Friday December 21, 2007

Hail and TGIF! Cold winter weather prevails on this penultimate Friday for 2007. The topic this week is games, and I'm going to give my top 5 PC games for the past year. This list is purely subjective and based on what games I had access to and played the most. In ascending order, my favorite games of 2007 were:

#5 Star Wars: Battlefront 2
A good mix of FPS action and the Star Wars universe. It also has a nice space combat component that adds some variety to the campaigns.

#4 Toribash
This is the only online game that I've really devoted much time to. I'm up to the green belt level and playing every chance I get.

#3 Dungeon Siege
It's not the most original concept for a PC game, but it is exceptionally well executed.

#2 Civilization III
Get Civ 3 if you want a deep turn-based strategy that will keep you playing for hours.

#1 Supreme Commander
2 words: insanely addictive. I literally have to limit my SC sessions lest I end up wasting more time than I have. The good news is that my addiction pretty much under control. The bad news is that the “Forged Alliance” sequel is out.

And that's my annual game roundup for 07. Keep watching this space for more of my weekly picks and pans.

The picture of the week was created using Bryce.
Click on the image for a full-sized view

The loops of the week are some angelic choir samples.

The song of the week is the “I Want You to Want Me” (the live Budokan version) by Cheap Trick: a bit of classic 70s pop/rock.

The book of the moment is Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Another bit of late 70s coolness, responsible for growing neurons even as it blew minds.

The PC game of the week is Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators. This game is huge in scale and time consuming but I've managed to stay alive thus far.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.

Bye for now!  

Friday December 14, 2007

Hi all and welcome back! It's Friday again and chilly tonight for So Cal. Most of my creative time and energies went into graphics and animation this week. I'd like to learn to use Carrara Studio or Blender, but every time I have a 3D animation project I end up going back to Anim8or. There are pricier and more powerful packages, but you can't argue with the sheer ease of use. The main animation projects this week were some more game art, an octopus character and a talking robot. With a cast of characters like that, can a comedy short be far behind? Stay tuned.

The picture of the week was created using Project Dogwaffle.
Click on the image for a full-sized view

The loops of the week are a set of bell-infused drum tracks.

The song of the moment is the Commitments cover of Take me to the River. The Commitments are, without a doubt, the best Irish R&B band ever.

The book of the moment is Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman.

The PC game of the week is still Worms 4: Mayhem.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!

Friday December 7, 2007

Salutations! I'm back on another rainy Friday night with more creative and compelling stuff. My creative energies and time this week past were spent mostly on music, so I thought I'd share a bit of music technology technique. I was working on a synthesizer track with Orion Pro and I used 2 very useful and complimentary processes: Quantizing and Humanizing. The Humanize button adds a little random variance to the volume, length or start time of the notes, lending the selection a more “human” sound. Quantizing performs the opposite function. It will pull the notes to the nearest beat or adjust the note length to the nearest whole or fractional value. In short, the Quantize function will make the musical selection very tight and precise. Quantizing is useful for correcting the small variance in a recorded performance, or for imparting a very mechanical sound. So there you have the yin/yang, organic/technical pairing of musical tools to use on your own sequenced works.

The picture of the week was created using Project Dogwaffle.
Click on the image for a full-sized view

The loops of the week are a set of synthesizer samples.

The PC game of the week is Worms 4: Mayhem. It's colorful, animated, and utterly violent. Worms dispatch each other with grenades, land-mines, dynamite, rocket launchers, shotguns, kung-fu punches, baseball bats, gas canisters, jet packs, exploding sheep, little old ladies, and the occasional mad cow bombardment. You can even design your own teams, weapons, and game variations.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!

Friday November 30, 2007

Warm greetings on a rainy Friday. I've been a busy gray cat this week, and once more my time management skills (or lack thereof) are getting pushed to their limits. I got a good dose of writing, doing more documentation for the Musubi project and writing up this weekly blog post. Musically I've fallen in with a group of guys for a weekly blues/rock jam and I've resumed work on a collaborated song that had been in the works for some time. In graphics, I've been creating new scenes and characters in Anim8or and I've started learning to use Corel Draw. Programming time was devoted mostly to SDL/Musubi in Euphoria and some preliminary work on a program for the Palm PDA. You'll likely see more of the results of those scattered efforts posted here on this very blog once they're in a state of completion. Next week we'll resume focus on the one topic or another.

