Yeah I'm not expecting many toots either.
But at least I went to the Southfield and got to talking with Cartoon James's girlfriend Jen, about the intricacies of shotguns, clay pigeon shooting and how much we can't stand MMOs, so there's one toot, you fuckers!
Also, Keith Olbermann's Special Comment article on Hillary's rather dumb assassination comment. No background knowledge needed, just watch it, it's quite awesome.
a) Tell you why I friended you,
b) Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a color, a photo, etc.,
c) Tell you something I like about you,
d) Tell you a memory I have of you,
e) Ask something I've always wanted to know about you,
f) Tell you my favorite user pic of yours,
g) In return, you must post this in your LJ.
OR I'll just insult you and laugh.
Things that are currently made of win:
-UT3
-Our Unreal guy in Collaborative Working and Enterprise.
-Skin modifier
-This image
For my Collaborative Working and Enterprise module. Model, normal maps, ambient occlusion maps, painted diffuse, all in three long ass Max-crash filled days, also involving a 16-hour Max stint on Sunday while you fuckers were watching Iron Man. :B
And yeah, I just finished it now at this stupid hour. All ready for today's trip to Eutechnix. :)
This reminds me, I need to bug Halch if they still want me and apply to Atomic Creations, another local company. :V
Sorry if this comes off a little mopey, but ages 7-15 sucked, so blow me. :P
Got to speak to a lot of art guys from Codemasters, Rare, Rebellion, Blitz/Volatile Games and Sony and I'm getting a general consensus on what they want to see in my portfolio, which amounts to the following:
MOAR 3D PLOX!!
The concept and illustrative work I put in there was nicely received, but it's not material that would clinch the deal and actually get me a job since Concept Art jobs are fucking gold dust. Whereas angling myself towards a 3d portfolio would actually get me a real chance of landing a job with one of the above companies, which ain't bad when you think about it.
So this summer, my final year project just got a lot more bigger. Lots of 2d concepts of characters with completed models! :)
Some samples from my portfolio.
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n
http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n
Research
Paradigms
I've effectively given up on the module now and I've cut short my several essays since I gather that both I and the examiner would have noticed by this point that
I DO NOT FUCKING DO STATISTICAL ANALYSIS. Honestly, friggin' Masters degrees...
I did Business Studies for several years, I can bullshit essays until the cows come home, unfortunately, with an assignment brief like "Conduct a systematic review and then write a research proposal" all doctorate style with proper Harvard-style reference formatting and the use of statistical equations and formulas that are named after various very clever people with "M.Acc" after or "Dr." before their name, then eventually what little you know on the subject is very quickly going to rise to the surface of your bullshit and anyone with a whiff of a Doctorate will notice immediately.
Fuck this shit I'm going to work on other, significantly more RELEVANT material instead:
p.s. Yes I thought of this image too.
Such as this Anatomical study model (for Portfolio class) which I'm about to normal map and texture and add to my portfolio ahead of the Games Grads North conference:
Zbrush is made of so much awesome.
I'll also have to hand in my Unreal Level and the in-game animations the week after next followed by our Collaborative working class the week after that.
All I want is to do character shit and hurry the fuck on with my final project, come out with an awesome folio piece and then get a local games job so I can have some fucking money for a change. >:T
Because if there is it's very annoying. :|
I'm not normally one to give a damn about people cheating in games, just as long as it doesn't cramp on my fun, I normally couldn't care less. But could people at least be subtle about it?
How to tell a hacker:
1) Scoreboard - at the very beginning of each TDM match, a hacker will always accelerate away in the lead by a pretty huge kill/death margin. But so could good players, so in isolation, this can only serve as a starting point.
2) Headshots - Head hitboxes in CoD4 are relatively big, but if someone is constantly scoring only headshots, then there's another cause for suspicion, bonus triple suspicion points if they get multiple headshots on seperate players within a split second. i.e. Their name appears in the kill log more than once with a headshot icon. (The kill log messages disappear FAST)
3) Wallshots - In CoD4, there's been no secret made of the fact that you can shoot through walls with weapons of a big enough caliber, but when they nail you with their first shot through a wall, that's a little too lucky, I reckon, the odds of such a shot being a little low. Bonus points for first-shot headshots, sure sign of a wallhacker.
