Canadian Polar Bear Refugee

Bikini Girl Model Progress

2009-05-29T09:54:00.002-06:00

For a fun side project I am doing with the current Torque3D beta I decided to take the Left 4 Dead concept and vary it a bit so that it involves Bikini clad girls on a tropical island who are being captured and taken away by sea monsters. Ya its real '50s goofiness, but its also something I figured would be a hell of a lot of fun :)

Here is an in-progress shot of one of the girls:

Click for Larger Version

More to come later...

My Top 5 iPhone / iTouch Games

2009-05-25T10:00:00.002-06:00

I had a few moments so I thought that I would throw together a list of what my current 5 favorite iPhone / iTouch games are:

1. Oregon Trail

At the core of this game is the classic old educational Apple 2 game that we all had to play in school but Gameloft has done a serious facelift to the graphics and gameplay to make it more enjoyable. There are new resources mini-games (berry picking, fishing, telegram puzzle, hunting and panning for gold) that allow you to earn food, money and/or supplies the ability to choose a branching path to follow on the trail to Oregon and more. Its definately fun and a great bit of nostolgia, though I found at the end of my games I just skip all the mini-game options because I realize I do not need to do them all.

2. Kachinko

At the heart of this game is your typical match-3 puzzle game, but its been combined with a challenging Packhinko (or Plinko) like game aspect. Balls are randomly released fromt he top of the screen and will go through a varity of pegs and physics obstacles on its way to the bottom. Your job is to move the slots at the bottom of the screen to collect the balls in match-3 style gameplay. The game is only over if there are no more balls to be dropped or if one of your slots overflows, making Kachinko one of those perfect iPhone/iTouch games for a timekill while on the road or waiting for something, short, sweet and to the point!

3. Shift

Physics is combined with the accelerometer of the device to allow you to tilt the device in a direction to have various blocks or obstacles move in that linear direction. The goal of the game is to navigate your pieces through the puzzles that have been setup and there is a personal challenge to try to achieve this in a set number of moves. I like this game but there are some challenging levels that makes me have to put it down and come back later to it, but once again another one of those perfect iPhone games that last the right amount of time.

4. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Oddly enough this is one of those few ports of a PC or Console game that is actually very much like the main game. The game is more of a static platformer that requires the user to draw various patterns or symbols on the screen to utilize their lightsaber or powers. Beautifully done in 3D with a lot of prebaked bitmaps to sell the environment the only thing that prevents this game from being my #1 is that I find the iPhone and iTouch are devices you play games on for only a few minutes at a time, as such I have found it very easy to forget the patterns or symbols that I need to draw in order to succeed.

5. Vay

Vay is a port of an old Sega CD RPG game that is very reminiscent of a NES or DS Final Fantasy title. Vay can be a lot of fun, its probably one of the few RPGs I have found for the iPhone that doesn't resort come off as a lame Diablo clone and instead resorts to a clearn and classic look and feel towards its gameplay and presentation which I really appreciate (and wish they made more RPGs like this). If there is one complaint that I have, and it keeps the game at the bottom of my top 5, its that I found it pretty easy to forget which quests I was on adn where I was to go since like I said the device is more suited to 5 to 15 minutes of gameplay at a time than long spurts that a involved game like Vay requires. But still I have liked it.

Art Concept Books

2009-04-29T08:42:00.005-06:00

Lately I have been trying to draw more in my spare time, as such I have been trying to recoup my collection of drawing tools from Faber brush-pens, to PrimsmaColor markers, various pencils, Staples Optipoint Pens (an awesome gel pen that I have found great for random doodles and sketches since the ink flows really well and best of all the pens are dirt cheap) and lastly oil painting supplies. While visiting these stores I have manged to stumble upon some really cool book that cover some really need art-theory (as well have really cool pictures).

Mechanika: Creating the Art of Science Fiction with Doug Chiang
Doug Chaing is a really amazing concept artist who has done incredible work for various films and computer games and this book shows various concepts he independently designed and the workflow and techniques that he used to create them.

Drawing And Painting Fantasy Landscapes And Cityscapes
A cool concept book I found that has various samples and techniques for landscape and architecture.

50 Fantasy Vehicles To Draw & Paint: Create Awe-inspiring Crafts For Comics, Computer Games, And Graphic Novels
Another book of techniques and great samples that show some great design logic for creating various vehicles from pure mechanical sci-fi, to organic and of course a mixed bio-tech design too.

Kachiko for the iPhone & iTouch

2009-04-20T16:08:00.002-06:00

Late last week we officially released Kachinko: our Pachink inspired, match-3, puzzle game onto the Apple AppStore for the iPhone and iTouch devices. Here is a short video that I did of the game being played:

iKachinko - Kachinko for the iPhone, Live Demonstration from mgtgames on Vimeo.

Do you part and buy Kachinko today. Trust me it's an awesome game (and I am not just saying that because its a game I helped make).

50s Monster Movie Creature

2009-04-18T11:37:00.003-06:00

A while back on the GarageGames site I had posted a link to a small artist challenge to create a 50s inspired Monster or Scifi movie creature. The idea of the challenge was just to have some fun and see what people could come up with with a set of guidelines.

