"Witty banter"

wip stoof

2009-03-17T20:40:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd post some stuff I was doing into (and now out of) the FMP, I had a lot more stuff ready to show but I figured I'd just post the more complete stuff, top pic is the scene from 2001 for the scene from a movie competition - stopped after nobody liked it either because they hadn't heard of the film or it wasn't Clerks - or both.

Second pic is that Aztec thingy which still needs a helluva lot more greens to balance out the blues - even though its meant to be stormy

Third pic I worked on over the weekend, is the Splash Damage art test thingy with CORNWALL CAPSTONtm oh and I nicked Bens plants which were always there as temoprary splodges of colour - i swurres

I just released theres a prominient pillar in the centre of two of the shots and a more obscure one in the third - freud would have a field day

Yay!

2009-02-25T10:26:00.000-08:00

Scout update go go!

Squash squash

2009-02-12T12:36:00.000-08:00

Brum Brum BRUM! This real life Rhino was made to promote dawn of war 2 apparently - can't imagine it parked outside Game but whatever its better than half naked 'models' plus linking to it I guess I'm promoting it myself

Manor Environment complete (more or less)

2009-01-28T18:12:00.000-08:00

Gonna call this done for now, took some advice from people to make the ceiling taller, shrink the lights and create more contrsast between the light and the dark and get rid of the paper piles which weren't really working

Ruined manor environment wip

2009-01-25T00:35:00.000-08:00

Another environment I've been working on in my free time, using some of the assets from the abandoned stately home all very much work in progress at this stage so some critique would be nice

Project has been christened my child

2009-01-24T07:01:00.000-08:00

Hoorah! My first model for the final group project, a war memorial, pretty low res shot as its tall and thin but it'll do

Completed research pic

2009-01-17T14:46:00.000-08:00

Even though theres still a fair amount to do to this im calling it complete for the purpose required of it, just need to type up a document of what i learnt while making it

Sample slides

2009-01-17T10:44:00.001-08:00

Seeing as no ones seen it I thought I'd post some of the slides for my Presentation, the best ones mind ^^

Ah, that'll do pig - closure

Cornish WIP

2009-01-17T00:16:00.000-08:00

Work in progress pictures of the Cornish village project, keeping it small seeing what works and what dosen't - will work on more models and tightening up the lighting tommorow but now i need to get some sleeps

No pictures no

2008-12-09T12:07:00.000-08:00

This is pretty interesting its a pdf briefly explaining the filmic techniques and examples learnt from making TF2 to Left 4 Dead, certainly idea's and examples we could use for le GROOP PROJKETtm

2008-12-04T17:08:00.000-08:00

Ok ok ok, I've so restarted it again, the other scene just wasn't working the way i wanted it to so I decided to filp the view back to the house again, lighting is always a priority and it was falling flat as hard as i tried on the other one

Also this is my one hundrenth post - im gonna buy TWO pasties tommorow, treat myself

garden update 2

2008-12-03T11:30:00.000-08:00

Starting to think about the lighting, at this stage im thinking the silohuettes of assets are more important than any textural detail

garden update

2008-12-02T09:46:00.001-08:00

Quick update, was away over the weekend so I've got 2 days to catch up - thinking more about the general mood of the piece, realised I had been completely honed in on one piece while putting off the larger details, so it was good to take a step back.

Been heavily influenced tree-wise by Left 4 dead which has the best alpha'd foliage I've ever seen - gonna post a few shots when i can

Van Cough

2008-11-29T09:42:00.000-08:00

Pretty nice I thought, instantly thought of the upcoming group project, looking foward to picking through the textures and seeing how he's done things

Snippy snippy

2008-11-26T16:10:00.000-08:00

This is my second attempt at the environment so far, only spent two days on it so far so i think im doing ok - was considering chopping it in two to make it a bit more focused and to help frame everything together - need to talk to Heather tommorow i think

Blergh

2008-11-23T16:50:00.000-08:00

High & low poly of the interiors are done, just need to unwrap it, bake it all out and slap a generic metal texture on it then run to the hills - swoosh!

Van update thingy

2008-11-21T21:57:00.000-08:00

Starting to come into shape, don't want to spend more than a few days on this before finishing it up, have a few quick idea's for the damage state which should hopefully still look pretty decent - exterior is more or less finished apart from the obvious grill, headlamps etc and I've started on the interior high poly tonight

Baking a cake

2008-11-16T16:21:00.000-08:00

Low poly is progressing pretty nicely, was hoping to come close to the polycount but its looking im gonna miss it by a quite a margin. Thought I'd jump ahead a bit and see how the normal map is baking out - slapped on a generic rust texture to try and give myself an idea of how the diffuse will act.
Need to start thinking about a decent specular and actually finishing up the low poly

Van update

2008-11-13T17:27:00.000-08:00

Started the low poly tonight, snapping the verts to the high poly mesh - its pretty mesmeresing for some reason just zone off into a trance

At his stage im concentrating on getting the silohuette smooth enough and relying on the high poly bake for any minor details

Update your blogs grabnamit

2008-11-12T05:08:00.000-08:00

I need something to read : (

...and yesh im gonna be updating this soonish

Don't I know you?

2008-11-08T18:56:00.000-08:00

Bad enough he's a slave, even worse he's scripted to run towards you where his head explodes - was mighty unerving seeing myself explode again and again and again best I could do in the end was to shoot him my self

Fisherman chap WIP

2008-11-08T15:01:00.000-08:00

A mish-mash of high and low poly meshes with poorly mudboxed slacks thrown in for good measure, working on the head at the mo. Thinking the hands might be too large although its too hard to gauge without a head at the mo, need to think of more accesories a fisherman would have about him to make it look a bit more current gen

WIP Van-thing update thing

2008-11-08T14:38:00.000-08:00

High poly van for baking normals - still a fair amount to do bit worried detail will be lost in the normal map, deja vu I've posted this before will post my fisherman chap and the early stuff on my new(!) environment later. Possibly

Environment: Stately home wip2

2008-10-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

Created some low poly assets and baked out some normals for the corresponding high poly versions, went around Leicester with Dave today taking SCHNAPS of everything - of course most of the photo's I've taken are blurred horribly but then again they are my own sourced textures so there'll just have to do - bleh

Environment: Stately home wip1

2008-10-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

Working on the Stately home option for the environment piece, decided to create high poly versions for most of the models to make it a lil easier deriving decent diffuse.normal maps etc, I went to a National Trust property and it was nigh on impossible to take any pics, all the ones i did take were blurry. I did however buy the guide book - which has one small pic of what im doing.

Working on the fireplace at the mo will post in a few days when i have some more stuff

Kardboard King

2008-07-11T20:21:00.000-07:00

Ok, its pretty funny but certainly not funny enough for dicks on youtube to go about bitching about it and frankly some of the comments are more than a little disturbing, stuff like his age went way out the window there...

Although I have to admit i did have a wee burst of laughter when he started tea-bagging an invisible corpse and i realised he was running through the games animations for every weapon he picked up - give him some clay and the boy will go far

Train of thought

2008-06-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

Been playing with the material editor in ue3, trying to follow up with this idea a few of us had, the model on the right just uses a standard diff/normal shader while the one on the left uses - witchcraft...

I've noticed a few things in producing this shader in how to correctly produce a texture, its heavily reliant on the underlying diffuse texture being quite flat with fairly consistent solid blocks of colour that maybe alter to reflect shadow and the like. The texture in use, a 256 no less, was heavily pixellated and had many high area's of noise with give some area's an almost 'frosted glass' effect. To get the desired 50's look simpler diff and normal textures may be required with any other details physically modelled in

'The desired look'

Oh yeah and i moved the one on the left as a crappy way of showing how a charecter model would look with it applied without baking it all in - gonna try applying it to an actual charecter tomoz

A happy cake

2008-05-07T04:56:00.000-07:00

So I've just got ahold of the pictures of my glorious queens building cake made among a few more cakes by Louise and Caz, lookit!