4) Ultra-quick reaction times - Only really noticeable when you're using a stealth build (Silenced weapon, don't appear on radar, silenced footsteps), but your general experience with a stealth build if you're running in parts of the map where you don't have teammates, is that you either end up running face-on into people, leaving about a seconds-worth of confusion time on their part before they start shooting, or you have the drop on some poor sap when you can pretty much walk up to them and stab them with your knife. In the first instance, the player who killed you may have gotten lucky or they were not paying attention to the radar, old-school FPS style, either way, that's fine, unless the reactions were absurdly quick. But it's when the guys who you have the drop on, all of a sudden flick round without so much as a turning animation and face directly at you while shooting (again, bonus points for headshots), then my suspicion is peaked a little. Out of all the directions they could snap a quick look and instantly start shooting, what reason would they have to start shooting in my direction? Stealth builds give no clue or warning to players at all and it's the reaction times upon seeing stealth build players that separate honest players from the cheaters.
5) Snipers - Sniper-hackers are tricky ones to uncover, since they will most often be aiming at highly likely places that people will walk out and headshots are common anyway. But nontheless, I did manage to uncover one sniper just today by throwing a smoke grenade at a low wall, waiting until it spreads and engulfs a full 5-metre area of that wall, then watching myself get headshot by a suspected sniper, through the thick smoke, as my head was rising and falling during the climbing animation. Lucky? Maybe, if he didn't fit the bill for conditions 1,2 and 4 anyway.
6) Spectate - When you just really need to be sure, there's really no better substitute for just looking through their eyes and watching how they shoot. Honest players scan for targets and the smoothly keep their crosshair over places they suspect enemies to be. Aimbot hackers have their crosshair locked in position and view movement is often extremely rough and jagged, while wallhackers look at walls a lot, in the case of point no. 3, the wallshooters, they'll squeeze off a few aimed shots through walls rather than the general tactic of grabbing a light machine gun and spraying through it.
The more of these conditions are met, the more likely the person is hacking. And I've found a lot of hackers in CoD4 to my dismay.
EDIT: Bear in mind, CoD4 having cheaters does not surprise or bother me greatly, so save the inevitable "HURR WASNT THAT OBVIOUS? OMG U SO DUM HURR". I'm just disappointed that with the many FPSs I've played over my PC gaming life, CoD4 has such a poor anti-cheat system in the form of Punkbuster.
No more being fucking bored without having any games to play. I can actually play the myriad of online FPSs I own!
No more sitting on my arse because I can't even get fucking STARTED on a piece of Masters work that requires image sources and information on how to use the FUCKING HORRIBLE PIECE OF RETARDED BUGGED BOLLOCKRY THAT IS UNREAL ED 2. (P.s. AI Pathing and scripted sequences are horrible)
No more hobbling off to the Athena building to do really arse work on Research Paradigms!
Wheeee! Fucking awesome!
EDIT: Excuse me, I have work to do now.
-An internet connection - the uni house connection seems to have died so I'm back home.
-+2 Parental Units and associated good food for a change
-Access to more Crack Of Duty 4 multiplayer
-The ACOG sight for the M4. PEW PEW!! :V
-More money from parents per week because apparently I'm eating too much cheap Iceland crap and not cooking enough for myself.
-Access to local awesome Carvery restaurant
-A bath. Uni bath broke temporarily and flooded the bathroom and kitchen...
-A copy of Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Dekalog', a series of ten 1-hour movies themed on the Ten Commandments. p.s. Oh. God. Wow.
-A shitload of Masters work to be done by the end of the month. Research Paradigms, my Collab. Working project where I model and rig a robot for Unreal 3, animation for my 3d unreal project and a bombload of life drawing to do.
-Another cheapo £1.99 black bandana after I lost my last one :>
I have lost:
-A few points of geographic latitude southward. Back in Manchester again.
-2 stone in weight. I know! What the fuck?!
-Any illusion that 300 was in any way a movie I could sit and enjoy. I would try and switch off my brain and enjoy the action if the action wasn't so completely tasteless and jarring in it's effort to be overtly cool, although if the Neoconservative propaganda link in my mind didn't jump out every two seconds and hit me in the face, I could probably look past that.
-Any illusion that Die Hard 4 was anything more than a REALLY SHIT season of 24. John McClane was supposed to be a wiseguy, not Jack Bauer.
-My innocence now that I've played through the Shalebridge Cradle level in Thief 3. Sweet Jesus that was awesome and horrible.
-My password for the SomethingAwful forums. :P
-All track of how the US Presidential race is going. AFAIK Obama is leading and Hillary is doing her best to rip the party apart.
As opposed to entering a race yourself ('A-spec') and doing all the hard work of actually driving, you can also go into Director mode ('B-spec') and play as the pit manager, while the AI takes over your car and drives, while you look at stats and tell it when to pit in, giving you all the prize money if it wins the race/championship.
