m just waiting for an idea to just fall out of the sky and hit me in the face. Just watch, now a flying hippo or something will come crashing through my roof and crap on my face tonight. Whatever that idea is, I’ll be using the C4 engine, PhysX, and Lua. I’ve already assembled a team of developers, which include other programmers, sound artists, 2d artists, concept artists, and level designers. Also, writers and stuff. The only thing I don’t have immediately covered is modeling, but I can model a few objects and stuff. Character design is a load of crap though–at least, that’s what my attempts at it look like. I’ll definitely need someone to specialize in that. I’ll be using C4 as the engine, PhysX as the physics engine (as it’s actually really easy to implement into C4. Maybe Newton if I magically find out otherwise), and Lua or Squirrel to make the actual game in. Face it, C++ is like traditional Chinese. A lot of game developers are using simpler languages, though making their framework and interpreter in C++, to develop their games. I don’t blame them, it’s just so much easier. An e-book (seriously who does these anymore) is coming out in a week or two, along with build 149 of the C4 engine, that should be a lot of help. I’m thinking I’ll get it–I mean, it won’t hurt. Always good to have a little extra documentation.
As for other stuff, I have none. I haven’t played anything too much lately, so I can’t talk about how exciting my gaming life is. I’ve been playing around in GMod as usual, and like I mentioned in an earlier blog post (I think) I got Flight Simulator X. It’s really fun, and I’m getting quite good at it. However, it really is a pain in the ass to find and line up with an air strip to land. Even with radar it’s painful, so just imagine without. I’ve been into a lot of music with more soft vocals lately, I don’t know why. I mean like Rusted Root, The Postal Service, Cold Play, Royksopp. Hell, even Gary Jules. It’s just really relaxing and easy to listen to. I don’t know, maybe I need that relaxing quality right now. All this “wtf am I doing” stuff is frustrating me.
I saw Get Smart yesterday, and I must say it greatly exceeded my expectations. It was non-stop funny, although a few of the jokes at the very beginning were a bit lame, but you’ll definitely come out of the theater feeling good and ready to crack a few of your own. If you’ve ever seen the show Maxwell Smart that the movie’s based upon, it’ll be a lot more enjoyable. They butchered the cone of silence, though, which I was very upset with at the time. However, the pro’s outweigh the con’s, and it’s a great movie. There are a lot of movies coming out soon; WALL-E on Friday, then sometime later Hancock, and sometime later after that The Dark Knight. Sounds like a good year for movies. Games too, I can’t wait for The Force Unleashed and Spore. Also, Far Cry 2 looks nice. Tomorrow I have to get up early to go to IHOP for breakfast with a few family members. Also, randomly changing the subject (I wonder why), I got a hair cut a couple days ago. Before I had rather long hair, but now it’s a lot shorter. It’s still kinda long at the front–just above my eyebrows–but the short is a lot shorter and a lot comfier. I like it. And again changing the subject: I haven’t had yams in a while. Maybe I’ll try one again soon–thanks Viva!
05.24.08Who knows…
Not too much to report on, as usual. I figure I spend most of my day just sitting down and thinking–whether that be infront of my computer, in bed, or on the toilet. I really like the latter, as at around 4pm the lighting and ambience is just great. It’s just a perfect environment to think in, really.
I watched the new Indiana Jones yesterday, and while it was a good movie, it just wasn’t an Indy movie. If you haven’t watched it yet, just skip this paragraph and go onto the next–unless you don’t mind spoilers. Now, come on, aliens? Inter-dimensional beings? That’s just scraping the bottom of the bucket there. I mean, it’s alright if the whole series is about that stuff, like how my game is going to be, but that’s a lot different. My game is a sci-fi–Indy is not. At least, to an extent. Of course the ark and grail are sci-fi by definition, but they don’t seem sci-fi by common interpretation: aliens and space ships. I think the ending of the movie was just rushed, as it makes no sense to me. So it flies off and our treasure is “knowledge”… And…? It didn’t wrap anything up! And on the subject of Shai LaBeouf, I’d like to know why the hell Spielberg keeps on putting that kid in his all movies! He’s a horrible actor; whenever he acts, he’s not acting as his character, he’s just being himself. Sure, that worked in the first season of Fresh Prince, but that’s different. When the hat rolled to his feet and he started to put it on, I almost cried. Seriously. Then Ford got the hat from him and I let out a massive sigh of relief, but apparently they’re making another movie. And this one with a young Indy. PLEASE DON’T BE SHAI!! Overall, it was a good movie, but it wasn’t an Indy movie at all. I think Spielberg blew it by putting Shai in it. It seemed to go the same route as National Treasure 2, in which it’s a big family reunion where the whole family is going on an adventure–and that never works. It always seems to make the movie cheesy and lame.
