Journals

E3 2008! What Games Will Be Revealed!?It's that time of the year!

Another explosive E3 event and thankfully GameTrailers.com has teamed up with E3 once again to bring us the latest news and media from each day.

You can check out the trailers released so far at:

http://www.e3expo.com/

One game trailer that caught my eye was Chrono Trigger remade for the DS! I never got a chance to play the original so this makes me happy.

While looking up information on the DS remake, I found out that many years ago a team of people actually started to remake the game into 3D but unfortunately Square Enix threatened them legally and the development had to stop.

A shame because they did a brilliant job:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n33lSRN92EU

http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/news/ - Old Website

I do wonder what E3 will reveal. I hope Hideo Kojima announces a ZOE 3 or new footage is shown of Monster Hunter for the Wii.

In other news, I was very pleased to have completed Donkey Kong Country on an emulator. I'm not sure if I completed it when I was younger because I think I may have cheated out of getting annoyed of constantly dying.

Finally today is the day I get my two new cats called Tia and Roxy. They're tabby cats but their main fur has a strange black and gold texture. I'll upload pictures sometime when they have adapted to their new home.

(Source Images: http://scrawlfx.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/electronicentertainmentexpo.png - E3 Logo - Date Accessed - 08 July 2008)

Lighting is borked. :<

Well I'm back from my trip to Mt. Beauty. 1 week away from the comp didn't feel that 'bad' as I thought it'd be. Anyway, snowboarding at Falls Creek (was about 45min away from cabin) was the main reason I went to Mt. Beauty. 38cm of powdery snow at an untracked area made me enjoy every second and to make it better, everyday I'd sit by the river just next to my cabin after a long, exhaustive ride down the mountain. Pure bliss~

Now obviously I've just come back so mapping hasn't started yet, but it will be hopefully tomorrow.

PS: I don't have any pic's worth uploading; some camera phones, like mine to be exact, suck regardless of their megapixel 'rate'.
I want a phone with a decent camera so any suggestions?

So on Tuesday afternoon, in the mountains above the city where I reside, a forest fire was either intentionally set by some pyromaniac or accidentally started. Don't know, and I don't really care to look into it. But before today, this fire hadn't effected me at all. The ominous (but at the time meager) cloud of ash and dust lurking above the city was just another part of the scenery so far as I was concerned. Today, however the fire has had quite an effect on my life. The day (or at least a portion of it) will now be retold as best as possible through a series of photos. Lucky I held onto my camera tightly. This was a shot taken from the street my house is on at 3:15 PM. Probably about three hours after I woke up. The smoke was just gradually worsening from the previous days, at this point.A couple shots of the sky at my Dad's apartment. Looked kinda neat at the time (6:20 PM.)Here I'm on the road at 6:50, heading over to my house with my Dad to get a movie or something.This shot was taken from my street right in front of our house at 7:00 PM... Between the trees in the center, you can see little bit of the fire on the mountainside, mostly obscured by smoke.At 7:20 PM, after the brief (and for now, last) visit to our house, my Dad drove me to his office, which is on the waterfront. We left the smoke cloud behind us as we got closer to the ocean.At probably 8:30 PM, while we were at the office, we got a call from my mom telling us that our street had been ordered to evacuate. She'd thrown the important stuff that was ready to be packed, along with our cat, into the back of her car. She drove to my Dad's apartment, nearby but far out of the danger zone. After a couple phone calls, I jumped back into the truck with my dad and we began driving back to his apartment. You can get a pretty good view of the fire in the second to last shot. As we got closer to it, the sky began to darken dramatically, and even though it was still light out it might as well have been midnight. And then out of nowhere...... A massive weight came barralling towards us from behind and pulverized the rear of our truck. I was holding my camera in my hands at the time, set to the video mode, and started recording seconds after we were hit. That'll be fun to watch. The little Nissan Hardbody took it like a champ, but wouldn't start up again after the engine was turned off. The other guy in the little GMC Jimmy took out his radiator in the crash, but drove away with it leaking. We, on the other hand, were completely screwed, and had to walk a mile back to the apartment in the pitch black storm of ash. Might've been comparable to smoking a couple packs. That happend at about 8:51.This here's my backup disk. 320 GB if I remember correctly. The entirety of my computer's hard drives are contained within it, and luckily I had the foresight to throw it into the box of stuff to evacuate with before I left the house. No cables, though.