What this essentially means is, you can enter a championship series or race with a grossly overpowered highly-tuned car that the AI can easily win with, put the controller down and....do something else.
I am impressed.
I'll probably just leave it running on a 200 lap endurance race, fuck off for an hour, then come back and accept the huge prize money and whatever, thus making the tedious parts of the game very, very easy. Also so I can save up and buy one of these lovely bastards =3
My chair and my PC wobbled while I was playing the Shalebridge Cradle level from Thief 3, which is to me, without doubt the scariest game level in any game ever. Door was closed, lights were off actual scary zombie vibes about.....
Hold me. :(
Ian and his paintfully long, arty, uninterrupted takes. :T
Although goddamn it the location was awesome. Ian has photos, I shall bug him, as it's essentially reminiscent of one of those Urban Exploration trips where people explore old mines, psychiatric wards and factories which haven't seen bipedal life for the last twenty years. Creepy and oddly fucking beautiful.
It's also nice to be around someone with genuine enthusiasm for the art, more so to work as the actor's "artist" consultant since the actor draws an image of a church abbey and I have to show him how to act like a convincing artfag.
------------
In other news YAAAAAY Robo Chris got his emulator working with Kalliera so YAAAAAY I gets more intarnet SF3!
Remy. :D
...followed by episodes 25,26 and 27, the last three episodes of Tengen Toppa Gurren Laggan which can be described as one of the hugest, most epic, galaxy-spanning giant robot animes in fucking existence oh holy shit he just punched someone out of fucking space-timeAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH
I REALLY need to go and lie down now.
In other news I did this:
Not mine at all, I just found it funny! Now I need to add a contribution to the Million Kamina Mission.
http://community.livejournal.com/swordbu
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7210
John Edwards / MILLS 18%
Hillary / Bill Clinton 27%
Barack Obama 55%
So after the past two weeks of some of the dirtiest campaigning I've ever seen from the opposition and Bill Clinton essentially jumping the shark and making a lot of people lose the shittonne of respect people (myself included) once had for him in the face of his numerous bitter attacks and hugely divisive rhetoric, I wake up to possibly the biggest political curb-stomp from the man Obama so far! A 28 point lead is just unprecendented, a MAJORITY over 50% even more so, Jesus Christ...also 3x youngster turnout up from 2004 and overall turnout 75% higher than 04!
He's actually inspiring people.
To celebrate, I have a video which aptly sums up my mood and that of a lot of Obama fans right now!
In other news, possible art update later :V
Welp, this sure fucking sucks.
BBC: "Maribel Suarez told the BBC: "I have always supported Hillary because she's a woman and it's time we had a woman president."
Combine this incredibly near-sighted bullshit sentiment with the exceptionally high black vote in Nevada and expected in South Carolina all turning out for Obama, and this is how the candidate for the most powerful individual in the world is decided, on the basis of whether someone is black or white or has a cock or in this case a combat uterus. Well done guys, why not focus on the issues and their stances on them as opposed to their gender and race?
Also your caucus system of "Pile all the voters into a big room, designate a corner for each candidate then tell everyone to rush to each corner and simply STAND THERE to place their vote" IS BEYOND RETARDED.
The problem I have with Hillary - if you were wondering - is that she is:
a) More likely to get slaughtered by Republicans in the General election
b) A gigantic warmonger who never removed the option of bombing Iran from the table during discussions.
c) A completely shrill "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" type.
d) A big fan of dishonest politics. If she lies, twists the truth and slings mud in her primary campaigns, what is she going to be like as President?!
e) The fact she's a woman counts as an issue somehow.
Super Tuesday is going to give me a hernia, I know it. :(
La la la laa no one reads this and it's awesome. I can rant about all sorts of shit! :D
Looks like LiveJournal tactics work just as well in Politics. Cry and whine about how hard your life is and you can get anywhere in life!
Oh, that's right you have to be a woman as well. Crying women pulls the sensitive vote while men doing the same sort of thing would rightfully earn him almost unanimous reprehension from the voter base for lacking the emotional stability required to take on probably the most stressful job in the world.
But no, Hillary is sensitive when she cries under the pressure of the early stages of the fucking Primaries, not even the General election.
Fuck you, you gigantic fake, drama-whoring manipulative cuntbag. Congrats for setting back equality in politics a fair way by giving credence to the dumbest of female politician stereotypes and most of all fuck you for turning the whole process into a dramatic showbiz sham.
Barack Obama - 38 per cent
John Edwards - 30 per cent
Hillary Clinton - 29 per cent
Welp. This makes me a happy bunny. Hillary bombing hard and Obama defying all odds and pulling the highest electorate turnout (big increase in the 17-29 age bracket) in Iowa ever - nearly double that of the previous election - and curb-stomping all opposition with such a huge 8-percent lead.
