modelling update

Okies decided to start learning the basics of creating a character specifically for the unreal 3 engine and the Queens building project next term - its Ranger off the original Quake also im liking my nerdy quake character in Unreal ironies - but thats just me.

Making the high poly first as opposed to vice versa

Waving it all in your face

So i had my modelling assesment recently and got a C, im not gonna be a prick and mope about how they were wrong and i deserve higher or whatever but i do kinda regret how the ways in which i work negatively affect my grade, final or not.
I often put long hours into modelling at home mainly because i enjoy it but also because im constantly wanting to improve myself, i have this constantly nagging feeling that if i just shoved all this up onto the lab, make it more visible, I'd get a higher grade but i have issues about blowing my own trumpet as it were so I thought i'd post up a few bits and pieces of stuff i've done so far - so long as its up here on the net its visible i guess

Okay you also get a mass of jumbled images - next time i do this, posting updates not whinging, im gonna slap them on a template or something make them a bit more legible

Ironic re-release: Daikatana

Gametap is offering the whole of Daikatana for free to download, now this is the gaming equivalent of free arsenic but its the best example of what hype over proper design can lead to I can vaguely remember playing the demo and finding it ridiculously hard even though it was the first level and I was (still am y'know?) into Quake.
The level design is hard, not in its complexity although due to murky lighting and repetitive textures i didn't know where to go half the time and everywhere is poorly signposted but the way the level throws you down ledges and slopes ever so slightly too steep or too high meaning you lose health even before you run into the robotic frogs or the mosquito's that take two impossibly well aimed shots to kill - two being the least number of shots to have any effect upon the world it would seem

So yeah every aspect of the game is appalling bit its a good opportunity to download simply to see what too much hype can lead to




Daikatana

Started painting

Well i started painting up the Sculpey fungus thingy, then suddently realized i really REALLY had to sleep i'll probaly finish it up later today

Also what the hells with Blogger making you download images now? Most vexing

..even a new tablecloth

Seeing as i've found a new wind of life for the blog I decided to make a fancy new banner for it im going for the whole dry humour approach something which sadly comes far too easily to me

I R SPEEDPAINT

I've noticed a few other ppl are posting there speed paints on there main blog presumably to pad them out but im not gonna swamp my blog with a load of my pretty poor images, thats what this is for Speed painting blog

I am however gonna post up some of my favourite pics I've done over a few weeks into a single image, this way its all nicely contained in a single post,

Image on the left is for 'Omnipotent' i figured a satellite is pretty close to that surveying all of Earth at a time, this image was completely unfinished the satellite looks more like a fridge and the Earth looks poo im pretty happy with opting to leave out any stars and stuff in most of the image making it look all the more remote and distant. The image on the right is for 'Augmentation' had been thinking of mudboxing up some Giger stuff recently so it made sense to do something close - a beauty machine that takes more from you than gives back

What really is creativity?

I've realised I've been blogging about creativity when I haven't really exlored what it really means, according to Wikipedia creativity is, 'Creativity (or "creativeness") is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts.'
Which makes sense creativity be it for any task or project is always new and original other than emulating something else, something games i guess could learn from i guess

BUT

people who always say 'ooh games need to be more original more creative' etc don't often consider that new creative ideas are horrible half baked ideas often the result of somebody with a 'great idea', im pretty sure this applies to all aspects where creativity and design go hand in hand. The closest example i can think of is the Car industry and the Fiat multipla.
Despite being displayed in the Museum of Modern Art at New York, sales worldwide were absymal with Top Gear voting it the 'Ugliest Car' car of 1999 Fiat eventualy restyled it back into a more traditional looking design and sales started to increase.
Showing more than anything people want familiarity not a car you would find in a pretensious modern art house, evolution not revolution i guess.
But creativity to solve a problem is a truly mysterious thing some spark of inspiration that completely rewrites the book and has everyone copying you until the next big wave of creativity

Crafted with my very own hands

I finally got round to doing some sculpeying(?) today bought some tools yesterday and spent most of the day making something up then trying a different side then smushing the other.

Still its a welcome change from staring at a screen day in day out.
Piece is a lil' something for my organic project although im not sure if it looks like a rose or a particuarly nasty case of piles

I know somebody in Edge magazine...

