Clarification

Maybe, while we wait for the GDC downloads to get finalized, I should clear up some confusion. Various people, after reading summeries of my session on the Interweb tubes, seem to have gotten the impression that my session could be easily summerized as “Lair didn’t look good until we used normal maps – you should all use normal maps!”

I did indeed make that comment in the beginning – as a quip to demonstrate that if it really was that simple, I wouldn’t have anything to talk about in the first place. Normal mapping is a widely used (and not all that complicated) technique that has been been applied successfully in many of the greatest blockbuster games we have played over the past few years. My talk concentrated on the fact that in the end, normal mapping is not a big wonder weapon, as some people might think. Your visual results always depend on the quality of the normal maps that are applied to a game, not the simple fact that you can do it in the first place. I did the session to present a few ways to increase that quality.

I just thought that it would be worthwhile to point out the distinction. Keep in mind that GDC is a developer conference. It’s all about the behind the scenes stuff, and about sharing knowledge that will help our industry to become better at what we do – so that we can all learn, evolve…and get the fuck off this planet. I’m not sure about that last part. But hey, any chance to quote the late great Bill Hicks

Home is…

• Finding a blue feather from one of your parakeets in the freshly washed socks that you’re putting on in a San Francisco hotel room.
• Finding one of her hair rubber bands, which she always leaves all over the house, on your computer desk in the morning.

There And Back Again

I’m back from GDC, with a shiny new copy of Motorstorm from the Playstation store Can’t wait to play the game online – my PS3 account name is “Matthias”, look me up in some online games!
I think the talk went well (and yes, it was technical ), and I’m incredibly excited for the future of the PS3 in general. Gonna get all downloads for my lecture ready in the next week or so. Thanks for showing up!

TV on DVD on my TV

Now that I’m all done with season 2 of Battlestar Galactica, I can finally give the much touted Firefly a try. If there’s one good thing about long crunch hours on a game it’s that I get to get to watch all the TV series that I never have time for (or, frankly, don’t want to find time for) during regular work hours. I’m looking forward to getting hooked by Firefly – I just hope that it really happens. I know that Joss Whedon is many people’s master now, but when I initially bought Firefly on DVD (must have been three years ago) I never got further than part of the first episode.

As for Battlestar, it’s a great, great show. I understand now why the people who stay caught up with the SciFi channel complained that the ending of season 2 felt a bit rushed, and that maybe one or two filler episodes could have been cut in favor of a longer ending, but those are details. I’ll wait for season 3 to appear on DVD, and then I’ll be all over it – as soon as the next crunch hits the Factor 5 offices.

Three days to GDC!

As I’m sitting here pulling together my GDC lecuture, I notice that as usual, I have way more material than I anticipated. The challenge, also as usual, is to make it all fit in a 45 minute lecture that is indepth enough to get the coveted “that was useful!” label from the audience, without being so detailed that it gets boring and long-winded.
I think I can strike a good balance: I will have some very useful (and hopefully eye-opening) workflows to help texture artists and producers alike, and on the fun front I promise some Lair demos that show off the assets I’m going to present very well and that you probably haven’t seen before. As usual, all the Lair stuff will be “you had to be there”, nothing will be released outside of GDC. But the slides and workflow videos will be available after the show.

Hope to see you on Wednesday!

Speaker: Matthias Worch (Game Designer / Technical Art Director, Factor 5, LLC)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 7, 2007)   9:00am — 10:00am
Location (room): Room 3007, West Hall

Six-legged tragedy

You see them every day, but you never notice them: insects that got crushed on the front of your car. Now Volker Steger has released a series of photographs that show closeups of this little graveyard. Spiegel.de has a (German) interview and a gallery with some of the pictures. Absolutely stunning, showing us the world in a way that we never consciously perceive it.

More Cowbell!

Damn you, SNL! So I’m listening to Peter Gabriel’s Family Snapshot, a really good song that I could get into. But all I can think of as I listen to the instrumentation (especially for the studio version) is “more cowbell!” MORE!

Sweet, sweet memories

C6 H12 O6 is the chemical formula for glucose, and the simplest form of carbohydrates. More complex carbohydrates are built on that base, and enzymes in our saliva break down those complex carbohydrate (flour, grains etc.) to get to the slightly sweet taste. Or something like that – I don’t feel like verifying every detail now, but I skimmed through the Wikipedia entry again and think it’s about right.

I remember this stuff from school, I think. I always had an affinity for biology, even though I didn’t like chemistry one bit. Back in high school I was very busy telling myself that I wasn’t any good at math and, by extension, chemistry and physics. It just didn’t seem to come naturally to me, and thus meant that I automatically sucked at it. Which is nonsense, of course. As I got older I realized that with just a bit of effort, all this stuff can be learned.  I really should have known back in school, when I completely screwed up a chemistry test on acids and got the first and only F that I ever got – just to study for the follow-up test and get a resounding A. Maybe it rung a little bell at the time, but the young mind has powerful way means of self-persuasion. I. Just. Wasn’t. Good. At. It. Okay mom??? *pout*

What has me puzzled is why I remember this kind of stuff out of nowhere. This whole glucose chemical formula thing came to me on my way to work this morning – and I started digging deeper and deeper into my brain until I was satisfied. Maybe I was thinking about my brother and that brough it on – he is doing this (and much more complicated stuff) as a job now. Regardless, it was fun remembering this stuff, no matter how rudimentary and filled with holes the information. I think the reccognition that school was good for something is just a good feeling, especially as you get older. I might still be smarter than a 5th grader, and when I have kids I might, just might, still be able to help them with some homework. Until then, I’ll wait for other random tidbits to enter my brain while I’m cruising on the road. Who knows, something interesting might come of it.

IGN interviews John Debney

John Debney, popular film composer and creator of one of my all-time favourite movie scores (that would be Cutthroat Island), is interviewed on IGN about his scoring work on Lair.

• Part 1
• Part 2

Domain Shuffling – Done!

If you can read this, the internets should have updated all tubes to accurately lead you to my webpage again. For the longest time, I used Langsuyar.com as my main domain and had various other pages forward to that domain. Email was on the old and trusty Ocrana server, which I have used for over 10 years and gets way too much spam these days. A bit of a mess that I finally wanted to clean up.
After a bit of work the main domain now is Worch.com. You can still reach me under my Ocrana email address, but I will be phasing that one out over the next few months. The new, reliable email address is mattias @ this domain. I’m sure you can figure it out, I want to keep the spambots off my tail as long as possible. The pages should still all work exactly as before. Please let me know if you find anything that’s broken!