Games Portfolio Journal

Monday 11^th May

 

Well, that’s most of the work for my important modules complete. Only thing left is Supreme Commander Artefact. Downloaded the official map editor today and managed to get it working after a long, long time trawling the internet. Why can’t there just be a single list with links to all patches? I also discovered the SupCom auto-updater is as pointless as translating “How to Speak French” into French.

Wednesday 13^th May

 

Well it was my birthday yesterday so I decided it was more important to go karting and have a couple of drinks rather than do work. But today after a few discussions with various people I have decided that in the time I have left and the amount of effort I am willing to put into this module, I am going to smoke and mirrors the artefact by reversing some footage. And it will look brilliant. But now: lunch! Cheerio.

 

Monday 18^th May

 

Checked the brief again the other day, found we needed a journal every week. Whoops. Still, nothing of any relevance to this module has been done so you haven’t been missing out on much. Over the last week I have been playing around with various scripts and seeing what they do. The short answer is: break. I’m not even trying to get additional models into the game and nothing seems to work. Even friends who are working on it are struggling and these are people who can script much better then me. Suffice it to say I don’t hold out much hope for getting there. On the plus side, I did manage to get a map working in the game. It’s just a blank piece of terrain for now but that’s one little bit of scripting that did function, so thanks out to the internet for that.

 

Monday 25^th May

 

Success! Built my map over the weekend although it’s been slow as my priorities have been leaning far towards Games Narratives work. It’s nothing major but given the camera angles I have recorded from using FRAPS it looks relatively good. Well, decent at least. You can’t see the edges of the map, put it that way. A bit of a problem I had was getting rid of the User Interface, which I eventually did using the help of a console command. Of course the problem with that is the console disappears so it’s hard to get the UI back again when you need it. After a couple of hours of struggle I finally had all the footage I needed. That’s when Richard decided to tell me about the keyboard shortcut that would toggle the UI on or off. Needless to say I’ve written to the mob and he’ll be waking up with a horse’s head in his bed soon enough.

Wednesday 27th May

 

Finished! Well, not the dev video but the artefact itself is. I found when I edited the footage together in Premiere Pro I was left with a few problems. The camera movement was a bit jerky, my slow computer meant the FRAPS videos had a slightly poor frame rate and because of the reversed footage my robot would vacuum up his own footprints. Ben said as a joke I should make it into an old fashioned commercial from the 1930s era, but me being me I thought this was a brilliant idea as the context of a video like that would solve all my camera and reverse footprint troubles. So I threw on a black and white filter, added noise, and did some old-fashioned title cards. I also made the footage shake at various points as if it was having trouble going through the projector.

 

That left me with just the sound and encoding left to do today. I went on youtube and found various old bits of music, including a brilliant little fanfare from a 1913 Chevrolet commercial, and some old jazz music that was actually used in Fallout 3. I was a tad worried about copyright issues but I couldn’t find an official copyright notice for this music and according to the law at the time that would only give it copyright protection for 50 years after its creation. So it is borderline as to whether its completely public domain, although I’m confident no one will worry about it, as there’s no way I’m actually going to put this artefact in my portfolio.

 

Ben helped me write a script for him to read out as an old-timey announcer, much more verbose than those of today. We had to do a few takes of course so Ben could get the speed and tone right, but once he was finished I added some white noise to the background and varied the amplification, and I played around with the EQ a little bit to give his voice a bit of a tinny sound. I also intentionally let the voice peak from time to time, as I felt that was appropriate given the time period it is supposed to emulate. After I edited this into the video and played around with the sound, we were left with a convincing pseudo-1930s advertisement from the future, and I am rather pleased with how it turned out!

 

Friday 29^th May

 

Hand in is in about….5 hours, and my development video is just encoding now! I had another quick look at the brief and discovered 2 slightly worrying things. First of all, I forgot to put this journal online. So I’ll upload it all as one bulk before I hand it in to my blogspot site (fox-review.blogspot.com). Also, I have a CD and case to burn to but the brief seems to imply that I may need cover art, which seeing as my printer is on the fritz and I am low on time just isn’t going to happen. Mine’ll be the one that says “Sony CD-RW” on the case. Oh yeah, the development video!

