This and that and stuff and things

Gosh, it’s been ages since I made any animation/machinima videos. I’ve been busy playing with my other hobby; writing software. I’ve been making an add-on for the Minecraft game called “Sim-U-Kraft” that extends the gameplay with aspects of The Sims and Sim city. The minecraft community have been amazing providing suggestions, bug reports and even helping out writing a manual and wiki for it in their own time!

I’ve been very inspired by the creator of Minecraft, “Notch”, who single-handedly (until recently), created this game on his own from scratch and went on to release it as an indie game making millions of Euros. So, I’m having a go at writing my own game from scratch, probably going take a year to get to public beta, but I find coding a very enjoyable pass-time, pity it sucks doing it as a job ;-)

I’m using the jMonkey game engine, which is 100% java, which means Windows, Mac, Linux and Android platforms, I did try the Unity engine, but I don’t think its suitable for this project, and I don’t particularly like the C# programming language. The game itself will be a 3D action/strategy/open-ended game with lots of silly humour, set on an alien world that has lots of similarities to earth.

Here’s a screenshot of what the game area looks like so far, perched on top of a sky-scraper.

Added fog and depth-of-focus effects yesterday, which make it look a lot more professional, although I am aiming for more about the gameplay and less about how cool/sick/wicked the graphics are! Anyway, still a long way to go.

Yay! Fixed my PC. The CPU fan had rattled slightly loose causing the CPU temp to rise to a toasty 85ºC, which caused the CPU to slow its processing down. Now idling at a more confortable temp of 30ºC.

Shame I missed the Machiniplex Forum in Second life, I was looking forward to it.

The latest Duleks episode (4) seems to have gone down well, 260 views on youtube after 2 days and quite a few more comments than I usually get, most of my videos get 260 views after several months!

Not sure why, but it seems “The Duleks” is more popular with my non-machinima friends/followers than it is with Machinima friends/followers. Now obviously the Moviestorm community isn’t going to be huge fans of the show, as its made entirely in iClone.

Anyway, Episode 5 is written, cast and ready to start making, but I’m putting it to one side and going to do a ‘serious’ project next - not going into details yet, but it will hopefully be another “lovely” short video that might even make you cry. Also for this project, I’m going to try out a technique I’ve been playing with which will blend iClone and Moviestorm seamlessly, no, not just regular green-screening, a little more advanced, I want to have the best of both worlds, the ease of animating characters in moviestorm combined with the soft-shadow-photo-realistic loveliness of iClone.

If you haven’t seen the new episode yet, here’s episode 4 of “The Duleks” - enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWIR1sYohbw Oh and BTW, I’ve switched off Google Buzz, its ok, but Tumblr currently does it better, maybe once google work on it a bit more things will change, but for now, it goes on the wait-and-see pile along with Google Wave. :-)

My sister was supposed to be on the BBC show “Crimewatch” tonight… no, not as a criminal !! She was going to be “woman pretending to type” in some b-roll footage of a police station, but it looks like she was cut out of that particular segment of the show.

I never realised how funny Crimewatch is, I didn’t think it was a comedy. The reconstruction videos are hilarious. I must parody it one day :-) and of course the lovely Kirsty Young co-hosting the show with “token asian-bloke”, she did a brilliant performance with ‘some chief inspector’. Very convincing, it’s as if she was about to cry at one point. Brilliant! oscar-winning!

Hang on, that photo-fit looks just like me…maybe I should hand myself in?

EDIT / CORRECTION : She was in it after all, 3 frames of out of focus, ‘depth of field’ footage, basically she’s a pink blur….Yay!

Originally posted to my old blog 22nd August 2009

I’ve was working away making sets for my ‘in production’ Sci-fi machinima mini series, when I was struck by inspiration to make a kind of music video/short film for Julianne Regan’s rendition of the traditional Irish folk song “She moved through the fair”. I’d actually made notes about it a year ago, but never got around to making it.

I dropped what I was doing and made it over the course of about 4 days (Been off work on leave this week, which was handy). It’s turned out to be quite lovely, and a vast departure from the usual machinima that I make. I’ve been getting some great responses from the machinima community, could be my most popular peice so far! THANK YOU EVERYONE!

Anyway, here it is, hope you like it too…