Latest Edge has a feature up on gamecity showing the various events around the uh event - but whatsthis?!
Why its Game Art's very own David Sillitoe! Apologies for the picture quality they were taken at 6 in the morning with a 'orrible energy saving bulb

modelling update

I've realised I've not posted up any new information on me self portrait model, well I started a brand new head this one has ears, nostrils spherical eyes and a inner mouth among another things that make it look a bit more realistic and believable and not like Odo off DS9. The face geometry has been reduced while still retaining its shape and im experiementing with a mixture of poly modelled hair and alpha's. Current new model stands at 2443 tris which gives me a further 57 tris to play with for the hair.

Alas the hands still look like a cripples - i need to find a way to model all fingers within the budget

Creativity or mum knows best

My mums just recently well 'retired' i suppose from working with various austistic children in a number of primary schools seeing as how creativity seems to be so tied into the education system, for better or worse, I thought I'd pick her noggin for a few of her thoughts on the whole arrangement.

If general education can quash any creativity out of an individual, guiding them down a linear path preset when the UK was more industrial than it is today the effects this has upon an autistic child must be huge,
Many of the children had been expelled from state school, most of the time simply for struggling with the curriculm, and thrust into private school the parents assuming throwing money at it would solve the problem, coupled with the parents expectations and they way the curriculum is drilled into children the oppurtunity for any creativity is long lost

The curriculm often hindered development of learning let alone encouraging any creativity, one topic would be covered a week then you would move on to the next. This topic could not be revisited even if the child showed a genuine interest for it interestingly this would apply for all subjects across the board not just the 'proper' subjects of Maths, English etc.

Coupled with an extremely rigid curriculm guidelines enusring they must stick to that completely without going off on a tangent despite any positive benefits it would have upon learning, for example studying insects in grass it would be completely discouraged for the teacher to take the children out into the field opposite to draw the insects in the grass

So you can see currently the way this stuff is taight is so rigid and unbending it often hinders itself let alone any oppurtunity that may arise for creative or abstract thought

UnrealED: Praise indeed

Righty I've been idly playing around with the UnrealED toolset that comes with Gears of War and UT3 for aroun d two weeks so i'd thought I'd post my findings and musings on the whole thing,

The Same Subtractive blockworld editing is still present here but you can now choose to build a map using additive brushes, for previous versions this would have been madness it was hard enough getting a correctly dimensioned room without having to create it from 6 brushes, but the new geometry mode pulls up a 'mini-max' style interface that allows you to select the verts, poly and edges of a brush allowing you to quickly resize and shape it, there are even options for modifiers and soft selections and because ALL objects now clip to the same grid you don't spend time carefully snapping them all to the same grid scale

Another nod towards Max is the inclusion of a massive directional widget, this can be toggled for scale and rotation and is a nice change over selecting a brushes tiny verts, holding down shift to move and have it shoot off into the void because your fingers had slipped. These can be scaled in uniform or non-uniform directions

Building upon previous versions is the new asset browser through this dialog window you can view absolutely everything in the engine from animation to UT map music all of which fire up there respective viewers, its really nice to be able to load up a custom model and be able to look at it ingame without compiling (im looking at YOU source engine) then dump it into your map. Being able to view all of the assets that would make up a map in one place quickly and easly is a huge boon to the speed you work. It also displays the various entities in a map logically sorted in a folder tree allowing you to quickly alter a large number at a time

Additionally importing stuff into the engine couldn't be easier models can imported from .ase or .obj with all of the smoothing groups and other details normally lost still intact, additionally theres no hardlimit on the amount of polygons you can import so models in there millions are doable although why you would want to im not sure. Accepted texture formats are even broader the expected .tga and .bmp extensions are there but being able to import raw .psd files is a huge time saver.

But the best thing has to be the material editior, by simply plugging in some rough textures and connecting up some boxs you can quickly make some really nice looking shaders and all without any shader programming knowledge. Stuff like water, oil spills, blobs of jelly anything that would require knowledge writing complex shaders can be created in the material editior. Im pretty sure this is the tool that will make a good map stunning

I've not even mentioned the kismet scripting engine or any of the sound stuff but yeah colour me impressed

Im gonna post up some of the problems I've found with it later on, although to be honest there not many

Shucksheesh!

Finally managed to get my nowhere near complete Tombie into the Unreal 3 engine, left is ingame while right is the Editors built in model viewer with snazzy self-shadowing. Also the material system is freaking awesome, can see that becoming being pretty useful.

S'odd hit a snag in me modelling, for some reason the UV window shows up pure white, clicking anywhere or anything does nowt I've tried exporting the file then reimporting it in various formats but still the same, pretty annoying and im sure its a pretty easy problem to solve.

Also now im happy with me mesh I've decided to start working on the alternate versions first, this way hopefully will allow me to iron out any modelling or texturing issues for the final version - of which I've already uncovered loads so i guess its working.

