Vielen Dank, Deutschland…

Ein Grund mehr, alsbald nicht zurueck nach Deutschland zu ziehen. Ich habe jetzt keine hoch wissenschaftliche Analyse, die diesen Gesetzesvorschlag als halbgaren Aktionismus enttarnt. Der allgegenwaertige, aber nie offen genannte Grundtenor scheint ja immer derselbe zu sein: “Sowas passiert nicht bei uns in Deutschland! Unsere Gesellschaft ist von Grund auf characterstaerker als in anderen Laendern! Wenn es hier jetzt solche Amoklaeufe gibt, dann muessen aeussere Einfluesse Schuld sein!” Und schwupps waren Computerspiele – die ein Beiprodukt der gesellschaftlichen Veraenderung und nicht der Ursprung sind – an allem Schuld. Ich weiss auf jeden Fall eines: das Spielen dieser “extrem gewalthaltigen” Computerspiele hat ausschliesslich positive Auswirkungen auf mein Leben gehabt. Ich habe Freundschaften geschlossen, die auch nach ueber 10 Jahren noch bestehen, mir kreativ neue Welten erschlossen – und dabei nie eine erhoehte Faszination fuer Waffen oder das Toeten realer Menschen entwickelt. Eine Abstumpfung hat ebenso wenig statgefunden. Und Spiele, in denen “Leben gesammelt wurden” haben wir schon als kleine Kinder gespielt: das hiess Cowboy und Indianer oder bestand aus selbstgebastelten Blasrohren und rohen Erbsen.

Aber gut, ich will mich ja gar nicht wirklich gross aufregen. Man muss nicht immer gleich alles so heiss essen, wie es gekocht wird. Hier in Amerika schlagen die religioesen Fanatiker generell um sich, sobald eine weibliche Brustwarze zu sehen ist, und versaute Pfarrer verkuenden, eine dreiwoechige Gespraechstherapie habe sie von der Homosexualitaet “geheilt” (*prust*). In Deutschland sind es halt gewalttaetige Spiele. Ein Land, in dem jedermann vernuenftig, relaxed und groovy ist scheint es noch nicht zu geben (irgendwas in Skandinavien vielleicht?), also warten wir weiter geduldig ab.

New From Apple

Presenting the “iPod”, a digital music player that can hold 1000 songs on its 5GB harddrive. As Steve Job explains in the video, this is a great growth opportunity for Apple and might just revolutionize the music market.

It would be too easy to laugh at the low specs of the original, 1st generation iPod. “Oh, look how quaint it was! 1000 songs? How cute!” But honestly, even back then everybody could project where the technology was going and how fast the product would grow to its current 160GB video incarnation. Maybe I’ll do the “Oh, how quaint!” thing 30 years from now, when I connect to the music collection of the entire world via the microchip that’s implanted in my brain.

What I find much more fun is how low-key this announcement event was compared to today’s keynotes. Small room, quiet crowd, subdued…okay, never mind: same Steve Jobs. But that’s the passion, showmanship and, uhm…”assholeness?” that made Apple what it is today. It starts at the top and trickles down.

GDC 2007 Schedule

Date/Time: Wednesday (March 7, 2007)   9:00am — 10:00am. Here’s the entry on the GDC page.

The Ghost of ILM

Circuit City store #238 always seemed like a bit of an anomaly to me. It’s off the highway and located in the canal district of San Rafael, one of the more affordable areas of the town and mostly populated by Mexican immigrants and various warehouses. Not the best place to put a high-tech store, you would think. Still the store always had a decent inventory when I visited – not great, but always very decent. My theory was that the store owes most of that good selection to a single nearby business: the mysteriously named Kerner Company, which is just a rather well-known cover for the old Industrial Light and Magic offices. Must have been good neighborhood for Circuit City – if you have a company of several hundred technophiles right across the parking lot, business must be pretty damn good around lunch time. Especially on Tuesdays, when new titles are released in the US.