Hopefully, this'll all blow over, and I'll still have a house on the fourth of July. There were quite a few orange groves between our house and that fire, and last I checked those don't burn too great. If not, well... hey, at least I've got that data there. Too bad my real passion is now a stationary hunk of metal, glass, and rubber sitting out in our garage.

Whoa has it been a long time. Several months I've been gone for. I almost forgot my password!

Nothing much has happened up until now, where I decided to go live with my aunt in Canada because my uncle is an evil manipulative old git who should crawl under a rock and die.

Happy times

Second journal entry! Whooah....

Operation Black Mesa media release is coming soon! Check the Moddb regularly for it. Sadly I'll miss it because I got a dentist appointment for checkup.

I joined Zombie Mod Source on FPSB a week ago as a level designer. My first ZMS map is close to it first beta and will hopefully be included in the first beta of ZMS. For those who don't know, ZMS is more of like a CSS zombie mod made as a seperate mod for Half Life 2 Deathmatch.

I wanna complain about how fast the school is starting but I don't have anything interesting to say at the moment. Maybe next entry.

Anyone know when Armored Core 4: For Answer going to come out to US?

UPDATE! Papersnark is available here!

I fixed the plans up so they're not aperture science to try and make one. Have fun Snarking each other.

---

He's my shitty papercraft snark.Also looks like my camera is going out on me as well. I couldn't finish the bugger cuz he is far too small to fold and glue all those parts underneath. He's only 2.5 inches tall, and he's sitting on my HL CD.

I dunno why I haven't posted this yet. It was in popular demand back when the 'gift from Rimrook' went out. So, here's a quick update to it, no scanned pages or anything.

lern2texture

okok, I deleted my last journal entry cuz the whole thing was stupid. I talked to the guy again today and I told him I felt sorry for the whole thing and that I had drawn him a picture.

Case closed.

(For Spike)
The original problem was some guy was stalking my online art gallery. I recently did a picture for someone I felt sorry for, so this guy who has been buzzing around my page caught me on MSN messenger and blandly chatted for the afternoon. After a while, he started complaining about how great his internet life is compared to how terrible his real life is and how little money he has. I didn't really care at first, but he got a little on my nerves after typine depressing crap for 20 minutes. so I told him to buck up and do something about it. He was incredibly defensive immediately to convince me there is no hope in his life and that the whole world is as terrible as he says it is. So I told him some more advice to learn to control things in his life and not let it get out of control and stay optimistic about things and he flipped out on me saying I can't simply change a person with some magical words. I didn't get heated until this, cuz I was trying to be nice taking time away from my own things and he's trying to rip my head off. So we argued for an hour about our viewpoints and generally it was Optimism vs. Pessimism. Eventually he couldn't craft solid sentances. So I said he's weak and can't handle life and we're done. I quit chat and blocked him on MSN. He came to me on Skype and called me weak for running and irregardlessly wish me well like a cocktard. Its the internet, its either you duck out or sit and argue for hours. So I send him a message saying "Don't worry, its the internet, say whatever you want and have a great internet life." If you remember Orpheus, so this was really short compared to that. The guy is a pussy to be in university with a roommate and a job with bills, and sit there and complain about how bad it is to a complete stranger. At least I was nice at first about it. But overall, I think he wanted a pity trip (characteristic to some emoes i guess) to get free art from me. Given its rare I do anything for free, and most of the time I do commissions.

Thats the scenario in a nutshell, written with a clearer head. I'm already beginning to forget about it. His reaction to the drawing was rather predictable too. "GO FUCK YOURSELF!"

Hey, I'm back...Sort of...

I wasn't really gone to be honest but I have been less online lately and this is due to a few things which I'll explain.

First off it's summer so I've been enjoying the sun as most people are. Ooo my arms feel like they're on fire.

Second I lost interest of the same routine: Go on TWHL, Interlopers, check emails, go on MSN and other stuff I can't remember. So I just took a break from all this really.

Thirdly on Sunday last week me and my parents went to a cat shelter to adopt a new cat. It has been a year since our last cat died and we felt it was time for another. Only...We fell in love with two very special sisters who we think are pedigree...They have a tabby appearance but their main coat is sort of gold with many black bits. So now we?re getting two?