 

I described the issues, solutions, and development the best I could. I was surprised after I completed my voice over that it came out to about 4 minutes, so I cut a few trivial bits out and sped it up after a second read. I grabbed various screenshots from the editor, Windows and the internet, as well as utilising edited and original artefact footage. To fill the gaps I found some relevant pictures on Google, I am quite pleased how I managed to get both Homer Simpson and Crash Bandicoot in there. I wasn’t going to at first as this is supposed to be a serious piece of work, but I figure as long as it makes sense there’s nothing wrong with having a bit of fun.

 

I’m looking forward to hand in so I can say I’ve got this module out of the way. At the beginning I thought this was just going to be a couple of hours each week to work on your portfolio. No assignments, just something useful for us. But then we end up having to use a high specification, buggy engine that we haven’t used before. I wouldn’t mind having a brief to work to if we could use an engine of our choice, after already having a module using it I would have preferred to use the source engine, as this is much more well supported, much less buggy, arguably more versatile and requires a reasonably low PC spec to run. And because of all these problems portfolio development has felt to me, and a lot of others based on my conversations, to be an unnecessary waste of time, as I doubt even with months worth of diligent effort and ignoring all other modules anyone would have come up with something that is actually portfolio worthy, with the exception of custom models perhaps. Not if they want to get hired anyway.

 

Well, encoding is finished now; I don’t think there’s anything more to say on here! Time to burn the CD and hand in. Cheerio!

Training Camp Assignment

First off, I want to say how disappointed I was come presentation day with this piece of work. As James Smith and I were creating it, we thought it looked pretty fantastic and we were hopeful of a pretty high mark. Come the class presentations, however, it was clear our judgement of the kind of quality we should be expecting from the rest was somewhat off, so ours was somewhat underwhelming.

And this was a bit of a let down. Determined not to repeat some of the same mistakes made in previous assignments, we started work the day we got the assignment, and it didn't take long for the level to be planned out and basically constructed. Our hangar for the briefing was especially cool, and we thought our "cruise ship mockup" was quite impressive as well. Very Call of Duty 4.

I stayed in Bolton for the holidays whilst James went home, but we still communicated often and effectively via MSN, sending each other updates and discussing what each of us should do next. Through this process we finalised our levels, James sent me the texture for our station approach scene, and we started work on the classes. 

Out of all the classes, the power core one gave me more trouble than anything else. Mainly because it decided it wanted to sotp working after a while. I told it to, upon taking damage, span a redeemer explosion class, play an explosion sound, and then destroy. Which it did! The first time I tested it anyway. And the second time. And a couple more times after that. Then it stopped. This baffled me, I hadn't changed anything in the code, so I went back to it. Sure enough, I couldn't see what had gone wrong. I tried everything - changing the explosion that should spawn, replacing the actor class in the level, creating the class again from scratch.... anything I could think of to sort out the glitch. But it wasn't having it so we ended up having a power node that just vanished with no explosion.

At the end of the xmas hold, we started work on the matinee. Which was just as godawful as I had expected. With two of us working it wasn't quite as frustrating as previous assignments, but was still a struggle. James did alot of the camera work and events whilst I did alot of scripted trigger and mover work. The matinee took quite a bit longer than expected despite factoring in extra time for it, so we ended up having to drastically cut down on our script - which was previously rather ambitious and cool - so that we could get voices recorded and put the work in on time. And this led us to our final problem: Unreal's audio import. Now I have been told by numerous members of our class that the only format Unreal seems to accept is 44khz, 16 bit, mono, .WAV. Well...not on mine it wasn't. 22khz was the magic sample rate for me, and if different instances of the engine like different formats, I'm slightly worried that on someone elses machine it might just get confused and explode.

Overall I'm disappointed with the final result as it couldn't quite meet our ambitions, as usual, and the quality from other groups was higher than I was anticipating making ours look a bit crappy in comparison. If I were to do it again... I'm not sure what I would do differently. I was happy with the way we worked as a group, happy with the planning, happy with the work we split, so I think the only way forward is to get naturally better with the engine.