Sweeney Todd

"Go on, run 'em over!"
"I can't just do that..."
"Why not, you're a Policeman, aren't you?"

Environment coming along nicely, and fairly satisfied with the trade off of clutter-versus-space. Too open and it'll look empty and sterile, too cluttered and there's no point in having large view distances and weapons that can reach 400 metres.


Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad (rhyming slang)

Having all of these streets with avenue style trees, street lights, telegraph/telecom poles, signs, roadworks and other ... well street objects, parked vehicles were somewhat noticeable by there absence. And they make good, large obstacles to use as cover.

So I modelled a basic, low-poly car (just 600 tris and then gets sharply LODed at 205 and 46) which comes in a police and civilian flavour - neither of which are textured as of yet beyond a basic UVmap. The car is basically the same for both versions, the civilian type just missing the lights off the top and the intercooler/radiator/bump-in-the-bonnet/I'm-not-a-car-nut/whatever-it's-called. Based rather loosely (as in unsueably loosely) on late 70s, early 80s Fords like the Consul-and-Cortina/with-a-heavy-dose-of-Capri.


British Armed Police. Not a musical about a serial killing barber

Policecar will have the old British "jam sandwich" colour scheme. I can't stand all the modern British police paintjobs - quite a surprise when I came back to the UK after living abroad. You wouldn't automatically think that they're police ... maybe some sort of bizarre doctor-on-call or just some boyracer (hotrodder) with a fancy paint scheme and strange bodykit. They're slate grey with day-glo yellow/green strips. Whatever happened to white/red/white layers? (hence "jam sandwich")


Though talking of music

Civilian version will be biege. Strange to think that biege is no longer considered a cool colour for a car. Oh the whims of fashion! Biege - the sort of awesome colour that should have it's own theme tune! Link. (There's a fleeting glimpse of a biege facsimile in the background of this clip at 0:0.27 - and check out the size of computers!)


Sweeney - dinner = a kicking

I'll also get round to a truck of some sort (a bigger thing to hide behind) which will come in civilian and military motifs. I've had a quick um-and-ah (that's thinking to most people) about whether to make these vehicles static obstacles or have them dynamically blow-up when damaged. I'm not sure the latter would really bring anything special to gameplay. Also wondered about making them driveable vehicles but aren't planning on it (though there is no boundary to feature-creep unless you set one).

After that it's a case of some road signs to set my fictional town in a factual location, two shop fronts (one a post office) and finalize a few textures for the big DIF (the town model). And after that it's a case of postmortem on how to build a level and lessons to be learnt. To be honest they're all pretty obvious and involve planning, listings, anti-faffing measures (as in going down the lists and not jumping back and forth fiddling with things) and less um-and-ah-ing.

And that's enough indulging '70s/80s British TV. .... I'm a child of my time .....

We Built This City on Rock and Roll

My new hard drive appears to be working fine, no problems since reinstalling my entire life.....



Been down in London (Where? Lon-don? Could you spell that please? L....?) and paid 12 quid (18USD) for a Mojito, which appeared to be a long glass full of ice. Consumed a good Magnum PI worth of free champers at a wedding so I guess it all evened itself out. Lon-don quite nice, but wouldn't want to live there.



Slowly but surely environment takes shape. Got street lights in, avenue style trees, and .... stuff. Still more .... stuff ... to do, mainly signs, benches and a few interior props before I'm happy. Had a further fiddle with the facade textures of buildings, and have finally decided on an art style.



Also been playing around with DRL and HDR lighting, and how the whole thing works with 200+ models (not batched) and visible range. And the answer appears to be ... fine. There really isn't much performance saving to be gained from cutting the visibility right down, or much to be lost from moving it right up.



So I've decided on just over a mile view at 1800 metres. Originally I was planning on half of that, but the performance change is fairly negligible. I'll see how the whole thing works when I have an extra 3-400 trees in the background (using batching to speed it all up).

Nigou Backup!

Apologies for the truly awful Japlish - at least that's what it sounded like phonetically if not literally ....

And how come the japanese don't have their own word for Backup?

By default it seems cavalier to apropos words from other languages like some sort of doppleganger.

So, death of my hard drive --- again..... sends an accusing glance in the direction of Dell and mutters "reconditioned" under his breath. At least the replacement arrived promptly.

Out with the Samsung of Korea and in with a Seagate of Thailand ...... but the first corruption of NFTS and I'm ditching the lot and buying my own decent quality drives (as opposed to constantly getting malfunctioning replacements from Dell).

But this is why we backup (that's the Royal "we" ..... or possibly the Gollum "we" --- depending on how often I'm eating raw fish heads).

A privately bought Seagate Freeagent is the main backup - main cos it's the biggest, and I've got a couple of drive pens after that, and then it's burning info to CDs. It's all part of a system designed to fight obliteration of blood, sweat, tears, nervous breakdown, etc of time and effort put in to development.

They might have sent men to the moon on something a little more powerful than a calculator, but they never had to reinstall 600 megs of Vista patches. No wonder no-one fancies chancing a Mars mission with Microsoft as the software flagship.....

And then there was all my programs, and then all the codecs, and other stuff that I don't really keep too much of an eye on. And then the development SDKs, at least TGEA (game engine - up for vote alongside the hugely expensive Cryengine2 on the Game Developer Magazine Awards)just slides across as is. Then what drivers did I have?

My usual forest of yellow, sticky, post-it notes had become overgrown into a thicket of the damn things. But anyway, we're back, after 12 hours of updates, reinstalls and reconfiguring settings to what I like. No WMA, you don't open anything, get off! It's Winamp and MPClassic, and what the hell codec did I have Mpeg4 playing with? And why can't I read anything at this resolution?

Anyhoo, drama over.