As for coding, I did quite some bit today. I coded a dresser like I mentioned a while back, and you can change from emergency service uniforms to your regular clothes and back with this. I also think I fixed the fire axe, discarded morphine for a while until I can figure out how to fix it, and finish the skillbooks. Unarmed combat and kicking down doors pwn now. There’s also a paper SENT that replaces /write and /type now, where you can press E to open up a VGUI with a textbox that you can edit where the paper’s body goes. It’s really neat–I like it a lot more than the old commands. The only things ‘to do’ are the newspaper SENT and the bed SENT. And also test the fire axe, as animations seem a bit fucked in 3rd person–at least on singleplayer. I’m parenting an axe model to the player’s hand to use as a world model, as there is no axe world model by default. A lot of people testing were having problems with the music not playing, so I made a quick little Flash SWF thing to play music for me. I can’t do that for the radio though, unfortionately.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it. I’ve been talking to Tony and Rev a lot recently about my/our game about Excel, Khan, and The Agency, and we’ve pretty much got the whole game down and ready to begin development. However, that won’t happen for a while. I’ll have to be working on a couple more smaller projects before I take on something so big. Meh. I’m thinking some kind of RTS that puts a lot of emphasis on tactics instead of brute force, that may just happen to have a lot of weapons and concepts and stuff that’ll be in the game about Excel. It already has a name, but I don’t wanna say anything in case someone gets a crazy idea of stealing it from me. I’ll probably be starting this some time in the summer, but who knows. Son, maybe? Who knows…
04.16.08Estimation: Soon!
I know I keep saying soon, but I actually mean it this time. I plan to get some major work done over the weekend, possibly finishing the script. Of course, there’d then be content creation to be done (SWEPs, SENTs, scripted companies, etc…), but those’ll be easy. Hopefully something doesn’t screw up my weekend plans again so I can do this. Also, hopefully I don’t get re-addicted to SWG. I really hope I don’t, or else that’ll be another two weeks… Uurgh….
Today I made major headway on the companies system. I’ve completed everything except the abilities to manage employees and quit/disband the company–which is quite a lot. I still have to do stocks, but I’ll figure that out eventually. I’m not even completely sure how I’ll do it. Perhaps maybe executives can sell these to players as SENTs, and then the player gets a share every X in-game days? That could work–I see no way to make an automated stock market like I’d like to. If you have any ideas, let me know.
Things to do:
- Finish company system (90% done)
- Make classifieds system (extremely easy)
- Make inventory and journal (DICK easy)
- Make buy menus (PISS EASY)
- Make stocks system (should be easy enough)
- Make content (very simple)
Of course, I may cut some of these things from the launch, but this is all I have to do until the script is 100% complete. Yeah, that’s not much is it? I can’t believe we’re so close! Hopefully I can finish mostly everything this weekend so I can begin testing–and that’ll be really fun indeed. I shouldn’t need too much testing done, so it’ll be on a “snooze or lose”-type basis whether you get a chance to test or not. Then I can get a launch date down and we can plan the festivities! …And I can tweak as I usually do. But hey, at least it’ll be done.
If you have any ideas, now would be the time to state them. In response to my last post, I’ve changed things around a bit. You can work without a company, of course, but companies are just for more advanced, more organized jobs with numerous employees and a steady payroll. You’ll be able to edit your job title in your character’s journal however you please–this won’t even show up in many places anyway.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it. I’m really in the zone, and I really want to finally finish this. It’s been so long since I’ve had a proper roleplay–too long. I’m really missing roleplaying with you guys and doing the radio and all. Ah, that was good fun. And it’ll continue to be! The new script heavily depends on player contibution–there’s no automatic payroll. If you ask me, this will be a lot more fun, since there’s going to be an actual economy and stuff. We’re opening a door to a more fun, realistic roleplay, that revolves around you: the players. You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension – a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.
[youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzlG28B-R8Y[/youtube]
03.16.08Yippie-ki-yay, motherf*cker!
So I finally saw Live Free or Die Hard. I don’t know what took me so long–I think I was just busy with other things, so I never had the time to watch it in theaters. Oh well. Of course, that would’ve been much better than watching it “on demand”. My parents’ old VCR was screwing up the digital feed from the cable line, causing the picture to turn completely blue every few seconds. Took me a while to figure that one out, but it became obvious once we tried watching it on another TV without an old VCR. Why do we even have a VCR, anyway? I still say we need to go HD, even if the picture quality is 1000000 times better without the VCR plugged in.
Anyway, back to what I was saying. What was I saying? Oh right, movie review. Overall, pretty good. The story was a bit weak, as it was a generic ‘bad guy trying to hold the world for ransom’ type thing, but it was pretty good anyway. At first, it seems a bit cheesy with all the absurdly unrealistic kung-fu, but it seems to dim down and get better after watching for a while. I’d call this movie more of a ’strictly action’ film–you know, the type where you laugh at how badly the antagonists get clobbered. I like it, though. It kept my attention, it was fun, funny, and very action-y. I should’ve seen it in theaters.