Click Here for Larger Version

My goal was to create a Creature from the Black Lagoon type monster combined with a few aspect of 'Ymir' from the movie 20 Millin Miles to Earth.

I spent a couple of evenings just doing research with Google Images, a copy of the incredibly awesome Dark Horse Comics version of the film (art by Art Adams), a pen and a pad of paper. Getting an idea for the shape and form and how the original Creature suit looked and pulling in elements of Ymir that I liked.

Next up I went into 3DS Max to create my 3D model for this creature. I kind of cheated here and repurposed one of my generic male models I created and did some quick modifications to get a generic form I could take into Mudbox 2009.

I probably dont need to display the work I did in Mudbox again (since its the first image that you see for this blog. But once I was done with Mudbox I exported the base data back out to 3DS Max (so I can make the character into something I can load into a game engine) and here is how it looks in Max with some viewport shaders.

You will have to forgive the blue normal map look of the model, I dont have a diffuse map ready for it yet (and there is no displacement map loaded to do the extra little modifications for the model).

More to come later...

It's Not Dollars But Your Personal Investment

2009-03-26T09:17:00.003-06:00

Isn't it interesting in indie game development when you see someone complain about the prices of the tools that they need to purchase (such as the game engine, programming or art tools) you just know that these same people will spend more than that in a year on upgrading/purchasing a new computer, buying books and training, accessing the internet on a fast high speed connection, paying for web hosting to promote their game or to run a SVN server for their team and many other things.

No one said making a game is supposed to be cheap or easy, it's a challenge that requires an huge investment. An investment financially and an investment from yourself to spend countless hours working on a dream you have and put in more blood, sweat and tears than you think you could possibly ever have. As such the real question people should be asking is not "How much does it cost to make a game?" but "How much of myself can I put into this so that I suceed?", and the true answer to that is far more than you can possibly expect. But then that is why making games isn't easy or cheap, that's why you don't see every joe bloe with a computer making a game for their best friends to play. If it was easy the magic that went into making it to deliver an entertaining experiance would be lost to its players.

Working with Mudbox 2009

2009-03-02T09:42:00.002-07:00

So I finally bit the bullet and purchased a high resolution DCC (Digital Content Creation) application. As you can tell by the title of this post I ended up going with Mudbox (instead of Zbrush) and the main reason for this is that I ended up liking the UI and controls as well as the painting tools of Mudbox more than Zbrush. Not that it really matters much though as both applications are capable of producing the same incredible level of work.

My first week with the application was mostly spent experimenting more with the different tools, goofing around and getting more familar with some sort of workflow that I could employ. I didn't produce anything worthy of showing off though until I stumbled upon this Vimeo demonstration of Mudbox:

Concept Sculpting in Mudbox 2009 Tutorial from Wayne Robson on Vimeo.

After watching Wayne Robson use the application and seeing his techniques he employed I felt pretty inspired to start fresh and try something new. So for the past few evenings when I had some free time (which isn't a lot with a toddler) I would load up Wayne's tutorial on one Monitor and Mudbox on the other and get to work. After a lot of pausing, playing and rewinding to review segments of the video over and over again I ended up with my own creation:

What I ended up with was a bit of an amphibious lizard guy. While I know its far from perfect I am pretty pleased with the fact that I was able to begin producing something worthy of showing off. So a big thanks goes out to Wayne Robson for creating such a cool and inspirational video.

The Age of Touch Computing... Hah!

2008-12-15T10:36:00.002-07:00

So it seems like Touch based interfaces are all the rage now thanks to cellular phones, so much so that a lot of PC vendors are now reintegrating the touch screen work they did with Tablet PCs into more mainstream models. Because of this a lot of people are starting to ask is this the "age of touch computing" and my answer is a honest "NO".

I've been working with touch based computing for the past 5 years now, developing artwork and interfaces for electronic gaming (Bingo) for one of the industries leaders. While this might not sound exciting to most of you who are reading this, electronic gaming such as this are for all intents and purposes the current industry leaders when it comes to touch computing adoption and usage. From my own personal experiance during this time I can honestly say that interacting with your computer screen via touch is rather intreging but it is also very novel (much like accelerometers in devices). Sure the demos look really cool and in some instances, almost entirely laid back-casual ones, it does work, but for any real practical computer usage it fails miserably for the following reasons:

1. Button Interaction. For all intents and purposes a button needs to be at least 24x24 pixels in size and you need to leave at least 6 pixels of space between buttons. This way you ensure that the end user can accurately hit the button that they intend to hit, but it also results in a lot of screen space wasted on buttons. Sure you could try to go small like the QWERTY on-screen keyboard with the iDevices... but anyone who has used that thing will tell you how frustrating it can be.

2. Accuracy. A finger is never going to be as accurate as a mouse or a pen, in fact you can be off as much as 20 pixels, or more for people with fat fingers, which is why you need such large buttons. As such using touch computing to control an art program will never happen and seeing someone use touch computing to write and edit a word document or spreadsheet is more of an exercise in anger management than it is at being productive.

