deesine's ramblings

Hop

2009-12-17T05:41:00.002+01:00

Work is keeping me busy, I haven't been blogging lately; should get back into that.

And it's almost christmas, so to anyone reading this, happy xmas!

Rising Star to publish Fragile in Europe

2009-06-30T07:28:00.002+02:00

Rising Star games has announced it will publish tri-Cescendo’s Wii title, Fragile: Farewell Ruins in PAL territories.

“Fragile has a great team of creative designers who in turn have brought to life a beautiful art style that pushes the limits of the Wii console without compromising on gaming quality,” said Tyrone Walcott, product manager at Rising Star Games.

“This announcement will delight European gamers and the Otaku community. Rising Star Games has again shown its commitment to bring the best games from Japan.”

Just the kinda news I've been hoping for. Finally a reason to dust off the old Wii again.

Monkey Island Special Edition

2009-06-02T07:48:00.003+02:00

Monkey Island Special Edition, huzzah?! A new version of the good old Monkey Island, from what I can tell, great news indeed.

And on top of that, a new Monkey Island game in the shape of a five episode series.

E3 2009

2009-06-01T18:49:00.000+02:00

Well we all know what this week is, it's E3 week! I'll be following a bunch of tweeters on twitter, including giantbomb, gamespot and others.

Not sure what I'm looking forward to, but the press conferences are always fun to watch, maybe they'll have some surprises in store..? I do however look forward to some Bioshock 2, Assassins Creed 2 and I've heard a rumor about Fragile making an appearance.

Google Wave

2009-05-29T05:13:00.003+02:00

This is awesome, exciting times.

http://wave.google.com

New blog

2009-05-07T15:46:00.003+02:00

I've started a scribble blog. Daily updates with sketches and scribbles, just to keep my wacom warm. Maybe I'll even up some traditional sketches later on.

Woven Hand

2009-05-05T12:24:00.004+02:00

Went to Debaser in Stockholm this weekend with a friend and saw Woven Hand, had a great time, they're an amazing band to see live.

Not much else going on, I have a couple of ideas for other blogs that I might get started on soon. Both related to drawing in some way.

Linkaroos

2009-04-29T23:18:00.004+02:00

A couple of nifty links found this week...

http://uvlayer.com/

uvLayer aims to redefine online video. With uvLayer users can easily manipulate their media, collect and publish to the web, and share videos with friends ...

This is really cool, I really enjoy the interface, it's kinda like a desktop where you drag videos around and everything isn't as sterile and linear as you might be used to. Only thing missing is more functionality between uvlayer and selected services, comment and favourite youtube videos through uvlayer would be even more awesome.

http://www.makeuseof.com/
Has a directory of links to various neat sites, software and lots more; like the Art category which contains a number of not-to-be-missed links.

84 Amazingly Useful CSS Tips & Resources
Rounding off with some web design related stuff.

OnLive

2009-04-22T03:31:00.002+02:00

Something to keep an eye on.

Will have to try it to get a good impression of what it's like, but just the idea, and the possibilities is just...mindblowing.

Is this the beginning of the end for console gaming? Not having to upgrade your hardware, get the newest console, games can be made for one system alone since the end user doesn't have to bother wether he/she likes 360/PS3 or whatever better.

Maya rotating cubes - the video

2009-04-20T09:56:00.002+02:00

Maya rotating cubes

2009-04-17T09:43:00.005+02:00

Here's a little script that'll rotate an x,y array of cubes, based on an input textures u,v colors.

A friend of mine showed me this neat effect, and we talked over various ways to do this, I proceeded to try replicating it in Maya; this is what I came up with finally. Basicly a script which does everything needed for the basic effect. It can be improved further for more advanced settings. What it does now is create a grid of cubes along the x and y axis, binds an expression on each cube to drive it's x-rotation by an input textures' color at given u,v coordinate. It's meant to be used with an animated texture to make them rotate over time.

I'll post a clip of how this looks on youtube this weekend.

The (quickly hacked together) basic mel-snippet is as follows :


$p = `polyCube -ch on -o on -cuv 4`;

$countCur = 0;
$mx = 64;
$my = 48;

for($y = 0; $y < $my; $y++)
{
$prevsel = `ls -sl`;

for($x = 0; $x < $mx; $x++)
{
$countCur++;

string $sel[] = `ls -sl`;

float $u = (1.0 / $mx) * $x;
float $v = (1.0 / $my) * $y;
$v = -$v;

$string = ("float $col[] = `colorAtPoint -u "+$u+
   " -v "+$v+" "+$animNodeTexName+"`; rotateX =
   20.0 * ($col[0]+$col[1]+$col[2]);");

for($sa in $sel)
{
 expression -o $sa -s $string;
}

duplicate -rr;
move -r 1 0 0;
}

select $prevsel;

duplicate -rr;
move -r 0 -1 0;
}

Spring cleaning

2009-04-11T00:37:00.005+02:00

Well it's that time again. Time to do some cleaning. Mostly this means I'll clean up my google accounts, fix my google ig page, I really need to organize my links better.

