Saturday 19th April 2003
And I've been busy for the last two weeks again. It happens.
The image is clickable; it HREFs to an image measuring 1920*1080. HDTV dimensions. Scary stuff. This is why:
Even so, we're up to 100.html now. The hundredth What's New. At least since I started keeping track of them about a year ago. Which is not to say that I've kept total track of them; 001.html is missing in action, for example. Not only is it not on my computer; it's not on the server either. I might have it somewhere on CD. Which is to say that it might be on one of several thousand CDs, and it might even be labelled as something. And it might even be somewhere in this room--possibly even on my desk. That my desk has everything from various action figures to nearly-empty boxes of Club crackers to fully empty cartons of Camels to a few spindles of a hundred CDs each to...hang on...Knight Orc for the Amiga500 [I think it was a textbased game, if I remember right] to...a couple of fedoras to...ooh--new lighter--I'll have to remember that...to...that's the most identifiable stuff of the upper layer; what might exist down in the Lower Jurassic of my desk is anyone's guess. Bear in mind that my 'desk' is three tables put together to give me nine square feet of surface area; I think I've got about twenty-seven cubic feet of stuff on top of the nine square feet of surface area. I have no idea where 001.html might be by now, if I have it at all.
Oh well.
Anyway: this will end up being 100.html when I get round to writing what will become 101.html sometime this year. For now, it's main.html; so it should probably have some news in it.
Lemee think up some news real quick....
I am, of course, still working on all the preproduction elements of Deadache. I'm also wondering what in hell I was thinking. This is a lot larger than I thought it would be.
Initially, I was thinking of the town being smallish. Like Windsor Heights [a suburb of DuhMoines measuring eight blocks across with an average IQ of about eighty-five and the narcissism to remain a suburb even though it's about a square mile and has nothing in it but a few cops who have to leave Windsor Heights to hit the Perkins in Urbandale instead of doing their jobs, which appear to amount to little more than enforcing the Heightswide speed limit of ATTENTION SPEED LIMIT 25MPH; whether that reads as Attention: Speed Limit Twenty-five Miles per Hour or Attention Speed Limit: Twenty-five Miles per Hour is something no one's ever fully worked out], maybe; or possibly Glendale, Colorado, which is slightly larger but totally surrounded by bits of Denver.
Neither looks like it will really work. The more I think about it, the more Gophertown has to have in it. And even though it's all a bit of a joke, it's not particularly possible to fit all this stuff into sixty-four blocks. So I'm thinking about pushing it to about thirty blocks by forty--closer to the size of West DuhMoines. Or, I suppose, the parts of DuhMoines itself which anyone bothers to know about.
Which is to say that, while DuhMoines is technically the space from East Fifty-sixth to West Sixty-third, there's approximately nothing of interest to the east of East Fourteenth. You wade through a few blocks of dusty, dilapidated ickiness before you reach East Thirtieth, which marks the western edge of the Fairgrounds, which marks the end of Western Civilisation as we know it. Of course, that has amazing potential for a show designed to point out the idiocy in everything from videogames to the sort of people who play them on the east side of DuhMoines; still, it's not really necessary to build a town a hundred and twenty blocks wide. I think I can cram everything into roughly the space from about Thirty-fifth to Sixty-third, east of which things start to get satirically ebonic, and west of which you end up in the pretention centre. Making it forty blocks north to south gives us roughly the area from Douglas to Grand; there again, anything north of Douglas has been irrevocably infected by Johnston, Iowa, and anything south of Grand has been...lemee amend that to south of South of Grand, since South of Grand is both a known sector and my old neighbourhood from that unfortunate time I lived in DuhMoines. Which is to say that I probably had a locker at Roosevelt High School and spent a bit of time within a mile of it lurking about between Forty-second and Polk, and University and Grand instead of bothering to go to any classes at all. And just south of that, and South of Grand, is Greenwood Park. And that [although, the last time I checked, it looked a lot like a weapons testing field] is a good sort of area to include in Gophertown.