3. Resistance. Basicly how the tech works is that it records some sort of resistance and conductivity from the end user. There are various techniques that screen makers use to do this, but the end result is that you pay for what you get. Some models only work well with heat (fingers), others work based on conductivity (fingers, rubber, etc.) and if you are really lucky you will find a screen based on the Wacom technology that also adds in conductivity and pressure. Sadly though I think you will see a lot of vendors use cheap screens which in turn don't always handle resistance well which means that gestures for manipulating the screen are a bit tougher to get in.

4. Gestures and Pattents. The idea of using gestures to control touch based interfaces is old, real old. Hell I can remember seeing tools 10 years ago for 3D art manipulation that let you do gestures on a wacom like tablet. So its no real surprise that gestures are an important aspect of working with touch screens that actually let you manipulate the view to move up/down, left/right, zoom and rotate. Sadly though companies like Apple are trying to pattent these gestures in a vain attempt to look like they are innovators, as opposed to the horrible copy-cat artists that they truely are IMHO.

5. Information overload. Those of you that have tried to browse the web on your Smart Phone will know what I am talking about here, the web (and most applications that we use today) have become cluttered with buttons, links and text. So much so that using a touch device to navigate the web or utilize an application is a real chore because you end up accidentally clicking on a lot of things you never intended to click on. As such to adopt Touch Computing there would need to be a massive industry wide push to remove the information overload that we see on the web and in applications and simply put that will never happen.

Ok so with that said it looks like Touch Computing is doomed to fail, and in many ways it will if people just assume that they can use the current applications that they use today to do Touch Computer without significant changes, but if PC vendors stick to providing novel approachs that appeal to the casual usage of Touch Computing they might just find a niche market, but they definately will not repalce current computer input devices with it, that's for certain.

But I Want To Be Evil

2008-11-18T08:37:00.002-07:00

Wrath of the Lich King, the expansion for the tremendously popular MMO World of Warcraft was released this past week. One of the new features that the game allows yout to do is create a new character class called a 'Death Knight', which is basicly another plate wearing DPS class for those of you semi familiar with the game.

One of the more interesting things that Blizzard has done with the starting area for the Death Knights is that the entire start is based on an instanced area, so its just you and other newly created Death Knights. What is really intersting however is that as you complete missions in this area, it actually appears to dynamicly change before your eyes by hiding and unhiding various creatures (and even other players), so that you are given the illusion that your actions actually have consiquences in the world (which is a first for WoW). Needless to say its very cool and inspiring stuff that is nice to finally see in World of Warcraft (as opposed to seeing the same mob you just killed respawned 30 seconds later), but that's not the real discussion of this blog post.

When you create a Death Knight, you fight for the Lich King's forces of undead evil. Which is a huge twist in the game considering you have always been forced to play as a 'goodie little two-shoe's', the end result of being able to play as this evil character is a refreshingly fun change in how you view the game. Gone is the illusion that you are culling some pack of wild wolves or misbegotten and aimless kobalds or orc, instead its a pure "be evil" mini-campaign of destruction, where you have to crush the forces of light that are opposing you in this starting instance.

Unfortunately though this "evil" campaign is short lived, after numerous missions of slaughtering the light and decimating their forces, you are soon sent on a larger mission to take out their leadership, but during the ensuing battle you aliegence gets switched (not by your conscent) and you soon find yourself allied to the very forces you were destroying, and the Lich King, who is the source of all your powers and abilities, is now your sworn enemy.

As a game developer I can understand why Blizzard cheaped out and went this route, it simply made things easier to integrate into the game so they don't have to worry as much about two different storylines, but as a person who enjoys playing games I have to say "what the fucking hell is up with this crap!". What happend to choice and giving the illusion that I have some influence in the world around me? Blizzard already has 2 factions (although really it should be 1 since they run down the same linear path, they just have seperate cities and can attack one another), so why not do much of the same and add in a 3 faction. An evil faction. It surely would not be difficult to use all of the existing game assets and setup to create a purely evil based campaign, so why not just do it and stop forcing players down this lame cookie cutter set of roles and storyline that no one really gives two shits about because they're too concerned with earning epic loot.

This is why I am excited to see what Bioware can do with their Star Wars MMO, they get the idea that creating unique experiances (within the limitations of the game) are just as importing as smashing enemies and earning loot. Sadly I can see that some of the guys at Blizzard get this too, but they're unfortunately handicapped for some reason from really making it happen.

Retro Gaming : Lawn Darts

2008-11-04T09:56:00.003-07:00

During this summer I went and visited my Grandfather (who incidently turned 95). While he is doing great for his age he has gotten in the mindset that he needs to rid himself of all the years of junk and clutter he has gathered and told us to take what we want out of his garage. Unfortunately I had a full car already, packing an infant 8 hours in a car will do that to you, so I had to bypass a few things for the real target I had been eyeing up since I was 5 or 6 and had enjoyed many summers with... the Lawn Darts.

Now these aren't your modern day, bottle nosed, weighted down "Lawn Darts" that they let kids play with today, these are the classic "take an eye out with a sharp pointed tip" Lawn Darts!

For those of you who never experianced Lawn Darts with the classic javeline's its pretty simple. You throw a targeting ring some distance away from you and give the javeline dart the olde underarm toss up into the air and towards the target. A relatively simple task that results in a lot of fun (especially if you are avoiding errant darts).