And yes, I stayed awake until 3:30am watching those result come in on MSNBC and watching the normally civil goon Debate and Discussion thread on the subject just delve into outright gameday cheering and idiocy as the thread expanded by several posts per second. It was special seeing Civil lawyers, medical doctors, philosophy majors and practicising politicians devolving into HOLY SHIT HILLARY 2% DOWN!!! OBAMA IS RAPING HER SIDEWAYS!! I NEED TO GO LIE DOWN! AAAAAAAAAA
Results from the Iowa caucuses going up around 3am GMT and afterward. I am going to be fucking GLUED to my Internet, mashing the F5 key as they tally up the results on C-SPAN.
For those that are unaware, or that just don't give a shit, Iowa is the first state to vote on who they think should be their party's Presidential nominee. The Democrats have eight candidates and the Republicans have about as many, each party will have clear frontrunners for their respective party nomination after tonight and that means who is likely to become the Presidential candidate for each party.
Why am I, a humble British person who can't even vote over there, so feverishly interested in US affairs? Simple, what America does, Britain follows...and I'd rather not have another fucking psycho in the White House who takes foreign policy orders from the tooth fairy and the neocons.
As far as the Republicans are concerned, all I see are the same Pro-war, anti-abortion, Evangelical-pandering hawks that want to nuke the shit out of Iran as soon as they get the chance WHY HELLO THAR MITT ROMNEY YES I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU! whereas I've actually some hope for the Democrats. Some will be unsurprised at me backing Barack Obama, seeing as he has so much support from the internet, but it's not for me not being critical of him. It's all to easy to fall for the charisma but after much thought, I do agree with his positions on foreign policy, healthcare (of course, being British), Iraq ("No military solution") and Iran - where he is completely willing to meet Iranian leaders rather than just beat the old "LET'S NUKE THE COMMIES/TERRORISTS/BROWN PEOPLE/INSERT WORD" war-drum. But mostly I can't see John Edwards as being anything more than an Iowa flash-in-the-pan (the one state he spent the most time campaigning in) offering nothing Obama doesn't already, only without Obama's cross-party appeal to the Rupublicans as well as the solid Democrat support he's gained.
And Hilary Clinton? Jesus fuck if ever I've seen a corrupt power-hungry bitch willing to do anything and use every dirty, mud-slinging celebrity trick she can use to get into office, it's her.
I'd have liked Dennis Kucinich to manage a result because of him being so left-wing, but alas he has less than 1% of support, so I am generally willing to put my support towards the candidate with a damn good chance of winning. (Obama has 32% of votes so far according to entrance polls, leading Hillary by 7%)
Go Obama! Make us proud to be America's bitch/ally for once and then when you win the Democratic nomination, stop outright scary autocratic fucks like Rudy Guiliani taking office.
I've bought myself this book : http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/07641560
Basically, my idea is to fucking brute-force my way right from start to finish, copying images straight out of the book. The benefits are threefold:
1 - I get a shitload of drawings done - the more mileage, the better you get, simple fucking truth for any artist..
2 - I look at bits of anatomy again and again and drawing them constantly forces me to remember how they look and work. Like I said, brute force.
3 - This isn't a creative exercise - this means I don't end up overthinking about what I'm drawing and end up not drawing as much. It's a purely technical exercise focusing on drawing rather than a creative one focusing on concept art, design work or any other thought-process-heavy material like that.
So far I have the following:
( HUGE NAKED MEN. Or anatomy studies. )
.
- Went off in the morning to have kedgeree with My parents cousins and their...wonderfully hyperactive kids, Isabelle, the oldest at the age of 6, recruited me as her personal traffic warden as she blasted around the house on her new scooter, that's when she wasn't trying to garotte me with ribbon. :T
- Came back home at about 2pm, had the full home made turkey dinner with the family and my Aunt, Uncle, Cousin and my Brother's GF, Turkey, Pork + Sage Stuffing, Roast and Mashed potatoes, Carrots and Swede and Profiterole gateaux with added Trifle OM FUCKING NOM NOM.
- Slightly tipsy family + Wii Sports Tennis = Laffo.
- Finally sat down to see Transformers, oh my. What a silly movie.
-Off to buy stupidly extravagant art crap from Hobbycraft tomorrow. Yey sales \o/
Merry Christmas you bastards!
p.s. I finished this as well, something I started ages ago thanks to an idea I had back in October sat in the Hub, since I've been listening to a lot of Symphony X and Apocalyptica, I decided to finish it up. Merry Christmas internet!
