So, I've secretly been working on Deadache a bit here. Which isn't quite accurate: it's not that it's a secret; it's that I got tired of mentioning that I'm working on it, complete with excuses for why it's still not done. The global excuse is that it's just me doing this, meaning that, if I did nothing else, it would probably take another ten years to get everything built out of polygons; I've got a number of people who'd be willing to help with that, if only they knew what polygons were, and I can think of several people able to help, who don't much want to. So: I'm still working on it.

What doesn't help is when I somehow go for six hours without saving anything.

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Fortunately—kinda—in this case, what I forgot to save was just a .lws file. In case that makes no sense, LightWave has two basic modes, though they're becoming more interchangeable with each new version. A given bunch of polygons—like, say, an F22 Raptor—would be [and in this case is] F22.lwo, meaning LightWave Object. Meaning also just 46,493 little triangles and rectangles and NGons kinda glued together to build up an aeroplane, usually in Modeller. Over in LightWave [strictly speaking, both Modeller and LightWave together are LightWave3D, but no one cares], the keyframes controlling the positioning and speed and mass and lighting and bounciness and so on of the F22 and the sun and the camera and the clouds and whatever should be saved as something like F22.lws, meaning LightWave Scene. Where should actually means shouldabeen. Because I totally forgot to do that before hitting F10 [not a plane but a key between F9 and F11] to raytrace out a couple seconds of animation as a fairly quick test. Fairly quick in this case meaning about four hours. Then I wandered off and didn't find out until I got back that something puked and caused a Fatal Exception [a stupid term, since the fatality was in no way excepted], eradicating the whole LWS which never became a DotLWS.

On the bright side, it finished raytracing first. So at least I know what it looked like before it was removed from the universe....

Also, since I've been doing this for a while, and even back on the Amiga which otherwise only had to be rebooted about once a year, heavy raytracing was always a good way to lock up the machine, I'm functionally incapable of raytracing more than a single frame without saving all frames individually, like the one above, whether or not I also have LightWave compile the whole set into .avi or .mov or whatever; these days, I just slurp all the frames sequentially into Flash5 [yeah: I've got Flash10, or CS3, or whatever the hell it is; I just don't like it as much for this] and usually export that as something like F22.swf, though I'll also likely export something like F22.avi to convert to something like F22.flv on the server; but, for two seconds of footage, I don't really see a point.

So, here's F22.swf:

I didn't really have a way to get the timecode off the thing, since F22.lws never really existed. But that's okay: it's accurate. The thing starts a kilometre away at 0.00s, flies by the camera at 1.00s, and ends up another kilometre away at 2.00s. I know some people at Lockheed in Marietta; I'm gonna see what sorta employee discount they can get me on one of these things; if we can get the price down to about $75million from the $137.5million MSRP, I want one in gloss black with red trim.

Since F22.lwo still exists here, I might repaint the polygonal toy to make sure that looks as cool as I presume.

Hello, Sthailors....

Really annoying is that I wasn't done with the LWS before I didn't save it. I wanted to do a couple of easy things, like twisting the flaps to allow the plane to roll like that, and a couple of borderline impossible things, like erupting the water behind and beneath the plane into a plume probably using partigons [I built a mushroomcloud a few years before ILM built one for Crystal Dull with similar effects; I'd probably use similar math for this], and, knowing me, as I do, probably a couple of zany things, like a Liopeurodon ferox surfacing somewhere in the distance. Because, let's be real: while I'm overkilling the effects and using more polygons than I need to, the point here is to develop a webcast serial spoof of ResidentEvil in the twentieth century, folding in GTA3 and MGS2 and TM2 and whatever else seems like a bad idea before I do it anyway.

Have you heard the good news about Jeezuz...?

There is I suppose the helpful element of taking longer to get this ready than I'd expected, though it's also a factor in the delays. Since I'm still building stuff, while new games and new systems keep coming out, I've got newish things to whiteboard out to build. I'm thinking that Gophertown Mall is likely to look uncannily like Willamette Mall in DeadRising; Gophertown General stands a good chance of looking a lot like Left4Dead's Mercy Hospital; a couple of characters written more for personality than aesthetics in the scripting phase could probably look a bit like that damned mole in Animal Chatting and the big gayhomofag king from What the Hell's a Katamari.

Anyway....

Damn. Previewing this and seeing those two fucktards, I forgot what I was gonna say.

Oh yeah. I might have a sort of shabby solution, though it doesn't fix anything immediately and it's a little dangerous to consider. I've got Deadache written out for five years with twenty-four episodes each, which is good. Less good is that, sequentially, I kinda need at least the entire city built in time for about the third one. But I might be able to go a little nonlinear with it, frontloading the stuff taking place pretty much just in the mansion, with a couple of exceptions. If that works out on paper, as it were, I could probably get the first year done once I've got the house looking the way I want it. Which might be meaningless, since it'll probably take more than a year after that to get the city finished, even externally, not factoring internal elements like the inside of the mall and the aeroport and all. But I'm keeping that in mind. It even makes a certain sort of sense to do things that way, since the first Res, if not the zeroeth, was mostly limited to the mansion; no one really saw Racoon City before the third game.

But, I dunno. I'll probably just keep working on all this, but go back to not talking about how much of it isn't done yet for a while.

More later....

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