It made the entire process worthwhile, if i was rewarded with a delicious themed cake for whatever i did i'd be a different man and most probaly diabetic

Group project can can

2008-04-21T18:28:00.000-07:00

Ah finally, tommorow the group project will be over and my constant cycle of working for 2 days straight and lightly resting on the third is at an end - hoorah.

I was planning on typing up a big essay type thing but frankly i now despise this fsking project and how its sapped me away from doing any decent art and im tired and still need to slip in some relaxing Bioshock before i go to bed, so I'll start with the positive and end with the negative, like a battery(!)

Okies,

Positves -

+ I learnt the Unreal3 engine! this is probaly the biggest pro that dosen't involve ppl or social structures and the like and means i can bring that knowledge onto the third year and my final project

+While the quality of my modelling may not have improved the speed has, something which would take me an hour or so now takes me around 15 mins to create and unwrap

+This weird culture ppl have of creating a single model, say the van or tree and then spending weeks tweaking it has finally been smashed after they realise they had to do 10 models or whatever in a week

+I've learnt a fair bit about colour theory and techniques constantly refering to the colour wheel chris gave us

+Using the engine meant i could try stuff like lighting and compistion of scenes,in greater clarity and detail something i would have really struggled to do in 2d

+Having created all of the surface and wall textures I think im pretty good at making textures and creating tiling surfaces, in fact making textures was something i found i really enjoyed and im already looking foward to making loads for the third year project - bit sad really

+I found that a models silohuette and general colour is more important than any niggly details on the texture, once its in the engine and lit most of the detail is lost anyway

+Although a bit of shambles this time around, I've learnt how to better prepare myself for potential future group projects and what might go wrong

+I would either be mad or a complete and utter bastard now if it wasn't for Ben reining me in now and again

Negatives,

-Peoples imagination and enthusiasm getting in the way of realism and logic only for them to realise later they were too ambitious

-Spending weeks doing concepts before we had a solid art style guide so they in effect became useless after one was picked

-How i reshaped and modeified the entire shape of the Queens building and never had anyone, perhaps the 2d leads, give me guidance or say perhaps its actually a bit cack

-The group working in a hugely linear fashion, spending weeks working purely on 2d concepts and completely ignoring any 3d concepts and experiments and then completely dropping 2d and working purely on 3d - the two should have evolved and bounced off each other i feel

-A solid art style not really ever being decided which lead to problems in what to include on the asset lists and all the way down to the final lighting for the level - guesswork is no subsitite for proper research

-People working in a completely fractured way and not coming into a centralised location such as the lab where something as simple as a model could be passed back and forth in a few minutes as opposed to a few days

-Peoples constant reluctance to come into the lab even when texted

-The importing process being completely ignored again and again with me and Ben having to resize textures, reset pivot points and so on over and over again

-The same model resized does not a new model make

-people purely interested in where there teeny weeny model was and why it wasn't in yet and never taking an interest in the the bigger picture and why it wasn't in yet

-How even though it was never my job i ended up creating and concepting the entire lighting for the level as well as the layout of all the models, something i felt the art leads potentially should have helped me with

-Reluctance on the part of some people to just get on with it, expecting input from myself for something that wasn't my area before they would do anything

And finally i think the biggest negative is how massively the whole project has dug into my 2d, 3D engines and modelling and so forth are something i pickup pretty quickly but art is something i really want to improve upon and i found myself constantly having to go back to tweaking this and that in the engine because people expected it, leaving me literally no time for the 2d
side of the course which more disheartens and saddens me than irritates me

So it became a bit of a bitching fest there but whatever thats what makes me tick, while i certainly would not like to repeat the experience again I've learnt an absolute wealth of information i can take into my third year and later life

Not a penis

2008-04-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

Just been going through my computer looking at some old stuff and i came across this half complete texture for that crab thingy i was working on, suddently hit me its leg looks like something else altogether

Engineer: Dispensing an erector!

2008-04-03T15:56:00.000-07:00

Okies been spending an odd day or two trying to learn the source engine so i could make, hopefully, a half decent Tf2 map. I've got a plan scrawled down on paper so im just following that at the mo while encountering a fair few of Hammers bugs. The pics show the Red spawn with paths branching off to the A and B points. All wip although im pretty happy with the lighting
Also: sorry Dave but i had to use it :0

This is schilly..

2008-03-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

Well Vista's bettered itself this time, didn't think it could get higher than 33 hours but its smashed the previous record with a close 5 day record(!)

A matter of pride

2008-03-23T14:50:00.000-07:00

Goooo!

Righty, blog time

With this group project I've been thinking more and more about how people interact with each other and the methods in which they deal with various problems and now because getting a job and getting myself known is playing more and more on my mind what potential future employee's would think of there attitudes and there ability to work in a group.

Im becoming increasingly worried about, not my ability, but promoting myself and the methods in which to do it - i would never consider myself a loud person and if theres one thing that irritates me more about people its people who blow there own trumpet even spouting off complete crap as it makes them look more knowledgeable even while im thinking to myself its complete crap this is usually solved by me wondering around from person to person explaining why said person was wrong - i would never directly confront them, one because they would simply talk over me and turn it into an inane argument and two, because it would affect there pride if i said there wrong in front of there 'audience'.

This system works fine in a closed environment but when your trying to promote yourself to outside parties namely Blitz and certain people within Blitz, Mike can fairly easily censor what work they see and who's work is shown ultimately destroying the gap between me and a potential employee again its the same thing when people's work is shown on the projector, my stuff is never shown and it really degrades my pride when i ask myself 'well why isnt it there?' and know full well its probaly the same work shown to various parties and I come up with no decent reasons apart from I don't shout about my work, of course I could just get into contact with them myself but then the people who have had a headstart from Mike promoting them are more likely to get a position

Im certainly planning on making a big deal of the work I've done, Im far too self critical at the moment and i do need to thrown myself to the lions as it were. I've done a crap load of work for this group project so hopefully it should reflect in how Mike views me and in turn hopefully get mentioned when its most neccesary

I've not forgotten rather its been a constant knife-like stabbing reminder

2008-03-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

Guh, been so preoccupied with getting this group project into a workable shape I've completely neglected my blog - well no more!
Hopefully gonna have a few sporadic blog posts when I've grown tired of the Queens building, which after pretty much wrestling it from the more lax team members is thankfully alot less than it was but i digress, blogs follow in 3, 2, 1...

Group: Cross those T's

2008-02-29T12:59:00.000-08:00

Love the way the small things are easily the most irritating heres a quick lil bullet list of things currently getting mein goat:

ppl endlessly criticising the blockout for not being exactly to scale despite all the plans available being both out of proportion to themselves and each other
ppl completely ignoring the blockout, produced to ensure the scale is correct, when creating there models and then expecting you to scale the entire blockout to a single prop object completely missing the whole point of the thing
Two or more ppl with apparently encyclopedic knowledge of the Queens building bickering over how many inches a door frame should be, both expecting you to make there changes and trying to appeal to both of them
Persons with below average modelling skills constantly criticising ppl who even though are currently less than stellar clearly want to improve themselves, simply because it makes them look better and they think we won't notice all the work they haven't done
ppl going off in a huff for whatever reason and completely severing communication with the group ensuring no work can be passed to and fro
Complete lack of leadership
ppl accusing other ppl of 'doing all the work' and 'why do you get to do that?' and when given the oppurtunity to do some of there own work never do and the other ppl have to do it while it goes in a loop of ppl moaning about the work load, the load being redistrubited, ppl not doing the work forcing the other ppl to do it and looping back

Theres plenty more but I'd thought I'd leave it there for now had to type some of it down before i went insane, if anyones reading this see's it as a personal attack it certainly wasn't met in the form of a threat to a person or even in jest but simply because i have to get off some steam for this fsking project

Root worm

2008-02-24T17:25:00.001-08:00

Quick post for this dominance war thingy and to take advantage of bloggers superior image hosting

2008-02-18T17:17:00.001-08:00

Just decided to post up some work i've done recently for fun - small psp spec demon done on and off over 2 days

There are no rules

2008-02-18T16:38:00.001-08:00

Righty think im long overdue for some course related ramblings, so I've been thinking about what makes a piece of work good or bad and i think its more to do with personal interpretation than most people think.

