Posted by Gremlin [12.254.24.80 - 12-254-24-80.client.attbi.com] on 01 January 2002 at 05.23.15 ZuluTime:
New year; new board; a few new things in general....
I moved a few things around on the board a couple of days ago, of course; with everything stacked up at the top, I was trying to find a good way to smash it all into a smaller space. It seems to have worked for now. I'll probably update it again when I have more time.
The site is effectively five years old now. That's kinda cool. And, looking at the hitcounter, which was dating back to last June, it was bothering me. So I had the choice of either blanking it to start from 1st January 2002 or approximating the actual hits to the site since the beginning. The scary thing is that the number is a conservative estimate. Granting that gremlin.net was getting fifty thousand hits per day in 2000, figuring 365*5*5000hpd is pretty low. Then again, by the end of 1997, we were getting about fifteen hundred hits per day; so nine millionish hits in the last five years is probably pretty close to the actual number.
Not that it really matters much either way. I'm guessing that a huge number of those hits had a lot to do with BangBang posting replies to every damned message on the boards. And a decent amount were people reading his idiocy and replying to it. And still more hits were lurkers watching the little plebian--or Pleiadian--or whatever he was--suck on a global scale. No big surprise: the top ten television shows have nothing more than a bunch of idiots misunderstanding reality to a laughtrack. If you want to be truly successful, just hire a moron as a mascot.
Okay: site news. None.
Kinda.
Someone got me the Star Wars DVD for Giftmas. It turns out I'm not the only one who thinks up desperately-impossible stuff and then notices that it can't actually be done. But: a few of the shortcuts ILM took on the CG might be useful here. So I'm playing with logistics now.
Meanwhile, I'm also doing that 1997 dewback playtest thing with the video. I'm working on a new video for cei.grem.tv with a few of the elements of the gremlin.net video in it. That one's a lot simpler than what I'm planning for gremlin.net; if it works, I can push things up a bit on the major project.
Not that the CEI video is at all simple either. It's just more mainstream, I guess. It also allows me to use Poser4, which is LightWave for Dummies. If it works, I'll be able to composite a few of the simpler things in the gremlin.net video and save some time.
In the end, it's just a matter of pixels. But at 640*360*24fps*60spm*5m...that's a lot of pixels to worry about.
Which is the other thing. Doing this at twelve frames a second isn't working. Most people don't see it, but it looks jumpy to me. The Japanese are doing 150fps now. But there are a lot of people in Japan; I'm working alone here. 24fps is good enough.
As for the new site, that's kinda related to all of this. And it presents more problems. At the moment, gremlin.net is designed for dedicated lines. If I go too far with this, you'll need a T9 to look at the site. So that's taking time too: working out what the site should look like, and then working out what it can look like, given the technological limits of the era.
Eventually, one way or the other, I'll get something worth seeing uploaded. So...stay tuned, or something.
More later....
--Gremlin