Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Bot man, sunday robot competition

We've started a competition here at the university. Every second sunday we'll make either a 2D or 3D picture of the current theme, for this sunday it's robots. I truly suck at sketching pictures but I wanted to participate anyway, here is my submission:


Other submissions:
They did it... by Mast
Den blodiga, farliga roboten by N1xi

When sleep isn't a option...

Woke up early today, so I figured, why not spend sometime to work on my next movie? First I had to spend 3 hours (!!!) to answer around 230 private messages I got at warcraftmovies.com and read some of the new comments at the movie page. The things I added in this session was; Shatterspear Troll Village, Ðeusero gryphon mount ride, Karazhan smiley, Karazhan graveyard and a new song to the soundtrack; Asura - Fahrenheit.

Speaking of Fahrenheit, a new game with that name was just recently released and it looks like a reincarnation for the adventure genre. If the people that thougth the Hot Coffee Mod for GTA: San Andreas was bad enough for their children, this game feature the same extreme barbie sex or not even worse. But it's a bit more motivated and not as cheap as its predecessor. Besides that the game got a extra-ordinary story and a few revolutionary gameplay controls, I think it's the first game that you have to open a door with a actual mouse movement coresponding that.

Well, I need to atleast sleep some more so we can work with our board game today. It needs a overhaul on the design because the fan made quake textures could get us in some legit disputes. Also we need to have five final copies produced before friday, and they should be as good as the ones in store shelves. Sigh.





Hot Coffee Mod
Quake Retexturing Project

Saturday, September 24, 2005

The source of the detonation is still unknown

"A powerful detonation around one-a-clock, the night to saturday, confuse the police.

Several persons living in south Visby have called to the police about the explosion. Even the police themselfs noticed the detonation, a police patrol felt the shockwave when they were in the southern parts of Visby. Any reports about shattered glass hasn't been reported yet. The police have searched for the source of the explosion during the night, but hasn't found a answer yet."

Kraftig detonation förbryllar polisen

BOOOOOM!!!

Wtf mate? 5 minutes ago a explosion was heard echoing through Visby, cars stopped at the streets and people went out on their balconies. Gamers here heard it through their maxed headsets and all the way down to their bones. I've never ever heard anything like this before...

Update: This just in, Nim don't know anything more about the situation, but he found a peanut butter and jam sandwhich in his window.

Friday, September 23, 2005

C++ distance course

24hours ago, a guy from school sat besides me, cursing alot and seeming really frustraded. When I left for the day, I asked him what he was so upset about, then he told me that he needed to get a few more points if he wanted to recieve his study grant, and the money for this month he was supposed to finish everything before sunday the 25th september. As most people know, CSN and schools are closed on holidays, so that meant he had to do everything until tomorrow. Why this concerns me is because I also needed to get a few more points (2 to be exactly, and I can only take 5 points courses as the least) if I wanted my study grant. So I got until today to finish the the rest of my C++ course, that is one third of the work for a two months course, and I had to finish it within 16 hours.

I brougth a friend home who were already done with that course and together with my friend who I share this appartment with all three sat us down and worked, starting from 00:00 yesterday (this morning). My inmate gave up first after like 4-5 hours of work, and my friend went home after 6 hours, I worked one more hour before I collapsed in my bed. I went up again at 11:00 only to eat breakfast and take a shower before going to school. As soon as I got there, I sat down and worked 3-4 hours more, finishing everything just before all the teachers went home, the question was, was it good enough to give me the grades I needed?



This is Tord Berglund at our school, a great guy, he was the one who got me into this school in the first place. Stressed and anxious I sat beside him while he corrected my work and ask a few questions that I were mostly to nervous to remember. Also I was starving with nothing to eat for the whole day. I went away for awhile to get myself something to eat, but I was too nervous and too stressed to eat my sandwhich I bought (from Vinäger, they make huge sandwhiches for 45sek). After a while Tord came to our group room, clinching a paper in his hand, with some of my code on it. This was it, I was screwed, I had to redo something and I wouldn't make it within the time limit anymore. To my suprise, it was just something unnecessary in my code he wanted to enlighten me with, and tell me that I made it, I got the grades!!!