Its as much as what you learn practice wise and from what you pick up on your own than simply being told this is right/this is wrong if I wanted to persue a more technically minded career say mechanical drawing as an example, there would be a set of rules i would have to adhere to make the piece of work i produced professionaly viable but in art ,while yes there are guidelines, these are looser and much less enforced I doubt Lowry would have produced his warped cityscapes with the tiny stickmen if he had to use perfect perspective studies for example

Art is as much as creating a mood or feeling as it is about emulating life, the same applies to games which while some ape reality as closely as they can others are far more abstract, concerned more with creating a specific mood or feelings through a specific use of colour and sound.

The best example i can think of is Patapon on the psp, a rythm game that has you controlling tiny stickmen to a specific beat to travel there world defeating monsters something which would never exist if games were forced to adhere to a specific set of rules

Swooooosh!

2008-02-07T09:03:00.001-08:00

Aaaaaaah Vista guess i won't be playing UT2004 anytime soon...

Quick speedpaints

2008-01-19T16:10:00.000-08:00

Some speedpaints i did trying to pay attention to light and colour - all between 5 and 10 mins

There not dolls there figurines

2008-01-17T12:52:00.000-08:00

Kay just found this perusing the interwebs - this is just example why the TF2 art style is freaking awesome and more studio's need to to do stuff a little more outlandish - Also to celebrate the new blogging topic, GOODNESS MAKES THIS GOOD

More

Queens building concept

2008-01-16T19:13:00.000-08:00

Concept for a potential reimagining of the Queens building - Ice cave

All those in favour say 'Aye'

2008-01-10T00:28:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the upcoming Queens building project and specifically how the groups are gonna work towards creative input and hopefully output.
Creative thought is, as far as i can tell, is having an untested idea and taking a risk on that idea with the following reward and failure because of it.

If the groups are managed by a commitee with everyone voting on and agreeing to a change or suggestion then all the ideas and suggesions will be medicore and simply follow the current trend however if the ideas are wrangled by a single leading person then i imagine the ideas would be a bit more outlandish although that dosen't neccesarrly mean there going to be solid gold 'creative marvels' actually im pretty much convinced its gonna be some loud mouth convinced we should model the whole of Leicster in the 16th century in SPACE and will defend it horribly because it was his/her idea.

A real creative idea seems to be one that despite the complexity of implementing it, although im assuming the more complex the idea the better it has to be for it to grab everyone, everyone will automatically agree that yeah thats a good idea that would work - lets do it!

Im really interested to hear about all the groups 'kerazzy' ideas and how there gonna hold it all together

Do said skills pay the bills?

2008-01-09T23:35:00.000-08:00

Righty i think its time for another creativity post i think,

the other day somebody said, and i won't name names although this certainly seems to be split down the middle of the group that sharing knowledge be it for modelling or drawing or any other key skill for the course is a bad idea as that person would then become, effectively in the lecturers eyes as good as the person who originally taught them this seems to terrify some people who like a clear and level pegging between certain groups and people.

Which got me wondering why it worried them so much, obviously theres the element of grades being threatened if more people are at the same level but its almost as if they've learnt up to a certain level and refuse to go any higher.

New skills and knowledge means more opputunity for creative output, instead of the same tired stuff being churned out learning new techniques even if there crap the first time around is much more appealing.

Additionally if more and more people are learning more and more it simply means you have to constantly push yourself and we don't end up in a creative rut

Carters theme

2008-01-09T23:28:00.001-08:00

Its 7:27 in the morning, i've not gone to sleep and the only thing keeping me going apart from not wanting to look a fool for this presentation is this amazingly catchy intro theme which i've been playing over and over again,

Never bet on Duke

2008-01-08T01:44:00.000-08:00

So i've just seen the new Duke Nukem Forever teaser im convinced its only shooter that seems to be working backwards in terms of gameplay looking at the older trailer http://youtube.com/watch?v=omOPjBoClw0 it has all the staples of a modern fps- scripted triggers, pseudo pysics (logs down a hill!!), vehicle sections, AI sidekicks and a crappy storyline that takes itself far too seriously.

Looking at the newest trailer okays its a teaser but still, theres no mention of any of the above just 'kerazzy' graphics (again) and alot of blood oh and a amazingly homo-erotic scene of Duke weightlifting with sweaty abs. A game like Duke Nukem just dosen't work now, sure it was funny when he was stuffing dollar notes into strippers and being casually sexist in the early 90's but that beast died when half life was released colour me not impressed - no sir no

modelling update

2007-12-18T16:12:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-12T12:34:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-05T13:13:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-03T00:33:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-02T01:10:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-02T00:19:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-02T00:14:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-01T23:16:00.000-08:00

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...

2007-12-01T22:59:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-29T11:41:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-29T04:46:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-29T03:40:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-11-12T20:02:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-11-08T16:54:00.000-08:00

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....

2007-10-31T06:48:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-31T06:08:00.000-07:00

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 (!)

2007-10-19T22:02:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-10-18T04:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-17T17:43:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-01T18:35:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-05-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-02-28T14:22:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-21T11:44:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-10T19:43:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-02-10T19:33:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-29T10:44:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-25T03:08:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-23T05:29:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-23T05:26:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-01-23T05:24:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-23T05:21:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-01-23T05:18:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-23T05:17:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-23T05:14:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-23T05:10:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-10T15:36:00.000-08:00

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.

Story and charecter

2006-12-11T08:10:00.000-08:00

I pity the fool who dosen't want to play this, yeah

2006-12-06T19:40:00.000-08:00

Forget all your tactical realism mods that seem to be churned out nonstop, i've found the best mod ever Battlefield 2, look! It replaces all the butch soldiers and vehicles with lego charecters - who dosen't wanna drive around as Mr. T i wonder?

All a question of control

2006-12-06T05:31:00.000-08:00

Being more of a pc orientated good ol' keyboard and mouse kinda chap there weren't many console pads I thought I had sampled but giving it a few mins thought made me realise how many I’ve come into contact with over the years and they all seemed to leave some kind of lasting impression on me, I still maintain the best pad ever was the original megadrive pad, it followed the D-pad on the left, face buttons on the right mantra originally devised by Nintendo's NES controller something of a missing link to past controllers which before it were simply a mish-mash of buttons crammed onto a pcb squezzing buttons in wherever there was space, ergonomics being a Swedish armchair manufacturer or something then.

I think as games became generally longer and people began investing more and more time into them, the design and functionality of the controllers became more important would the original super Mario be quite as good if it wouldn’t on the NES' standard setting controller? If making the fat plumber jump over Piranha Pete was too hard, would the game be as popular as it was and still is? A console pad links the player to the onscreen protagonist be it a soldier in ww2 or a high speed dragster if the game controls difficultly because of a poorly designed console pad the game will ultimately suffer, a controller has always been about making a design so streamlined and unrestrictive to a players thoughts and reactions to any given situation that his or her reactions and decisions are displayed instantly without them having to look down and remember the controls.

That’s why I think Nintendo's Wii is trying a more adventurous route, forget the fact there trying to target a wider audience by making it look less like a scary console, a console pad has always been translating a players thoughts and reactions to the screen. Pressing a button is far too mechanical for emulating the swinging of a sword, having the player actually physically swing his/her 'sword' makes it far more real and visceral than merely pressing a button. it should be a real test for more bizarre methods of control to see it the wii and its unique style of control will succeed, judging by the ridiculous levels of preorders worldwide I think merely having a new way of playing games is increasing the hype more than anything else.

Storytelling in games

2006-11-29T09:58:00.000-08:00

Unlike other popular media where the story acts as a train for a series of events, scenes or chapters games can be detached sometimes to the point where a storyline is not even necessary to some games. Because of the repetitive nature of games, all games can be broken down into a series of tasks and activities; you shoot this, jump there etc a story is for the most part simply a brief explanation as to why you’re hurtling through space or killing mafia goons.