The first texture variant im working on is a zombie version of me self or if you will a Tombie (Arf!)

Also: QWAYKE!1

Restart....

God damnit - Got back from Gamecity a few days ago now - might post up me thoughts but tbh too many people have done it and most have done it better than i could - plus no one is reading this...

ANYWAY my coat got nicked, the one i was modelling and my hair is longer and black so i've decided to start me model from scratch and learn from my mistakes

Education

Good grief Education, as someone who seems to have struggled with it most of my life im not sure im qualified to provide any real insight into it, but whatever.
Theres a school of thought that suggests modern teaching methods and the whole education system in general is crushing any creativity out of children from day one and moulding them to follow the 3 constants of maths, science and history, not sure about history in that one but you get the gist of it.

This stems back to Britains modern industrial roots where having an adept knowledge of maths or science provided a quick 'grab bag' of skills to surive in this exciting new world of cotton mills and pig iron fast foward to today where most of the UK's skill base is primarly service based and it still more or less applies today. But there is certainly a feeling of rank and prestige applied to certain subjects whereupon others are looked down upon as useless or even uneccesary for an education.

I'l' be honest and say that EVERY subject i took throughout primary school all the way up to Sixth form has done diddly squat in helping me with the course, all the skills and knowledge i apply on a day-to-day basis getting whatever relevant work done was learnt at home on my own not at school which im realsing more and more was a complete waste of time.

Even subjects I would have thought useful even neccesary such as art where rendered useless by the muted style in which they were taught 'Just express yourself children' a phrase i heard all to often is great for someone who just wants to play around with paint but not someone who wants to learn the fundemental basics of art this of course wasn't helped by a frankly shit teacher just counting the days to her retirement .

This concept terrfies me, if something you spend nearly decades of your life attending to apparently 'prepare you for the real world' dosen't even apply to your particular life, just some gormless business student, then whats the point?

Carters hawt bod (!)

Okies! As far as i can tell i've finished the body and just have to make some decent looking hair, it took me a while squashing and scaling the head down to look correct on my body while at the same time conforming to the reference images i used i have about 80 tris for the hair now thats probaly not enough i dunno i might get away with it

Head Progress

Making progress on the head this is my third attempt i think now and it finally looks vaguely like me! Those rugged good looks...



The head is 584 tris left out of my budget of 735 for the head so i have 151 tris left to finish off the neck and do some decent hair - its gonna be pretty tight i think...

Okies been idly modelling myself, I've not been investing nearly enough time into this as i have with the art side of things but i feel alot more confident with modelling than i do drawing - anywho figured i'd post up some WIP screenies to show i am actually doing something,



The entire thing so far is 1773 tris that leaves me with exactly 727 tris for the head and and hair - i dunno is that too much too little? Be good if someone could post up there thoughts

So i've recently completed HL2 EP2 tis great and all, real whizz bang etc But why is it all of the Half-Life games seem to have me moving from one place to another powering stuff up or waiting for lifts? I know theres smatterings of pretty decent plot and some pretty enjoyable set pieces but jeez another lift?!
You could argue this is valves way of keeping the games narrative conventions in check 'the lift won't work until you find the powersource, now bugger off over there and find it' but im getting pretty tired of it, it harks beack to the original Doom's coloured keycard hunt and if this is a reflection of FPS games in general its pretty worrying from a gameplay POV, I can see massive flaws in this argument already but its late and i wanted to get this damn lift hate off my chest

Jon Jones

I've just stumbled across this site about working as a freelancer in the games industry, improve your portfolio - loads of useful info really

http://www.thejonjones.com

Week 24 - at last...

Jesus gawd i suddenly realised today i haven't updated me blog in aaages and with me paying so much attention to the art and 3d side and with a dead laptop - found out today EVERYTHING has died ram, motherboard etc i've finally had an oppurtunity to update the old gal.

Okies end of the first year, im still here and i hope im saying this again the next year too. I've certainly learnt alot about drawing something which im sure i'd have to apply for a specialised fine art degree to learn and moy modellings improved leaps and bounds.

I think im naturally better at modelling than i am the 2d requirement but im planning on doing lots of practice over the summer to improve myself and hopefully tie all the techniques i've learnt together. Im hoping to concept a charaecter(sp) then model him/her/it in 3d.

Im looking foward to the next year specifically working in teams producing content - hopefully it should give us an idea of how working in a development studio is and the challenges it presents.

