Yay…

Finally finished the simple model I was making with Blender.

It ended up looking nice enough (don’t worry, it looks far worse after importing into Unity), guess I’ll use blender from time to time on simple objects especially if I have time to waste, since what takes me 30 minutes on max takes over 2 hours on blender at least for me (this is due to not being used to blenders workflow, I’m not criticizing blender (must be the first time such thing happens…I feel dirty :-( ))

Talking about Unity, I finally managed to make a tree on the ‘tree thingie’ a couple of days ago. Then I deleted the tree and never spoke of it again…

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Damn…

As of today, there’s one thing I’m sure.

While Superman had his weakness on kryptonite, mine is…video tutorials, every single time I even try to watch a video tutorial, I fall asleep on my chair after ~10 or 15 minutes. Maybe the problem is the monotone voices used on those things, dunno.

Bah, I should be thinking about my game projects, like, decide on how the hell I want the ‘vertical ladder’ system to work on Colina. For going up, maybe the typical ‘you’re on rails and can’t move your mouse’ way; going down just jump, since tall ladders aren’t planned, but every time I think about it I feel compelled to make a water tower or something just to put somewhere in the game.

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Progress

Finally got a terrain heightmap that I liked, still not perfect, but better than the previous one. Looks like I was finally able to use L3DT correctly, although it still lacks a bit of control.

As far as new 3D models, made a new bridge model (kind of…still being finished), next I’ll do some small props (a first aid kit, a toolbox, that kind of stuff)

Decided to finish the 30-day trial of Unity Pro and switch to free, reason: afraid of getting used to the pro features.

Talking about Unity, still trying to figure out how to use Beast.

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So…

Well, I decided to start posting my rants about ‘Colina Silenciosa’ on my website instead of the team site.

So, yeah, after being halted for some time, I decided to start working on it again.

Nice…so what am I doing now?

Scrapping the – few – models already made and remodelling everything. That includes the terrain in Unity.

Which brings me to L3DT – that I use to make the heightmap to import into Unity, Unitys terrain editor is a bit…crappy – which I can’t seem to work very well with, my biggest peeve with it is control, again, I love to control the measures on my 3D models and I wish I could do it on terrains too.

Another fun thing is that we are using a square 4 km by 4 km terrain, yet, for the storyline and other planned buildings we would need less than half of that (ie. 2 km by 2 km, which is in fact one fourth of the area, but you get the idea). Let’s call that ‘artificial gameplay extension’, we make the game look long due to you having to run around for hours between planned events (Hello Oblivion…and a few others of the same style).

All for now, will be back with more ranting some other day.

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Unity 3 is out.

For now there’s no free version, only the Pro trial. Scrap that, there’s an option to activate free

Which I was already using for a couple of days, in a fast and easy explanation: Google is a good friend of mine.

In a bit longer explanation, google indexed a download page for the f1 version (RC1, if I’m not wrong) and you could register it as trial. And Unitys update check feature took care of keeping me up to date.

Now, stuff…(Consider I’m using the pro features and I’m a noob, so I’ll only talk about graphic stuff)

Continue reading

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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.

Continue reading

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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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