However as games become increasingly more complex mirroring movies not only in terms of cinematic effects and angles but in storytelling games are increasingly being judged by the quality of there storylines alone, with specialist storywriter’s stories are fast morphing from something which was shoehorned in last thing in development to briefly explain why the player was in a given situation to being fleshed out and revised at the very start of development, defining all visual and aural aspects of the game.

Unlike the film industry where telling a story has always been key games have found themselves with this burden of not only telling a competent story but tying together gameplay as well, did Space Invaders ever need a story? There were aliens coming down the screen what were you expect to do but shoot them, you didn’t need a story for that. But people now need explanations as to why there in a given situation even games clearly completely devoid of a storyline such as death match games now somehow need a shoddily constructed story purely to justify to the nit-picky reviewer there existence.

As games further diversify along there different genre paths types of storyline and the way in which there told is also changing, an fps such as Half Life 2 would be an epic albeit completely linear experience with events in the story closely mimicking and complementing the environments – you’ve gotta break someone out of a creaky converted Russian gulag? Fine then along you go! If HL2 or any other shooter was presented purely as a series of corridors, would it be such a good game? Do people even consider most games storylines when there in the thick of a game for the most part cut scenes are used to illustrate and expand upon the story, a non-interactive element of what should be a completely interactive experience ‘sit down, shut up and I’ll try and explain why you’re here’ the games seem to say.

Actually because of there interactive nature, can a games storyline differ as you progress? Rather than follow the same storyline with the same events placed in place months, sometimes years ago shouldn’t the player be able to forge and create his own story? We’ve already got sandbox gaming where events or motions can be discovered by the player that wouldn’t necessarily have been thought of by the developers surely a games overall storyline could be altered by the actions of the player rather than simply bumping along a story path much like the linear gameplay, taking a tangent at key opportunities.

Going back to stories in general a story seems useless if the characters it contains are not cared or feared for by the player, characters present a reason for the player to continue playing if people can find themselves emotionally attached somehow to a given character in a 2 hour film surely games should be able to do it in 10? So called ‘digital actors’ high polygon, naturalised models with personalised details such as ripped jeans and other details create a sense of the model standing in front of the player is a real person or at the very least a collection of pre-recorded lines and dialogue following a predefined path throughout the game that makes the player believe that there following a real genuine person.

Looking at games where perhaps the characters and the situations they may find themselves have already been defined often in the form of books or film tie-ins, such as Reservoir Dogs that was demoed today, its even harder to not only follow the original storyline and ethos of the source material appeasing both publishers and fans alike but to create an actual game around it as well. This is one of the reasons I believe games of films are often so poor, despite the incentive to rush it out of the door publishers and the film studio’s being overly protective of there material massively hinders the creativity of the development studio.

Art direction

2006-11-22T07:50:00.000-08:00

An art director’s job is essentially the head of the entire art team for any given project; he alone decides the games art style and direction, ensuring all artistic standards gel throughout the entire game. This usually happens at the very start of a projects formation and ideally would take around 3 to 6 months although for the most part pre production takes place around 3 to 6 weeks during this time a games entire visual ‘personality’ is created including characters, environments, weapon designs anything that would make up the game visually is first drawn and conceived during this time. Without the correct standards; for example texture resolution, polycount etc elements of the game will look widely different to other elements - part of an art directors job is to reign in individual members and ensure all elements of the game not only suits the game style and plot but looks consistently professional throughout.

Take for example, Half Life 2 - the main Art Director, Viktor Antonov this person essentailly had to decide the games overall look and feel creating several stunning images - seriously look at the site, to give the various modellers, texture artists and various other specialist artists to produce a consistent enviroement both to his original vision and one that valve ould be proud of.

The art director also acts as the head for the entire art team, deciding whether a teams artistic goal is possible within a specified time and money budget, an average game simply for the art and design budget is around 3 million pounds (CHECK THIS!) so it is vital the art director can decide whether or not the design team can produce the work if not time and more importantly money is lost pursuing an over budget over time game.
Additionally technical specifications are written for sections of the game these documents detail the average poly count of a typical prop its texture resolution as well as any other elements that will determine the technical background of a game - the end specification of the console or pc it will end up running on is also considered - this is where the technical specifications come into there own a model can look stunning but if its too high poly for the end machine its useless.

For this the art director typically goes back and forth between the design team and the programmers ensuring there vision is possible and mapping out any limitations or drawbacks to the system it will be supporting

Being an art director means a person must be able to tie together an artistic vision bereft of technical limitations with a strict polygon and time limit of a modern game, the person must balance an artistic vision and allow every team member to envision this vision, there is little opportunity for individuality in the working environment, the art director ensuring all members are working to a similar goal. Unlike a number of jobs in the games sector which are individual to the sector, an art director’s job seems interchangeable with a number of other popular media's including TV and films.

Infect as games become increasingly more complex and the resulting art direction in turn becomes more complex wouldn’t it be possible for a person previously worked on the art direction for a number of major films to transfer to games? Well, not really - for the most part an art directors position in TV and films seems to be a more managerial position determining if a team can produce an artistic vision within a specified time limit - a games art director does this and more having to take into account the technical limitations of the games and the target platform

'One of the hardest things as a Art director is to get everyone to see your vision' - Rick Hath, Former Art director for Codemasters

But is it fun?

2006-11-15T08:50:00.000-08:00

There has been some lengthy discussion over the years of what separates the medium of games apart from other older forms of entertainment, they both share the storylines and intricate plot details of modern films while following a specific set of rules, similar to the rules of a board game or any other traditional game. These rules essentially create the framework of a game and when used collectively can be referred to as gameplay.

These rules and specifically the overall game plan is evident in all games, regardless of how badly it plays as a final product or its apparent simplicity, taking Minesweeper as an example. The player must clear a grid of numbered squares and not set off the various bombs hidden inside, if the player clicks a grid and there is no mine present one of two things occur (1) A number appears indicating the number of adjacent (including diagonally-adjacent) squares containing mines, or (2) no number appears; in which case the game automatically clears those squares adjacent to the empty square (since they cannot contain mines). Squares so cleared which themselves are empty (do not contain a number of adjacent mines) have their neighbours recursively cleared as well. The game is won when all squares that do not contain a mine are cleared.

Even in this simple game there are various rules which tie the game together and creates a fair challenge to the player, the location of the mines are randomly generated each time so the game can be played an infinite amount of times although there are limited strategies to use each time. Looking at a modern game, this element of maintaining a set of rules and creating a fair challenge to the player still exists; nobody wants to be shot by an all powerful omnipotent sniper each time, the game instead creating opportunities for the player to win in a fair way each time.

As games do get more complex, developers seem to be shoe-horning more and more gameplay features into a given game and simply bloating it out with unnecessary junk, just like graphical gimmicks such as lens flare in the mid 90’s features like over zealous use of bullet time and recharging shields are copied, ripped off and emulated constantly, does every third person shooter need bullet time? It only ticks another box on the grab bag of features most developers cram into any modern game.

Simplicity is key to creating decent gameplay I think, course I could ( probably am ) wrong but most players don’t want to be overburdened with too many rules or restricting features its all very well creating hundreds of rules and restrictions but if the game isn’t fun after all the features added its useless.

A classic example is MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, a huge multiplayer game taking place over the Star Wars universe the game promised the world but delivered very little – plagued by a promised feature set that was simply too big many of these features were dropped while those that actually managed to get through were broken from day one and even to this day despite major patches from SOE attempting to fix them the game still feels like many as a beta version.

Taking this simplicity vs. complexity study further, two multiplayer death match games one is Quake 3 the other Unreal Tournament 2004, both are high speed ‘twitch shooter’ games based on various popular modes of play originally spread through Quake 1. Unreal Tournament 2004 features 10 game modes and even features vehicles, it’s important to note that at the time having vehicles in an fps shooter regardless of plot or setting was the current fad, see bullet time for an explanation of this. The game was also built using the then newish Unreal 2 engine with the maps, arguably the single most important element in a game involving high speed competitive shooter, merely graphical showcases for the engine with very little consideration given to the layout and flow of each map the game was also littered with pointless powerups and unbalanced weapons. Quake 3 on the other hand had just 4 modes of play all of which were perfect carbon copies of death match or capture the flag people used to play on every other multiplayer title at the time, the game had no vehicles instead restricting the game to a series of self contained maps, these maps while graphically inferior to the UT2004 offerings played perfectly and firm favourites were soon found. The weapons themselves were perfectly balanced no weapon dominated the entire map instead each one became a specialist tool for specific instances, with even the most powerful weapons having major weak points

This is an example of feature bloat with a developer adding in more and more unnecessary features as well as graphics wining over gameplay during development time.

