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.

Jock’s son passed away today. I’ve never met Jock, or his son Bobby, but his videos on youtube have kept a Scotsman in Canada entertained for the last year, not least because they feature a net-savvy over-seventy-year-old in a country only now discovering Facebook.

I imagine most people waching this here in North America won’t have a clue what he’s saying, but sometimes words are unimportant. Farewell Bobby, your father is a poet.

Summer is here in Montreal and it’s hard to spend any free time at home in front of a desk, unless it’s to upload a fantastic picture of back home sent from your parents’ latest outing. Anybody thinking of holidaying in Scotland would be wise to get there ASAP while the two weeks where it doesn’t rain holds up.

I have many a fond memory of viewing beautiful scenes like this through rain-covered car windows, steamed up with a family’s-worth of impatient breath and opened flasks of tea, finally taking one triumphant run outside during a break in the clouds before driving back home again to our Sunday dinner and less weather-reliant pursuits of newspapers and videogames.

Recently Watchdog, (a UK consumer complaint show), ran an article on DS Brain Training / Brain Age supposedly discriminating against accents – especially those of Northern England and Scotland. As silly as this sounds, I actually found it to be entirely true when playing despite commanding a relatively well-spoken Scots tongue myself, though was impressed enough that the voice-recognition worked as well as it did. Nintendo were even thoughtful enough to allow the omission of the voice-recognition element from the Brain Age test.

The thing they don’t mention in the segment, however, is the blatant discrimination against a particular way of writing the number 4. In order to avoid being labeled with the mental age of a seventy year-old I had to relearn something that’s come naturally since childhood, with a numerical brainwashing so thorough I’ve never been able to go back to the old way since.

I wrote a post just a few weeks ago complaining about “back home”, but it’s easy to get homesick when your friend sends you pictures of his recent camping trip in Glencoe, Scotland.

The Canadian Rockies are majestic, the NY Adirondacks are incredibly fertile, but there’s something about the Scottish Highlands that’s just classic fairytale.

It’s not at all related to games or animation, but I just found this site claiming to relate local news from my hometown of Dundee, Scotland, in the local dialect.

While it’s far from regularly updated, they do have an iFrame displaying the local weather from an external site, which I’ve stolen and handily embedded below. It’s clear to see at least one of the reasons I left the UK as the weather certainly is shit right now – (This is an external link though so will likely be bright sunshine by the time anyone gets around to seeing this).

This is vaguely relevant because today, Marie-Jo informed me of a new twist on Speed-Dating that’s apparently catching on in the UK. Called “Speed-Hating”, socially awkward singles interact with one another in brief rotation, and in the great British tradition, complain about every facet of their miserable lives – a task presumably requiring more than just the few allotted minutes.