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.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

High-res LotR

We all kinda know that DVD resolutions and compression rates are crappy. But it’s astounding how quickly we forget just how crappy it is if we haven’t seen the theater version for a while. This week, TNT is showing 1080i versions of the three Lord of the Rings movies, so I streamed the 1080i signal to my laptop and took a few screen captures to compare them to the 480p version stored on DVD.

Nice.

It’s still not the kinda stuff that will turn me into an early adaptor for HD-DVD/BluRay players (I’ll wait for my PS3 instead). But for somebody who’s been referencing the DVDs very often and got used to the DVD quality, this is a neat little reminder of how much better the movie actually looks.
Here’s a couple of comparison shots. You thought that the title font of the three movies was just plain white? Look again. And it’s nice to see all the hard work the WETA artists put into Gollum’s skin shading in (most of) its glory again.

A few things to keep in mind:

• I used software decoders to take all shots, a hardware solution as found in BluRay players will produce a better picture.
• I saved the shots in JPEG to cut down on bandwidth. I used the highest quality setting, though, so it should look about as good as the originals.
• TNT zoomed in on the picture to fill out the 16:9 frame, so there’s some scaling going on.
• Finally, it’s an interlace signal, which looks better in motion than in stills.

After I did all of this I noticed that somebody else has already done a more comprehensive comparison here. Definitely worth visiting.