Gameplay could also be intepreted as methods of control, if your control scheme dosen't work the game is useless - more deeply not only can a decent control layout fuse the interactions of the player with his or her onscreen persona it can also create and enhance the game experience, Resident Evil 4 a third person horror game unlike any other game using a similair control method does not have a strafe action, this slows the game right down and make the action all the more frantic as the player positions themsleves in a position to kill the onslaught of spanish people ( not zombies this time ). The player can also not run and gun and instead must be standing still to use any weapons another element that adds to the overall tension of the game

In the end I think developers need to find a good mix of gameplay and graphics marrying the two with perfectly balanced controls and stop simply emulating the current market fad and chucking in every gameplay feature to make a competitively made game

Criticising the critics

2006-11-13T10:40:00.000-08:00

Reviewers mean critics and critics ultimately mean opinions or rather there opinion, I despise critics purely for this reason even there name annoys me 'critics' to criticise something sometimes constructively sometimes not.

But unlike film reviwers, arguably the most elitist bunch in a pot of snobbery - games reviews are something different. Unlike films, predefined linear experiences games are different, for the most part they share similair atributes with there filmic cousins there still tied together with an engrossing plot and mulidimensional charaecters but theres something thats different from film - gameplay.

What makes a decent game? Its not its storyline or the detailed back story of its charecters although this does sometimes help, its how well the little fat italian man jumps along your screen or that lest level boss - gameplay is what makes a decent game amazing, how do you review this, is there any formualic theory that reviwers follow?

For the most part there isnt, they simply review current games by way of comparison with whatever the current genre topper is, this is all well and good for generic shooter 4 or Sims expansion 4431 - 'Recruitment centre fun!' determining how many boxes it ticks to fill in with every other title on the market but if its a new game or one that dosen't neccesarly follow the norm, more often than not several things happen:

1. Graphics are scrutinised, Does the game feature visceral amounts of blood and gore? If yes, congratulations! Your instantly a mature game and any question of simplistic gameplay is washed aside in a flurry of headshots and apprecitative teenagers

2. If the game features somehow cartonny or stylised graphics, the gameplay is instatly a moot point regardless of depth of play, especially to GTA chasing 14 yr olds - Look at most peoples perception of Nintendo's games for example, although thankfully this is changing

3. Does the game feature insaney beautiful graphics but severly lacks in gameplay options? This will still garner an above reasonable score especially on a new or just released console as reviewers are washed into the hype of said machine offering better and faster everything over the competitions previous offerings - im betting quite a few of the ps3's release games are merely graphical updates of the last games for example.

4. If the game somehow differs from the norm, be it plot, charecters or any other detail, the game is criticised for being too weird, as if following the norm guarentee's a good game. One of many reasons why criminally underated games like Beyond good and evil and Farenheit were completely over looked on release

Certainly there are others who have a genuine insight and knowledge of games and can deliver it in a proffesional journalistic manner but any console specific magazine is generally absolute dross, targetting whatever target audience the consoles themselves target and delivering any platform bias news by way of low brow sexist comments, and idiotic jokes.

Welcome to world of tomorrow !

2006-11-01T13:33:00.000-08:00

Future of games eh? Well like any multi faceted industry this is almost impossible to predict, according to certain ‘industry professionals’ in the car industry by now were all supposed to be being driven around by autonomous flying cars and seeing as how games are now the fastest growing entertainment medium its doubly hard to reasonably predict gamings future over an entire industry, today’s big break through can become tomorrows fad and yesterdays classic becomes today’s has been.

Maybe its reflective of the age games as a whole, sure they’ve been around in some shape or form for around 60 years but it wasn’t until much later they began to take a huge global impact, around 1985 I think that by my games to humans anthropomorphic personification process would make the games industry a sprightly 21yr old, short attention span jumping from idea to idea still trying to get to grips with being a ‘big boy’ constantly trying to impress its older stale brother dressed in its new suit of ‘immersive gameplay’ and hat of ‘digital actors’. Course there was a time, not so long ago when you consider the evolution of other entertainment media, when a boy in his room armed with just a idea for a game and an inquisitive nature could create a commercial hit, course like any start up industry essentially made up of enthusiasts more than capable with a bit of code but not too great at marketing and ever escalating development costs the suits closed in – in this instance dressed as publishers.

The premise was simple the people would develop the new games and the bespoke publisher would advertise and package the final product creating shelf space for it in spectrum world or wherever you kids went then. This has essentially been the blue print ever since, developers propose a game to a respective developer and they decide whether or not it’s worth making.

At the start there wasn’t a problem, games were still cheap enough to develop for a publisher to take a few commercial failures before the developers had there breakthrough and created there smash hit clawing back the dosh, new genres were being created almost every month with the likes of Dune heralding in the RTS genre and Wolfenstein properly introducing the world to the FPS perspective (that Ultima game doesn’t count – was technically 2d just used a scrolling panel)

*Went a bit wacky with me tense here – basically your in the future 2010, got somewhat confused writing it for some reason*

Fast forward to 2010 and what do you find? Still no flying cars but games are now huge the largest fastest growing entertainment medium and publishers have warped into the game equivalent of film studio’s commanding billions in assets but playing the entire industry as just that, an industry with opportunities for profit not new gameplay opportunities or interests in pushing the industry forward. A modern game can now take roughly 50 million dollars to produce, not factoring in advertising and packaging costs why should the publishers who still provide the money for the development houses to produce these games provide the money if there not guaranteed a return on there investment?

Publishers and the entire industry to a certain extent are now stuck in an inescapable circle – forged at the very start of modern gaming. As games become more and more complex requiring more time and money to develop publishers are less likely to take risks instead relying on sequels and expansion packs to tried and tested formulas. Where before new genres were being created constantly now the same tired idea’s and game types are trotted out year after year – Any sports game identical to last years but with this years stats copied and pasted into, whatever time period every single fps shooter suddenly decides to visit bouncing along humanities timeline like a space hopper ad infinitum, countless expansion packs revisiting the originals gameplay dynamics but in a slightly different social setting, I’m looking at you Sims. Add on to this the strict development times publishers command of there developers and the end product is a clone of every other game on the market, merely emulating gameplay style rather than creating new ones – revolution rather than evolution.

But developers are fighting back, with the advent of high speed world wide internet around 2000 and the introduction of pioneer content delivery systems like Steam it’s now simply not viable to have a publisher create a hard copy of what is originally in a digital format easily transferable and copied, then placed on a DVD and physically placed on shop shelves for the customer to come and buy something that could have been easily and quickly downloaded directly to his/her computer by the time it takes them to walk to the shops. With Developers starting up secure download services for customers to quickly download the games, publishers are taken out of the picture in one swoop now developers can concentrate on making new games exploring new gameplay techniques and not worry about excessive time limits or having there intellectual properties held to ransom over the money required to develop them, this also combats a spiralling problem and one that ran in parallel to the overall cost of a game, piracy.

For every game sold, 4 people have downloaded it free. Once a publisher factors in this dynamic a game has to be incredibly successful for any chance of a developer hoping to create a sequel.

Especially in the PC sector piracy was rife every apparently ‘copy secure’ disc publishers trotted out a few days later the game would be freely available online stripped of its copy protection, unlike the music and film industries who instead of embracing the internet and its high speed content delivery have tried and constantly failed to ban the transference of film and music. Games on the other hand at one with the emergence of the internet and its worldwide explosion have offered secure content delivery – a specific account bound to a customer’s name and credit card details ensuring unless someone is willing to share credit card details with someone online piracy is pretty much wiped out. However games are still getting progressively more and more complex with costs ever spiralling, instead of developers throwing more and more money at it like the previous publishers developers concentrate on streamlining there development process factoring in content creation to AI in one single pipeline ensuring games are produced much more quickly and to a generally cheaper budget.