Thanks to some of my class mates that helped me in the time of need, and when I'll get the money I'll take you guys out to dinner. Cheers dudes! Also Thomas, I hope you also made it in time, and thank you for warning me so I could get my thumb out of my ass.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Fable

Fable is a rather intresting game, it's a very linear action-rpg where your actions add to your karma. Bad deeds makes you sinister, you'll grow horns and people will be afraid of you. Helping people out makes you look good and shiny. By sacrificing innocent people and beating up my wives I became a evil person with flies after me (do evil dudes smell bad?), but I could get my souls forgiveness by donating a large sum of money to a temple.

So this is how I looks like now.


I must say I've enjoyed the game, because I finished it three times already (not counting the extra chapter), even though you can finish it on the first day you're playing. Money have been no problem for my characters because I stumbled upon a intresting bug with my first char. I was just playing cards with a bandit and won 1000 coins, after that I exited the game, a little later I loaded my char again and was about to play cards again when the game stucks in a loop where I just gets 1000 coins over and over again. I can't control anything or move anything, so I wait for a couple of minutes, but when the money don't stop I decide to save and then restart the game. When I loaded again, I got like billions in money, just as I had hoped when I saved the game before. The screenshot below don't show all the money (I guess they didn't expect anyone to get more than 9 million) but you should add a couple of more nines before those numbers (don't know how many yet ^^).

Nintendo Revolution Controller unveiled

Almost a week ago, Satoru Iwata unveiled Nintendos new Revolution controller for the first time at Tokyo Game Show. The discussion about what it was and how it looked like have been roaming constantly on the internet since Pablo Belmonte released the fake NintendoON video on the 13th of May this year. I'm glad the end result didn't end up like the one in Pablos video, because I don't have a big of enough room to run around the floor in a virtual reality gadget, it would probably have met the same destiny as Virtual Boy did.



The Nintendo Revolution controller is probably the best buisness move they ever made, after hiring Miyamoto of course. They wouldn't had a chance to try and compete with the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 hardware and software support, so this is probably the only way the could've done to be able to release a new console without a huge financial loss. Nintendo will probably in the future make the same decision as Sega, and stop producing consoles. Handhelds will they of course continoue with, they are dominating that market for crying out loud.



Both the looks and idea of the Revolution controller isn't really a new thing, sensors and wireless sticks have been around for years (thank you virtual reality) and even a group from my class had a similiar idea for half a year ago. We were planning for our Theme Park project (Gotlands GAME Convention, GGC) and came up with a idea of using three projectors as screens and a dancemat for movement, you would look around by waving a wireless stick or a game gun. We wanted to get the player involved in to the game as much as possible by using smell, hearing, seeing and feeling. Tough enough the groups changed after all concept designs and the project never saw the daylight. I'll have to go now and practice some with a remote control, so I can be ready when the Revolution is released next year.

Pablo Belmonte, NintendoON fake video
Pablo Belmonte, behind the scenes on NintendoON
Nintendo Revolution Controller Showcase, Gamespot
Tokyo Game Show 2005 Keynote Speech, Satoru Iwata

The 2005 Game Developers Conference

The fifth annual Game Developers Conferance was held between August 31 to September 1, this year. I'll try to attend to GDC in San Jose next year between March 20-24, in the meantime I'll watch this years GDCTV coverage over and over again. Visit their site and register for free to watch hour long sessions with things like Fable postmortem with Peter Molyneux.

The 2005 Game Developers Conferance, GDCTV coverage

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Monday, September 19, 2005

The Laminator

Woke up at 09:07 today when I got a phone call from a stressed Niclas. He was wondering where I were, we was supposed to meet at school by 08:00 and I obviously overslept (I wonder how, with all the sleep I got tonight...). When I finally showed up late at school after a quick shower, we encountered even more problems. The printer was out of color so we couldn't print our game board and the laminator (the machine that puts a layer of plastic on our cards) wasn't working correctly. When we finally fixed our problems and had printed out our game cards and boards we rushed to the location where we were supposed to present our games, only to stop once on the way while the wind scattered our cards over the streets =/

I'm sitting here right now (Vikten) and are playing some of the other games that some of my other class mates made. Obviously most of us had problems with making comprehensible rules for others to read, maybe a problem that occurs when you play your own game too much and the rules seem obvious. Maybe I should make a walkthrough tutorial on how to play our game?

