What if…

Posted at 19:00 on 26 May 2022 | Add Comment |

I hadn’t done anything in Blender for months, so I started a project to re-make a prop from the 2002 film The Time Machine. The film itself is moving art. You could watch it simply for the visuals, or the music. It has been a favourite of mine since I first saw it. On reflection and despite appearances, it is remarkable what a dark story it has. It is sad at the beginning, it is sad in the middle, and dystopian doesn’t begin to describe the ending.

It took me 7 or 8 weekends to make, I have lost count. It is the most complex thing I ever made in Blender by several orders of magnitude, and I learned a lot about detail.

I put in as much detail as I could bear, and ended up making a few things that aren’t visible in the final render, like most of the battery bank console pictured below left. I knew the display on the main console wouldn’t be visible, but I just had to make it.

It might be the most excellent steam-punk contraption ever constructed.

Posted under Blender, Pictures

Update to YTDLF

Posted at 00:54 on 30 March 2022 | Add Comment |

I’ve made some long overdue fixes to the youtube-dl front-end. Hopefully this will inspire the youtube-dl developers to update as well.

I haven’t been doing the background art jams lately, so there hasn’t been any new Blender art to post. In fact I haven’t done any Blender in months. I should fix that.

There haven’t been any post-worthy updates either. I am just working, as usual, trying to finish a project. My game ideas keep getting better, you should watch this space. Maybe you could be part of the future.

Posted under Blender, Future plans, Linux, New game

Gran Turismo’s Historic Racing Car Cup graphed

Posted at 18:28 on 3 October 2021 | Add Comment |

I have been playing Gran Turismo a lot lately, and the one race series that most players will agree is most difficult, is the Historic Racing Car Cup, where only cars from 1979 or before are allowed to participate. The problem is, the fastest cars of this era are expensive as hell.

I find that the in-game prices are roughly analogous to a car’s real-world price. Old racing cars are rare collector’s items and so are extremely expensive, in the real world and in the game. For instance, here are all the old cars over 1 Million credits. Cars that weigh more than a ton are left out. (more…)

Posted under Games, I'm playing, Pictures

The one that got away

Posted at 00:11 on 12 September 2021 | Add Comment |

Many months ago there was a game jam with the theme “a glass of water”, and I made this:

I had come up with a setting that has a very low art burden, and in my brain this meant I could fill up development time with fancy blender water physics sequences and groundbreaking new mechanics for adventure games. But time is something you have very little of in a game jam, and this I had yet to fully appreciate.

In the end the new mechanics were too good for such a small game, and I didn’t work on it any further. All I did for this project was this test scene and a lot of design. It is probably the cancelled project I spent the least time on, but the one I still feel most guilty about abandoning, because just look at it. It’s beautiful.

Posted under Blender, Games, Pictures, Uncategorised

First release of youtube-dl front-end

Posted at 03:33 on 1 September 2021 | Add Comment |

I’ve been using youtube-dl for years and for some time I’ve needed a front-end for it, so that my command-line history is not filled with videos I watched when I should have been working.

Enter then the youtube-dl front-end, which allows me to keep a history of downloaded media, arranging the files in their correct folders, and a few other features. The other front-ends for youtube-dl I’ve run across on the internet all seem to suffer from bloat, which is something I like to avoid whenever possible. Hopefully others will find a good use for it too. It is currently at version 0.5, but everything should be working. So if something isn’t working, and you can type on a keyboard, then let me know.

Updates on other things: The site’s been quiet, but I have been working like a bastard behind the scenes. At the moment I try to keep to a pattern of working on one project on weekends and another during week days, which seems to be going well.

Posted under Future plans, Linux, Releases

Linux build of Starship Light beta released

Posted at 05:35 on 8 January 2021 | 1 Comment |

OR How to Learn C++ One Compiler Error at a Time

It wasn’t easy, but I got this game running on Linux, on my distro, at least. I was running into the kind of barriers one finds at the end of reality, so I decided to write a new AGS sockets plugin for Linux from scratch. It’s simple compared to even the oldest existing AGS sockets plugin that I know of–I won’t be making an AGS torrent client with it anytime soon–but it does what I need, I think.

So far, testing the game in a live environment has been interesting. Much like I imagine space exploration, I keep finding things in my own software that I can’t explain. But, onwards and upwards.

Posted under AGS, Games, Linux, New game
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