Playing Lawn Darts one is pretty amazed by the simplicity of it all, its a game of self challenge trying to best your last try and its a game of competition against the other guy, so social and solo. But it also goes to show you really do not need to clutter a game full of non-sense and fluff to make it fun (has anyone seen Sorry Sliders? It's some lame combination of throwing weighted Sorry pegs at one another on a small game board like it was a game of curling... very lame and unoriginal), just get down to the core basics of what makes it enjoyable, social gaming with friends (competition and sharing some laughs) as well as individual competition to do better than last time.

Needless to say I am pretty pleased to have saved this little bit of banned history and look forward to next summer where I can get a quick game of Lawn Darts in on the fresh new sod in the back yard.

Howitzer - Lore Invasion Style

2008-10-30T09:18:00.003-06:00

For the forthcoming siege gametype mission in Lore we needed a big powerful artillery cannon for the bases. Instantly what came to my mind was a Howitzer cannon that is used by pretty much every regular army on the face of the planet today. Of course though being Lore, I needed to make it a bit more "future like" and add some typical Lore flavor to it.

After a few sketches (sorry didn't scan them in yet), here is the polygonal model that will be used in-game:

And of course the obligatory UVW layout:

Next step the high poly version of the model, I will post those images in the next day or so.

The Cult of SoftImage

2008-10-27T09:28:00.002-06:00

It seems that the shit has truely hit the fan. Unlike the Alias purchase where Max and Maya users were concerened, but in a fairly polite way, about the future of their applications, the SoftImage purchase has been quite the opposite.

I hate to generalize the SoftImage users, but for the most part every hardcore user I have met has been indoctrinated into the "SoftImage is the greatest application ever" mentality from the very first day that they used it (personal opinion: its a good app, just not the 'end all, be all' that people claim). Unfortunately this eventually evolved itself into the whole "Cult of SoftImage", which is where we get our problem that we are in now. A full cross-internet smear campaign where these jokers are bashing what is really the only good move for a true future for SoftImage.

Contrary to what they will like to beleive SoftImage had no future with AVID. According to this article (which does a great job of outlining the purchase), SoftImage amounted to a paltry sum of $4 million in profit for AVID (on an estimated $16 million in sales). This is an incredibly low amount of money and really outlines how poorly SoftImage tools sold on market. Worse yet it also means that SoftImage tools do not benefit from a R&D level needed to continue to grow and succeed.

"...according to Marc Stevens, General Manager of Softimage, decided that to grow in the 3D market they would need to make a very significant investment and thus the best thing for both Softimage and AVID was to sell the division, "at that point we started a pretty extensive process, we spoke to a lot of people, ... Autodesk was not the first company approached by AVID" he commented to fxguide."

Reading what has been said it is pretty clear there was no future for SoftImage tools at AVID, its sales did not dictate an increase in R&D spending to ensure that the application would grow and AVID itself did not want to risk spending on an application that continued to be a distant #3 application in terms of sales. Yes SoftImage tools had made some good progress over the years, but in terms of where they are now, to where they were 5 years ago, the tools have gone from something incredible to something average simply because the competition has been evolving while SoftImage tools remained essentially stagnent (yes I place Max and Maya in the average level too, and I say average because no app is better than the other 3, it may have an area it excells in but it also has an area its weak in). So it makes no sense to me why the hell the "Cult of SoftImage" would be bashing this idea and Autodesk to no end... well except for the fact that the whole beleive system that made up the "Cult of SoftImage"" came crashing down on their heads.

Autodesk now Rules the Big 3 in 3D

2008-10-24T09:58:00.002-06:00

In case you missed it, Autodesk has just signed an agreement to aquire the SoftImage suite of tools from AVID for a paltry $35 million (much less than they paid for Alias). This means that Autodesk now controls the 3 biggest 3D application on the market and aside from Lightwave and some boutique tools such as Zbrush or Modo, really has no competition.

Personally though I am glad to see this happen. Not because I am a fan of Autodesk, but because I think that the developers of SoftImage were getting a royal screw job as a part of AVID. AVID's only desire is to make editing and compositing applications, it had no desire to be in the 3D market and was only in it because it coveted the editing tools SoftImage had (ie. SoftImage|DS). As such, its 3D tools were left in limbo with little support from the parent corporation to continue to evolve.

So how will SoftImage tools evolve under Autodesk ownership? Well simply put Autodesk invests something like $100 mill a year in R&D (it should be noted its pretty much the only 3D company investing serious cash like this), which in turn translates down into its many various 3D applications. 3DS Max and Maya have benefitted from this increased R&D and only a complete idiot would tell you that over the past five or six years that they haven't been slowly positioned into some powerful strategic positions and swayed the tide back in their favor. So it's not hard to see that SoftImage will benefit from being a part of the Autodesk umbrella as well.

Now I am sure that we will see a lot of fear mongering going around about this, with pissed off XSI users screaming bloody murder. But really I do not see any need to be concerned... well not yet at least.

iTGB... opening new door possibilities

2008-10-11T21:02:00.002-06:00

Max Gaming got our hands on iTGB, one of the two game engines produced by GarageGames to make Torque based games on the iPhone!

