Author Archives: vortex69

I’m – mildly – impressed

By blender, I guess what I mostly missed was the interaction of 3ds max.

As I posted earlier, I’m playing around with blender – a piece of software I’ve disliked ever since I first touched it, a few years ago – and for now, I’m able to model simple stuff – that means I’m able to assemble cubes together in a way that makes them resemble something – then I wanted to put some textures on it and it took me quite a while to find out how to do that, reason? The “Texture” tab was out of my monitor viewing area, together with whatever tabs come right after it.

Then a little, simple bit of UV mapping, not bad, overall the same as max.

Remember those ‘sticks’ I posted earlier, that didn’t export very well using fbx?

They were an actual prop for one of my projects (Colina Silenciosa). A little old, beaten pier.

Here’s a magnificent ‘look mommy, I’ve used blender’ WIP:

The best part of using blender is: Next time I say I hate it, no one will be able to tell me: “But you never tried it!!” and be right. tuzki_muhahaha

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Today…

Today I finally decided to search for a 3ds max interaction preset for blender and found one.

And magically blender started working for me – not really, but better than before – now all I have against blender is that it has a tendency to crash. That and it lacks any way to measure an object, which is bad, very bad, since every model I make always uses the correct, real life measurements. And FBX exporting on blender sucks…a lot…it might be my fault, but it’s not normal that this (quick “Oh, look I’m able to use blender now” test):

Becomes this in Unity:

Same thing if I import it into max, only 1 ‘stick’ in there. Thinking positively, Collada works  and imports ok into Unity.

*edit*

If I’m not wrong, the problem was my good old nemesis “Export Selected”

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Nothing interesting, as usual

Finally finished “At the Mountains of Madness”
Now, a long stop from reading anything by H.P. Lovecraft, back to my computer related books, I miss them.

As for my game projects, “Project 32” (the point and click, escape the room project) is on hold, not currently in the mood to work on it, the project I’m working in with a friend, Colina Silenciosa (we fucking need a name for it…) is back to my work table since I decided to at least end the terrain. Talking about terrains, Unity’s terrain editor sucks.

Talking about Unity, seems like the release date is getting near and still no official feature delta. All I know is that Beast will be there in a ‘light’ version and the object occlusion thing (forgot its name) is pro only. Hopefully someone will release an occlusion add-on – if I’m not mistaken there is one for 2.6.1 – or else at least one of my 3D game projects will be killed due to technical limitations, if not the two of them (the unnamed sniper game and Colina Silenciosa).

On – personal – computer related news, my old mouse broke and now I’m using this wireless POS that randomly double clicks.

Thought of the day: Damn I hate to be poor...

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I’m a slow reader

Believe if you want, but I’m still reading “At the Mountains of Madness”

Probably one of the factors for such thing is that I normally only read in the instants before going to bed, when both my eyes and brain are already tired. To help the ‘my eyes are fucking tired’ effect, I normally wake up at 10 or 11 in the morning and go to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning, around 80% – or more – of that time is somehow wasted in front of a computer.

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The joy of online file storage

One thing I’ve learned to love – since I started using dropbox, around 3 months ago – is how useful those ‘Online Backup’ websites are.

Right now I have an account on 3 different sites – ADrive, Dropbox and SpiderOak (referral link, we both get 1 extra GB) – and since ADrive offers 50Gbytes for free – not that I really believe I’ll be able to use them – it can be considered my ‘main’ one, storing five compressed backups of my websites and my projects and a few misc things, Dropbox is used to store the latest – compressed – backup of my websites and my projects (until the projects folder grows too large…) and some small documents – due to dropbox syncing stuff, which is nice – and SpiderOak stores an uncompressed version of my projects folder (which is only 1gbyte for now). All of that using a connection with 1mbit of upload, yes, I’m a very patient guy when I want.

Now, obviously I’m waiting for the day when I’ll need to retrieve those files for some reason and then I’ll find out why those are free.

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As usual…

…change of plans.

Going back to one of the old ‘sleeping’ projects, “Project 32”

And will probably attempt to make it using WinterMute Engine instead of using Flash. Which has pros and cons, the biggest con being that using WME I won’t be able to submit it to Newgrounds.com. The biggest pro being that using WME I won’t need to worry too much about file size, since it would have to be distributed as a download and not embedded, so it could have ambient music, some SFX, etc.

Why this particular project?

Well, it doesn’t need any storyline – it’s an escape the room game – and I already have a list of ≈10 puzzles for it. Although I want them to be 32.

So all that is left is to start 3D modelling the whole thing. Oh Joy! Modelling and texturing dozens of objects that are not completely planned yet. Sounds like a typical project by me.

Now Reading: At the Mountains of Madness

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Is that you…Duke?

It is you, the last real hero! :D

At least the last one who had a personality…

Let’s see if this time the darned game will really be released.

Now listening to: Motorhead - One more fucking time

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Reading H.P. Lovecraft works, Part 1

First an ‘unofficial’ thanks to feedbooks.com , thanks to that site I found most if not all the works by H.P Lovecraft and just printed them, the poor guy wouldn’t get any money if I bought them anyway. :D

“The Call of Cthulhu”, “Dagon” and “Herbert West: Reanimator” have been read.

TCoC was nice, as an horror story. (I’m not much of a literary analyst, as you can see)

HW:R was great, as dark humour. West and his poor unnamed assistant always end up in the always ‘special’ “Oh…fuck…” situation, their first experiment conclusion, described by me:

“Meh, didn’t work…” /both go to another place in the house/

/minutes later/

*hellish sound*

*two guys running out of the windows*

I won’t even talk about “Dagon”, not that it was bad, just that I won’t talk about the really short stories.

So, those were worth the paper and ink that I spent.

Next I’ll probably read all of the really short stories (under 10 pages).

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Putting all my projects to sleep, why?

…why?

First, probably because I have some mood changes…pretty much every single day. So the project that was “fucking great” and “easy to accomplish” on one day, a few days later becomes the project that “is boring”, “too fucking complex” and “needs more planning than I like”.

In reality, that is not much of a mood change, it’s just that when I first get an idea I get ‘drunk’ on it, everything is wonderful, then a few days/weeks later I just look at it again, with my usual ‘cold’/not biased look and all hell breaks loose, that ‘wonderful feature’ becomes ‘a fucking nightmare to implement’, the base idea goes from ‘great’ to ‘needs some tweaks…lots of tweaks…better rewrite the whole thing’.

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How random am I allowed to be on this site?

As I said on an earlier post, sometimes I just love to be overly dramatic…

I also love to type on a ‘normal’ keyboard, been using one of these “Made in china” rubber keyboards for a few months now, due to killing 2 normal ones in less than 3 months by spilling drinks over them. 2 days ago I remembered I still had 1 or 2 functioning keyboards around, plugged in my Logitech keyboard and…ahhhh…much better, except for the annoying noise of the keys – yes, it annoys me, mostly after 2 am, I’m fine with the noise during the day – anyway the rubber keyboard will comeback, will try to wash it, the poor thing is getting a bit dirty. Also my typo ratio dropped immediately after the change, the damned rubber keys were awful if you wanted to have some ‘precision’ while typing.

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