Monday 11th 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 13th 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 18th 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 25th 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 29th 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.
