Thursday 15th May 2003
Found HalfLife. I've been too busy playing that for the last five days to write one of these things. I really need to hire a staff to do this for me.
Which is so close to the exact look I want for the cops in Deadache [obviously the cops in a small Duhmerican town should dress like the SAS] that I'm thinking about just using this file. Partly because, if I understand things correctly, the CounterStrike models are derived from HalfLife models, which are derived from QuakeII models, which are opensource PD stuff. Also, this guy has less than a thousand polygons, meaning that I'm rendering a frame at 0.0 seconds:
This is good news. Granting that 0.0 seconds is anything up to 0.049 seconds, each element in a scene might take a fifth of a second to render; a group of twenty objects could actually result in a trickling 1fps in rendering times. One object is rendering at 20fps or more, which isn't bad when the whole thing is designed to play at 12fps.
Anyway: here's the news on that.
Well, first of all: as much fun as HalfLife was, BlueShift and OpposingForce are actually pretty interesting. Particularly OpposingForce. CounterStrike might be interesting, as much as it looks like TeamDumbass; but every CounterStrike server on the 'net is either overfilled or has zero people in it. I guess I'll find out later.
Meanwhile, after a bunch of different ways of trying to do this, I finally managed to rip the .mdl files out of CounterStrike and into LightWave. This was the result:
Of course, it's not quite this easy. Even ripping Quake models out of a game will take a bit of modification. And I need to add the bones to the models so they don't just walk around like people who took DaVinci way too seriously. And I'm still building sets here. But it's starting to get closer to a show now. A bit.
Sets are, of course, an issue. It's a dumb little circle. I can't really finish building the town until I work out what has to be in it; and I can't work that out until the story is written; and I'm having problems writing the story without a general idea of what's in the town. Usually, this doesn't happen; usually, I'm just writing a novel in which any given thing can magically exist around some anonymous corner; with this, I have to plan ahead for all the corners; cutting them doesn't really work.
Ironically, I could probably get the town worked out in an hour using SimCity4, if SimCity4 would run for more than five minutes without hitting a bug. I'd like to do a show based on videogames; but if I base it on SimCity4, everyone and everything in the city will crash and die six times an episode. It doesn't sound that entertaining, to me.
Okay. Let's move on.
We went and saw Matrix2 last night. I probably don't have to mention much about it; the only reason I had to see it a day early at all was to avoid hearing about parts of it when everyone else on the 'net went to see it tonight. If you want a review...um...go see it, I guess. Or don't. Up to you. Like any film with more CG than plotline, it looks pretty...um...I'm not sure I'd say it even looked all that good, factoring that they had four years to do it. It's definitely fast though. Everything you'd want in a videogame. And, if Enter the Matrix is the same, it'll do pretty well.
Storywise...the reluctant messiah beats everyone up until finally meeting the only guy in the Martix who makes Morphaeus and Smith appear to talk quickly and casually; then he finds out that the prophesy is just propganda designed to talk him into ending the world. Oh, and some assassin shows up out of nowhere and fails to kill him. And stuff. On the bright side, I don't think I ever heard Reeves say 'whoa'; maybe that'll be in a deleted scene on the disc later this year.
So. What else is new....
Did I mention that SunCoast pissed me off? I know I meant to; I'm not sure I ever did. google.com thinks I didn't. Okay. Here's what happened.
About a month or two ago, I went into the SunCoast where I keep buying films. So...they've got these neat little rectangles at the register, and they open up into larger rectangles covered with words about films. So, like an idiot, I picked one up to look at the words about films. And, after about five seconds, the manager who knows for a fucking fact that I've spent more in his store than he'll make this year, tells me, 'you know...we don't mind it when you look at our magazines; but we'd rather you bought it if you're going to read it.'
Now...I have two important questions here. First: where is the line drawn between looking at a magazine and reading it? Is this some sort of fair use policy I hadn't heard of before? Like when you see a book with the little disclaimer telling you that you can 'reprint portions of this work for review purposes'? Exactly which percentage of assimilated words kicks you up from looking to reading?
More importantly: who the fuck set the precedent on this policy? You mean I'm not the first guy capable of reading a fucking magazine to walk into Aurora Mall? Who's the other one? I want his number; we'd probably get along.
Seriously. This is not the mall of literacy. They have warning signs which no one literate has ever noticed before. For example: NO SMOKING WITHIN 100 FEET OF MALL ENTRANCE. Which is just above the ashtray two metres from the fucking door.
On which door is the sign reading, among other things, NO ANIMALS ALLOWED. I've tried to ascertain whether the people who go into this mall are vegetables or minerals, to no particular avail; I'm sure that vegetables and minerals are as equally perplexed by the question as the people I've asked.
There is something very, very wrong here.
Now...I'd film some of this shit as evidence, but I can't. Because you're not allowed to film in the mall. Of course, you're not allowed to smoke in the mall, either. Because it's a public place. Which is a paradox. If it's a public place, then the people in it are public figures, in which case they've waived their rights to anonymity and I can film them all I like. Someone here is an idiot. I don't think it's me.
I'm thinking about wasting a few hundred bucks on some sort of SpyCam thingy just to film these morons anyway. I've mentioned that to a few people already; so far, the people I've mentioned it to very much want me to do it. To the degree that they'd actually pay a monthly fee to see it on a website. Maybe I'll do something like that. Sort of like Michael Moore without the outbursts.
Well, without the same outbursts, anyway....
Um. Okay. Done now.
More later....
--Gremlin