On the hardware side consoles are still just that, consoles. Every new generation and there apparent move to a more PC architecture always heralds the apparent death knell for the PC. It never comes – however much people say consoles are becoming more and more like PC’s there simply not. A hard drive does not make a pc, consoles are prefabricated boxes technological snapshots of whatever the cutting edge was on there day of creation you cannot upgrade a console to the same extent you can a PC sure you might be able to upgrade the hard drive increasing the storage capacity but I can do that with my digital camera.

There huge modular nature and the fact all new graphics and processing technologies are tested first on the pc as well as all games being developed on the pc regardless of the games final destination ensure the PC will always be at the cutting edge. Actually that’s a good point if modern consoles are supposed to be like PC’s why don’t we see developers actually creating the games on them? It’s not a case of control a keyboard and mouse can easily be connected but of distribution and networking if individual developers can’t share assets it’s useless.

As for the entire industry getting bigger – new target demographics are being sought with new control methods and means of presentation , as started by Nintendo in the early 2000’s once the apparent play thing of the nerdy teenage boy games are now enjoyed by most age groups. Once games were seen as ‘murder simulators’ shallow two dimensional play things there now seen as equal to film or literature, simply telling a story – the same genres exist but the opportunities for expansion by way of the explosion in audience ensure new methods of gameplay.

This could essentially be seen as the renaissance for the games industry

'arghdfdf!!11' Dead bird in face: or why games are scarier than film

2006-10-30T01:40:00.000-08:00

Saw saw 3 yesterday ( tee hee! saw saw! like a inverted see-saw or rather ) wow what a silly film, horror films always brings out the sceptic in me and this one was a doozy, full of 'arrghhhh yes look in the cupoard when theres obviously someone behind you' or 'How 'bout using that fork lift truck you've been suspended from for the past half hour to i dunno maybe break down that flimsy chain link fence and uh escape?'

But apart from me clearly being head smarts when it comes to a horror situation, the other thing that washed straight over my head was the gore, im not saying im some kind of gore fanatic and truth be told i get a lot more scared at more mundane things in life 'oh crap my keys are inside how am i going to get back in?' sending more chills down my spine at recollection than any horror scene. In fact the scariest thing was the dawning that Jigsaw the films anti hero bares an uncanny resemblance to Gary Glitter

But i just ended up mentaling counting each grisly scene and mentally ticking it off where i've seen it in a game, point blank shotgun to face? Soldier of fortune 2, Acid burns? Prey Dismembrement by ways of fancy saw blades? Quake 4. Being bathed in fetid pig guts? Again Quake 4 and damnit we went all the way and used people.
Apart from the chain bit which again they just ripped off the original hell raiser and the rib bit which they heavily borrowed from the 'blood angel' the vikings used to do to the pesky Christians there was nothing i had'nt seen before.

Theres only so many things you can do to a body before it comes boring or worse comic, thats why i think games certainly in the horror genre are finally moving away from film. Its our oldest emotion and one that games have always been damn good at raising, pretty much every game, ok not sports one and no not that driving one your holding, use horror in one way or another. Developers have to learn to pace themselves otherwise you end up with just a closet jumper like Doom3 a typical film is an hour and a half long a typical first person shooter lasts for around 8 hours this presents much more oppurtunity for the developers to suggest horror or something ajar instead of jumping straight into the blood and guts routine.

The scariest piece of media i ever experienced was the Cradle level in Thief3 good god, that made me forget what century it was let alone i was staring at a screen. A huge labyrinth level set in a partly destroyed orphanage/insane asylum. Relying upon the player to piece together the clues and create the monsters in there own imagination, its not until almost the very end you even see a monster but theres always the anticipation that just around this corner is that monster your imagining.

Im gonna explore games as horror devices later in alot more detail, me thinks got the ol' noggin a turnin

Im sure i saw a monday around here somewhere

2006-10-30T01:17:00.000-08:00

Well, my alarm went off today got up 5 minutes before im meant to be in my lecture then stopped, wait i told myself, the clocks have gone back you've gained an hour matey, go back to bed! So i did again to wake at 5 to 10, got up and rushed to Fletcher - increasing the pace as i realised i might end up in the animation lounge again *shudder* with people talking about fantastical things like some 'maya' or rather.
Got in the lift, usual routine with the damn fashion students only ever going up one floor, honestly i've only been here a few weeks and i want to kill them god knows how Micheal feels....
Anywho so i stepped out of the lift, Floor 9 10:00 really 9:00 and what do i see? Some illicit drug cartel that Micheals been running? Ghosts playing Call of Duty? A unicorn?

No, i see a locked door and the lights switched off with none of the computers powered on and me feeling like an idiot - i checked all the parameters the time, the location and slowly realised, i was on my own remember, that maybe it wasnt tuesday but monday. Scew people going 'cool! i've gained an hour, back to bed!' through my own stupidity i've gained an entire day, hah beat that!

Gaming keg of fun

2006-10-24T14:11:00.000-07:00

Well god i thought i already did this, um i guess i can pad out the middle bit a litle.
After Quake i discovered Unreal Tournament although it was rendered in treacle vision due to my comp barely meeting the minimum spec at the time, 200mhz and 32megs of ram baby!

Anywho i pretty much converted to that and then continued to play that religiously - i loved the variation in map designs how you could jump from an ancient castle to a space station to some kind of hybrid space castle thing floating on is own exclusive lump'O rock in the middle of nowhere. I eventually got my computer upgraded to something approaching decent for the time and was capable of running modern games, before i had been lagging behind but now i could run with the big boi's! Ahem...yes a 450mhz P2 and a 32 meg tnt2 worked wonders at the time when shaders were something you'd uh um do something humourous with. Anywho i continued on this first person shooter ride sampling some Mortyr here, blururghh to some Unreal there, odd really never got that game. But it was Quake 3 that well changed my life i suppose - lame and cliched as it sounds it probaly did if unreal tounrnament captivated me in terms of its variations in map designs quake 3 dazzled me with its pure gameplay brilliance yes it was just deathmatch to people who were'nt watching it closely but everyting from the way in which the doorways were constructed to allow people to fly through propelled by rockets to the timings of the powerups and the placement of the weapons or the specific stats of each weapon that ensured that even with the most powerful weapon a player could never dominate the map on just firepower.
Quake 3 pretty much taught me about how games were made - i learnt how maps were made with its map editor and even today can pretty much map out a room with my eyes closed, woo thats a party trick right there, i learnt about textures and there specific resolutions light placement, optimization and triggers to me it was a huge keg of pretty much undocumented wonder.
After that i was firmly cemented in the fps genre of games i played online games like everyone else sampled some mods and you basically end up at the last section of hte previous segment of this.
Hope this has been inteesting but i keep gicing myself aheadache thinking back this far

Growing pains

2006-10-23T16:07:00.000-07:00

The ‘middle ages’ or the periods between the 1980’s to 1990’s saw a huge leap in games with a shift away from traditional arcades to home-centric consoles and the introduction of now familiar companies and genres.
It was Atari, Nolan Bushells company one of the key players during the initial rise of consoles during the late 70’s that gained the most popularity during the early 80’s with the introduction of the Atari 2600 this went up against its competitors the Colecovision and Mattels first entry into the competitive console market the Intellivision. All consoles gained popularity with there perfect reprsentation of popular arcade games, in fact this emulation of arcade games was probably one of the main reasons the consoles proved to be most popular, ‘why waste dozens of quarters/ten pence in a grotty arcade with snotty kids when you can play all these games for free as many times as you like in the comfort of your own home?’ they seemed to ask, it was Atari following from there tradition of copying games from there copyright infringing copy of space invaders that was the clear cut winner due to the release of "major" titles for the machine, including rushed home ports of arcade hits Asteroids and Defender, as well as original titles such as Adventure and Haunted House. The 2600 was the clear-cut winner of the race, but would also suffer a bit because of Atari's poor business decisions. When the time came to get a home port of Pac-Man licensed, Atari released it to much fanfare, before fans realized just how big of a loser it was. The entire formula was tweaked with, and the arcade experience just never came through. Regardless of this Atari became a house hold name and was the spokes-company for the entire industry, like any other huge corporation in a popular position Atari cocked up, big time.

