Well, well, well look who has come crawling back to the only medium where anyone can spout inane bullshit and get away without receiving a swift kicking. Yes, it is true I have returned loyal readers.
Now that I’ve given my ego a good massage, I’d like to welcome you back dear reader. I have neglected to update this blog for too long and I miss the cathartic release I get from writing on it; I am selfish and write purely for myself. 
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So what have I been doing with myself of late other than work, well, to be honest bugger all. It is my nature and I won’t have it any other way but I have been busy with some things; why just today I baked some bread and it ranks as one of the greatest achievements of my life which certainly shows what a pathetic creature I am, throughout this whole bread endeavour I was excited. No that doesn’t really cover it, remember back to when you were a child and the first Christmas where you really understand what is going on, magnify this feeling tenfold and you will come close to the giddy squee that I personified this afternoon. You could not have genetically engineered a being as excited as I was this afternoon, the simple act of the dough rising almost killed me so happy as I was that I momentarily forgot to breathe.
Sadly, like so many things I turn my hand to, I failed utterly. The bread baked I attempted to extract it from its container which took me a good ten minutes only to find that the bottom of the bread had not risen correctly and was a malformed clump. I still tried some but it was horrendous and I quickly got rid of it. Even though I screwed up I enjoyed the process though it has reestablished a valuable trait I should have kept throughout my life and thus I will endeavour to even more of a pessimistic bastard than before.
*EDIT* I added some pictures, because it makes it look better.
For the longest time I have wanted to see something I have made in a game, honestly it’s a silly little dream of mine one hampered mainly by my chronic laziness and lack of any discernable talent but this hasn’t killed the dream!
To this end I’ve always been interested in modding and the scene around it but as above I have never taken the time to learn how to mod and so have done nothing to be proud of. A few years ago I used to play Dawn of War, the popular Warhammer 40K RTS by Relic, but it wasn’t until maybe the expansion Soulstorm came out that I even noticed there was a modding scene for it and Christ it was a real mod scene, there are absolutely loads of brilliant mods both cosmetic and otherwise out for DoW but I only really played Firestorm over Kronous because of the plethora of content it added.
Anyways, enough reminiscing, DoW2 is out now and I feel strongly that I want to mod for it and thankfully I am able to get the tools to do so. Due to being a student (kind of) It was pretty easy to get a copy of 3DS Max 2010 from Autodesk for free, albeit with a 13 month limit, so I have begun to learn how to use it. Currently I am just getting used to to interface but it does not seem as difficult as I first thought, once I feel confident enough I will post a couple of renders on here.
It was my hope to be able to mod DoW2 at least cosmetically with Max, but unfortunately the scripts provided by the Relicnews forumite Santos will not work for me, strangly they work for everyone else so no doubt like usual I have fucked up somewhere along the line, but I really want to get this to work so I’m not going to shrug and forget about it! It is time to moan and whinge and hope Santos will take notice and help me.
The good thing is, in the mean time I can learn Max and try getting models in the UDK as well as attempting to build my own game with it. 
Ah two months is really not as long as it feels, these past months have gone extremely quickly and that’s a small part of the reason I haven’t posted anything on here since February, the other, larger reason for my absence is due to college and the work therein. And absolutely nothing to do with my terminal laziness, not even a smidge.
Actually to say I am lazy is unfair, I mean these unlocks on Bad Company 2 don’t just magically appear on my screen everytime I log in, no sir, there are hours and hours that go into that. What would be fair though is to say I have what borders on a disturbing lack of motivation towards completing (read: starting) my college work. The Trials of Hercules are nothing in comparison to the gargantuan effort of merely fishing in my bag for the assignment sheet, at least Hercules had the wrath of the gods and the guilt of murdering his sons to spur him on, while I have nothing more than a tutors stare and a vague feeling in my stomach that I should be doing… something… but these are quickly dealt with, BC2 provides a great distraction.
This all came to a head last week though when I was required to do a presentation on my project, being woefully unprepared even though I had about a years notice I quickly threw some slides together and lied my face off, I’m not sure the tutor was impressed and I expressed, truthfully, at the end of my presentation that I had dicked about all year though the reaction off the tutor was surprising; understandably he said that up until the presentation he would have said that yes I had indeed been dicking around but after the presentation he felt I had actually learnt something through the year and had recognised my mistakes.