I have to say that I am personally pretty excited about this since one of the primary reasons for getting the iPhone (which is btw the worlds shittiest Cellular Phone on the market). Plus I really feel that it opens the doors to some good opportunities for us to produce some nice simple games that we normally would not have done because finding a market for them is pretty time consuming.

More to come about this later.

Do You Want to Beta a Mech Game on InstantAction?

2008-09-26T10:07:00.002-06:00

Lore Aftermath will be entering into its private-beta phase on InstantAction later on today. So if you were ever a fan of MechWarrior, Battletech, Shattered Steel, Gundam, Armored Core, Macross/Robotech or any other series with big giant robots and want to play a pretty cool game (shameless plug) with that sort of thing, then head over to InstantAction, signup and then let them know on the beta forums!

Lore Aftermath Video - Pressure Fault

2008-09-23T10:42:00.002-06:00

Here is a video of the mech game Lore Aftermath, a game that I helped develop that we are currently in the final testing stages before release on instantaction.com.

Lore Aftermath - Pressure Fault Game Play from mgtgames on Vimeo.

If you are curious what exactly I worked on here I did everything art related except for the weapons, weapon FX, the Lava particles and the arena wall structures that the player starts in (including mission design).

Pax08 - The Good, The Bad and the Really Late Blog Post

2008-09-22T13:58:00.003-06:00

Ok so PAX 2008 has been over for a few weeks now, but unfortunately I got caught up with a bunch of work and couldn't post about it until now. So here is my quick summary for PAX 2008...

The Good
- We demoed Lore Aftermath at the InstantAction / GarageGames booth in the expo hall on Saturday from 4pm to 6pm (closing). Adrian and I figured that we would get a good reception from people at the show, but what we got was an incredible reception. It turns out there are a lot of mech fans out there wanting a true mech game, so when they saw Lore being played on the big screens in the IA booth, they stopped by, tried it out for themselves and really enjoyed what they saw! They didn't care that it wasn't Battletech or Armored Core, they liked what they saw and wanted more of it!
- You know you have made a good game when other developers from the big AAA houses like Blizzard come up, play your game and then tell you afterwards how they liked it.
- We got 2 free meals off of GarageGames... score! ;)
- Our first official PodCast for Lore Aftermath was done after the show with Ian Torrey from IA. You can listen to it here to find out more about the game.
- Gamers got to see what they wanted at the show. Games they could play.
- There were some very cool costumes people came up with.
- Talking to other devs at the show was incredibly easy, there was no snobbish response, or "who the fuck are you and why should I talk to you" responses like you get at GDC when people are running from session to session. Just good honest feedback and talking about games.
- I got to meet a lot of the new faces at GG/IA I had not met yet, and also met some old friends too.
- You could buy items on the show floor if you wanted. As such you could buy games, books, tshirts, gaming devices, etc.
- The show was relatively under control and wasn't anywhere near the headache inducing levels of E3s. Everyone seemed to respect one anothers booths and weren't assholes about drowning out the competition because they had more money to invest.
- I got a chance to check out a few really cool games coming to Instant Action and the PC that I had not seen before. I have to wonder soon if companies will begin to use PAX not to demo finished products but to grab more in-development feedback with regards to their games.
- The coolest thing I got from PAX wasn't the Legions t-shirt, but actually the Fallout 3 "So You Want to Leave the Dome" booklet that they were handing out. Its a really cool and well done booklet that gives you a taste of the Fallout world (and as someone who never played Fallout, I went through this booklet cover to cover and enjoyed it).

The Bad
- Why the hell is the registration booth on the 4th floor of the convention center? As someone who bought his 3-day pass at the show, I have to say finding this thing was a huge inconvenience.
- Please someone give me a freaking map & schedule of events in my hand-outs I get when I register. I missed a number of good talks and wandered around the first couple of hours aimlessly looking for the few posters of the PAX layout. This was not cool guys.
- Some kid thought it would be cool to have a shot of someone else in a Master Cheif (from Halo) costume beating him up... unfortunately it ended up looking like the Master Cheif was gonna tea-bag him instead. I didn't take a picture of this but I am sure if you look hard enough on the internet you will find it, I was simply too disturbed to want to look at it anymore.
- Some game demos had really really long lines to check out. Maybe it was the fact that there were 50,000 people at PAX, but it seemed like some companies were ill prepared for delivering the good. Left 4 dead, DragonAge, Fallout, WoW: Wrath of the Lich King were really bad.
- Free what? Unfortunately because you could buy things on the show floor there wasn't a lot of free schwag to give out.

iPhone Week 3...

2008-08-08T10:01:00.002-06:00

Ok so it's now my third week with the iPhone and I figured it would be worthwhile posting a quick follow up to mention what I feel about the device now that the excitement of owning one of these things is gone.

At this point I would honestly say I have mixed feelings about the device. As a phone is above average. As a PDA, once you get the email configured (no fault of the phones), its pretty schmexy, I love not lugging around 15 pounds of laptop. I still hate iTunes and the Apple Store is so woefully inadaquate for selling software that it makes my brain hurt at how a company the general masses think is so "brilliant" can be so stupid at how it sells software (but oh that's right, Apple doesn't really know how to sell software without slagging its competition with TV ads that are outright lies).

