300 Fuzz Riders

Been on a cinema binge recently. Hot Fuzz was good fun. By the makers of Shaun of the Dead, similar to it, and not quite as good. Fine on a first watch, I suspect it doesn’t have anything like the repeatability of Shaun. Ghost Rider was very silly, even for comic book films. It’s also not bad, as long as your definition of “not bad” includes Satan’s (literally) flaming Harley burning up the side of a skyscraper. It has plot holes large enough to produce gravitational fields, and Nick Cage plays Nick Cage’s Nick Cage, but worth a watch if you’re a boy or a tomboy. Spinal Tap (1985) played my local poseur (sorry, art) cinema as part of a comedy festival. The venue has an extraordinarily pleasant auditorium, and an impossibly cool bar – you expect at any moment to see cameras filming a million-dollar Bacardi advert. Was amazing to see Tap (again), and in such a luxurious setting. I’m destined to see Musclequeens of Sparta, sorry, Frank Miller’s 300. Sure I like Gladiator movies, Conan movies even more, that doesn’t prove a thing! And I’ve had respect for director Znak Snider’s agreement with Universal to remake Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Every other director on earth would have refused out of honour, out of principle, out of respect for the dead. I mean Romero. Snider made it anyway, and he made it one a hell of a trip. If he does for Thermopylae what he did for the slow blue shuffling genre, I’ll be delighted.

Project Mayhem V

We’ve had all manner of technical issues with Project Mayhem, not least that our very high-end modelling package Softimage XSI doesn’t correctly export textures to the low-end Direct-X-dot-X format we use in the game. A lot of research and downloading of 3D model conversion packages and we have a mechanism for exporting our models, animations, textures, and shaders (a technical texture that gives the appearance of ‘shine’ and ‘depth’) into our game. This was more challenging than it sounds, lots of attempts saving in various formats and using conversion programs cut, changed, chopped, or altered some other part of our model. As it is we’re being forced to manually edit our model files to paste animation information into them, but now we know what to do it doesn’t take long, and the results appear pixel-perfect.

During this process we were using single models, for example a spaceship with integrated gun, wings, exhaust ports, and the like. Today we worked hard at chopping a ship up and loading bits of it separately. Overcoming a number of errors we finally managed to get an easy-to-implement mechanism of constructing the ships in bits and assembling them in-game, and keep the complex animations together. What this means is when aliens swarm in they will have, randomly, different guns attached to them, each firing different weapons. All we do is build a library of guns, exhausts, etc., and we can have a very, very large array of distinctive opponents.

Due to the short timeframe of development we came up with a mechanism that avoids building “levels”, yet as a “cheat” to avoid work we’re starting to get really excited about the idea. We won’t have levels, all attack waves will be randomly generated, as will (as discussed) the weapons. Actually the attack waves will come from a number of pre-determined attack wave types, but essentially the more you play the game, as you get power-ups, the more likely it is a very-hard type of attack waves arrive. That the ships themselves can be dynamic (having puny guns on early on and very powerful ones later on) means, with luck, the game will have a real sense of progression despite being random.

I’m currently working on a scripting language for attack waves and enemy bullets. This is a challenging task, but if I can get it working (within our timeframe) it means people will be able to modify and extend the game without needing the source code. While I’m not using “XML” natively, I have produced what is essentially a customised version of it. I am debating if it’s worthwhile writing an editor for this language, I suspect it is and will probably produce one this weekend – time I have reserved for project development.

There are three other teams. The team I left, Acid Works, are producing a 3D space tunnel game where you collect chillies and sombreros. It’s really the game they always wanted to make and their development has gone well. Another team are working on a vastly ambitious 3D RPG project, they’re being told they’ll never get it ready in time but they are making good progress- they’re working hard at it. The final team are also working on a space shooter, except they’re using 2D sprites nicked from the Internet. I feel that’s a shame because they are led by a talented coder, he’s not making a 3D game because he’s daunted by the task. However the inherent simplicity of their format means they will probably have a lot of time in which to “shine” their game, something we might struggle to do.

Redeemed by the Daleks

Time to put up a micro-review of Redemption ’07, a sci-fi convention I went to last weekend.

Things started off slightly bumpy with a flight delay of an hour and my chauffeurs GPS not being able to find the venue, but those earthy struggles aside we made the convention in reasonable time on Friday. The opening ceremony was short, informative, and humorous, and started a weekend-long campaign of electing a supreme leader. Among the presidential candidates was Zaphod Beeblebrox (with two heads and three arms) and the Puppet Alliance, bemoaning the move from puppet leaders to CGI monstrosities. The buffet was ghastly (greasy meat and raw pasta) but a few drinks (purchased from the supermarket) sorted out any complaints I might have had. Said hello to a few people, then watched that strangest of Dr Who movies “Abducted by the Daleks”, an illegal (unlicensed) soft-porn, not worth bothering with for the Dr Who-ness but very much worth tracking down for the unintentional comedy – the Daleks coughing “a-hem” to garner attention brought the house down.

Saturday was the busy day, one of the best convention quizzes I’ve ever witnessed. I only answered one question, but did so in style: there was a “Question of Sport” style visual round interspersing other rounds, the subject matter being vehicles in cult productions. The visual aids were small, you had to walk up to see. The very last vehicle I didn’t leave my seat, I just bellowed “The General Lee” at the host, winning a point. Surely they wouldn’t have had a cult-car round without The General? Of course not. Attended a humorous, and rather over-informative, panel on Tentacle Sex (an incredible phenomenon in Japan). Wrote a short review of “Abducted” for the convention newsletter (you have no idea how difficult I found it to write a family-friendly review) and by 8pm I had started a game of “Twilight Imperium” and epic board game of galactic conquest, diplomacy, and trade. By 10.30pm we, the six players, had finished the first round. Subsequent rounds went a bit faster, for a while, but by round six it was 4.30am, an no clear winner in sight. TI has a good deal of merit to it, but it’s imperfect. It’s a space-combat game pretending it’s a negotiation / strategy / diplomacy game. The combat works okay, but soon starts getting difficult to calculate, the technology tree is perfection, but the trading element is a no-brainer. The game has potential, but it’s just not quite there yet (depsite this being the third edition).

Sunday was a quiet day, went to a panel on sci-fi / fantasy in video games, bought a few books from the dealers, had a good chat with a project manager from Sony (games), and went to the Orbital ’08 planning meeting. I’m now committed-ish to writing a large Live Role Playing Game set in the Philip K. Dick universe. That’ll be interesting.