ILM moved to their new offices a few months ago, and I didn’t pay much mind to the Circuit City store, anyway. But the other day, when searching for some good Blu-Ray and HD-DVD titles in surrounding stores, I decided to give that Circuit City a try. I really didn’t expect much; but I felt like browsing a selection of HD-movies-that-I-do-not-really-need-but-will-buy-anyway-because-I-have-Blu-Ray-and-HD-DVD-now. I hadn’t had much luck at other San Rafael stores, so this one became a viable choice.

Well, things have changed at store #238. The first thing I saw when entering the store was a prominent section of Spanish movies and music, titled “Regional Mexican” – something I don’t remember seeing before. Acknowledging the neighborhood, I guess. And hey, why not. But what pleasantly surprised me was the comparatively large selection of HD movies! I saw Blu-Ray and HD-DVD titles in this store that I had never seen in any other store in San Rafael. The late blessing of having had ILM around, I think. The store still gets quantities of the old inventory, but there’s nobody around to buy that inventory anymore. Because – and I say that without any prejudice or ill intent – I don’t think that most inhabitants of the San Rafael canal district are the most likely early adaptors for the new HD movie formats.

PS3 Pricing

Say what you will about the Playstation 3 price. Yes, I know that it’s nice to have options and that not every consumer wants the full package. But for somebody like me, who does want all the accessories (and just finished buying them by adding a shiny new HD-DVD drive), the Xbox 360 is indeed more expensive than the oh-so overpriced PS3.

60GB Playstation 3: $600.
20GB Xbox 360 + Wireless adaptor + HD-DVD drive: $400 + $100 +$200 = $700.

That’s 100 bucks more for the Xbox, and for that I get a significantly smaller harddrive and no digital (HDMI) output. So yeah, rag on Sony’s pricing scheme as much as you want. It’s not really that expensive.

GDC 2007 Session

Details for my GDC 2007 session finalized! It hasn’t been posted (or scheduled) yet, but if you’re going to be in San Francisco this year keep it in mind!

More Than Just A Pretty Map – Creating Next-Generation Materials for Lair
Presenter: Matthias WorchSession Description:
Next-generation materials are more than just an accumulation of color and normal maps. Join us as we take an in-depth look at the techniques that were used to create the highly detailed materials in LAIR.
The focus of this session is on the artist. It will present multiple ways to quickly and efficiently create color, normal and height maps for realistic materials. It will also demonstrate different ways of acquiring source data for these maps, for example by scanning real world surfaces. To address the bigger picture, we will look at the texture/material creation process from a technical art director’s perspective. We will review different approaches to a company-wide shader authoring system and discuss ways to spread material creation knowledge throughout the team.

Idea Takeaway:
Attendees will acquire techniques that help them to quickly and efficiently create realistic-looking materials for next-generation games.

Intended Audience:
Texture artists and art department managers working on next-generation 3D games.

This should be a really fun session! I have a lot of material and demos to share. As usual not many slides, mostly realtime demos that show how stuff is actually done in the applications. Some topics circle back to my GDC 2005 talk, so I can build on a lot of the concepts and ideas that I presented back then. I used similar material to educate our company, and I had various programmers tell me that it helped them to get a much more indepth idea of what the art department is doing. Even if you’re no artist, this would be a great way to broaden your horizon. Hope you can make it!

Update: Talk is posted on the GDC webpage now. No scheduling yet, though. And an outdated bio

iPhone

iPhone here, there and everywhere. Is it okay that I can’t get the least bit excited about it? Please? Don’t get me wrong, I can see why other people would get excited about it. But I’m one of those people who has only ever used his crappy free-with-service-plan phone to make phone calls, and I don’t need it or want it for anything else. Sorry! Judging by the geeky rejoice all over the web you’d think I belong to another species, because I don’t want to organize my life, watch movies, play games and surf the web from my phone 24/7, regardless of where I am.
I’ll probably get an iPhone (or whatever it will actually have to be called) whenever my current iPod stops working and I also need to get a new cellphone plan. It looks like a neat product. But if you listen to some people, you’d think that the iPhone is the second coming of Christ. In my mind, it’s just coming. Sometime, in the future. That’s not a revolution. That’s a slow, creeping march towards the product a few years from now, whenever other outside factors (stuff breaking) make it an option. Until then, I’ll keep making calls on my perfectly adequate “outdated” cellphone.