The biggest disappointment I have had thus far is the fact that the iPhone SDK requires a Mac. When I got my phone I took a look at the app store and saw pretty much 95% crap/overpriced items on there, but it did inspire me to want to maybe write a few small apps of my own. Sadly this dream is done for until Apple gets off its collective ass and smells the coffee by releasing the SDK for Windows and Linux. I honestly do not know what they were thinking but 95% of the computer work does not use a Mac, so why they chose to cut this massive market segment out from developing for the phone IMHO shows that they are either ignorant and inept or theyre being anti-competative and are trying to force people to buy Macs to really extend the iPhone capabilities and make it great.

A minor disappointment is that for some reason, if I change the ports on my email, it somehow fucks up the phone and prevents it from connecting to the 3G network of my carrier... WTF. So each time this happens (luckily I am done configuring the email) I have to reset the phone's settings. GAH! I had to learn this the hard way by waiting on hold to my carrier for them to give me that 2 minute solution :(

A minor annoyance is the fact that for some reason now, my keypad on the iPhone is horribly laggy. Maybe I am trying to type too fast but I can end up whole sentences ahead of what the phone is displaying on the screen and then I can watch it play cathup. I am not sure what is going on here but it seems like a major flaw to me which makes using the phone for anything more than a quick email response kinda useless. If anyone has any suggestions on fixing this please let me know.

Another minor annoyance is using the web browser and posting in a forum. For some rediculous reason, each type you type a letter in a forum post, the retarded Safari browser decides to scroll the screen suddenly up to the top of the screen and then back down to the forum post. I have found if I zoom out of the forum post (which is a bit tricky because the keyboard for the iPhone takes up so much screen) I can get around this issue... but reading what I have typed becomes a bit tricky :(

As for any new positive things to say about the phone, I haven't really experianced any since my initial post, but if I do I will be sure to mention it.

iDs Rage Requires BluRay For Best Graphics? WTF?

2008-08-05T09:18:00.002-06:00

While on the road to my grandfathers 95th birthday I read an article on my iPhone from Gamastura entitled "QuakeCon: Carmack Talks Blu-ray Advantage Over Xbox". The jist of the article as I understand it is that apparently iD's new game "Rage" won't be as good on the PC and 360 because of texture and audio compression.

Now to some people they might be turn this into a PS3 vs 360/PC debate, myself however I have to wonder what the fucking hell anyone should give a shit about whether the data is compressed or uncompressed. Why? Well great games are those that are fun to play. Compressed or uncompressed data has nothing to do with gameplay.

I will tell you what isn't fun though... load times for games, and I can fucking guarentee you that if iD thinks that Rage will be a bundle of joy because of a lack of data compression, what won't be fun is the end user waiting minutes on end for the dammed game to page from the optical disc to their machine, and then their machine trying to figure out WTF to do with all this data. I already hate the amount I have to wait right now for my console games to load, nevermind when I have to page down gigs and gigs of data for a mission environment. I can just see it now, players impatiently waiting as they watch their screen say "Game Loading... estimated time for completion, 30 minutes".

But maybe iD will suprise us and in between load times we can play one of their older Quake or Doom games and completely forget about the fact that this wonderfun technological triumph that is Rage is loading in the background. Then while you are in the middle of a rocket jump, your screen will flash over and say "Rage is now loaded" and the player will respond with "Rage... what the hell is Rage, I was playing Quake! Get me back to my game before that newb guns me down!"

So now Rage loads up and we go and play, shoot shoot, drive your vehicle... let the system page the data as we travel in a fast moving vehicle, surely we won't mind a second or two of lag for the opportunity to see a spec of dirt in such fine HD glory will we? I don't know about you, but I hated Oblivion on the 360 because of this, so I am just dreading the fact that I will be trying to play an action game with any sort of paging going on.

Maybe I could be wrong. But I have a sneaking suspicion I will be right and in the end if iD does go down this route we as the consumer will suffer from broken promises and another boring tech demo of engine technology.

Going from PvE to PvP in WoW

2008-07-30T08:57:00.003-06:00

Like most World of Warcraft players I am incredibly bored at the moment with the game. My characters are at level 70 and I have done probably as much raid content as I can considering how god dammed difficult it is to get a 25 man run going when all anyone wants to do is run Karazahn for badges or get their 'Charity Purples' by playing Battlegrounds/Arenas. As such I have started to level a new character but this time I decided to go not on my usual PvE (players vs environment) server but on a PvP (player vs player) server.

I had always been curious to see how this would work out, and as luck would have it a few friends of mine were on a PvP server so it made the hop pretty easy. I entered into this server thinking I would need to watch my back, gain some new and interesting experiances in a game I already knew and have some fun in the process. However the real truth of the matter is far from what I stated.

For the most part PvP on WoW seems more about leveling your character as quick as they can to level 70 than it is about PvP. Once you hit level 70 you go and grief the hell out of everyone else in some vein attempt to make up for those times some level 70 asshole corpse camped your body in some low level town or zone.