A couple cool stuff picked up this week, this blog, which is kind of design'ish related, I dunno, mostly gone through the stuff filed under typography so far, but I'll keep checking it out. I found this nifty font resource through that blog.

A friend sent me this link, which says Tales of Vesperia is coming for PS3. And it also mentions a new Tales of game for the Wii; happy days. Hopefully not related to april fools, most likely not as a PS3 release of Vesperia has been kind of a given.

iPhone GUI elements nicely separated and laid out in a photoshop file, only chopped up imagery, no recreated effects or such for the most part, nice to check out if your into interface design.

That's about it, happy easter. Time for another go at Folklore before bed.

Play! Concert in Stockholm 2009

2009-03-20T01:06:00.006+01:00

Brrr, cold. I just came home from Stockholm, it's 1 AM, and I'm freezing my buttocks off.

I attended this years Play! concert in Stockholm Globe Arena (Annexet), I also invited a friend which I hadn't met since university a couple years back; we had a good time (atleast I did) and when the music from Oblivion, Zelda and Castlevania, in particular, was playing, I got chills. However it wasn't really what I expected and the fact that they had decided for some reason to play Guild Wars music at the end was kind of a let down, they did however manage to redeem it with an encore, which was a nice rendition of the Sephiroth theme.

All in all, a decent concert.

Took some shots with my iphone, mostly blurred crap, but I got atleast a couple that aren't all too bad, which I've posted here. It should be public and viewable by anyone.

Empires 2.23

2009-03-15T18:01:00.002+01:00

An update for the Empires source mod has been released, there's a lot of fuss in response to this. I, however, am going to try it now. Looking forward to it.

DeeTexGen

2009-02-02T14:17:00.008+01:00

This is an old project I found together with a few others, it's a simple texture editor created with win32 api and absolutely no classes or real structure behind it. I picked it up again however and added some new features, next thing to add is correct bitblit'ing of the bitmap instead of putting pixels as I had originally implemented the texture display drawing, you can actually see the drawing happening as it is right now :)

The current version can be downloaded from mediafire. It's a debug build and hopefully not all too unstable.

My future intentions for this app is to use it as an editor for a custom procedural texture format. Any new progress will be posted here.

A few demoscene demos

2009-01-29T02:30:00.006+01:00

Figured I'd post this, been sitting in edit for a while; it's a few of my favourite demoscene demos, found on Youtube. Some of them are starting to get old, but they're still great and art is a timeless thing :-)

Here they are:

FFXIII

2009-01-29T01:56:00.002+01:00

The Final Fantasy XIII release date is closing in, especially if you live in Japan; Europe will have to wait until next year however, and here I was, waiting for an official release date sometime this year. Oh well, atleast there's a Square Enix Europe teaser site out there for FFXIII.

I'll just have to get back to Fallout 3 meanwhilst, Pacific Rift and TimeShift should drop in any day as well.

Back to reality

2009-01-05T16:27:00.003+01:00

Yup, 2009 is here, happy new year and all that.

Must admit that this new years eve felt a little awkward and I wasn't really looking forward to going back to work; but now I'm here, after a couple of weeks off doing nothing but blowing off some steam.

So, now it's back to everyday life, resuming projects etc. PowerCell is closing up to a first official release; I'm currently modeling some levels for it so we get some content which makes the game worthy of release, it's really the only thing missing - more content.

Another game that's in development, slowly but surely; is "Minigolf 3D" - there's a blog here about it, maintained by the main dev.

I'll also resume the 2D game pretty soon, I do have a couple of guys that depend on me on that one after all.

That's about it, really, I've also embraced the fact recently that I am a gamer, and there's nothing wrong about that; I'll post some more thought on that in the future - I even have another project planned regarding the topic of gaming that I have "scheduled" for this summer; we'll see how that turns out.

DeeSymphony startup

2008-11-11T11:26:00.002+01:00

I've started development on DeeSymphony. Currenly doing some GUI and basic greeble tests in Maya 2009. I'll post updates here as I progress.

One major change from DeeGreebler is that DeeSymphony will be split into several scripts for easy maintenance; and it wont be as experimental.

2D Game Development

2008-11-10T10:00:00.005+01:00

I've been working on a 2d engine in linux and windows, ever since I started playing Cave Story I've had the urge to create a 2d game; and I'm currently writing an engine with a game/editor ontop which should be pretty versatile and support any kind of 2d game project. Below is a current screenshot from the editor in action in Linux.

PowerCell follow-up

2008-10-10T07:07:00.003+02:00

Yes, there is continued progress on PowerCell.

Currently PowerCell is developed 100% in Linux, and even though my initial goal for the game was a free, easy to pick up and play game, I have a couple of other guys working on it now who might think otherwise. It's too bad though since I think the linux community could use more free, open source games to forward and expand the linux gaming community.