EDIT: Is it bad that I even put this on 4chan? http://cgi.4chan.org/ic/res/169156.html#q
Holy shit! This looks awesome!
Keep in mind, this is being developed by Capcom Japan and is not being licensed out to a small fry dev house like Arika, which resulted in Street Fighter EX, which was quite balls and utterly broken.
Street Fighter 4 - O shit, more SF!
Capcom Japan - Not a piece of shit studio by any means and more than capable of producing a BALANCED title as well as a fun and pretty one.
3D - Lets not kid ourselves here, people will buy it on the strength of it's graphics as well as it's name, which will hopefully lead to SF being less niche and means that it WILL BE RELEASED HERE AT LEAST. You can show it off in the magazines and on websites without Johnny Public going "Ew, 2D!!!"
Now all we need to see is if the gameplay that SSF2T and SF3:3S developed transfers across well.
The 1Up article confirms 2D gameplay with the 3d graphics, the same six-button layout and Ryu, Ken, Chun Li and Dhalsim (Better than Necro, huh?) are confirmed, but they had BETTER BRING BACK SAKURA!!
p.s. Shin-Shoryuken YUO GIEF!!
Only really relevant to those who know me in person and what happened in second year. ^3^
1) Halch. I can't get into details thanks to the NDA I signed, but it's a games company that does Nintendo DS games and I can say that I'm not needed just yet. This could change rapidly though.
2) Freelance Artist. Found a jerb which basically involves taking customer photographs and doing the requested edits, touch-ups, crops and reformats for them and working back and forth with them until a final design is chosen. Sent off the images they asked me to do as a test and now I'm just waiting to hear back.
3) Cleaning job. Part-time cleaning job that basically involves me working early mornings. Awaiting interview.
4) Freelance modelling contract from a goon. I may well be modelling and texturing the interior of Air Force One. Awaiting agreement of terms and pricing.
Also ohshi Doc's huge ICAs for 3D Content Creation and Animation were published today. I'mma gonna be busy this year. D:
In other news: Ear drops have a wierd side-effect on me which basically involves the tops of my arms and shoulders filling up with blood and feeling really hot to the touch. Excess vasodilation perhaps? Or maybe the drugs themselves are vasodilators?
p.s. JESUS CHRIST SF3:3S is better than SFA3, not only are inputs massively easier, but combos are hugely easier to pull off thanks to the slower speed and super-chains even more so because of the ability to hit confirm with enough time to realise that your hit connected so you can go ahead and finish your supaah combo.
p.p.s Fucking hate Research Paradigms.
p.p.p.s Going to email Halch this Monday and see if they still have a job for me, if not, I'm going to try for a Freelance Design Artist position I found which basically involves the mighty powers of photoshoop.
Bit of background first, just so the ramifications sink in: Ever since I was a baby, I had an ear condition known as Glue Ear, which is mainly due to malfunctioning Eustachian tube in my left ear. Meaning all the crap that builds up behind the eardrum, which usually drains away down said tube, doesn't.
Meaning the inner ear behind the eardrum gets backed up like fucking crazy with all sorts of gooey shit, thereby stopping the eardrum vibrating as much as it normally should. In my case, I had a particularly strong case of Glue Ear all through my life, resulting in an almost totally deaf left ear, I actually remember being quoted as having only 5% of my hearing through that ear.
You guys may have noticed this in my mannerisms, when I end up turning my right side of my head toward people on my left and saying "What?" a lot. Trust me, I know it's annoying to have to repeat yourself (I know this, since I have a totally deaf mother), but worse than that is the social problems that can occur when you're growing up, simply not hearing what people are saying in a social environment does a lot to try people's (other kids) patience and hamper your own social development (you going to ask someone talking to a big group to repeat themselves? No fucking way). Yeah, I'd say that my deafness definitely was a contributing factor to me becoming something of a socially inept introvert.
But today, I was wheeled out of an operating theatre in Boro hospital (unconscious as all fuck and loving it), sporting a brand new valve in my eardrum (a "grommet"), meaning all that gooey crap behind it gets filtered out and for the first time in my life, I held a conversation on a phone using my left ear.
Let me reiterate, I held a conversation over the phone SOLELY using my LEFT EAR.
Going from being half deaf to not deaf is just a little mindblowing when you've been half deaf all your life and this is just a few hours after the op! When the valve has had time to work, I get a hearing test in eight weeks to hopefully show a clean bill of hearing!