Sorry but aside the some pre-pubescent kids living in his parents basement, who exactly thinks this is fun? Where are the raids on the enemy Captial Cities I had heard of, where factions would try their best to nuke off a Leader/Boss of one of the cities? Or the idea of Guilds taking on other Guilds. This is the same lame gametype from a PvE server but with the option of some cowardly player being able to kill you when your back is turned... lame.

Because of this experiance here is what I am finding are the unwritten rules of playing on a PvP Server:

- You do not really PvP until you hit level 70, until then its considered faux paux to PvP in the world against the other faction.
- Players are apparently afraid of karma biting them in the ass if they do PvP some guy on his own. So the general rule of thumb is don't attack someone if they are on their own.
- You never really want to PvP someone your own level, always pick on a guy lower level than you, in a low level town where the guards for the most part will ignore you.
- If your do PvP against someone your own level and lose you should immediately call all your friends for help, or conversely think that you are some sort of genious by bringing in your twinked out level 70 character to extract revenge.
- Never PvP unless you outnumber your opponent. 2 on 1 is always better than 1 on 1.
- If you do kill someone off easily, you should corpse camp them for the next 5 to 10 minutes to remind them of your vast superiority. Add in another 5 minutes if you are vastly higher level to the target you killed.
- Why PvP in the world when you can PvP in a battleground instead?

So what could Blizzard do to make PvP servers more enjoyable?

- Reward world PvP at a much higher rate than Battleground PvP. Give the player 5x more points for killing someone in the world since there is way more of a challenge and risk to do so.
- Create more of a reward for killing the city bosses. Maybe they should drop Badges of Justice, give a ton of honor points, vendors dont sell and/or increase the cost of buying items in towns aligned to that faction? Do something at least to encourage it.
- Make city/town guards smart. No one fucks around with PvP in the Goblin towns because those guards are tough as nails. They lock you down and then beat you stupid. Do the same with city/town guards as well since these places are supposed to be refuges for players not concentrated killing zones.
- Punish corpse camping by giving negative honor. You got the guy. There's no need to sit there and harass the player, there is no honor in that.
- If a player is 20 levels lower than you, make them a negative honor target as well unless they attack you first. With the way that level 70 gear is so grossly overpowered its not even considered unfair PvPing anyone lower than level 50. It's just inhumane.
- Create more PvP gear for characters level 1 thru 59 (Honor points only), nothing fancy just good green/weak blue level, and have one central location for all this gear. Currently players in this level range have to run about and try to find the vendors... something which I would bet 90% of the players in the game have no idea how to do.

iPhone, The First Weekend

2008-07-28T09:13:00.002-06:00

I usually detest travelling because it means that I have to lug around a shit-ton of electronic equipment in order to stay connected. Worse yet I am paranoid about moving my equipment around for fear of losing information on the device, so if you saw me in the airport I am one of those guys cluthing the laptop bag as if it were my life... which isn't far from the fact since I work at home as an indie developer and don't necessarily have much for fancy backup systems, just a portable HDD and some DVD-Rs. As such I have been eyeing up PDA devices for the past few years, trying to find that perfect one that meets my needs.

Now I would like to say that I chose to get an iPhone because it's the best thing on the market. But the sad, honest truth of it all is that I really did not consider getting one until I saw that I could get the Torque Game Engine's running on the iPhone SDK. This really excited me because we use Torque a lot at work for the stuff we do, so not only as there a possibility that we could maybe put some of our stuff on the iPhone but now I could convince myself that buying the phone and writing it off was a good idea. All that I had to do was convince my wife, who reminded me that I was entitled to "treat myself" to new things once in a while... which translated from woman-speak meant "sure you can get one, just get one for me as well".

For the most part the phone is pretty sleek and easy to use. Though as a iPod virgin, the lack of any sort of instructions on how the dammed thing operates annoys me (bad Apple, for $350 could you try not to be a bunch of cheap fucks and put in a tiny 50 page booklet on the basics of the phone?), so I am still learning things about this phone today and will probably continue to do so for the next few week.

So here are some of my quick thoughts on the iPhone after using it for a weekend.
- On Syncing the phone to the PC: Using iTunes the device was able to quickly pull over all my bookmarks and contacts... which I then had to go and edit down (since most of my bookmarks and contacts are there for long term storage and not day to day usage) and then disable the syncing of bookmarks and contacts so I don't nuke anything on either device.
- iTunes: I hate it. Once again the lack of instructions here is rediculous (I spent a good hour or two doing the old "hunt and peck" approach of figuring out what the software does) and now I have an invasive Apple brand application trying to take priority of loading various files on my PC.
- The web feature is pretty cool and I like the fact that if there is wifi in the area the device will try to connect to it first. It's also completely WYSIWYG with only a few issues such as trying to type in a forum post when the screen isn't zoomed into the field in a PHP3BB board.
- The email functionality is pretty good too, though setting it all up to work, due to SMTP and POP configurations by the ISPs I use and having to remember my email passwords wasn't much fun but I cannot fault the device for this. Now that it is working its great.
- The app store for the phone is pretty lame. There is no real opportunity to look at demos or screenshots, so IMHO its pretty hit or miss what you are going to get. Though I will admit I am thinking of trying my hand at programming again to maybe create a little app of my own.