But I'm glad that most people seemed to enjoy our game and the design, those who could understand the rules within 15 minutes, some it took over 25min to make their first move =/

Concept and prototype board



Kitchen magnets on a board of steel...



This the first time I played the game that inspired us, Roborally.

eN(one)eXAi



Well this is probably the final look of our board game,
and I need to get up in like 5 hours to print it. ^^

eN(one)eXAi, is the name of our game and it's originally
from our group leader Niclas nickname N1xi.

Best of luck to us today during our presentation.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

So... what's up?

We've been working on our "noname" board game project everyday of this week and it's really turning out to be something intresting. It's already really fun to play and we think we've balanced the "movements card" just right today, even though I had a little to much bad luck with my cards... the game itself could be best described as a capture the flag where you try to push each others down pitfalls and escape with the flag back to your base alive. You start out with two players per team and there's four teams, so you could play both the players yourself or you could get a friend to help you out. Once all of your team members die you're out of the game, so you could win the game by either capturing the flag or killing everybody else.

Before each round start every players get a set of 10 random movement cards (forward/backward, strafe left/right, turn left/right/180*) that he will use seven of, four for one team member and three for the other, which one who gets one card more is optional. He'll then lay out a sequence for each of his team members to move for the next round, placing the cards facing the back upwards on the table. After all the competitors have placed out their movement sequences the round will commence.

The first competitor will then flip his first card and show his move, and move the team member it's meant for, and then he'll flip the other team members first sequence card, moving that team member likewise. After that it's the next players turn to flip his first sequence cards and move once, and when everyone moved once, they start fliping their next card and going another lap around the table, and so it continoues until everybody moved all their seven movements card (the selected seven cards in their selected order out of the ten recieved cards..).

If during this session one player is about to collide with another player, he'll push that player one step in that direction he was moving. This will totally mess up that player movement sequence (if that player wasn't expecting that of course and had taken precautions) and that could be fatal, considering the board is covered with pitfalls. I'll try to publish some pictures of our prototype game board tomorrow.

Other stuff that's in progress is my Nogg-aholic movie, the sequal for my Exploration the Movie, it's the only two movies to ever get banned by Blizzard themself personally (special thanks to Caydiem), but I haven't had time to finish it due to school (see above). But once I'm done with our board game, scheduled monday, I'll first finish my C++ course (two months late), and THEN I'll finish the movie asap. Also, I'm currently playing around with Liero Xtreme for a conversion of my old Liero mod, "Liero with a vengance" (see post below).

That's it for day, now I'll take my laptop, go to bed and watch some One Piece.

Another Liero with a vengeance review

Liero With a Vengance
Creator: Tobias Lundmark
Stats: Weapons (40), Levels (4), Sounds (yes), Graphics (yes)
Size: 518kb
A TC based around nothing in particular. But don't let that discourage you - this is an shockingly fun mod. It has the full 40 weapons with a smattering of all sorts of different types, although I must add that there were way too many shockwave weapon...y'know, weapons that shoot out a perfectly circular wave of something. Not to say that they weren't some of the best shockwave weapons I've ever seen but there were just too many of them. Also, Liero Vengance has one of the most damn annoying sound mods you'll ever hear in a game!
Still, this conversion would definitely be near the top of my 'To Get, Don't Forget' list.

Liero with a vengeance review

Liero with a Vengance by Tobias Lundmark
"Moo..."
Those are the first words you will hear when you play this TC. Of course, nearly the whole soundtrack is made out of "Moos". Well, enough about moos. This TC is based around nothing, yet it is great! Still, some weapons were just TOO powerful, like BFG, ATOMIC NUKE, and some others. Figure them out for yourself, ban them if you wish. Anyway, this mod contains some seriously cool weapons, such as Gunster, Mini Raiders, D3stroyer, and November. There are a lot of "shockwave" weapons though (shoots out a very round ball of something), but other than that, this is a very cool TC. Nice levels too. Moo.

Playability-8 (aagh! my eyes! BFG!)
Weapons-8.5
Sounds-7 (moo...)
Graphics/Effects-8
Fun Rating-8
Overall-8.5

Moo.

Liero Xtreme

It was a LAN here tonight where we challenged SIM3 on Liero Xtreme.
Hopefully we'll meet again some other night to finish what we've started...
Liero Xtreme

Friday, September 16, 2005