Well, I know you don’t come here for random banter about movies–you come here for random banter about progress on EXRP-Script. (or other semi-related things) Progress is…. Well, progressing. I finally finished the receiving end of the mail system after fixing some really nasty bugs, and I’m moving on to the ‘compose’ screen. This should be a lot easier, as it’s just a bunch of DTextEntry’s that send information through concommands, then saving that information into the database. And don’t get any funny ideas from that–I’ll be sure to escape my MySQL stuffs.
As for my sleeping/coding theory from last post, it’s been proven incorrect. However, I have a new one: I get pumped whenever I listen to the Tomorrowland background music from Disney World. Yeah, strange, I know, but it works. Maybe just because I’ve had so many good memories there, the nostalgia comes up and makes me happy, putting me in a better mood for coding? I don’t know, and I don’t intend to. I stick with what works, and apparently this does. It’s just really calming, I know that much. You can listen to a small clip of it below.
…And that’s about it. I didn’t get too much sleep this weekend, but when do I ever?
02.27.08Delay
Shh, I know, I know. I don’t like the sound of it either, but there’s gunna be a delay in the launch of EXRP-Script. It’s about 70% done now, and I could launch on time, but it’ll seem very anticlimactic. All this waiting for something that’s not even done yet–I don’t like the sound of that at all. Half of everything will say “coming soon” and there won’t be any SENTs or SWEPs. It’ll suck–truly. That’s why I’m delaying it. Okay? Don’t get angry. I’ve just had a lot on my mind/plate lately. I’m human too, you know. (Although my brain is made of nanites and my blood contains code…) Anyway, point is, EXRP-Script will be delayed for a bit. I don’t know exactly how long, but I can’t imagine it more than two weeks. That’s not to say that it will be two weeks, but it won’t exceed it. I’ll let you know once I get an estimate. In addition to the actual coding, I have quite a bit of reorganization to do within certain things–namely staff. I want to lay down some very very basic rules and lay down a tougher standard for applications. Nothing too big, I’m still the same ol’ friendly “X”.
Well, I’ve been busy. Actually, not really. I’ve just been playing Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, watching random Youtube videos, downloading all the good Stage6 videos, and reading/watching things about Spore. I wanna make Disney World in RCT3, but I need the expansions to do a lot of things. Meh. I’ve been kinda obsessed with WDW recently, dunno why. I’ve been watching a lot of on-ride videos and getting a lot of nostalgia while doing so. Fun. As for Spore, I can’t wait to play it. I saw a really cool video of it from a past E3 where Robin Williams creates his own creature–it was so ugly, it crashed the game when he tried to make it produce offspring. Fun stuff; makes me want to play even more. Plus Robin Williams pwns–I never knew he was a gamer.
That’s pretty much it. I’ve been really tired lately, which surely contributes to the delays. Hopefully I can get more sleep. Lets just leave things off with a good ol’ kung fu skit. Yeah, everyone loves those! Plus it has Jackie Chan–bonus!!
[youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uRjSboqWKc&feature=related[/youtube]
02.14.08Integrating PHM, random banter
I worked a bit more on the RP menu today, just laying more of it’s structure down and everything. The more ‘major’ thing I did would have to have been integrating PhoneMod with the new character-selection system. Wasn’t too hard–I just took the old PHM stuff, optimized it, and then threw a bunch of code into the gamemode to mangle the two together. Since I’ve pretty much covered everything new, all that’s needed to be done is content and the RP menu. I’m trying to make the RPM as reusable as possible, so I can just have a table with a bunch of values that the RPM loops through to use for content. That way I don’t have to hard code all the jobs and such. Other than that, not much new today. I have a massive headache that’s impairing me from hitting down some major coding like I did yesterday–probably related to my cold/flu/whatever the hell it is.
The teaser trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie was released today. I’ve gotta say, it looks pretty nice, and of coursed I’ll see it, but…. I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem the same. Maybe it’s because all of the footage is both out of context and somewhat unfinished, but it just looks really… Cheesy. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, really, but it just seems more like a comic book-themed-looking movie like Batman & Robin. Plus Harrison Ford looks a bit too old to be playing Indy. At the end of the trailer when he says “only part time”, he looks and sounds like he could be someone’s grandpa. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. I hope it comes out alright, though.
[stage6 width="480" height="204"]http://www.stage6.com/user/jayray74/video/2216974/Indina-Jones-4-Teaser-Trailer-1080p[/stage6]
Go watch the full thing
As for Assassin’s Creed, I’m now starting to see why some people say it’s a bit repetitive; mainly because it’s a bit repetitive. Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazingly fun–probably one of the most fun games I’ve ever played–but each assassination mission is more or less the same thing. Go to ol’ gramps at the assassins’ HQ, have him talk to you about some random crap, ride your horse until your thumbs get sore from pressing the analog sticks forward, save a citizen to sneak into the city, find an eagle point, go to the bureau and find out who your quarry is, pickpocket or eavesdrop someone who has evidence of where your quarry is, assassinate your quarry, then hide from guards and do it all over again several times over. I’m probably just too soon into the game to judge, though. Hopefully it gets less repetitive during the ‘middle’ of the game–otherwise, I can’t wait for ‘free play’ once I finish the game.
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