Now I just need to deal with life's volume being cranked up and somehow learn how this "positional hearing" thing works :D
Well that's kind of nice. :)
Somebody, anybody, would you kindly give me a hug please? D:
Meme template available here: http://nyu.deviantart.com/art/Art-Meme-6
Even I, who picked up a 360 pad for the first time ever early today, won a 25-kill Free for all Slayer match against three other long-time Halo fans.
Rather than bash Bungie, "For making a game solely for pubbie nubs because I'm an elitist prick" I completely applaud their shrewd design decisions. Things such as making melee weapons and attacks so strong, encouraging rushing tactics with the sword/gravity hammer (keep in mind the slow controller-based turning rate makes this hard to counter), keeping movement slow and floaty so everyone is nice and easy to hit and giving the weapons so much autoaim that you need only point yourself in the general geological direction of your opponent and the auto-aim does the rest. All this while keeping the players from feeling that the game is TOO easy, that's a tricky balancing act to pull off and I highly respect Bungie for nailing that.
It's designed to be the ultimate casual FPS that anyone can pick up and do well and that's pretty much what they've accomplished, even I had fun picking it up for the first time! They deserve to make a killing because they know their market and the point of their game and they're damn well going for it.
Now I just think about what can be learned from the success of games like Halo, with a view to applying it to other, otherwise highly elitist genres like RTSs (Not doing 50 commands a minute? You'sa gonna lose in multiplayer.) and Fighting Games (Sit and learn combos and memorise and practice Frame links tighter than a nun's DECREPIT GENITALIA). It seems that to make such a game, you have to lower the entry level skill requirement, whilst preventing skilled players from getting too good at the game. Nobody likes to be stomped constantly by a player a million times better than them, so from the view of a company like Bungie, why would it be in their interests to allow skilled players to get significantly better than everyone else? Simple answer; I believe that it isn't. Just keep everyone in the fair-to-middling range in terms of skill, allow new players to score lucky kills with instakill homing melee weapons here and there, so they feel like they're accomplishing something, while hampering the pro player and their desire to stomp pubbies 25-0, they'll still stomp the newbie, but not enough to make the newbie feel unwelcome in the community and not play any more.
I'd just like to say that this is how I'd design a game if I wanted money, not if I was designing a game I'd like to play myself, that'd be quite different.
So with this, Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, Guilty Gear:Accent Core, Melty Blood: Act Cadenza and Street Fighter Alpha 3 to play when Jon arrives back...I'm a little spoilt for choice really in the 2D fighters department :D
One thing in particular I just love though:
Endless pushback ending your awesome combos prematurely? NOT ANYMORE THEY AIN'T.
By pressing a single button (Known as "B action" or B-CHARGE - it also doubles as your super move button) you can use a measure of your super bar to instantly dash your character forward through all combo pushback to continue your relentless abuse. I picked this game up about two minutes ago and that one feature already had me doing an manual 18 hit combo! LAFFO.
light medium heavy B-CHARGE light medium heavy B-CHARGE light medium heavy B-CHARGE....
It's an awesome idea on the scale of the Roman Cancel from GG (that is, the ability to extend super bar to chain moves that shouldn't chain) and I love it.
I hear the game is broke as fuck balance-wise at the momment, but they've got patches out and on the way that address the problems. :)
You can get the game on PC if you're willing to trawl Mininova...however you get it, the latest patch is available here: http://aja-games.com/nrf.htm
(not mine, it's a Strogg Icarus from Quake 2)
Yes, I did spend most of the night wearing only my headcrab hat playing ET:QW.
Now to get back to those other games I've got, although which one to go back to first is quite a problem - Bioshock? Or Cave Story?
Read that again until the gravity of my situation here at home makes sense. Counterstrike 1.6, not CS:Source!! I cannot have my FPS fix unless I play Quake 2!! This PC has difficulty with POLYGONS.
Which means I am looking forward to going back to my own heathily-specced PC (needs a big upgrade though) back in Boro this Saturday. When I will spend most of that night wearing only my headcrab hat, playing the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demo until 3am and periodically shouting KILL THE HUMAN FOOD!!! as me and my Strogg Goon allies stomp all over those pesky GDF pubbie nublets round after round after round.
It shall be glorious.
Also, Halch employment is looking highly likely, now I just need the university to give me my fucking timetable so I can sort out my hours and start working :|
I consider the composition of the piece usually before I start out, which bits of the page am I filling, where the dynamic lines of action are and all that, but from thereon in, I almost completely depart from a large portion of plans I originally went into it with. An image that was initially meant to be really sombre and cold may, with a little experimentation, look a shitload better as a hot piece with firey colours, or maybe this would be a better piece involving this character instead, or should this bit of the image be totally different or maybe something else doesn't work and it needs changing. Pretty much every piece I do gets ground through this mill of constant developmental scrutiny and I usually end up with a piece that was better than what I originally had planned.
