Archive for March, 2008

Here’s an interesting video via gamepolitics.com depicting an overtly videogame-like rendering of one of American republican candidate Ron Paul’s speeches.

If officially sanctioned, it must be an attempt to connect with the Halo demographic of American teens likely too busy capturing the red flag to busy themselves with something as trivial as democracy any time soon. I especially enjoyed the allusion to Monty Python’s Meaning of Life for the rising building shots towards the middle of the piece.

I don’t usually care to think about anti-videogame attorney Jack (John Bruce) Thompson lest it give him credence or, worse yet, a notion that his voice is relevant in the overarching debate over videogame censorship. But this time he’s really outdone himself with such a noteworthy argument that it’s worth sharing.

After the recent Show Cause order by the Florida Supreme Court, in order to overcome “the Court’s inability to comprehend” his arguments, they imposed a limitation on his ability to submit any further filings after a stunt involving his submission of a children’s book-styled motion in illustrated form containing clip-art images between the text depicting “swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word “SLAP!” written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, a baby, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, a house of cards, and the motion concluded with the cover of Thompson’s book, Out of Harm’s Way“.

Class…

I just discovered this nice little treasure-trove of technical notes from Pixar covering animation and rendering topics used in their film productions.

As ever, we can’t directly use anything from film in our games due to the huge discrepancy in rendering times (30 frames per second vs 30 hours per frame), but they do appear to be leaning towards shortcuts for hair that avoid complete simulations.

I recently bought Forza Motorsport 2, enticed mostly by the car customisation editor allowing players to deeply personalise their vehicles before taking them online and racing against others, giving them a real sense of ownership of their unique vehicle. It’s amazing how much fun can be had simply winning new cars then painting them and adding racing stripes, decals and text. Even more fun is taking your worst prize cars, painting them beige, adding expletives on the hood then sending them to your friends via the “gift cars” option.

Anyway, I wanted to write about this to draw attention to the amazingly comprehensive character-creation editor included with the upcoming APB debuted at GDC, (the animation-related notes of which I’ll be uploading as soon as I get the time), and created by my old buddies at Realtime Worlds back in Scotland. Check out the decal editor below, which can be applied not only to vehicles but clothes and tatoos too. While I love playing with customisation editors in other people’s games, it’s a real bitch to support in your own from an animation standpoint. One of these days I’ll have to work on a simple game that simply requires specific animations for specific, un-evolving characters. Chance would be a fine thing.

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