So both of us suitably surprised, me in that I had not received a bollocking and him that despite appearances I had managed to pull something together with substance, we parted ways and I went home with a strong determination to finish the project once and for all.
But like I said, those unlocks don’t appear by magic…
It is official as of today I am going to use the UDK after seeing the “Make Something Unreal” winners for last year I was pretty impressed with what they had come up with and in all honesty the engine is amazing, while there is going to be a lot more work involved than there would have been from simply modding Torchlight, I am sure that by the time I get something playable out it will have been worth it.
On the subject of changes I will no longer be making a RPG, as much as I would like to I feel it would be better off for me to make something a bit simpler for my first foray into the UDK and game design in general.
It will be a sci-fi shooter, think an extremely cheap man’s Mass Effect. An impoverished man.
Oh couple of links you might enjoy;
Dungeon Defense – the demo prototype for Dungeon Defenders, which was made if I read it correctly, in just 4 weeks. I haven’t had a chance to play it myself but I’m going to remedy that tonight, it was made with the UDK and looks very fun.
The Haunted – winner of the 2009 MSU competition, enough said really, check it out.
I’m a Final Fantasy whore it has to be said, so when FF7 popped up on the PSN store I quickly bought it for my PSP even though the PS1 discs sit not mere metres away from me, obviously I did the same when FF8 came out as well purely so I can play Final Fantasy when at college or out and about.
As should you. 
I love FF8, truly, I think it is probably one of the best in terms of story and gameplay, it may just be nostalgia but when I first played Final Fantasy, I was introduced to 7 but I think I was too young then to really care about the characters or the game but when I got to play 8 I had matured a bit more and could appreciate the characters and so it has a special place in my gaming collection.
Anyways enough bullshit, I mainly came on to say that I’m going to get the Lionheart on disc 1 because;
- I’m a masochist.
- I’ve never done it before.
- Being overpowered is occasionally fun.
Wish me luck.
Yeah that’s right, very quick update on what has to be the most offensively bad chainsword model and texture in history, again this was just a test to see if I could get it into Torchlight. Which it is pretty obvious I did.
Told you it was crap.
Apologies to any 40k fans out there, I promise I’ll do a better job next time.
Regardless of the utter awfulness of this picture, it does actually bode well, depending on how much time and effort I put into it I might be able to get a total conversion on the go. I really want to try the 40k universe as a base though there are obviously some issues with 40k + loot whoring, though if I work in a story it might not be so much of an issue. I was thinking of doing either an Inquisitor (because Dark Heresy is brilliant) or a Space Marine mainly because as much as I love the Eldar, Imperium stuff is easier to model.
Either way, they both present a wealth of opportunities.
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And a shit load of work :/.
You may remember I initially started this blog so I could record my attempts at modding Torchlight, well, I’m kind of not doing that mod any more due to issues I was having with being unable to get models into Torchlight, fortunately that has all changed as of about 10 minutes ago when I finally managed to get a textured weapon into the hands of the Alchemist while messing around in the editor.
I had only been playing with the software for about 2 hours in my quest to achieve this, the model is only a cuboid and the texture is like digitised shit but the main thing is that it works!!
Now I can begin steadily putting new models into the game as well as really learning the editor as I honestly have no clue how to make even a simple room with it due to me just generally being clueless. Anyways, here are a couple of pictures of my aptly named “Stick” and the editor even kindly provided two magically ones for me when I dropped it in from the console.
The all mighty and powerful Stick!
...now with fire.
Long time no post I guess, not much to say really I’ve been playing Darksiders and it is great. I absolutely love the art style and recommend it to anyone that reads this, suffice to say I’ve not done much else except Darksiders, work and learning how to model in Blender.
It is a fantastic free piece of software if you are unaware of it, on which you can create a wide variety of things.. as long as it is to do with 3D graphics, take a wander around their website and look at the beautiful pictures in the gallery, I’m too tired too talk in much detail about it at the moment but as long as you overlook its crazy interface (version 2.49 at any rate) then it is a gem. However, version 2.5 Alpha 0 is now out and it is even better, practice with either though as the majority of the controls are the same though 2.5 is more intuitive.
To learn Blender I recently signed up to Blender Cookie, a sub-site of CG Cookie, the tutorials on there are great and have really helped me. Below is a pair of headphones I made tonight following one of their tutorials, sub-surf modelling seems to be the way forward!