Okay yeah i've realised i've not got any ideas to improve upon the course alot of things have already been said and im not a person to say 'do this do that' im a sheep not a uh do'er but from what i've heard the course certainly is going in the right direction

Cya next year!

Next gen asset creation

Okies i've choosen Cross Application Asset Creation for LAIR (Catchy) flicking through the number of articles this is the one that stood out for me most of the gameplay articles seemed too 'what if' for my liking rather than concentrating on the near future direction is taking, plus this lecturer raised questions i had been wondering about myself, how has the timespan increased for the completionof assets for a next gen game to a current gen one? Are more specialised people needed with a greater knowledge of packages? Are games shrinking in scope as it becomes harder and slower to produce all the assets required?

Gameplay quibbles aside Lair does look pretty good and seems to be throwing the entierity of the latest and greatest graphical effects at the screen to give it that next gen sheen, i was recently privy to a Art R&D talk from Volitiale games on how there approaching asset creation for the next gen - the major thing between the current and next generation certainly in consoles at least dosen't neccasirly seem to be polycount it seems to be more the number of maps being displayed at once, luminance maps, normal maps, specular maps as well as several other maps were shown designed for a specific purpose all being displayed at once interacting with each other and giving everything that lovely glossy sheen.

So if you consider that current gen games use typically a diffuse or colour map and perhaps a luminance map at once thats an increase of around 5 maps that have to be created to push an asset as far as it can currently be taken plus polycounts have to be taken into consideration as well as creating a high poly version for proper normal map extraction and you've got a huge increase in time, i don't feel like dragging up the quote but Epic said it used to take them around a week to create a new charecter for UT2004 from concept to running around in the engine in about a week now for a Gears of War charecter it took them around 6 weeks to do a single charecter. Thats a huge increase in time invested and it makes you wonder if the tools currently available for creating this content is as streamlined and compatible as possible. Indeed there dosen't exist a model viewer free or not that can display all the maps at once for a next generation model - if the tools don't even for you to preview your models before they have to be tagged and imported into an engine your left with feeling a tang of sympathy for the people currently trying to wrestle all of these new techniques and approaches into a workable solution

Week 19

Some game companies want highly trained graduate artists and programmers. Some claim they really prefer creative individuals with a good Liberal Arts background. They can't both be right can they?

Uh well yeah they can - games by there very nature seem to tie together both the technical aspects of creating an engine, tool set etc as well as the artistic side of story lines, conceptual art, modelling etc because games are getting more and more complex with ever increasing specialist jobs i can see these two divides one of institulationised - arghhh spelling, I'm an artist not an writer etc artistic skills and the other a more free form creative individual.

Can you teach creativity? No of course you can't and it should be more of a requirement to gain further education rather than a incentive to produce apparently 'creative' pieces of work which ultimately in most people's eyes look like pretentious drivel poop. Higher education courses and even internal development studio courses should be teaching how to learn a new tool or equipment, much the same way your taught how to use a new medium such as watercolour learning and mastering something like a modelling app inevitably leads to bouts of creative expression and i don't know flair or something i guess, something which ultimately cannot be taught.

Essentially you cannot tell an artist exactly what to draw/model whatever and seriously expect it to come back exactly as you states he's gonna slip in his own creative processes whether you like it or not.

Sound in games

I had never really considered music in games to be all the important and for a long time designers seemed to think so too, the music track simply being plunked into a level giving nothing to the beat or flow of the game.

That was'nt until i played the original Call of Duty theres a specific level that tasks you with manning an artillery cannon and destroying a series of incoming tanks as the flow of tanks ever increases and the game becomes more and more frantic a steady orchesteral score is introduced increasing not only in granduer but also in volume so by the time the tanks are piling up you can barely hear the weapoons fire.

What striked me about it was not the sudden introduction of the music but the way i did'nt notice it until it was over, the sudden silence making more of an impact upon me than the actual score,

Rather than games simply following linear forms of narrative such as films where the changing events trigger a score change i think games have to try something a bit more dynamic, games are by there very nature non-linear so trying to force an approach to music that is suited to the linear, pre-defined world of film is a bit foolish. However go back far enough and this simply did'nt matter the old 16 bit platformers of yore presented the player with a level the player working there way from left to right until they reached the end where the next stage was loaded, the choice of music was reflected in the type of stage if it was an egyptian looking level Egyptian inspired music would start to play and so on this music would play much like the level in a linear fashion from beginning to end, you could backtrack but what would be the point? There were enemies up ahead.

