Thursday 1st May 2003
As much fun as it might be to expose spam here at gremlin.net, it's somewhat less fun to realise that you're getting over a thousand EMails a day, a large percentage of which are spam.
Given a texture map, and an attachment to a character, it would look a little better than this does. The important part is that it's the right shape and polygon count for this.
Lemee clarify what spam is real quick.
Spam is an EMail bothering you to buy something which, if it were worth buying in the first place, would logically be advertised in a better way. The Scamway logic. If your product can only be sold in a pyramid scheme, you have to assume it's something no one would ever actually want. The same goes for spam. And pretty much anything advertised by minimalist means. Radio controlled matchbox cars; card decks with fifty-two Iraqi morons on them; used cars; christianity; whatever. If you haven't got the budget to advertise something correctly, stop and ask yourself why before telling me that it exists.
There are really no enforced laws regarding spam. There are various regulations, most of which contradict each other. One law in California allows an ISP to charge a spammer five hundred bucks per spam to any user @TheirDomain.com. Granting that gremlin.net is considered an ISP, and that the server it runs on is located in California, I'll go ahead and focus on that law.
So. Here's the new rule, effective 1st May 2003. All unsolicited EMail sent to x@gremlin.net, as well as any domain under the grempire, will be backtraced to the loser of origin and sent a bill for US$500. Pay it or don't. Outstanding bills will be logued under accounts receivable and used at the end of the year as a writeoff.
At some point, when I have the time to do it, I'll set up a new subsite here listing the true EMail addresses and identities of these spammers, segregated into both categories--outstanding and paid.
Depending on the success of billing backtraced spammers, I might have to start sending the bills to their ISPs, and leaving it to them to cover the fines and charge the spammers the money in their normal service bills. Granting that spamming is considered a crime, it can be argued that any ISP not taking actions against the spammers are aiding and abetting.
Not that I'm really expecting this to do a lot of good on its own. But it might be fun to hand the IRS a logue illustrating that I'd love to pay taxes, but I'm down half a million bucks a year over the deadbeat section of accounts receivable.
Okay; let's move on....
I am, of course, still working on all the technical stuff for Deadache. Part of the problem is that I keep forgetting I'm doing something for the 'net, based on videogames. So I've got all this stuff built for films. Which is to say that any given object has the polygon count of an entire scene. So I'm trying to reduce things to realtime levels.
Obviously, that can be done. And a good modern example is Counterstrike. I haven't actually played Counterstrike yet; but I've looked at enough stills from the game to see how it's done. It seems to be based on HalfLife [which seems to have been based on Quake], which I have played. Somewhere in the house--possibly in this room--potentially on my desk--I've got a box containing all five or six HalfLife games; not that I can actually find it. So I'm working on that too. The plan is to make Deadache look a lot like that. Big, flat polygons with enough texturemaps to make things look somewhat lifelike. Which is a lot like painting a Rubik's Cube to look like an M1A2 Abrams.
Dropping the polygon count that low isn't exactly required to get the thing filmed in time, of course. I happened to watch Star Wars the other night and noticed something really funny. Two things. The first was that a VHS cassette looks really bad on a television with a resolution of 1920*1080. Also, that little documentary about making CG dewbacks is funny as hell to watch now. It took ILM about a year to drop a CG Jabba into a few minutes of footage; the polygon count of Jabba and the dewbacks was about ten percent of the stuff I've been building, where each object takes about a tenth of a second to render. It's always fun to realise that your laptop is faster than the DecAlpha machines ILM were using seven years ago.
So. Polygons.
Building objects and characters to match the polygon counts of HalfLife gets things to look about right. This puts us into the technological realm of Quake2, TwistedMetal2, ResidentEvil2...if it's the second generation of a videogame, it's probably the look we're talking about. Unless it's Mario, in which case you'd have to imagine Mario64 with better textures. And, of course, somewhat fewer retarded plumber eunichs onscreen at any given time. One of these days, I'm going to work out why Mario screams testicle every time he enters a level, too.
To give you an idea of the polygon counts we're aiming for, this is thirty-six polygons, although I could probably drop it to twenty-four without losing much. It took about ninety seconds to build and animate, and two seconds to render sixty frames for the animgif.
So there's still a bit left to do here. Which means that, at the earliest, we'll probably be ready to broadcast this fall--about the time all the normal shows start up again.
I'm also still thinking about format. It's possible that I can do this in Shockwave. I'm just not sure how small it would be, or if it would look better or worse than .wmv. So I'm looking into that. My larger concern at the moment is getting everything ready to film in whatever format before worrying much about broadcasting the final release.
More later....
--Gremlin