It isn’t Pixar quality, but it sure is close. Here is the latest game/source-engine promo for Valve’s upcoming Team Fortress 2.

I’m sure the animation team at TF2 jumped at the chance to create this as I can’t imagine too many cutscenes featuring in a non-story based game such as Team Fortress, (but then why even bother with facial rigs at all? – I guess the jury’s still out there), but I’m sure you’ll agree he does look fantastic, and only serves to strengthen the fantastic look of the already Incredibles-esque character designs. More stylised games like this, and this industry will only be that more appealing to those artists and animators working in film.

So, the third major overhaul to this site arrives today, along with something of a change of delivery.

1. New Look. The first and most obvious change is visual. This was inspired by the upcoming Apple iPhone, and the entire site has been formatted to work with the dimensions of the screen based on the initial movies and specs found on this site. Whether the thing takes off or not, I’m sure you’ll agree that everything is much more legible and easier to naviagte now.

2. New Database. The entire site has been migrated over to a wordpress-powered blog, with the main reason of the database functionality allowing for much easier cataloging. Previously, gameanim.com was created by hand in Dreamweaver, with all links and media updated by hand – which began to be such a pain in the ass that updates were difficult when I was busy elsewhere.

3. Coming Out. The second major change, (and one from which there is no turning back, based on the consistent hits from whois.com every month), is as you may have just noticed, I’m no longer writing in the third-person. This was always an admittedly cowardly approach to writing by hiding behind a pseudonym, which was mostly serving to provide a critical commentary on industry and animation free from any attachment to employers’ public image, (though the footer below still stands). The reason for this change of heart is twofold. Firstly, to change the emphasis of this site away from humorously poking fun at amateurs via the Bad Walkcycles, and secondly: see below…

4. Change of Scenery. I’ve had several overhauls in my life recently, moving away from my previous job as Lead Animator on BioWare’s Mass Effect in Edmonton, Alberta, and moved to the opposite side of Canada to live with my girlfriend, Marie-Jo, in Montreal. We had been doing the long-distance relationship thing for almost a year while awaiting the finishing of the Mass Effect project, and as soon as the animation was in a state fit to leave, I did.

Aside from freeing me up to write about more personal thoughts and events in my life from here-on in, I’m hoping that sharing what work I actually have done should give the game animation-related opinions expressed on these pages a little more weight. Please check the About section for the full rundown on who I am and what I do.

At one point in a recent late night session of co-op Rainbow 6 Vegas, the gunfight paused to facilitate the spec-ops excited admiration of a downed enemy, killed midway through his grenade-throw lying there with grenade in hand, followed up by a gratifying witness of another comrade shooting flatscreen monitors off desks in full physics.

While there is certainly a degree of “developer-only” satisfaction in those two accounts, whereby a greater appreciation is garnered by simply knowing just how technically difficult those two occurrences would have been to create a few years ago, the real revelation, and the purpose of this post, is that much of the perceived satisfaction we as gamers receive from videogames is based on empirical knowledge of what came before.

Every new console generation, we wow at the new graphics possibilities – “Push 3,000,000 polys instead of 30,000!”, but to an outsider, that is nothing more than another round of game-like graphics, perhaps slightly smoother, slightly faster, but still game-like all the same when their frames of reference come from movies and, more importantly, real life.

How many press releases have claimed features such as “the ability to destroy environments”, “realistic looking physics-based damage and death animations”, or even the sheer mundanity of “new moves for your character!”. While these might excite gamers who know that up to that point these bullet points were beyond the scope of their current consoles, no-one without this empirical knowledge of technical limitations can even claim to be impressed.

Perhaps that is one of the biggest problems in attracting new players outside of the already converted with a history of late night online fragfests.