It was kind of sad to see these cats locked in although unlike most cat shelters this one had a sort of open area where the cats could walk around and sit outside (keep in mind it's all caged).

I went up to this really nice black cat who turned out to be 17 years old. S/he was very friendly and it upset me to see it stuck here. Rarely anyone wants an old cat so most likely it'll die there.

Anyway I have got to wait a week because a small cat infected the whole shelter so these two new cats called Roxy and Tia are being drugged and injected. Supposedly the previous owner was some tart who was evicted and couldn't keep them hence their names...Sort of Essex like XD

Lastly yesterday my Dad as per usual worked too hard on building our garden pond and ended up tripping on some stairs. He twisted his ankle and from what I heard, it sounded painful...Anyway he said his eye sight was going and he felt sick...He then passed out and my poor Mum thought the worse because my Dad's family has been known to have weak hearts at his age.

We called an ambulance and as we did he came back to consciousness and said he felt alright. It turns out he passed out from the pain but at the time myself and my Mum were none the wiser. We were very traumatised but everything is ok.

It's hard to believe something like this would happen to yourself because you see it on TV and hear about it but you never fully comprehend it happening to your own family...

Well that's my story really so far. I got a 3ds Max book to learn for my second year at university and my course results come in tomorrow. Apart from that I ended up reformatting my PC yet again as my NVIDIA driver corrupted and a system restore just didn't do much good so I opted for a fresh start and I'm glad because it's nice and fast again and clean.

Just as Srry saw Wall-E, I saw 'Wanted' last night.

It wasn't shit, but it wasn't good either. I was expecting to see a bad movie, honestly, because Angelina Jolie is generally in very crappy movies (I got to see her ass, though, so I'm fairly happy).

If you saw 'Shoot em Up', you basically saw this movie. The only difference is that it's more serious than it is funny, but there are bits of humor in it which not everyone can catch, which is something I happen to love.

If you didn't see said movie above, than all's 'Wanted' is, is an outrageous shooter movie, full of crazy stunts, insane CGI (not the whole movie, but the stuff they do in CGI (i.e. people getting shot through the head in slow motion) is awesome), and a lot of action. The best word to sum this movie up is 'ridiculous', because that's all it is.
If you try to see it for a good movie, than you're going to hate it. But if you just want to see some 'ridiculous' action, than this movie is for you.

I didn't necessarily want to see this movie, either, so don't think I did. I went out with this girl for her birthday, and she picked it. I'm glad I only had to pay 7 dollars, though.

Saw WALL-E tonight. It's way better than a Pixar movie has any right to be, in my opinion (sorry Ant, they usually just lean too much towards the "family movie" end of the spectrum for me.) The annoying kids and piss-poor seating I got couldn't even ruin it for me.

Meet the cast...again!Ok, what's changed...I've discovered a little texturing trick that allows me to put a glow around the characters. Since this is texture based and not light based, it has a relatively low hit on the render. It also matches whatever angle the camera is at, so it's very low maintenance as well. It's allowed me to remove the toon outline shader on the ghost as well, which did impact the render time somewhat: since mental ray couldn't render the outline as it originally was, I had to convert it to polygons. These polygons would then rebuild themselves everytime the camera moved (the shader matches the camera movement so you constantly see an outline: it's more commonly known as cel-shading), which added plenty to the render.

You'll notice that the colours are more vibrant this time round as well: I embedded my LCD screen profile with this image. I'll probably end up batch processing the entire animation with this colour profile, as it gives it a much more colourful feel. At least, on my screen it does.

Now, imagine this at a twilighty/night time setting, with cool cutout trees and clouds and stuff...

Meet the cast!The ghost is done and rigged, the little guy with the glasses is fully modelled and ready for rigging, and the devil is still in development.

'Been like a year since my last avatar change, so here's a new one. Max is awesome, however, Zappa's a god. One of my fav. pics with him. ^^

Well I'll be heading to the snow in about 2 days; I'll be there for a week. And yes, Frag Fence... I've changed hard drives and I haven't copied it over. Don't worry, it will be done eventually. Speaking of heading to the snow, I think I'd be able to get some inspiration from where I'm heading so I'll probably be making a snow theme map whenever I have the chance. As for now, I just have to survive one more school day before term 2 ends. ~Josh