When it comes to my digital works, a lot of this plays into how I do post-production editing. Once I'm done with the toning, painting, colouring and all that balls, I start fiddling with all the photography editing tools inside photoshop, such as Levels, Hue/Sat and Colour Balance, making overall changes, gradually edging towards a satisfying result. A rather average paintjob can be elevated quite a lot through simple manipulation of brightness and colours on the broad scale. Of course, you can't polish a turd, but unless you have serious self-confidence issues that need to be addressed, you won't always be producing dead-end crap artwork. The more you do and the more you reflect on the material you have produced, the better you get, simple as.
The only problem with this workflow, is when a client is involved. You can't send the drawing over at every stage of development for approval (you kind of can if they're within 12 feet of your desk though!), while a personal piece need only be scrutinised by the artist on the go, but that doesn't mean you can't bundle 16 minor light/colour/saturation edits in the same email when it's time to get feedback. :D
A fellow artist friend and inspiration of mine from Finland always felt like he was cheating himself whenever he deviated from an initial plan whether in a drawing or when doing photoshop post-production. I do see his point though, you are challenging the purity of your original idea by changing things along the way and there's a lot to be said for the traditional art effect of fully intending a piece to be done in X manner from start to finish, going through that entire process successfully and having no further way to improve on it, that's no doubt a huge boost to to the artist's own confidence.
That said, this developmental method of working is really, really not for those inclined towards traditional work, thanks to the comparitively unforgiving nature of actual paints and stuff. The upshot of that though is that traditional stuff is great practice as it forces planning and concentration. Watercolours were always a trial-by-fire thing for me, since once brush touches paper, that's it, you have to go with it, or risk fucking it up completely through simply not being confident with it. That's something digital work can hide well though if you're clever, confidence in execution, the tactile marks, brush strokes and what have you or indeed, a lack of such confidence. It can't do shit for hiding confidence in technical ability, planning or artistic judgement though!
Then again, what I practice with and what I work with 'professionally' are two different things.
Even if it is just something as simple as a fun piece of fanart or whatever.
I play Battlefield 2 because I don't have to get good at it to have fun. Random pubbing is usually fun.
But then I end up fucking despising the game when it is played well.
- Clan-stacking - if you're not on the team where all the people with the fancy clan-tags are topping the scoreboard, you're going to get raped. Losing a match via loss of tickets isn't bad at all, but being pigeon-holed onto a single flag where multiple vehicles hammer the spawn points is not fun. SPAWN-DIE-SPAWN-DIE....don't allow it to get that way you say? How? With my full team of similarly impotent casual pubbies?
- Spawn-rape - Battlefield has set spots around each flag where players of that team can spawn in from. Clan players place teammates behind these spots and shoot people up the ass the second they spawn in while they spend a second getting their bearings. There's no downside to doing this, so if you aren't doing this, you aren't being PRO. That's if they don't have tanks or APCs with their sights trained on that precise point anyway.
- Want to re-enact some fancy mil-sim tactics? Good luck with that because close-range and medium-range infantry combat is all about who can hammer PRONE and spam their medic G36E quicker. See an enemy two feet in front of you? PRONE FIRE FIRE FIRE!!
- Doing well in taking down an enemy squad? Congrats, except that they're all medics and everyone you just killed has just been revived by a medic squadmate. Kill another one or two? Congrats, they'll be standing again in a second or two! HAVE FUN WITH THAT.
- If that's not bad enough, far too many player's first resort is to throw grenades down at the ground in front of them. You have your assault rifle out, ready to fire, they have grenades out. You see each other and he runs backwards spamming grenades two feet in front of him while you're forced to move or fucking die instantly. STOPPING TO SHOOT HIM MEANS YOU DIE ANYWAY. BORING!!
-The fact that planes are virtually unkillable doesn't bother me that much any more - by virtue of the fact that every pilot knows where the stationary AA sites are and bombs them the second anyone enters them, that the AA sites themselves never fucking hit a target thanks to shitty coding. Finally, the pilot on your team is too busy dropping bombs on the largest concentration of enemy players, racking up billions of kills in the process, to bother hunting down an enemy pilot. But that doesn't bother me much any more, what bothers me is that when these pilots get a clue an actually start dropping those bombs on useful stuff like fucking armour columns and bases we really need to defend, all the while, joe pubbie pilot on your team is off kill whoring at the other end of the map and NOT KILLING THE ENEMY PLANE.
