Satan Sam.co.uk

Why aren’t I fat or dead!

I’m in good shape and my BMI is hovering between underweight and recommended (according to Wii Fit). I guess it’s down to those hikes.

It’s been another productive few days, even with certain big white potential RRoD distractions. I’ve gone through the levels updating the graphics again which include adding an alpha channel overlay on one of the later areas;

Currently doing the graphics for a whole new area, and thats pretty much it! Graphics and more levels. It’s all fun.

So I think I’ve had an Xbox 360 for a few days now, I’ve played them a few times in the past but never really dove into any of the features beyond playing games. And how I’m reminded of the Xbox’s manufacturer – Microsoft.

Paid themes and images-  Why? Why on Gods great earth would anyone spend money on a JPEG and few colour changes. It’s absurd that they’d charge for something as paltry as some tiny PNG profile pictures too.

Stop trying to sell me things! Just an extension of the above point, but why is the first screen I see a spotlight of disposable nothings on Xbox Live? Isn’t it a better idea to have My Xbox as the first screen, or better still give us the option of selecting the initial menu.

Menu removal- Okay Microsoft, no matter how much you want me to I’m never going to rent a video from your store just as I’m never going to play a video DVD on it. The system is much too loud to be a media centre. Maybe some people do rent, but it would be nice if we could remove channels that we’re never going to use. The only customisation on an Xbox costs money, unless you go for free themes.

Avatar- Let us shift around body parts.

Community games- Some of them aren’t worth the pixels they’re printed on, are there any free games? There should be free games.

Meh, I guess it all comes down to everything having a price on the Xbox 360. £50 wifi adapters, 120gb HDD at £90, paying for themes, renting (not owning) videos, paying to play a game online. No wonder they charge so little for an Xbox now.
But oh do I like it. It’s got some great games and I’m really enjoying it before I’m flogged.

Someone like, properly hacked into my computer whilst I was arseleep and filmed this. And then the same miscreants stole my Youtube account and properly uploaded it before hacking ME and making me write this post out. Can you believe it?

And in this future I own an Xbox 360. I’ve not set Live up on it yet but my Live name thingy is raggedjimmi, so add me! Or something. I’ll be borrowing games from my brothers library of about 30 million so I’m sure we can play something.

I can’t even attach the screenshot of my stats page so you’ll have to take my and Pineapple’s word for now. Over the weekend Sam had a snip over 210,000 downloads.

This is why I need to get Tormishire out!

Update: 377,894 downloads in the past 48 hours.

Update 2: 402,951 .

So Windows Live Writer finally decides to work. Have some pictures.

Debug testing the newly added weather engine. It looks nothing at all like this ingame (the trails have been pasted onto the image), but a screenshot wouldn’t show direction. There’s a lot of customisation to this weather engine and hopefully I’ll be able to show it off on the next trailer. Supports wind, precipitation which also ties in with a sound engine that plays samples panning, volume and frequency depending on the weather.

Spent some time today tweaking the players sprite. The old (left) looked way too boring, it’s like he’s just stood there with all this shizzazle going on around him, the new one looks more, as the late Duke Nukem would have said, ready for action.

Also spent a lot of time tweaking explosions, altering the lens flare graphic.

Actually I wanted to properly research into lens flares. I set up my digital SLR camera and played around with torches and different length exposures to see how the lens flare forms. The specific event I was looking for was the circular rings that fan out when a light is centred on the lens.

These 2 shots are the ones I modelled the lens flare on, but this is a “level 2” type flare that only appears when the torch is activated. Explosions are common and would cause too much slow down. But as the light source approaches the centre of the camera view this radius effect fades in and rotates and all that to get a fairly nice look. Another idea I had was to adjust the number of angles of the actual projected flare object depending on how dark or light the surroundings were, emulating the look even further by providing aperture simulation. It’s possible to add in and I may do when MMF2 gets one hell of a performance boost. But it’s one fantastic effect in motion, especially when you’re running past explosions and the flares all pan across the screen.

So fact of the day. The lens emulation in Tormi is based around a Canon EFS 18-55mm lens.

Almost a year ago I was out photography model shoot thingy. The building that I set up in had a load of junk lying around, according to the owners it was all left there when they moved in. So they let me have a midi keyboard! Evolution as well (whose name I remember from an old midi composing app from years before). But it suffered the same fate at my house and was thrown in a corner to get dusty.

Until today! I wasn’t even sure it worked since it had no power adapter but I rummaged around the house and found one, wired it up using my M-Audio midi to USB adapter and Garageband on the Macbook and BAM! It works like a charm. But this is much better than my old keyboard due to its size and pitch/modulation wheels. The reason why I stopped making tracks for Tormi was because my Roland keyboard was much too large. So yea.

Tl;dr discarded keyboard I found works, back to making musics.

Makes me very happy.