There's also been talks of a PowerCell sequel with better graphics and physics. The current version of PowerCell is nearly complete as is, it just needs more content and a few final touches here and there, but overall I feel that the current engine is more than enough to create a release.

The first release should be coming soon enough, and in what scope that will be remains to be seen. I'll probably do a post-mortem on the game as well.

Dee...Symphony?

2008-10-10T07:05:00.001+02:00

DeeGreebler is returning, under a different name which I haven't decided yet. It'll be a complete re-write and will support Maya 8.5; though I intend to make it as backwards-compatible as I can, it'll be virtually impossible for me to make it work with every version spanning from 6.0 and up.

A plug-in based version has also crossed my mind, but it'll have a larger maintenance overhead and it's harder to make a plug-in work for more versions since it needs a fresh compile afaik from previous experience.

As for a name, DeeSymphony is probably the name of the development version, since I intend to include some other scripts as a "toolset" of sorts.

New games I'm looking forward to

2008-07-21T13:30:00.003+02:00

Here's a list of games that caught my attention at E3 (to be updated):

Mirror's Edge (X360/PS3/PC) (gamespot search)
de Blob (WII/DS/PC) (gamespot search)
Halo Wars (X360)
LittleBigPlanet (PS3)
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS)
Castlevania Judgment (WII)
Sonic Unleashed (X360/PS3/PS2/PC)
Flower (PS3)
Tomb Raider Underworld
Resident Evil 5

PowerCell

2008-07-16T00:08:00.003+02:00

PowerCell is my most recent hobby project, I'm working on it alone when I feel like it, it uses Irrlicht and FMOD.

It's meant to be a small and lightweight project, with brainstormed gameplay elements; my primary goal is to make it fun to play and replay.

PowerCell gameplay preview 1 at YouTube.

It's been a while since I uploaded this video, and since then the game hasn't seen many updates. What I've been tackling since is mainly two things, the movement system which I've been trying to get to work properly scaled by time rather than FPS, and compiling and running it in Linux.

Linux is once again my main platform at home and while compiling and running the game in Linux have been pretty straight forward, converting the content to a Linux friendly format hasn't. The main problem is that I've been using IrrEdit as my main level editor, which is only available for windows presently. The XML files saved from the editor of course can't be opened with a default text editor in gnome since it doesn't recognize the format, not a major issue since vi takes care of that, so after going over the level files and changing case sensitivity issues, paths et.c. I've run into another issue, which is with the models themselves; it seems some of them have lost polygons on the way somewhere. Most likely a normals issue.

Now I just have to find a different way of getting 3d content into PowerCell, CSG modellers have crossed my mind and even the possibility of creating my own level editor for placing elements. Though the easiest and most painless way right now seems to be a windows partition where I can still run IrrEdit.

I might have to find a willing programmer to help me with the character movement issue and possibly adding a better physics engine.

More updates to come. I'm not ready to drop this project yet, unless it starts to deviate from my main goal.

Some of my E3 press conf impressions

2008-07-15T23:11:00.007+02:00

I saw a recorded feed of the Microsoft press conference this morning. My general thoughts after seeing that is that they seem to shamelessly steal concepts and idéas, an avatar system which immediately made me think of the Wii's Mii avatars. Lips, well clearly someone's been playing Singstar. And last but not least the Buzz ripoff.

All is fair in love and games I guess. I wasn't too impressed with the Microsoft press conf. in general.

I watched the Nintendo and Sony press confs. through the gamespot live feed and I was really looking forward to see what Nintendo could possibly conjure up, I did feel a little disappointed after their show. I had heard some things about a "secret game", and I had also read some stuff about MotionPlus. One of the bigger announcements were defenitely Animal Crossing City Folk and the new WiiTalk, and I was pleasantly surprised, certainly exceeded my expectations, even though an AC announcement seemed likely; I wasn't really looking forward to it before the show started. The MotionPlus apparel also seems promising, I guess it's hard to tell until I actually have one plugged to my WiiMote. I had my hopes up on some F-Zero Z news or other major titles we've come to love in previous Nintendo generations, but no such luck.

The Sony conference was definitely the top of the three for me, now I don't own a PS3 but I've been looking forward to getting one down the line and a lot of what was showcased really wet my appetite. A bunch of nice titles and exclusives. And the ending presentation of MAG, which seems to promise those kind of massive, frantic and tense battles I've been dreaming of in a multiplayer setting; were more players work together to hold off an ambush or assault in large numbers. I just hope it can live up to some of my expectations.

Deesine's Personal Blog

2008-07-15T22:53:00.002+02:00

This'll be my first post in a new blog where I'll post things related to my personal life and interests. I'm doing this to keep my portfolio clean from ramblings.

Some things this blog will most likely touch upon:

HMI
Computers
Drawing
Games
My personal life

Et.c.