Also due to there technical limitations the music and sound effects of the time could only playback primitve midi tunes, this gave them a distinctive sound signature so thats part of why if you were to play the Super Mario Bros it would instantly register as a piece of videogame music.

Jump foward to the 90's and the advent of the cd-rom and faster processor speeds meants sound could be reproduced in much higher fidelity and was more akin to movies - but instead of epic sweeping orchestral music or even a soundtrack in suiting with the style and charecter of the game they swamped them with trashy dance mixes i don't care if sony made gaming 'cool' with the playstation by dumping it in nightclubs and slapping *shudder* 'clubland hits' into the games it just made them shallow, two dimensional - gamings equivalent of MTV. The music did'nt reflect the game or the mood the games were trying to set. It was like rolling past idlyic awe inspiring hills with some boy racers mix tape blaring over the top - grr rant over

Anywho jump foward to the nowish and sound and additionally the music in games is taken alot more seriously, designers now realising that using a linear form of audo presentation simply dosen't work for all games mixing in dynamic music that shifts between action and dynamic reflecting the events in the game and also relying on prescipted events such as a boss fight to further emotionalise the action

Would you like fries with that?

This is mighty interesting its an article i've discovered on gamasutra about the marketing and creation of all these Blitz / Burger King games - pretty interesting as it covers the original reasoning behind approaching Mr King in the first place and the effect its had on the company.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20061113/sheffield_01.shtml

Trinigy engine is a serious games engine *frown*

Lookie here!

Been looking more into game engines more spefically the more exotic ones, found this its a game engine developed not only for normal games but actually mentions its application for Serious games so i guess that guess lecturer chap was'nt completely mad.

Some of the things the developers can promise it can do is 'Automotive testing simulation, Virtual ship training simulator' among many other simulations but my personal favourite has to be 'Conference visualisation'...i get the feeling they were scratching there heads when they put that one in

Game engine task

Game engines are the invisible glue that seems to tie together all the assets that create a game -a decent engine can literally make or break a game long before the user gets to sample any modicum of gameplay. At its most basic level a game engine ties together among other things a 3d renderer, collision detection, sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking among many other things. Creating a link from the base level of a computer to the inputs of the user, often via a graphical api like DirectX or OpenGL As far back as Wolfenstein, engines by way of my nerdy legend John Carmack have written ever more and more complex engines adding in feature after feature as the power of pc's have increased the feature set of these engines has in turn increased - in fact game engines and 3d accelerators have an almost symbiotic relationship with the increasing speed of pc's linked to the ever increasing feature set of the engines.
A engines key engine technologies are constantly being updated and up hauled for a new faster technique in fact its rare for an engine to have a feature in one iteration but lack it in the next - game engines seeming to take a kitchen sink approach to features trying to pack in as much as possible.

Nowadays game engines are some of the most complex pieces of software written tieing together countless features to ultimately display and run a game. Because of there overarching complexity and the time it takes to program engines are often licensed out to third parties, the most significant of these are the Unreal and Quake engine games of which the licence for a single game can cost upwards of one million dollars for the latest Unreal 3 engine. These engines now include an entire suite of features and tools to better implement and create there game – merely having the engine is nowadays not enough, developers expecting an entire suite of tools to better implement and create there game.

Subtractive and additive could mean one of two things I’m not too sure which so I'm gonna detail then both – woo! Subtractive and additive editing is relation to how game levels are created, subtractive takes away a predefined block from the ‘void’ while additive editing means adding features to a featureless 'void', such as walls, floors etc much like space. I could write entire essays on why subtractive editing completely sucks simply because of my Quake engine knowledge but they fall on the unreal engine devil side so i'll ignore them. Simply having subtractive editing seems to rely more on blocking out a level then falling back on predefined models to populate the level while additive mapping rely's more on adding further details still in the level editor and allows quick and easy eidit and manipulation
(Think im gonna write a blog about all this actually)

Now the other Subtractive and additive doodad could have meant adding and taking away features of an engine depending upong its end use.
The most obvious examples i can think of are the Doom3 and source engine lighting implementations, the Doom3 engine uses a per pixel lighting engine meaning all lights in the game can cast shadows depending upon the objects surrounding it and is automatically updated if the objects move around, the shadows lenghtening and shifting - this is very demanding on most pc's so the Doom3 engine is limited to a few lights each time and refined to traditional corridor based enviroments while the Source engine relies upon precomputed lightmaps, the map creator places lights around key points in the level editor before compiling it which works out how each light would react and illuminate the surroundings. This is much faster and more suitable for larger expanses of surroundings the only problems is the lighting is entirely static - shooting a light would certainly not have the same outcome as if you shot it in Doom3 and moving or editing a light in the level editor would mean you would have to recompile the entire thing. A game like far cry which features both indoor and outside expanses relies upon both precomputed lightmaps and per pixel lighting to achieve the desired effect, i think developers will be dropping lightmaps almost entirely in future titles as the hardware becomes more powerful and fall back on stuff like soft shadows and the like

