So, We're outta O-Week and my fresh n00bs are looking somewhat pwned. Goodness knows I'm feeling kinda pwned too.
This year has proved interesting so far - we seem to have scored a peculiar combination of 1st years!
It's looking more and more like lower OP cut-offs mean a higher proportion of high school kids. Compare this to the previous two years, our percentage of ex-TAFE or other students is lower (though this may be a consequence of a former TAFE lecturer moving to head up the games element at QUT).
Most interesting though are our international students, mainly dudes who've already done some interesting things in the past - some former engineering, graphic design and psychology students! I'd be keen to see what interesting insights these folks have to bring to bear on the subjects we'll be covering.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
OK, let's see if this turkey flies!
As I've mentioned previously, I'm trying out a few things with Unity3D and slowly learning how to use C# (which is freakin' agonizingly slow!) Let's see how linking to a build will work eh? Bear in mind that it's windowed really small, uses WASD and mouse to control and has no interactivity in there... YET.
There's a LOT of builder's debris in there and nothing's been textured/UV'd yet. I'm kinda winging it on this project -there's very little preproduction, and I'm just experimenting with how cool shapes look so it's been a very very slow process:)
There's a LOT of builder's debris in there and nothing's been textured/UV'd yet. I'm kinda winging it on this project -there's very little preproduction, and I'm just experimenting with how cool shapes look so it's been a very very slow process:)
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Angiogram Blues
Its a strange feeling having several strangers run a catheter through your femoral artery (from a groin based entry point). You can feel the damned thing crawling about in your torso, and it's more than a little unnerving.
The room is almost chilled, probably 20 degrees with a gentle breeze that blows over your body. The Nurses and Doctor have thoughtfully covered your feet with what feels like an electric blanket, but the rest of your body is covered in the thinnest of gowns and sticky plastic and paper coverings. Look up and you see a large xray device mounted on a robot arm. Periodically the doctor calls to the radiologist in the booth to shift it with cryptic acronyms, called more like bored liturgy than anything else. The arm whirls abruptly this way and that, pausing occasionally to make rapid fire snapping and crackling noises as though it's shooting a million rounds a minute.
Then comes the freaky hot and cold flush that washes over you chest first as they inject the x-ray opaque dye, then the strange angina pain as they inflate the balloon in a congested artery. Once, twice, three times as they try to shove the fatty deposits aside with a tiny spring that looks like it's a binder for a microscopic sketchpad. Eventually they spring pops open, locking into place and allowing a greater flow of life giving blood to starved regions south of the blockage.
I have no illusions, the deposit is still there, albeit pinned behind a dam of shape memory alloy wire. I have to make some changes - dietary, medication and a raft of others if I'm to make it through the coming years. I've been through this twice now - I can't recommend it as a fun way to spend Christmas.
The room is almost chilled, probably 20 degrees with a gentle breeze that blows over your body. The Nurses and Doctor have thoughtfully covered your feet with what feels like an electric blanket, but the rest of your body is covered in the thinnest of gowns and sticky plastic and paper coverings. Look up and you see a large xray device mounted on a robot arm. Periodically the doctor calls to the radiologist in the booth to shift it with cryptic acronyms, called more like bored liturgy than anything else. The arm whirls abruptly this way and that, pausing occasionally to make rapid fire snapping and crackling noises as though it's shooting a million rounds a minute.
Then comes the freaky hot and cold flush that washes over you chest first as they inject the x-ray opaque dye, then the strange angina pain as they inflate the balloon in a congested artery. Once, twice, three times as they try to shove the fatty deposits aside with a tiny spring that looks like it's a binder for a microscopic sketchpad. Eventually they spring pops open, locking into place and allowing a greater flow of life giving blood to starved regions south of the blockage.
I have no illusions, the deposit is still there, albeit pinned behind a dam of shape memory alloy wire. I have to make some changes - dietary, medication and a raft of others if I'm to make it through the coming years. I've been through this twice now - I can't recommend it as a fun way to spend Christmas.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
yeah, it's another tank. So sue me!
This is what happens when I'm left alone with some high end software. I go all juvenile and start making tanks.
The treads are immature, but they're at an OK stage of development considering the chassis and turret(s) need some love. What do you think dear non-existent readers? Suggestions (other than the sweary kind) gratefully acknowledged:)
A new project for the holidays!
Yes, I know it's an early start to the holidays - or at least it feels that way.
I've started building an environment in Maya and Unity - if nothing else I'll gain a better understanding of how to build up a decent workflow, etc. I've planted it all Here so if you're interested, feel free to check up on me - I intend to finish the bastard off before xmas!
I've started building an environment in Maya and Unity - if nothing else I'll gain a better understanding of how to build up a decent workflow, etc. I've planted it all Here so if you're interested, feel free to check up on me - I intend to finish the bastard off before xmas!
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
On becoming a Taliban...
A little dramatic perhaps, but I felt a curious flash of revelation whilst playing Red Faction 2 a little while ago.
