Those around me will no doubt by now be sick of talk about the diet I’ve been on for the last few months. For the record, I’ve always had a distaste for what I call the “Game Developer Physique” sported by so many of our contemporaries, so any slip towards that abyss I consider a total failure on my part. While I’ve never been shy of the gym, a recent trainer schedule ended with the shocking realisation that my weight and BMI placed me just into the realms of “overweight”, which by some twist of fate coincided with the symbolic humiliation of a button bursting off my jeans.

So in addition to ramping up the gym attendance, it was high time for my first serious stab at a diet – specifically one that would kickstart the old metabolism to make it sustainable when going back to “real life”. Thankfully, I have the support of a similarly enthused exercise nut in MJ who has joined me in this challenge and proven invaluable in terms of forcing good food habits on the both of us.

As such, I can say that after just a couple of weeks of cold-turkey I found it really easy to manage, all the while eating better quality food than ever with the only downsides being the extended time to prepare meals and, hardest of all, facing the social challenge of not drinking around others, (each of the major spikes above being a piss-up). In addition to completely changing my food intake and greater exercise, part of this project involved picking up Wii Fit as a means of exercising at home while playing. However, much like every other Wii enterprise, I quickly found the exercises tedious and low-quality to the point of the balance board being a mere gimmick – how can you possibly get fit by balancing alone anyway? While I used it nearly every day, its scope was dramatically reduced to being nothing more than a fancy set of scales.

What I didn’t count on though, were the reinforcing effects of having your scales directly linked to a self-updating graph, charting progress (and regress) over the following months. These little triumphs are what drives decision making during the day, whereby not only are achievements and mishaps recorded, but calorie intake becomes something of a game to try and go for the “hi-score” in weightloss every day. The latest issue of Wired magazine has its cover and a sizeable section inside dedicated to exactly this – the power of personal data-tracking, with articles on Nike+ and other gadget-related accessories, though for some reason overlooks Wii Fit and its hidden weightloss meta-gaming.

Now with just 9lbs left to achieve the ideal BMI of 22, but with a 2-week holiday and the parents visiting from Scotland in a few days, I’ll once again have to run the gauntlet of alcohol and other temptations – which can be considered something of a boss fight.

By some strange paradox, E3’s lack of announcements regarding the next “next generation” of hardware has prompted many news sites (and publishers) so speculate as to when the next cycle will begin.

When I first began animating games at home in my highschool years and was invited up to the local game studio, DMA Design, back home in Scotland it was exacly at the time of the big shift from the 2D of the 16bit consoles (SNES and Genesis) to the impending 3D revolution of the as-yet unrealeased PlayStation and N64. I still clearly recall being informed by my tour guide (Art Director Oz, who by some strange twist of fate now works just up the road from me in Montreal at local studo A2M) that it would be “a long time before we’ll be seeing round edges in games again” with the move to hard-edged low-poly games like the original Tomb Raider and Tekken. As such, I promptly ditched my computer and all my 2D skills and instead decided to apply for art college to get drunk and meet girls.

On completing my studies and joining the industry proper it was 5 years later and the old-hands I learned from and I were wrapping our heads around the leap from the original PlayStation to the PlayStation 2, with its analogue input and superior power and memory specifications. During this period a lot of over-estimation of these specs on our part resulted in much trial and error, (with the latter being most prevalent), and the unfortunately disproportionate ratio of actual creative-to-technical work was quite the learning experience. But hey, I didn’t know any better…

4 years later and I make the jump across the Atlantic. After a brief stint with the Xbox, it’s on to the Xbox360 (at the time, known as Xenon) and the then unfinished Unreal 3 engine. Again, lots of over-estimation of hardware specifications despite being some of the first developers to receive the new hardware kits and being the UE3 early-adopters. Again, having to relearn how to create animation in games from scratch as we apply new methods such as blending, additive animation, IK and an entirely new facial system, not to mention the poor artists who had to completely rethink their workflows with the move to normal maps and Z-brush modelling.

So here we are once more. 5 years later and on the verge of when another hardware generation cycle is expected to be announced, so I’m going to put it like this…

Can you imagine how crippled the art of filmmaking would be if every time shooting starts the vast majority of the crew’s time is spent creating reels of film and re-designing how it works inside the camera? If every time an author sits down to work on his or her next bestseller they must first spend years establishing workflows for simply getting the words down on the page? And every new album is delayed months as your favourite band is holed up in the studio, luthering their own guitars?

For the first time ever I’m coming into work and purely creating art. Not worrying about whether I’ll get the tech in time to finish the workload. Not dealing with crashes, bugs, delays and instead just knowing that when I want something to work, it does. For the first time in my career I’m spending 100% of my day creating mature, thought-provoking content, and it’s really something of a marvel to be discussing character motivation and story arcs safe in the knowledge that everything else is taken care of.

To this end you can keep your new hardware and your fancy camera inputs and magic wands, because I’m concenrating on content.

“I normally don’t give guns to little girls, know what I’m saying, I usually give something else, but you know hey, don’t tell anyone I said that…”

The other day the fancy laptop turned out to be not so fancy after all and crapped out on me after just a few months, so in the interim I’ve been using the iPhone for surfing duties and comandeering MJ’s computer while she busies herself ranking up on Call of Duty 4, (it sounds great getting your girlfriend into online gaming, until she really gets into it and you can’t get near your Xbox).

A pleasant surprise, however, has been my awakening to the joys of cloud computing. Some time ago I placed all my bookmarks on Firefox’s Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) site after experiencing the pain of rebuilding my surfing experience during the initial move to the laptop, which really paid off during this situation.

Additionally, I’ve been dabbling in image editing with the AMAZING online photoshop-like suite of Aviary tools. This is really impressive stuff, especially the Node-based UI of Peacock for generating effects and really sparks the imagination for what could be available in the future – 3D animation software perhaps?

Lastly I’ve been writing up documents and spreadsheets with Google Docs – something that’s certain to continue even after the computer is fixed as it’s opened up a world of non-static, shared documentation. Having spent the last decade working out of server-based file-management systems like Perforce and jumping in and out of Maya’s referncing system, (not to mention several years tinkering with .html and .php), I find it abhorrent to work on documents static or local.

I’d be interested to know if there are other cloud-based software out there I should be aware of?

In a recent japanese videogame tech magazine, (why don’t we have these?), Namco discusses the optimisation of Soul Calibur’s female skeletons from the PS3 to the PSP:

In both Soul Calibur IV and Soul Calibur Broken Destiny, everything, including fabrics, is animated by “bones”.

On the PS3, there are two separate bones in each breast, giving a total of four, and it is these which give rise to breast motion, whereas on the PSP for the sake of load reduction things had to be simplified. We managed to obtain satisfactory results with only one “bone” across both breasts.

Swaying breasts may be most enjoyable, but from time to time we are warned that they move a little too much.

Via andriasang.com

This week is all about E3, and this time it’s going back to the way it should be – all loud noises, special announcements and awesome presentations on a world stage. We released a preview video some weeks ago which will forever be known internally as “the one with Parrish’s moustache”, but I wanted to wait until the real deal to throw it up here.

Virtually all of the cutscenes in both videos were done by our team here in Montreal, so a special shout out to the hard work of the guys both here and in Edmonton, and Parrish’s moustache.