It's also tempting to figure Corey's old neighbourhood into this [naturally, he now lives South of Grand, within walking distance of the house I walked out of when I moved to Denver] even though it's way the hell over on the southeast end within walking distance of Southridge Mall. Which is a slight oversimplification, since I've actually walked from Valley West Mall to Altoona [the other side of the street at East FIfty-sixth] before. Nothing in the Greater DuhMoines Metro Area [sadly, there are those who call it that without joking] is beyond walking distance; in the words of Arthur Bach, they recently had the entire town carpeted; we're talking small.
So. I'm building a town with the dimensions of Thirty-fifth to Sixty-third and Douglas to Grand, and cramming in all the neat stuff from DuhMoines, Denver, New York, Los Angeles, London, and so on. So I'm not done building it yet.
Then there's the other matter. Filming.
I was right. Filming at 320*180 [or, actually, at 320*240, letterboxed to 16:9 to make the process of formatting easier] is faster by half an order of magnitude, and translates about the same from .avi to .wmv. The only problem now is that dropping the kbps to realtime dialup speeds is a Bad Thing. Dropping it to roughly the kbps of a DivX film [700MB per 120 minutes, or so] works out all right for quality, but still amounts to about 97kbps. Which is to say that it's about a hundred kilobytes per second. Which is about 800k, in modem terms. Which is the cable/DSL area of realtime downloads.
So that's pretty well that. A show broadcasting at 56k is going to suck. A lot. A show broadcasting at broadband speeds is good enough to watch, but will require downloading most of a thirty-minute file [about 175MB] before watching the first frame.
So I've got it mostly worked out now. The show will be about 175MB per episode. Real modems will be able to deal with that. Dialups will have to download it over a few weeks before watching it at all.
Meanwhile, I'm saving and refilming the files at better resolutions to end up at about 700MB per episode; then I'm saving those onto CD [and hopefully not hiding them on my damned desk] and making VCDs out of them. Those should be available sometime after the show begins to webcast; keep an eye on wastedinc.com for that.
Actually: that's not entirely accurate. I'm saving and refilming the files, of course; but there might be a few changes for the larger versions. Because a 175MB .wmv hides a lot of things, I can get away with building and rendering various elements in less time for the same basic look in the end. Except that the end is a 700MB file which would exploit the shortcuts; so I'll probably replace the LoRes stuff with HiRes stuff before refilming at DVD dimensions for the discs.
Of course, optimally, I'd film it at HDTV dimensions. But that's huge. Here's an example:
Size: 1920*1080
Depth of Field: 49.25 metres
FStop: 4.0
Segments: 11
Raytraces per segment: 33
Total raytrace passes: 363
Total rendering time: 01h.08m.03.2s.
Total theoretical rendering time at 24fps*60s*30m: 5y.215d.14h.24m.00s.
Odds of spending nearly six years rendering a thirty-minute show at 1920*1080 at 363 traces per frame on a 2.4GHz laptop: 0.
As a basis of comparision, ILM are rendering 1920*1080 at 24fps in 11segments*5passes [55 traces per frame] on a bank of SGIO2 supercomputers and taking a year to do, at most, 130 minutes of footage. Which suggests that a thirty-minute show could be produced by NORAD in just under ten weeks. Which suggests that we're not quite ready to film this thing in 1920*1080 here.
The Stealth rendered at 320*180 in 1.1 secondsI'm well aware of the irony in using countless supercomputers over three months to emulate a videogame playing out at realtime on a 1920*1080 television set from a PS2 running at 300MHz. Although, I think the average PS2 game is 320*240, occasionally letterboxed to 320*180, which is what I'm using to film this thing at under a second per frame; to give you an example of rendering 320*180 without the antialiasing, refelxions, refractions, shadows, and so on, the same shot is rendered in 1.1 seconds at the dimensions I'm using for Deadache, over on the right. I'm averaging about ten percent of realtime here. Once everything is built, it'll take something like six hours to film a thirty-minute show. Unless you count the downtime of telling the various objects and cameras what to do first, which is conditional on what the people doing the voices have spent several hours recording, which relies somewhat on the script I spend an hour or two writing, which relies on the server bringing me more coffee sometime this year. Otherwise: things should move fairly quickly once we're beyond all the preproduction shit.
More Later....
--Gremlin