Blogger you curr

Goddamnit i hate blogger that or im an idiot it seems not to have posted aload of blogs i wrote mostly over the winter break - ah well there up now all posted on the same day(!) - guh, thats gonna look weird

Machinima hate

So judging by the views of many in the lecture today nobody likes machinima, i can kinda see why in some parts but i disagree with many others. Using stock animations and models for something outside of the scope of the original game is foolish yes - seeing master chief in an embarrasing yet apparently humourful (not sure if thats even a word) social situation as he goes through a looping reload animation is so metally jarring it hurts, but when there used to further extend a games story or ethos it can only be a good thing, right? Much the same way fans write fan fiction for there favourite film or book machinima could be used for games.
Alot of the machinama out there at the moment is based around comedy and lets be honest all of its crap, its about as funny as you'd expect from a 14yr old living in Texas i can see parelles people draw with comics many people expect comics to be funny have some kind of punchline at the end of the three frames, raised on the sheltered antics of the Beano and the Dandy its hardly surprising - i struggle to think of any newspaper cartoon that isnt marely shallow humour and im including those shameful daily mail strips about footballers and girls with there tops off. But dig deeper and comics are a serious genre as grave and adult as there big brother, literature. Anyone who's read through Holocaust inspired Maus will testify to that - all monochrome and tiny frames crammed onto the page the thing oozes depression and dispair.
So why can't machinima try this approach? Get rid of all the damn linkin park music video covers and making something truly dark almost artistic? It was also mentioned in the lecture how using compuer models will never be as good as the real thing, well no they won't, thats uncanny valley territory there humans are very good at identifying a real human from a fake be it a real model or onscreen , even the very finest pixar models which take days to properly render look stiff and wooden which is why they often go for a more stylised cartoony look, think Incredibles. Look at the latest iteration of team fortress its clearly take a leaf out of the incredibles design book somehow the models look MORE realistic when they follow the design rules commonly used for more traditional cartoons.
If someone would take the time to create custom models for a given role, never seen before only used for the role in which you first see them with the props and enviroment matching the same design and visual look with an intelligent story and direction would it still be crap? I can see machinima becoming gamings equivalent of claymation - some of the more arty one's you never see in the mainstream are positively evil, brief visions that takes months sometimes years to create rather than constalty trying to twist gaming and the tool set that comes with it into something its not, in this case mainsteam films why can't they be something on there own?

Dance Dance Immolation!

Just seen this in the newest PC Gamer, called Dance Dance Immolation its what I think should be outfitted to all dance rhythm games frankly - rhythm based games and pyromanicacy go so well together I find.
Take a normal Stepmania powered machine and attach several propane flamethrowers to it, if you shuffle you booties correctly it fires jets of flame harmlessly into the air if you don't it fires them into your face. Of course what would be a pretty short one-time type of game is made replayable by the inclusion of a fire suit normally used in chemical spills and raging infernos.

I can't help but think of the Saw series of films, with the main adversaries making ever disgusting machines of disfiguration if you succeed in the task of self perversion you can free yourself if not, bam! That’s what the audience came to see etc

I can't help but think there could be a series of gaming related machines - fail to come top in a multiplayer last man standing game and you really won't be respawning again.

More here: interpretivearson.com/ddi

Gears of tried and tested

So thanks to my 360 owning friend I’ve played and completed Gears of war, good grief is it short but overall very good the context sensitive control system overall works pretty well with you slapping your back against walls with aplomb but I found as with most things that are over simplified to a single action the game often caused me to jump out into fire when I just wanted to move into cover - a word on cover, every object in the game be it a chest of drawers a wall or a pillar is recognized as cover with the areas in the game being broken down into competitive puzzles more than anything else, simply rushing head first into the enemy will get you killed with the game taking a more tactical edge, something that surprised me coming from Epic a developer who previously worked on Unreal Tournament a fps as gristle headed as you get.

The environments in the game are presented in a linear fashion, clear one section of baddies and the game will proceed to the next often in the form of a cut scene or NPC interaction, the game constantly loads the next segment in the background so your never presented with a loading screen something I want to see more developers doing as it was very effective in immersing me in the story and mood.