The picture of the week was created using Bryce.
Click on the image for a full-sized view

The loops of the week are a set of synthetic bass runs.

The site of the week is singer/songwriter Nicole Alden's page. I stumbled onto her site while on an unrelated search and was rewarded with awesome music and beautifully constructed songs. Catch this rising star while you can.

The PC game of the week is Toribash. This game almost defies description; It's a martial arts game that is turn-based rather than real-time. The current version is free (always a good thing) and best played online, against other human players. It also earns a few extra coolness points for using SDL/OpenGL. Check it out!

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!

Friday November 23, 2007

Happy Friday. So It's Black Friday and for once I didn't brave the crowds in search of a good deal at any of the countless retail sales going on through the weekend. There were some rather tempting offers, but nothing enticing enough to overcome a tight budget and a bit of will power. Rampant capitalism aside, I've continued my work on programming in Euphoria in general and Musubi in particular. Making progress would be much easier were it not for various and sundry distractions and secondary projects. The distraction for this week was the impending birthday of my nephew and my desire to make a birthday card for him. My nephew shares my love of Star Wars, Legos, and Mecha so I decided on one of those themes. I started by doing a search on Dogpile using the keywords “Mecha”, “Gundam”,and “3DS”. The search yielded a few hits for models that weren't commercial. I chose a wicked looking mech with large bat wings and a scythe and once downloaded and unzipped, I imported the robot into Anim8or. The next step was to scale the whole model to fit on the screen and to delete the scythe (too dark) and some other superfluous objects. I created a minimal scene with the the robot, a camera and a light source and saved the rendered image to a file. Finally I used the word processing application of Open Office to print the image and some text. It's more work than simply buying a card, but worth the while to have something unique.

The picture of the week is a larger version of the mech image, with a backgound created using Project Dogwaffle.
Click on the image for a full-sized view

The loops of the week are a set of drum fills in 6/8 time.

The song of moment is the acoustic solo version of Overkill by Colin Hay, formerly of Men at Work.

The PC game of the week is Onslaught, a flash game with an addictive quality somewhere between Oreos and crack.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it. Bye for now!

Friday November 16, 2007

Hi and welcome back! My topic for tonight is music theory once again, and I'm going to discuss the blues scale. As an aspiring Blues piano/guitar player I've had a little bit of firsthand experience playing blues scales. The blues scale has 6 notes, one less than the normal major scale, and 3 of those are flatted. The six notes of the scale lead naturally to melodies and from there to some of the great solos of the genre. Of course there's more to playing or singing the blues than knowing the notes, but having a look at the fundamentals is a good start.

The loops of the week are a set of synthesizer tracks.

The picture of the week was created using Anim8or
Click on the image for a full-sized view

The song of the moment is Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple. It's an unwritten rule that every novice electric guitar player shall learn the opening riff.

The PC game of the week is once more Supreme Commander. I completed the 3rd campaign at the medium level and I've done a few skirmishes.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it. Bye for now!

Friday November 9, 2007

Greetings! It's November and quiet here tonight. This week I tried to do a bit more programming in Euphoria. I've been trying to pick up where I left off on Musubi, a simple library for using SDL with Euphoria. My tool of choice for programming in Euphoria is still the Crimson Editor which actually serves nicely as a kind of IDE. The other major piece of work that remains to be done on Musubi is some meaningful documentation. I usually keep the manual simple, but a project with the scope of Musubi will require a more detailed approach. I'll post more as I get more work done and approach the first release of Musubi.

The loops of the week are a set of booming bass lines.

The picture of the week was created using Anim8or
Click on the image for a full-sized view

The website of the week is the Mathematics Graphics Gallery

The PC game of the week is still Supreme Commander. RTS rocks, and giant robots rule!

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it. Bye for now!