On the back of Steven Spielberg’s supremely popular E.T the extra terrestrial Atari decided it would develop the licensed game, even though the details of the transaction were never fully divulged it was widely reported that Atari had paid US$20–25 million for the rights—an abnormally high figure for video game licensing at the time and one that would take until the late 90’s to become the norm. Due to the extended length and the high number of delays in agreeing to the licence Atari only had only five weeks in order to meet the September 1 deadline necessary to ship in time for Christmas shopping season. By comparison previous Atari games, Yar’s revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark, each took around 4 to 7 months to complete. An arcade game based on the E.T. property had also been planned, but this was deemed to be impossible given the short deadline. Warsaw who had previously worked on the fore mentioned games accepted the assignment, and was reportedly offered 200,000 USD as well as an prepaid Hawaiian holiday. This to me just shows Atari’s ignorance at the time, if something didn’t work or someone was under pressure they simply threw money at it until it solved the problem, a 2 million dollar bonus and a luxury holiday does not make a good game. Due to the extreme time limit involved the game was rushed throughout all stages of its development - the game play plan for example took just two days to create and testing was skipped completely.

Unsurprisingly the game was a complete failure, Atari bolstered by its previous success on earlier releases forced retailers to accept one year orders in advance for the entire year. At that time, Atari had dominated the software and hardware market, and Atari was routinely unable to fill orders because of this. At first, retailers responded by placing orders for more supplies than they actually expected to sell, but gradually, as new competitors began to enter the market and word of mouth spread about the quality of the game, Atari started receiving an increasing number of order cancellations for which the company was simply not prepared eventually Atari had a huge surplus of surplus cartridges, these cartridges numbering over 2 million in number were eventually buried in a landfill in new Mexico.
E.T. is seen by many as the death knell for Atari and is widely regarded as one of the worst games ever produced as well as one of the biggest commercial failures in videogame history. A major contributing factor to Atari's demise, the game's failure epitomizes the video game crash of 1983.

Following the crash of ‘83 personal computers took hold spurred on by companies such as IBM and Compaq these PC-clones of popular more expensive computers where equally as powerful as previous consoles and since their simple design allowed games to take complete command of the hardware after power-on, they were nearly as simple to start playing with as consoles.
However the PC’s reign was short lived with the introduction of the NES from Japanese newcomer Nintendo. Known to the western world as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), it was bundled with Super Mario Bros. ( Cor I wonder how that did…) and was an over night success, retailers more than cautious of introducing another console system so soon after the crash of 83 simply placed it on there shelves with no advertising or market exposure regardless of this the NES was a colossal success in America while in other territories other newcomers were as successful including the Sega Master system in Europe and the PC Engine in Japan. This introduction also saw the advent of new methods of control with the old fashioned joystick of the arcades synonymous with the market crash of 83 replaced with console pads with many more buttons and a 8 way directional or D’ pad.
During this time many popular games where born although they would be unrecognizable from there current form, Squaresoft maker of the now supremely popular Final Fantasy was struggling and decided to make their final game, titled Final Fantasy (1987), a role-playing game modelled after the previously successful game Dragon Quest, the games success saved Squaresoft and the Final Fantasy series was born as a result going on to become one of the most successful RPG franchises . At around the same time, the Legend of Zelda series made its debut on the NES with The Legend of Zelda (1986). Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear series also made its debut with the release of Metal Gear (1987) on the MSX2 computer, giving birth to the stealth-based game genre. Metal Gear was ported to the NES shortly after. In 1989, Capcom released Sweet Home (1989) on the NES, which served as a precursor to the survival horror game genre, in particulaur the original Resident Evil.

Due to ever spiralling prices and market exposure the 90’s were about games maturing into a Hollywood-esque landscape of ever-increasing budgets and increasingly wary publishers. At this time, the wide variety of games that existed in the 1980s, traditional arcade game such as space invaders or missile command faded away, with the larger corporations desiring to maximize profitability and lower risk in the form of sequel after sequel to popular franchises.
The introduction of the 3d accelerator and the huge increase in size of cd-roms meant developers could squeeze more data into there games, at first developers were unsure of what to do with this seemingly infinite space relying on full motion video or FMV games to fill the space requirement, with the advent of 3d acellerators and higher resoltion textures and sounds the cd-rom's quickly filled up.
When the 16-bit and 32-bit in the form of the SNES and Playstation respectively consoles arrived offering superior graphics and sound to the arcades. By this time, video arcades had earned a reputation for being seedy, unsafe places. An increasing number of players would wait for popular arcade games to be ported to consoles rather than going out. Arcades had a last hurrah in the early 90s with Street Fighter II and the one-on-one fighting game genre, although arcades in Japan are still just as popular with many games getting arcade only releases amd a special culture developing over the fighting games, the best players even developing into minor celebrities. As patronage of arcades declined, many were forced to close down. Classic coin-operated games have become largely the province of dedicated hobbyists. The gap left by the old corner arcades was partly filled by large amusement centres dedicated to providing clean, safe environments and expensive game control systems not available to home users, although these have never been able to once draw in the crowds as much as the original arcades did.

1989-1994
At this time, America was dominated by the Sega Genesis, known to me as the Megadrive (woo!) Nintendo debuted there SNES console in 1991 running on the same naming conventions as the NES, but this one was a SUPER nintendo entertainment system kids. The two consoles battled for market supremacy with the two consoles acheiving roughly half the marketshare each. The NEC Turbografx 16 also debuted around this time but a lack of English supported games and poor advertising in the face of Sega and Nintendo ensured it nver achieved a foothold in America.
The high levels of competition between the 3 companies ensured the marketting plan was more than a ittle harsh thoroughout with Sega producing the slogan, 'Sega does what Nintendon't and bth companies flinging around buzz words and slogans informing the general public there console was ultimately better because of 'blast processing' or some crap.

Gaming vomit

2006-10-17T10:34:00.000-07:00

My first gaming memory was playing the original Duke Nukem side-scroller on DOS my dad had borrowed off a work colleague. I remember begging him to set it up so i could play as i went into a trance watching all the colours and the lights i can't remember if i was any good at it and if i had'nt played it again recently, still good btw, i could'nt even tell you what any of the enemies looked like I just remember watching this man with blonde hair jumping around the screen the primitive 'w00p' from the pc speaker just increasing my trance-like state. Until one day when he 'accidently deleted it' although i still maintain he purposely did it because it was possibly affecting my school work - well look what im doing now H0H0 ironies...

I also have memories of the original Aladdin, before you could play it you had to input a random code from this huge code book, i never ever got past the second level though those monkeys on the second level where something else oh my yes. I have memories of various other games around that time but the order in which i first played them is muddled these includeded Missile Command, Doom and Worms.

I remember getting a megadrive, me and my sister spending hours playing sonic2 she was Tails i was Sonic racing each other to the finish or playing Micro Machines V2 learning every track oh and Dr Robotnik's mean bean machine - clearly a Puzzle Bobble rip off it was still fun especially when you triggered lots of beans. After that it was a Gameboy, several variations later im now considering replacing my imported original DS 'phatty' with a sleek Lite but anywho first gameboy game i had was Super Mario 6 golden coins and get this i've never owned or played tetris, pretty scary eh?