Control wise it did remind me allot of Resident Evil 4, it has the same over shoulder view and maps the same context sensitive actions to a single button, tilting and panning the camera around your onscreen avatar.

All in all, gears of war is a more traditional game a huge blockbuster of a game - a world in a peril, boss battles, huge weapons and even bigger characters in a climate that’s constantly trying to be new and fresh its nice to see a game still it touch with its action film roots.

Gah! Intergrated chipset evil!

So I was over a friends house today to play with his spangly new computer, several games underarm I checked the pc's specs everything checked out multicore this gigabytes that but wait! GAH! What was this an Integrated Intel chipset? Something which in some of the more nerdier circles is whispered in hushed tones of revulsion. He would be unable to play most of the games I had brought and the ones he could run would be reduced to 'orrible juddery slide shows of PC gaming's current finest.

Why the hell do Intel do this? They dress up these things to read like the second coming of the electronic messiah in advertisements but when you get down to it there about as powerful as a calculator, like every other sector of the hardware league Intel and AMD are in a constant battle to produce the fastest zippiest processor, even at the budget end of the spectrum there processors are still more than adequate to run a modern game respectably so why are there graphic chipsets so crap?

Of course you could argue that these onboard graphic chipsets aren't really graphics sets but merely something to display windows, perhaps display video and the ever cheeky office game of solitaire, while it falls to dedicated video card makers ATI and NVIDIA to produce something that caters to anybody wanting to do anything more demanding than run Windows but with the recent purchase of ATI by Intel rival AMD this has been put into question.

Microsoft's next iteration of Windows Vista, has a new graphical interface named Aero glass that pretty much demands a card capable of displaying these complex graphical titbits, a bog standard Intel integrated job by simply won't cut it. This coupled with the ever increasing popularity of high definition video endures that the casual e-mail sending, web surfing pc user is going to require something much more powerful.

Of course its the corporations that ultimately control this, PC makers such as Dell concentrate on the more recognisable indicators of a systems power in advertisements when targeting there casual pc using audience the choice of graphic chipsets often seems like second fiddle to the more recognisable representations of a pc's power namely a headline dominating processor speed and ram size these are the numbers the general public understands, so long as it sounds big and flashy its ok.

Additionally its companies like Dell's biggest customers that also effects this the most not the casual pc user but the IT sectors of gigantic corporations if it costs a IT manager an additional $5 to increase the graphics chipset to something approaching respectable speed what’s the harm but increase that over 50,000 pc's and suddenly you see why graphic cards are sill are luxury.

Games for windows

I wandered into a GAME shop the other day, that place is fast becoming the sole reason for my ever increasingly jaded view of the traditional public image of games but more on that later. A quick look around any games shop confirms one thing, the PC section is shrinking skulking and further back into the shadows a sad collection of budget titles and console ports while the shelf space given to console titles seems to be ever increasing - hell the PS2 section in most GAME shops seems to almost dominate half the shop, the things almost dead yet its still given quadruple the space to the PC arguably the birthplace of all games.

While the revenue in things like MMORPG and casual online games are increasing ten fold a 10% drop in traditional titles from last years shows something’s up, with the ever shrinking public image of PC games it’s hardly surprising.

Well its fallen to Microsoft to address this issue, with there unveiling of games for Windows initiative, all console games have a standardised box layout, console name on the top perhaps on the back details of the numbers of players supported that kind of thing; with pc games its different there’s no fully standardised look with each publisher taking a different approach in presenting specifications, genre etc all the things customers look at when deciding a purchase. It maybe purely psychological but having a instantly recognisable banner and look on each pc game would make the pc look more like a viable gaming platform a brand if you will and less like a scary mix of specifications and publisher branded games to the casual gamer.

Addiotnally Microsoft are also tackling the traditional trap of the requirements box to Mr Casual gamer, working with Vista's new PC rating system the pool of numbers and stats are now broken down into a numerical score on your PC, if your PC scores a 3 and the game requires a 3 or lower than congratulations you can run it! Of course there’s bound to be mistakes in this approach but it massively increases the potential of people trying games on there PC's rather than simply being put off at the first hurdle.

Of course you could just argue that Microsoft is doing this simply to control the PC games sector much the same way it does with the 360 make the PC a closed system, they hold all the cards in the same way there trying to do with DRM for multimedia. Only time will tell

Dreamy cast

I bought a Dreamcast today for the princely sum of 20 pounds plus a copy of jet set radio, for many reasons I see the dream cast as something of a forgotten gem and standard setter, the first online console, the first proper current gen console - shudup Atari jaguar your are NOT 128 bit, the first console in which the aspirations of online game play and console to pc connectivity are realised.