This is why I am personally avoiding clan servers from now on and looking for casual servers, because god fucking damn it, high-level BF2 is FUCKING BORING for a pubbie nubfuck like myself.
-Parents came up to visit, we went and got food at Isaacs then headed off to Redcar of all places. I despaired at the crap arcades, then my parents dropped me off back home and headed off back home home down in Manchester. Really nice to see them again. :)
-I suck because I found my latest piece of correspondence with Halch in my Bulk mail folder 5 days after they sent it. Not good. Oh well, they're testing my modelling skills before they hand me a job, which is fair and good I say. :)
-I'm also now playing Robo Chris at Street Fighter 3: Third Strike on a regular basis over Kalliera netplay. I've at least found a character that I really like and am better with than my usual tactic in Street Fighter games of PICK AKUMA FOR MASSIVE THROBBING WIN P.S. NOT CHEESE, SHUT UP.
-I'm buying an airsoft gun!........assoonasmyfirstpaychequeclea
Either one of these: JG G36C - Because it's my favourite gun in BF2, simply for being an all-out RAPE MACHINE, as well as having more railz and spinnaz to attach accessories (Red-dot scope LAFFO) than...
One of these: JG M4A1 Carbine - Because it's a fucking Colt M4 and it's one of two types of gun I've ever actually fired in real life, you have to love US gun-ranges :) (The other being a breech-loaded .22 piece of shit SA80, back when I was in the cadets).
No, I am not turning into Mike from Spaced. That would imply a transitional phase from one state to another, in a way, I've always been him! :V
Anyway, I came up with an AK47 model over the weekend, improving massively on the one I did for 3DEFG.
On top of that I am currently downloading the Bioshock demo, while hoping and praying that it runs on my PC that barely meets the minimum specs and fucking DREADING the fact that it's a System Shock game with modern tech in an UNDER-FUCKING-WATER city that is falling the fuck apart! Which I'm sure will go fucking GREAT with my mortal fear of drowning!!
EDIT: Oh, Jess. I put in a word for you, told them you were a good modeller and have plenty of experience with pixel art, since you used to do it a lot. Also that you learn damn fast, if the MSN convo we had a while back with regards to character texturing and then you coming back with a finished model so soon after was anything to go by. :V
Seems they don't care about me going onto a Masters and want me for a part-time texturing job which when you think about it is FUCKING AWESOME. I get paid to gain industry experience WHILE studying for a degree! That's if the deal comes through and they like me! If so, then I'll be doing a lot of super-low res texturing and 3d work with a DS as an intended platform
32x32pixel x 16 colour textures. Ooh, boy. :V
Thanks for putting a word in for me Kim, you ROCK!
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/2125
Wait, what?:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/2300
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In other news, I got hold of FFVIII for the PC and am playing it through again. I only ever played through 8 once, 7 and 9 moreso, although fuck FFX. I suppose I'm kind of wanting to reacquaint myself with the series since I'll be trying out FFXII when Jon gets back.
I am tempted to kill every enemy I come across with Card, thus negating xp gain and stopping the enemies from levelling while I pack on the stats anyway, but it just seems like too much effort! I'll probably draw every tiny piece of magic I can get my hands on and teach my GFs to convert items into magic, cards into items and magic into more powerful magic, which turns me into a stat-whoring god...before anything else.
p.s. Hi Marc! :V
Lastly, I'm finally getting to play GG again with Phil! Wow, I've gotten SHIT!
It's a 3D Guilty Gear game!! Guilty Gear 2: Overture, coming to the XBOX 360.
From initial speculation it seems like it's NOT a 1v1 Fighting game, or a competitive game in any respect. It seems from these VERY crappy scans to be something more closely related to Devil May Cry or Dynasty Warriors.
...which I think is a fucking great idea! Really! What better way to flesh out the universe and story than an action-oriented game which ISN'T pinned down by the needs of people worrying if Eddie actually finally being dead impacts on his RAPE-TIER status.
Plus it's not like Arc are going to discontinue the arcade series, as successful as it has been!
Now I just need to pilfer me a 360. >:(
Practical Project (60 Credits) - 68%
3D Effects For Games - 62%
Drawing & Composition 3 - 80%
Games Development - 58%
Game Dev was a bit of a downer and I apologise to my team for being such a crap team leader (No fucking chance I'm taking that job again!), but otherwise, I'm ultimately very pleased with the results. I'm glad EFG went well, since I had so few ideas as to what to do and I'm stunned that I scored so high in DC3!
In short:
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aliginge- Christopher Reeves
- Aliginge's Deviant Art Bullshit
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