I'd played through a couple of hours worth of random missions - there was a sufficiently amusing selection thereof. Free-form demolish this building, rescue these people using whatever method it takes (even ramming a truck through their house) as well as some linear scripted ones... but there was something hollow about the experience. I was supposed to be a Martian revolutionary, a kind of bad-ass space faring George Washington or something and yet I didn't really feel it. There was a very tenuous sense of connection to the NPCs that milled about the rebel bases in that they dressed much the same as I did, and were correctly aligned faction-wise to the mission givers back at the base. I had trouble pinning it down until I realised that the audio cues are rather ham-fisted; it's hard to empathise with people who only yell slogans like "I almost feel proud to be a Martian today" or "The EDF killed my mother just like that!"
It was at this precise moment that my mum happened to wander past me and mutter in very disappointed Farsi "Ugh, so you've joined the Taliban"
At first I thought this was a glib and stupid comparison. Sure, both Red Faction and the real life Taliban fight a guerrilla campaign against much larger, foreign forces for control of mostly arid desert like environments. Surely this was a silly comparison?
But I couldn't shake the thought that Mum had come across something actually rather clever.
I realised eventually that I'd been following a laundry list of revolutionary acts to do, no matter how apparently random them might seem. Demolishing artillery positions or watch towers made sense. But demolishing the Dust City town hall because the EDF had taken it over for use as a HQ? That seemed a little over the top; I gleefully did it by ramming multiple trucks through it and planting charges. Other priority targets were wind farms, mining machinery and even an apartment block.
Where was my faculty for critical thought? Why could I not determine which were and were not valuable targets?
In the end, I did it for the fun of working out how much damage and where to apply it on a given structure to make it topple over. I did it for the curiosity value - I wondered how they hell they could have made a level editor for the designers to use where the physics of the building was critical to being able to have dudes walking about inside and on top of it. Never once though, did I do it because of a diagetic need for me to rescue an oppressed people or because I sympathised with the Martian colonists' plight.
The Taliban comparison seemed apt therefore - extremists with a conviction about eradicating whole groups of people or structures from maps and history books; men who were inculcated in a warped version of Muslim doctrine. Extremists who thrive where there is no critical voice to counter their wild rhetoric, they are men who are disconnected from the flow of normal every day life - the quiet life of the family man, the businessman, the tradesman or the artisan were not for them. They sought to stand apart, to play a strange micro version of the grand Kissingerian game of geopolitical warfare. They may make the right noises about standing up for their oppressed Muslim brothers, but are they really? is it not the thinnest of veils, the faintest of pretexts?
Are they not, in a word, playing a game? Are they not then, the Red Faction?
I'd played through a couple of hours worth of random missions - there was a sufficiently amusing selection thereof. Free-form demolish this building, rescue these people using whatever method it takes (even ramming a truck through their house) as well as some linear scripted ones... but there was something hollow about the experience. I was supposed to be a Martian revolutionary, a kind of bad-ass space faring George Washington or something and yet I didn't really feel it. There was a very tenuous sense of connection to the NPCs that milled about the rebel bases in that they dressed much the same as I did, and were correctly aligned faction-wise to the mission givers back at the base. I had trouble pinning it down until I realised that the audio cues are rather ham-fisted; it's hard to empathise with people who only yell slogans like "I almost feel proud to be a Martian today" or "The EDF killed my mother just like that!"
It was at this precise moment that my mum happened to wander past me and mutter in very disappointed Farsi "Ugh, so you've joined the Taliban"
At first I thought this was a glib and stupid comparison. Sure, both Red Faction and the real life Taliban fight a guerrilla campaign against much larger, foreign forces for control of mostly arid desert like environments. Surely this was a silly comparison?
But I couldn't shake the thought that Mum had come across something actually rather clever.
I realised eventually that I'd been following a laundry list of revolutionary acts to do, no matter how apparently random them might seem. Demolishing artillery positions or watch towers made sense. But demolishing the Dust City town hall because the EDF had taken it over for use as a HQ? That seemed a little over the top; I gleefully did it by ramming multiple trucks through it and planting charges. Other priority targets were wind farms, mining machinery and even an apartment block.
Where was my faculty for critical thought? Why could I not determine which were and were not valuable targets?
In the end, I did it for the fun of working out how much damage and where to apply it on a given structure to make it topple over. I did it for the curiosity value - I wondered how they hell they could have made a level editor for the designers to use where the physics of the building was critical to being able to have dudes walking about inside and on top of it. Never once though, did I do it because of a diagetic need for me to rescue an oppressed people or because I sympathised with the Martian colonists' plight.
The Taliban comparison seemed apt therefore - extremists with a conviction about eradicating whole groups of people or structures from maps and history books; men who were inculcated in a warped version of Muslim doctrine. Extremists who thrive where there is no critical voice to counter their wild rhetoric, they are men who are disconnected from the flow of normal every day life - the quiet life of the family man, the businessman, the tradesman or the artisan were not for them. They sought to stand apart, to play a strange micro version of the grand Kissingerian game of geopolitical warfare. They may make the right noises about standing up for their oppressed Muslim brothers, but are they really? is it not the thinnest of veils, the faintest of pretexts?
Are they not, in a word, playing a game? Are they not then, the Red Faction?
Monday, November 23, 2009
Dante's probably in Infierno!
The animated version of the game (so loosely based on Dante's Inferno that it barely hangs upon it) is here. Well, at least it wasn't as bad as the Dead-space animated feature. The comments are... well, somewhat amusing.
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