There’s nothing quite like a new console even if this one is old hat to the rest of the world, the exotic looking controller, the start up jingle promising so many hours of discovering some of gaming's classics, mentally adding to your internal repertoire of games played and rated seeing where franchises started before becoming muddied by shameless ports and sequels, Sonic Adventure anyone? An opportunity to see first hand exactly what Sega did to ensure this was there last console ever made *Sniff*

I've also discovered thanks to a custom boot disc written some years ago there is absolutely no need for me to buy any of the games languishing in Amazon limbo, a quick download and burn to a bog standard cd ensures I can sample many classics which for whatever reason would be out of my reach be it region or ridiculous rarity coupled with even more ridiculous price - seriously have you seen the price of Shenmune 2? Because its a dead console there’s not the slight twinge of guilt I feel when downloading a game normally either.

Now if only I had bought a memory card with this thing I could get a bit further in jet set radio

Console Exclusivity

There’s always one thing that’s irritated me with new consoles as the hype for them reaches fever pitch and all and everything is promised of there capabilities games normally associated with the PC seem to get up and leave or even worse games originally intended for PC suddenly become console only, lured in by the Microsoft or Sony dollar, boasting there title portfolio for shiny console X.

Of course there’s several reasons why this is done, consoles are standardised things, technological snapshots of whatever was the cutting edge when they were made this presents an easy opportunity to push a new game to a consoles maximum capability's and not worry about the balancing act of high and low end pc architecture, when a console is brand new is the only time it will match the average gaming PC displaying a developers vision as well as possible but when publishers take time to port a next generation game say from the 360 to the PS2 a console now nearly 7 years old it makes you wonder why they don't bother with the PC a system arguably more than capable of hosting the 360 version. Of course sales projections come into it why bother porting a game to the pc if only X number of people are going to buy it? While porting it to the PS2 may ensures it has a massive graphical downhaul sales ensures this would be more than worthwhile.

This robbing of titles has been going on for years as far back as Elite moving from the BBC to the NES, if there’s any good from this I believe that the PC is where new games and genes are created and nurtured before they reach a level of recognition and size to be ported to a console, creating room for the next bi g thing, fad or genre all game genres began on the PC with the the possible exception of the dancing game (woo) and I can't see any reason why this isn’t going to continue.

Of course its just as bad as when traditional PC games are 'consolofied' (swish!) then ported back to the PC at a later date, Deus ex 2 while a passable game on the Xbox just doesn’t compare to the PC's original and the PC port of Halo is frankly more than a little lack lustre (sorry Michael it really is) when compared to thorough bred pc fps games.

Still in a few years we'll all be emulating 'Console title smash!' on our pc's so whets there to worry about?

The industry as of now

Like any industry the games industry is growing faster than anyone could have predicted, once purely the realm of the talented bed room coder the games industry itself has warped and transformed into a global industry employing thousands and thousands of specialised people much the same way the film indsutry began to diversify as talkies started; the increasing complexity and additional rise in development costs has meant development houses have had to outsoruce much of the work to third parties usualy located in poorer countries were the wages are generally lower, great news if you've just started a game art course, with the prevalance of the internet many people can now work as contractors for hire moving from one developer to another producing a specified model when requested a good example of this would be the poop in my mouth chap
who has built up a solid portfolio of work for potential clients - this global bulletin board is great for attracting much more potential employment but it also places you in competition with every other would be game artist.
This decentrilisation of development houses could mean that people who work together for many months of possibly years may never meet face to face - im not sure of the outcome of this but having a global pool of talent instead of the people who could get to the offices each day could have an enormous increase in the games quality or it could make it a confusing mess like Splinter Cell: Pandora's tommorow the multiplayer element being developed in Shanghai and bearing little relation to the main game. Communication is always key it would seem be it if the person is across the room or across the continent.

Course as games do become more expensive and longer to create publishers are going to want to see a profit to this title however many million's they've poured into game X - a prime example would be publisher EA until recently working overtime there was considered normal and developers worked long in to the night getting a title complete before its projected release date, if a game misses the holiday scheudule there bound to make less but when anything is rushed the quality suffers.
This increasing rush to get games out and recylcing the same idea's means games are slowly but surely losing there creative appeal to many. Additonally developers at EA signed a lawsuit against EA alleging they had not payed them for working hundreds of hours of overtime, images of some developement sweat house are hard not to imagine.