Denrei's Blog

SN Reorganized0
thedenrei posted in Uncategorized on August 25th, 2006

With everyone in such close proximity now, I had thought that things like meetings wouldn’t have to be scheduled and things would more or less organize themselves when they needed to happen.  But this doesn’t seem to be how things will work.  The “problem” is that we operate as a group of friends first, and an elite team of independent game makers  second.  I tend to be overly pushy in terms of my expectations of others at times, and I’m trying to be very aware of this – but at the same time it will take some discipline to get anything done.
Chris is fortunate to have an interesting and stimulating full time day job.  Unfortunately for the team, this is eating up the bulk of his coding energies.  This last week or so, the team is been feeling out adjustments to the working style that our new living arrangements demand.
Maybe this makes it sound like there are all kinds of problems, but in the big picture things are definitely cool.

Part of the plan is that Tony will be taking over the bulk of the actual code generation “monkey work”, and Chris’ time will be more focused on design decisions.  This solves the problem of Chris being over worked as well as making Tony more involved and capable with the game engine we are developing (which Chris authored).  Additionally, I’ve started looking deeper into MEL (Maya’s scripting language) so that I can take the load of tool creation.  This too is a good arrangement for multiple reasons.  I have the best understanding of what Maya is already capable of, and how it can be practiced most effectively.  While writing MEL is a “coding” task – it really belongs in the realm of asset creation.  We’ve got Gavin running through the tutorials Maya provides, so that he can help out in the near future with simpler asset related tasks.  I’d be interested to see a blog post of his thoughts as he learns the system.

My first MEL task will be to create a referencing system, so that I can build a level in which I can place objects made elsewhere.  I’ve got a few ideas I’m excited about, but I’ll save that for another post once things get more cleanly laid out.
Ordered 2 books from amazon,

• 1 of: Complete Maya Programming: An Extensive Guide to MEL and C++ API (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)
• 1 of: Complete Maya Programming, Vol. II: An In-Depth Guide to 3D Fundamentals, Geometry, and Modeling (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics and Geom

I’ve been able to finish the section on MEL in the first book, and it’s pretty thorough.  Might have liked more examples.  The API stuff is a bit over my head, I haven’t touched C++ for something like 2 years now, but I’m definitely interested to explore that sometime if it looks like it could be useful.

PubCrawl has been sitting around waiting for Internet.  Should be able to post that tonight or something.  I had a pretty clear idea of the type of game I wanted to represent in the milestone, and I think it comes through in the game play to some degree.  I hope you have some fun with it.

Lemon -> Lemonade is how denrei rolls0
thedenrei posted in Uncategorized on August 8th, 2006

Its an unforgiving life for a refugee here in Madison WI. Its been over a week since flooding forced my entire apartment complex to relocate, and it looks like move out day will over take being allowed back in. It seems that our underground basement/garage became completely filled with water to chest/neck level, floating the cars it housed. The result was in the form of a damaged, hazardous transformer and a pool of filth and gasoline. My roommate: “Fun half day of helping cute girls in sports bras push their cars out of the garage turned into shitty half month of homelessness”. My beloved roommates, bless their little hearts, didn’t clean out their fridge when the power initially went out, opting to save that task for about 5 days later, after spending the weekend away. (I have my own mini-fridge where I keep my stuff ((I love you Mom, Dad)) which was cleaned out in a responsible and timely manner.)

But, as I’ve been instant messaging to concerned onlookers, lemon -> lemonade is how denrei rolls.

I’ve been taking daily showers in the University Gyms available to students here, and used this opportunity to start working out. This means I’ve had to up my diet from a single chipotle burrito every day to a burrito and a large tuna sandwich. Also, I drink far more milk than I’m comfortable with, which is bought from a nearby convenience store at a price much higher than I’m comfortable with, at a time much closer to the expiration date than I’m comfortable with.

All of this means that I’ve spent a huge amount of time in the UPL and PubCrawl has been coming together brilliantly. Tony and I have been working most our waking hours on it. Our time is split between describing to one another of how great the systems/we are, and making an interesting/productive test. Its a little heart breaking to have these models that I’ve invested so much effort into to make normal mapped shlopped in here with bland maps, but its also great to see them in the engine in any form.

Please keep in mind as you play these milestone tests (crossblast, pubcrawl, whatever we do next) we definitely do NOT consider these complete upon release and hardly “games” at all – they are short term tools meant to hone our skills and technology for games to come, and we’re excited to share what we’ve done with people who happen to be interested.

P.S. for those of you who tried crossblast and it didn’t run – please do give this one a try. If it doesn’t work, it would be very helpful to us to get a comment letting us know. Part of the purpose of distributing these is to reveal various machine-specific problems. Our QA department consists of my roommate’s dell laptop and Tony’s girlfriend’s desktop.