I Am Not Dead Yet, I Can Dance and I Can Sing…

If I’ve been quiet for the last couple of weeks it’s because I have been pretty busy picking up after events that you normally don’t write about on your blog. Potentially fatal car accidents, for example.

Two weeks ago, on my way to the airport to visit friends in Seattle, my car got off the road in Sonoma, ran down a ditch and got totaled. Needless to say, I was in it. That’s really about as much as I can write about the accident – I don’t remember much of it, anyway. I don’t know if the car flipped or not (it looks like it did), I don’t know how I got off the road in the first place (the surface was wet from the previous night, but it’s hard to accept that that was the sole cause). I don’t even know how long I was unconscious inside the car until I got out, managed to call the CHP and got taken to the hospital. But I do know that was alone in the car and nobody else was involved in the accident. So far, so good.

The next six hours were spent in the hospital, laying on my back and not moving, while various doctors performed various scans, put staples in my head to stitch the laceration I had endured and generally made sure that nothing else was terribly wrong with my body. Luckily, there wasn’t – I’m fine, and a nasty concussion and said gash in the head are all that I took from what could have been a much more serious accident. So far, even better. Remember to wear your seatbelts people, they save lifes!

So the car is totaled, but luckily that’s covered by insurance. I took my time looking for a new car and considered several options. I finally settled on a 2007 VW Rabbit (that’s a Golf for all European readers, VW has decided to rebrand the car again for the US market). It’s certainly not as racy as the old car, but drives nicely, and VW increased the engine power for the 2007 models.

Two weeks later everything is (almost) back to normal. Victoria has been a great help and support through all of this. Above are some images from this episode – they say pictures say more than a 1000 words and stuff, I hear. Sorry for the watermarks, but I don’t want this picture to show up on any other webpages that happily celebrate car crashes. This hasn’t been all that funny, and I’m posting this for readers of my page, not anonymous amusement. I’m certainly glad that this is an interesting episode I get to tell people about, not a life-changing event.

I’m still alive!

Quite literally this time.

Congratulations Epic!

Gears of War is looking very cool so far.

Neverwinter Nights 2 modding

Been busy picking apart NWN2 this weekend. Here’s some info I posted on the message boards:

• Correct Normal Map directions for NWN2 maps
• Hooking up new tilesets

Beware the Extremists, There’s Always a Reason For Why They Are the Way They Are

“I am a deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life,” wrote Ted Haggard, 50, who was fired Saturday as head of the 14,000-member church.

*sigh* How can you get it so incredibly backwards? The problem, dear Ted Haggard, is not that you think you have a sexual problem. The problem is that you and your followers don’t realize that you don’t have a problem. But instead of accepting the inevitable conclusion of this episode, that maybe it’s just good old human nature and not a choice as you so often claim, you cling to millenia-old scriptures that were written in a time when people were ignorant, thought that the world is a disc, women had no rights and homophobia still reigned supreme.

The other problem, of course, is that you’re a hypocritical asshole who wasn’t man enough to stand up to his nature and channelled his “demons” into public campaigns of intollerance instead. But that is almost incidental – not being able to cope with the first issue and looking for an outlet paved the road to where we are now.

In other news: people protesting the message of tollerance. Gotta love the irony of that. I’m assuming that the play in question is The Laramie Project. Victoria was assistant director on that play a few years ago, now I’m glad I know about it.

Today’s Weird Search Result

I have no idea why somebody would search for this. And end up on my page. Fun to see, though…

NWN 2

So far, so easy and straight-forward. I can convert Obsidian’s stuff to .obj, hook up the diffuse maps and make my own models based on those templates. The asset complexity doesn’t look too bad, either. Getting this back into the game is an entirely different matter, it’s currently limited and you have to resolve to hacks. Waiting for some better tools to add custom geometry with all shader effects into the toolset.

I guess I’ll get started on some simple tileset stuff. Looks like NWN2 tiles are just arbitrary building blocks now, with no more connection rules and crazy stencil shadow meshes to consider like in the old NWN.

Maybe I’m Projecting…But Probably Not

You know what’s sad about the whole Ted Haggard story? All those Evangelical Christians on their “we’re protecting the family values of America” high horses won’t wake up and smell the roses, realizing that hypocricy reigns supreme in many of their circles. Instead, every second sermon on Sunday morning will cite this event as proof that the devil is well alive and walking this world, just waiting to seduce every single one of them – unless they are ever watchful and keep going to their ritualistic megachurch ceremonies of course. Because obviously, if it can happen to somebody with as much integrity and high moral values as Ted Haggard, it can happen to everybody! And only strict following of the church’s rules – not a healthy and relaxed outlook on life – will protect you.

I don’t mean to offend religious and spiritual people or lump them together in the same category as the lot above. But to me megachurches and TV priests symbolize everything that is wrong with organized religion and institutionalizing what, at its core, is a good idea.

Now Playing: Neverwinter Nights 2

God I’m excited for this game. The first one was good, the construction kit was great, and from what I hear the editor for NWN 2 won’t be an inch worse than what the first game offered. And that’s really what it’s all about, you know: the construction kit. I spent a good part of my highschool life making D&D modules for Unlimited Adventures, and…well, making stuff for “other” games (even though I barely finish, let alone release, much anymore) is plain fun. I’m hoping for a fun built-in single-player campaign, but tapping into NWN 2′s seemingly limitless potential is what it’s all about.

Too bad this game is such a resource hog. My 7800GTX can decently render the interiors at 1280×1024 (which is a crooked resolution for my natively 1600×1200 LCD ), but as soon as I leave the house and get into that first campaign fight the game chugs majorly for reasons entirely unknown. It all looks decent, but not very complex and like it should warrant such high system requirements. And the toolset doesn’t even load on my Dell, it crashes on startup. Probably some laptop ATI driver issue, my desktop machine works fine. But still annoying as hell when said toolset is such a major selling point.

I’ll dig in deeper over the weekend to evaluate the gameplay. First impressions were okay, but I haven’t played far enough yet. I hear the story and conversations are really good, so that’ll be fun to explore. And of course I want to see how painless it currently is to author custom content. I already downloaded the .obj converter, but it’s 3rd part and I don’t know yet how well it performs.