Lair Art Show

I will be at Cogswell Polytechnical College tomorrow (Saturday the 2nd) for the opening of the Lair art show. The college will host an open day with tours of the facility, and we will do a panel with various people from the team (including me) answering questions from a moderator and the audience.

“The Art of Lair”
Exhibit Dates: June 2 through July 27

Special Exhibit Events – Saturday, June 2, 12:30-6:30:

• Cogswell Open House: 12:30 to 3:00 p.m.
• Panel Discussion with Factor 5: 3:00 to 4:30 p.m.
• Gallery Reception: 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Cogswell Polytechnical College announces an exciting new exhibit for The Gallery at Cogswell. Factor 5, Inc. of San Rafael will present work from its eagerly anticipated video game, Lair. The exhibit will run from June 2 through July 27. Lair, a dragon combat action game, was developed by Factor 5 and will be published by Sony Computer Entertainment for its PlayStation® 3 platform. [...]

Happy Birthday Beyond Belief!

10 years ago today, Beyond Belief was released. How time has passed!

I knew that I wanted to make a Quake episode from the moment the game got released. I kinda had to, after all the Doom design work I had done before. And those were interesting times – the mapping and modding community was still in its infancy and a tight-knit group. There weren’t that many games to mod for, anyway – Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem. Quake was the only true 3D game. We’d hang out in the #Quake and #QuakeEd channels a lot, trash talk about various things and generally discover the exciting internet world that was out there. I’d clog up my parents’ phone lines the entire night, using a long phone extension cord that ran from my room to the lobby. It’s hard to imagine these days, but back in 96, talking to people from all over the world was something incredibly new and exciting.

Initially, I wanted to make two Quake episodes with 8 maps each, but eventually I settled on only one. Building these levels took a lot of time, and while I didn’t exactly kill myself with my university workload, I had other things going on in my life that also required attention. The tools weren’t quite up to par to what they are today – I made most of my maps in Quest. A very capable editor, but it lacked basic niceties such as shaded 3D view. All my levels were build in wireframe, and in the beginning I had to align textures by hacking the text file and manually typing in the UV offset. I’d compile the level, run it and see if the texture looked correct. If it didn’t, I’d count the number of pixels that I had to adjust for. Back then that was possible because the textures were low-res enough and there was no bilinear filtering to disguise the shapes.

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Finch feeders…

Still attract finches! This is me trying out the zoom lens I bought for the camera and a few wild birds outside the house. The lens weighs over 300 gram, about as much as the HV20 itself! So the camcorder gets a bit front-heavy, and holding it steady to get a good picture is tough. A tripod will certainly help with that!

Here’s a 720p clip. The finches are somewhat blurry, the…uhm, the bigger bird looks better. Background noises courtesy of NASCAR and our five birds, which can talk up quite a storm!

25 budgies with beer on the perch, 25 budgies with beer…

I had considered buying a digital camcorder several times last year (the closest I came was a Sony HDR-SR1), but in the end I always shied away from it because the HD quality didn’t seem quite good enough yet, and a better camera is released every 2 months. The cameras could only do interlaced HD footage, HDV tapes are only MPEG-2, AVCHD doesn’t have good editing support and fills up your harddrive…etc. pp.

But in the end you can wait forever and never buy anything, and true 1080p support in a consumer camera is still a few years away. So when the Canon HV20 was announced, I decided to order one. The HV20 is using HDV tapes and is still bound by the HDV specs, so it can’t do true 1080p. But it can do anamorphic 24p as well as anamorphic 1080i@60hz, and the CMOS sensor manages the picture at true 1920×1080. That’s pretty damn neat for 1100 bucks. Now I can document whatever I want to document. It’s fun

I wanted to do some 24p tests to see how well the motion blur works and how much light I’d need to shoot this kind of footage (Hint: more than I used in that clip). So I aimed the camera at my birds and waited. Here’s a small clip of Jerry and Cloud at full resolution. That’s glorious 1920×1080, progressive scan…and then downsampled into a wmv file I didn’t have enough light in the room, so the image is kind of dark and flat. Still very neat, though. You can also download the clip here (Save As), it’s 8.5mb.

Lame

I started losing interest in American Idol last week after Sanjaya got eliminated. It just isn’t the same when the guy who so obviously doesn’t deserve to be there actually has to leave! After today’s forced “surprise” non-elimination I’ll probably stop watching altogether. I realized that I just don’t care who stays and who goes.
Ah well, it’s not like AI needs me. This was the first season I followed in the first place, because it was fun to watch with Victoria. But I’m not exactly the kinda guy who keeps the show alive. So I guess we’ll watch America’s Next Top Model and Hell’s Kitchen when it returns. Guilty pleasures are fun

Lair Media Blowout

You can find all sorts of flashy new Lair media on the web if just look around a bit. The two videos I’d like to point to are the guided developer tour that Gametrailers posted. I think they show off the polished game in the best light and give you a good idea of the finished product. Enjoy!

Mailaf kenn ich gar nicht, nur Olaf

Hidden in the depths of my 9000 song iPod shuffle there’s a selection of the best Deep Dance CDs. Most of these mixes date themselves quite convincingly – and the music is cheap and fluffy dancefloor techno, which will never earn anybody a spot in the music hall of fame. But in my late teen phase these CDs were my some of my most priced posessions, and when I’m in a good mood I listen to whatever mix comes on. Especially if it’s one of the yearly summery mixes, because those are a fun (and often depressing) reminder of what music was hip in Germany in the early 90s. Most of the songs are crap, but ever so often I’m reminded of a song that everybody loved back then and that became a pervasive part of German pop culture.

So yesterday the 1991 mix came on, and here’s the one song that I was pleasantly reminded of when listening:

Frighteningly bad performance, isn’t it? (Psst, I don’t think they’re really singing!) But the song was quite a phenonemon when it came out, and exactly the kind of stuff that we, as teenagers, would latch on to. Plus Diether Krebs, the late great comedian from Essen, deserves a special mention on this webpage. I can’t think of many other comics who have left their mark on German comedy as prominently as Diether Krebs. Think of him as a German Benny Hill – but with a serious acting career to go along with the slapstick. Krebs died of lung cancer (ironically enough, “Krebs” is the German word for cancer) when he was only 53 years old. He leaves many iconic characters of German TV history. And of course this, “Ne Pikfloete!”

Torture

You know how you sometimes wake up with a song stuck in your head that you really don’t want in there? What’s even worse is waking up in the middle of the night and having a song stuck in your head, and you can’t go back to sleep because your mind is racing around that song.

I had this stuck in my head at 4am last night. If you didn’t watch German television in the 90s it might not quite have the same ring to it, but let me tell you – as funny as that skit was, you do not want it in your head! What’s worse, the only song I know that will reliably purge an unwanted song on command is Duran Duran’s “Rio” – and having that in your head instead isn’t exactly a picnic, either. I feel kinda drained this morning…

While we’re on the subject, mehr Hape in Reinkultur.

God of War II

Wow. If anybody had been shown this game in 2000 and had been told “This is a Playstation 2 game. This is what this console is capable off!” they wouldn’t have believed it. God of War II looks and plays fantstatic. Of course the game doesn’t look as good as a true PS3 game, but who cares when one is so sucked into the experience? I think I’ll be ready to completely move over to PS3 after God of War II – if this isn’t the swan song for the Playstation 2, I don’t know what is. Awesome job, guys!

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