That's all for now... more later.

Postive Study Results for an Education Game I Helped Make

2008-06-16T13:47:00.002-06:00

About a year ago now I helped create some art for DimensionM, an educational game produced by Tabula Digita. DimensionM initially began its concept as a game called Dimensia (a game I also worked on), a single player game in which the player was trapped on a reserach island where experiments had gone crazy and strange creatures had evolved. In both of these games you needed to utilize math skills, and not l33t deathmatch/killing skills, from around the grades 4 thru 6 range to complete the puzzles.

Throughout the development of DimensionM, Tabula would tell us how the kids really liked the concept of the game and couldn't get enough of it and would in fact stay late after school to continue to play it. Well now there is some scientific proof that shows that these types of serious/educational games really do benefit children (as someone who played educational games back on the Atari XE computer I can attest to this already, but I guess some people need reearch proof that it really works).

I think its pretty cool to see work that you have done become very well recieved by the target audience, and even more so to see that it has helped benefit them. Even better is the fact that our team (Maxgaming and 21-6) was able to do this on time and on budget and while completing all the goals we had set out on top of the fact that we had to help bail out the team that was involved in this project as well. So this was a real double-win IMHO and has put a nice positive spin on my day.

My Response to Bill C-61 to Ministers Prentice and Verner

2008-06-12T15:56:00.001-06:00

The following is an email response I have sent to Canadian Ministers Prentice and Verner, authors of this latest "attempt" at copyright reform here in Canada (better known as Bill C-61):

I applaud you for attempting to get a first salvo in to sway the public opinion towards your side, but unfortunately the word is out about Bill C-61.

I am dismayed at your vein attempt to masquerade the fact that Bill C-61 is anything more than an attempt to rob Canadians of their rights for fair use for content that they legitamitely own or have access too and in turn give far too much in the way of rights and guarentees to large multi-national corporations. In effect treating honest Canadians like criminals for doing non-criminal acts.

Do not get me wrong, I am a creator of digital media content myself and understand that piracy is an issue and that copyright does need to be updated and refined as your culture and society advance. But it must be done so in a careful balance that protects both the rights of the all consumer and producers, not a small select set of corporations that are too draconian to make the necessary business changes to meet the demands of todays economy and market, not a small, select set of corporations who are using laws and lobbyists to push their agendas while appearing as though they are the weak and undefended victim in all this, which they are most certainly not.

I have already written my MP (Mike Lake, P.C.) and asked that he not support Bill C-61 and it is my hope that both Mr Prentice and Verner will withdraw their bill as they will see that the vast majority of Canadians will never support a Bill such as this which takes away their legitmate rights towards materials they have legally purchased or have access to.

Lastly I feel that I should remind you that as an MP your job first and foremost is to protect the rights of Canada, its citizens and most importantly the constituents that you represent, and in my honest opinion, your Bill C-61 fails on all of those.

Logan Foster

Once again I ask that each and every citizen of Canada write their MP and inform them not to support Bill C-61.

The Canadian Government... Looking to Fuck over the rights of Canadians Apparently

2008-06-12T14:12:00.002-06:00

Those of you in Canada might know that today the ruling party of our government has tabled some legislation today which attempts to reform Canadian copyrights... unfortunately this reform is for the benefit of large multi-national media comglomerates who are looking to fuck us all over for an extra buck.

What is interesting, is that this bill was tabled by two new ministers who are happy to sell out to these companies, Prentice and Verner and not Bev Oda (who previously tried to sell us all down the river with her attempts at copyright reform in Bill C-60, which was thankfully withdrawn after some large protests).

Ministers Prentice and Verner made a first salvo attempt to deflect damage by sending out a mass email to those who had concerns with Bill C-60 earlier this year by explaining that this was a wonderful change for all Canadian. What they did not explain was also how it screws everyone over.

For a better explaination of what's going on one simply needs to read Michael Giest's blog. For the record, Mr Giest is a copyright lawyer and law professor at the University of Ottawa, so you can trust that he knows what he is talking about.

Here are some interesting points that he brings up:

"The effect of the digital lock provisions is to render these rights virtually meaningless in the digital environment because anything that is locked down (ie. copy-controlled CD, no-copy mandate on a digital television broadcast) cannot be copied. As for every day activities like transferring a DVD to your iPod - those are infringing too. Indeed, the law makes it an infringement to circumvent the locks for these purposes."

"The digital lock provisions are worse than the DMCA. Yes - worse. The law creates a blanket prohibition on circumvention with very limited exceptions and creates a ban against distributing the tools that can be used to circumvent."

So it looks like its time to call up your local MP and point out to them that you do not support this bill and that they as your representative should not either.

Mental Ray Materials Site

2008-06-03T09:09:00.002-06:00

I found out about this very cool website called Mental Ray Materials (or MR Materials as its known as) that has been setup by Jeff Patton and some associates. The site offers a bunch of tips, tricks, Mental Ray shaders (for various 3D apps that support the rendering app) and materials to make your Mental Ray renders shine.

Being a bit of a novide with Mental Ray (developing games will do that to you) I have found the site to be a pretty cool resource and well worth recommending for others to check out.