TTP Prototype

My old room in Essen doesn’t bear much resemblance with what it looked like 15 years ago, back when I started making my first game mods on ye olde Amiga and DX2-66. I’ve been gone for 9 years – only to reappear once every xmas – and of course my parents started using the room for other purposes. But tugged away in one of the old drawers of my old furniture, there’s two boxes with 3 1/2 inch disks that used to host many of my (then) biggest treasures. One of the boxes bears an old “Amiga – European Computer of the year 1990!” sticker; the other one is still locked with one of those cheap universal keys that nobody has ever trusted to keep anything save – with the exception of Diebold voting machines, maybe.

The lock was busted open in a matter of seconds, and as I started digging around the content of various disks, the one that caught my attention was labeled “Lord Bane’s Playground”. LBP was an Unlimited Adventures module that I had sunk over a year of my life into in 1993. I really wanted to see that old module again, but unfortunately for FRUA fans, the disk had been overwritten with something else. Fortunately for Doom fans, the new file was NoName.WAD, which turns out to be an early version of what would become The Troopers’ Playground episode for Doom 2. Apparently I had a fetish for “playgrounds” back then. Or my English just wasn’t good enough to come up with other titles.

I don’t recall the minute details of my Doom editing career. I do remember that the first ever level I made was actually created in Heretic because I liked the art so much. It was nothing more than a simple room with a player start. Then of course there’s the TTP/MM2/Requiem phase, in which I also made the two deathmatch levels that would be released as part of TTP. But in between, there is a black hole. I guess NoName.WAD neatly falls into that hole.

The WAD contains four levels, of which the first one should most interesting because I don’t recall ever releasing it. The TTP status bar was done, and there’s also some enemy frames of a fishdude that replace most Hellknight animations (but not all – I guess I wasn’t completely done yet at the time). I had completely forgotten about that fish guy! Apparently there’s also some Dehacked work that’s more of less lost on me today because the archive doesn’t contain the .DEH file, just a patched Doom2.EXE that had been renamed to NoName.EXE. If you still have an original Doom 2 setup you can try to get it to run – but if you do, you’ll have to use NWT to merge the WAD with the main IWAD.
The fish guy never made an appearance anywhere, he would be replaced by the evil Doom trooper instead. He doesn’t look particularly good, either. But I’m sure back then, I though he was the greatest thing ever, even if just for the reason that I had replaced a monster in my favorite game! What can I say, this was 1994…

Here’s a breakdown of the levels:

• Map01 – My first completed Doom 2 SP level. As far as I can recall, it has never been released before. First map ever – of course it’s rough around the edges and if you choose to play this, you should save often to not get stuck. There’s various slime areas that can only be passed with enough health.
• Map 02 – I think this is the third SP level I ever made, and would appear as map08 in the finished TTP. Definite improvements in this map, and a bunch of custom graphics. I still have a soft spot in my heart for this one.
• Map 03 – I made this level right after the initial one, and it would become map03 in TTP (with a few touchups). Still early and rough, but it had some good ideas and a neat non-linear flow.
• Map 04 – Early version of map06 in TTP, with some missing areas. I also reused this level in Requiem.

Anyway. Without further ado, here’s the file: NoName.ZIP. I hope you have some fun with it, especially if you’re an oldschool Doom player like me.

Playstation 3 Network

If you have a Playstation 3 and would like to add me to your friend list, you can send an invite to “Matthias”. Remember that this is a 100% private account I use for recreation.

Hello, 2007!

Why is it that every time you get back from a vacation, you find that one of the (luckily redundant) network HDs has stopped working and needs fixing? Ah well, reminds us to not take data for granted. Anyway, first post in 2007! Or “The Bond Year”, as Roland is calling it. Looking forward to it