Notice the hidden audio jack lead
Soon if all things go well, I might even be able to get a weapon into Torchlight – which is something I struggled with at the weekend to no success.
I think that must be my inherent fail though.
So Tuesday has rolled round as it naturally does following Monday and my copy of Darksiders still hasn’t arrived, I’m going to put this one down to the weather yet again or somehow the box is bigger than my letterbox and they couldn’t post it, either way I’m going to head to the Post Office tomorrow with 3(!) failed delivery notifications and claim what is rightfully mine as I had a couple of other packages that haven’t arrived; so the packages I am going to collect are either the first 3 books of the Wheel of Time series or the first volume of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, both series having been recommended to me some time ago but I had forgotten them until recently. Anyways, enough of that onto the free games!
In between bouts of Dragon Age and waiting for the visceral pleasure that is Darksiders I have been messing around with a few free games that friends have recommended, all are developed by people with a real passion and in most cases the old trope “The Dev Team Thinks of Everything” is extremely apparent.
First up is Captain Forever, a fantastic Space Shoot-em-up from a true blue game developer, Jarrad Farbs, who quit 2K Australia to concentrate on his Indie gaming career, I’m glad he did as Captain Forever good fun even if sometimes difficult. You start off as a little pod that is the core of your ship, a handy information node pops up and gives you some girders, lasers and boosters to build your first real ship, from there you zoom around the playing field destroying other space ships and acquiring what you haven’t damaged, all the pieces are colour coded so you can tell what is stronger at a glance, I believe the scale goes from green (weakest) to white (strongest) but don’t hold that to me.
A simple concept maybe but it works brilliantly and I hope you check it out. Just watch out for the bigger guys early on!
My most successful design before I was destroyed.
Next up is Angband, a dungeon crawler in the most classic of senses, you start the game by choosing your sex, race, class etc, set up your character and prepare for an epic 100 floor journey as you loot more and more equipment eventually being well equipped enough to defeat the big bad at the end. I won’t spoil anything for you, mainly because I can’t, I don’t think I’ve been past 10 levels in the dungeon before getting my arse handed to me. Angband isn’t a particularly difficult game and I quite like its pace which as it is pretty much turn based, however quick you want to go.
Angband takes most of its inspiration race-wise from Lord of the Rings, which is nice as I’m a big fan and it is always fun to go bodding round a dungeon as a dwarf regardless of the setting, I believe there is also a multiplayer version available, but I’d have to check. For such a simple game though it is strangely addictive and fun, especially facing hordes of monsters down with only a torch and a broadsword
My dwarf Tarik facing off against the seemingly endless worms!
Lastly is NetHack, what is really the genre setter for dungeon crawlers since its first release way back when in 1987, itself a descendant of Hack, which is a descendant of Rogue. It has pretty much been in constant development since it was released so when I was first linked to it I was expecting some pretty big things from a game that is older than I am.
There is no doubt that this is a deep game, hell it is probably more complex than my beloved Dwarf Fortress, though this complexity is not readily apparent there are some definite hints to the unwary, take for example during my first venture into the game my character was thirsty but I didn’t have any water or rations to give him so spying a fountain in the distance I wandered over and drunk from it, half a second later a messaged popped up informing me that drinking from the fountain had summoned a water demon which proceeded to demolish me in one hit. This is something I didn’t even account for especially not in the first level of the dungeon, so I was surprised a bit, I have tried to get into it again but completely random things happen which is making it difficult to appreciate this game which is apparently loved by so many.
I don’t mind hard games but random things do not please me.
Ceourl the Barbarian attacking a Kobold Zombie
Just a few games, I might come back with more, christ knows I’ve got enough games. =/
Laters and I hope the images provide a nice break from the gratuitous amounts of text.
Life continues as it ever has and work begins anew, not that I have done much this morning mind, save a drawing that has to go to another company on Wednesday.
All in all it was a pretty uneventful weekend, fortunately The Colour of Magic arrived during the week so I started to read my newly founded Discworld collection from the beginning.
Riveting and hilarious are two words to describe it, but really you need a whole lot more to accurately convey it and I recommend them to everyone if you haven’t already read them. I first found the Discworld, Christ maybe 7 years ago in the school library and started with Guards, Guards! and loved it, Vimes is probably my favourite character with Rincewind coming a close second after reading the first 2 novels.
I’m glad to have started this collection, absolutely bloody brilliant books.