The first game i bought was the original Quake, i think i was about 12 at the time just walked in and bought it, truly those were the glory days before you got all this sensationalist media blaming games for all societies downfalls. If Doom before it triggered my interest for first person shooters Quake cemented it and my love for all things ID. I can still remember my next door neighbour, being more than a bit of a delicate flower, watching as i dodged zombies hurling there own rotting flesh at me before gibbing a shabmler in the most visceral way this side of any 80's gore flick, she then ran outside and threw up on our frontstep - truly if games could do that i thought it was worth sticking around to see what else i could play to make her throw up quite so much again

So did i really keep playing games as a conduit to watch children younger than me throw up? Well not entirely, games have always intrigued me like a less cocky film industry games are literally interactive stories wrapped in something unique to games - gameplay not restrained by money or audience interest or books linear one-dimensional, you read/watch it once you've already seen all it has to offer but with games its different you can decide where to go and what to do, its a cliche to say people like being in control but its one of the reasons im still playing. Ever increasing technology is also another reason while i continue playing each new release be it a console or graphics card or even new rendering technique brings the zenith of ultra realistic visuals ever closer to the player

After that i heavily uh 'invested my time' in fps games, playing everything from unreal tournament to Half life everything was an open book with no means of analysing there quality i jumped jumped from game to game before settling on the ones i liked. I've played so many FPS games its more a case of finding out the ones i haven't played. I've only ever owned 3 consoles megadrive, PS1 and gamecube but i've upgraded my PC countless times and can still remember my first graphics card, tnt2 woo! with the fan the size of a postage stamp nowadays there the same size as the card and seem to make more noise than a hoover ah well thats progress i guess.

Im currently playing through oblivion - still and Quake 3 - again, looking forward to Bioshock, Assasins Creed and any info on ID's new game

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin....

2006-10-17T06:37:00.000-07:00

1947, Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann patent a 'Cathode-ray amusement device' this simulated a missile being fired at a target, probably inspired by radar displays used during World War II. Several knobs controlled the trajectory and speed of the missile toward a preset target, because onscreen graphics were not possible at the time targets were literally drawn on the screen by the technicians. The patent states under the first claim 'The game is of such a character that it requires care and skill in operating the device...skill can be increased with practice and the exercise of care contributes to sucess' these two factors, practice and skill are still relevant to games today.
Its hardly surprising war was used as an inspiration for the game, World War 2 had only just ended and the games similarities in both presentation and style, the oval screen bore a close resembalance to a radars screen and the fact the player tracked a missile to its target would be thrilling to the post-war world.

The second widely agreed game was OXO a digital game of noughts and crosses, this was written by A.S Douglas as an example of his thesis on human-computer interaction while studying at Cambridge University. Written for the archaic EDSAC one of the very first computers in 1952 the player could select where to place his/her nought/cross using a mechanical telephone dialer the computer would then play a game of noughts and crosses with the player. OXO is considered to be the very first graphical computer game, the device designed in 1947 relying on targets being physically drawn on to the display while EDSAC was equipped with a ridicuously high resolution cathode ray display of 35 x 16 pixels for displaying the game ( my word sarcasm on the internets...)
OXO was created in a environment of learning and education as an example of computer-human interaction, its interesting to note that one of the first computer games was simply a remake of one of the more recognizable games in the world with the same rules and restrictions of its real world counterpart. Douglas was exploring the different ways in which humans could interact with computers believing digital representations of traditional games to be one of the more interesting aspects.

This trend of using high end university mainframes for producing games continued to 1961 where a group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created Spacewar! on the then new DEC PDP-1. The game is notable for being the first two player title with both players piloting a space ship capable of firing missiles. A black hole in the center created an obstacle for both players to avoid while they blasted at each other. Instead of OXO which was limited to Cambridge due to the low availability of the ESAC system, Spacewar! was packaged with every new DEC computer and is regarded as the first widely circulated computer game. Like the cathode-ray amusement device of 1947 clearly inspired by the new radar technology spacewar! was written during the height of the spacerace when rocketships and astronauts where very much in the public eye, games were fast becoming another means for people to imagine the impossible much the same with books or films.

As computers became increasingly smaller and cheaper mainframes became less and less necessary, this miniaturization was central to computers becoming introduced into homes with games also making the transition. Specialist games machines known as consoles where also developed allowing the game to be displayed on a regualr TV display - this split between computer and console games still exists today

Until 1969 games were limited to large corporations or Universities as curious little asides, now anyone could play these games at home using the Magnavox Odyssey plugged into a standard television set this was developed from a prototype from 1968 the magnavox was capable of playing a number of games through a removable circuit similar to a cartridge slot seen in later consoles. Colour overlays which stuck onto TV screens emulated colour graphics hearkening back to the original cathode-ray amusement device of 1947 when targets where physically drawn on the screen.
Although commercially it was a failure the magnavox had created a pathway for future consoles and companies to follow, 3 years later Atari released pong and sold 19,000 machines this 'console arms race' of ever increasingly powerful consoles continues up to today with next gen consoles all battling for a slice of the multi-billion dollar games industry pie.

Eaten alive by heroin

2006-10-16T09:25:00.000-07:00

Blerugh, heres reaon enough to never even consider 'trying' heroin, specially if it can reduce a person to this

'Maybe its behind those Amazon packages?'

2006-10-16T05:54:00.000-07:00

My laptop was scheleued to arrive today, well scheleued this time course it hasnt arrived. I scanned the list with all peoples names awaiting deliveries against there room numbers willing mine to be on there the best i could find was F. Cameron from F03 with bad writing that can quickly look like a T. Carter from A03. I went so far as to demand the hall manager rummage through all the parcels it slowly becoming apparent that perhaps my laptop was'nt hidden in all those Amazon dvd containers.
Whoever said the wait is better than the eventual event is wrong, horribly wrong they just hated themselves

Falling into Oblvion

2006-10-15T20:18:00.000-07:00

Started playing Oblivion again, gah that game scares me you start it with the intention of playing through one or two quests and before you know it its past 4 in the morning and you slink to bed feeling very sad for spending more time in Tamriel, Skingrad all the way folks(!) than the real world. Im not sure what it is but there seems to be a sense of tangible reality to the whole thing its the way the guards turn to watch you as you stroll past, the random conversations npc's have over quests you've previously completed 'they say he closed the oblvion gate!' and the heavy use of spoken dialogue throughout the whole thing, im convinced the game would be nowhere as apealing if you had to read a block of text at the bottom of the screen each time. My only saving grace from eternal bedromdom is that is so demanding i can only just about run it on medium at the lowest resolution although my ruddy nevergonnaappear laptop should sort that out.

"Witty banter"

wip stoof

Yay!

Squash squash

Manor Environment complete (more or less)

Ruined manor environment wip

Project has been christened my child

Completed research pic

Sample slides

Cornish WIP

No pictures no

garden update 2

garden update

Van Cough

Snippy snippy

Blergh

Van update thingy

Baking a cake

Van update

Update your blogs grabnamit

Don't I know you?

Fisherman chap WIP

WIP Van-thing update thing

Environment: Stately home wip2

Environment: Stately home wip1

Kardboard King

Train of thought

A happy cake

Group project can can

Not a penis

Engineer: Dispensing an erector!

This is schilly..

A matter of pride

I've not forgotten rather its been a constant knife-like stabbing reminder

Group: Cross those T's

Root worm

There are no rules

Swooooosh!

Quick speedpaints

There not dolls there figurines

Queens building concept

All those in favour say 'Aye'

Do said skills pay the bills?

Carters theme

Never bet on Duke

modelling update

Waving it all in your face

Ironic re-release: Daikatana

Started painting

..even a new tablecloth

I R SPEEDPAINT

What really is creativity?

Crafted with my very own hands

I know somebody in Edge magazine...

modelling update

Creativity or mum knows best

UnrealED: Praise indeed

Shucksheesh!

Restart....

Education

Carters hawt bod (!)

Head Progress

Jon Jones

Week 24 - at last...

Next gen asset creation

Week 19

Sound in games

Would you like fries with that?

Trinigy engine is a serious games engine *frown*

Game engine task

Blogger you curr

Machinima hate

Dance Dance Immolation!

Gears of tried and tested

Gah! Intergrated chipset evil!

Games for windows

Dreamy cast

Console Exclusivity

The industry as of now

Story and charecter

Trinigy engine is a serious games engine frown