Oh ya? OUYA!

It's been a very sleepy week, mother nature doesn't seem to know what temperature to put the heat at.  As a result the weather has been cold and frozen-soggy.  I haven't  really had the energy to do much.

I finally purchased an OUYA off amazon.ca.  It's that small android game console that had a really successful kick starter campaign last year.

I haven't really played it that much but some of the woes that people where complaining about are in fact true.

The out of box controller isn't all that great, its kind of flimsy and tends to loose its signal every so often.  This isn't really a major problem since I heard you can use pretty much any USB direct x compatible controller in it's place, haven't tried it out myself though, I pretty much need a USB hub since there is only one USB port on the system.

I have only tried a few games, but the trend is pretty much what people have been saying, most of the games on it where designed for mobile gaming.  Translation, they where designed for a small screen with no controller.

Despite these obvious flaws I'm still interested in making games for this little system.  Not having all the expensive bullshit that the other major consoles have, makes it worth while to at least look into the possibility of developing for it.  I think that this console will shine if it can get more games designed for a big screen & controller.

Unfortunately I imagine this is going to take a while.  Making a good quality game takes time to learn the necessary skills and practice them until you get good enough to use them in a production setting.

With this poor economy the already established game developers, I figure are leery about changing course into unknown waters.  A lot of developers that go though the rigorous (and sometimes expensive) training process prefer to go the major 3 systems/mobile gaming rout, or at lest I assume so.

I'm in a position where I don't mind taking a chance, however because I have a full time job and the economy is so crappy I don't want to take a chance on taking a job with less hours, so I only have so much time to invest into game development.  This problem is probably persistent for more than just me.

Also the evolution of video game consumption is veering more towards hand held.

I blame this trend almost entirely on the economy as well.  If you figure that anyone getting out of high school  is either going to have to get a crappy wage Mc Job or end up in university/collage, I figure these people don't really have the time to sit around at home and play games.

The older generation loves to bitch about the younger generation using all the gadgets to talk to one another, but seem to forget that back when they where young gasoline was  0.05 cents the liter, you could get a reasonable home with just a crappy Mc Job and only one person had to work to support a family....

So to summarize, the OUYA has some pretty big hurdles.

In other news, I decided to retopologize the heroin.  Yes, I know I did this before....  I'm still learning though and I guess you could consider this the wax on wax off method of learning 3d modeling.

I was trying to avoid doing a complete retopology because now I'll have to remake/refit several pieces of her armor.  Mind you that's probably not a bad thing.  My skills have improved quite a bit since I made it and it also gives me an excuse to redesign parts of it.

That's it that's all.

EDIT: removed some redundancy and broke some larger paragraphs into smaller ones.

EDIT Again:  Some spelling and other stuff corrected/clarified -_-;

Main screen turn on!

Got my new PSU A couple of days back, I was so shocked when the Purolator guy showed up.  I said "holy shit I ordered that yesterday!".  Newegg doesn't appear to have free shipping like Amazon or other big online shops, but their regular shipping is really fast, no need to pay for express shipping lol.  Dev comp is back online and sounds a lot better.

A problem with Blender rigging that had been hounding me for months now I finally overcame.  I asked around and people tried to help me, unfortunately they didn't have any advice I didn't know already.  I looked around and found various tutorials that had what I was looking for but the topics where so old that they didn't seem to apply to the latest version of Blender and the help/demo files where often broken.  The problem was rigging corrective shape keys to auto deform the mesh when the bone changes position.  Surprisingly simple but so complicated when you don't even know where to start.....

So I finally broke down and bought a training vid from cmiVFX called massive mammoth masterclass V2 by Nathan Negdahl  (he's the dude that made the human metarig in Blender, not to mention a whole slew of other projects he took part in). 

Not that I mind spending money to learn something new, but $60 (after all the tax and conversion) isn't exactly cheep for someone that just dose this for a hobby with no real commercial game plan.  Suffice to say I was a tad worried that I would just end up running into a road bock like with all the other resources I found on the net, and the money would pretty much be spend on a training topic that I didn't entirely need to solve my current problem.

Anyway everything is good, I shouldn't doubt Natha's training vids because they are always awesome, and full of really good information, that he presents really well.  I'll look through the rest of the vid when I have time, I'm sure I'll learn a lot more than I already do about weighting and other topics covered in the vid.

I plan to continue work on the heroin that I've neglected up till now due to the shape key issue (I have standards dammit!).  My life is still pretty busy with problems I have to address, but all is well.

PSU F U POS

Looks like the only thing I didn't buy new for my dev computer is now going the way of the doe doe.....  Such is life... It's only money -_-*......  Getting a new Corsair 850 that's 80 gold certified.  I can probably still work on my dev computer but it shuts down at random when the PSU overheats.  Problem may not be the PSU but its the usual culprit in these cases, I can always use another PSU if it isn't that anyway.

Other than that, haven't had much time to work on my game.  I spent a few hours the last few days getting some skeleton animations in the game.  I learned a kewl new trick in unity on how to apply layers to game characters (objects) that need other frames of animation to sync up with the main sprite body.  This is actually very important for the game I have in mind, and works a lot better than the prototype workaround I originally devised.

Was working on some props, ground texture and grass object when the PSU started it's grievance.  Most of the important stuff got saved though.

Little by little it will get done....  Probably will just stay on my game machine and do tut's while I wait for Newegg to ship my new PSU.

Blender 2.70 is AWESOME!

Even though Blender 2.70 is not officially released yet, I got to try out a test build.

The freestyle component in the later versions of Blender had major problems handling mesh data that exceeded 30 or so thousand polys (my characters are around 2 million +).  Needless to say it never rendered the characters fully and crashed the program.

With the latest build though I heard that freestyle had its code reworked, and now it works like a charm!  Still takes a long time to render.  But the results are worth it!

Just in case your not familiar with freestyle, to put it simply it draws lines around the character silhouette and other areas that may be defined by the user.  It's pretty much essential to get that traditional anime look on your rendered models.

This is an older version of the Heroin that I'm still trying to find the time to finish.  Some of the gear has been changed around a bit.  The purpose of  this scene and setup was just a quick test I did to check proportions and see how well the character moved with the equipment I made pretty much entirely from imagination.  And how it would look in a setting.  Some of the parts are messed up, most notably on the inner thigh where the under-armor clips though the leg.

I could have done one with the more recent modification but I just wanted to benchmark the new freestyle code myself.  And I have to say I'm impressed!  


EDIT:Some minor grammatical corrections.       

New Dev Comp

Last week I dropped a few coinz on a new desktop.  Last one I had wasn't bad but felt like just going a bit higher.  The 8 core AMD Is really a step up from the i5 and I have more ram to work with.  Also got one of the new nividia card models based on the new Maxwell architecture, it's a slight improvement over the Radeon I had in the other system.

Been doing tutorials in Unity again and working on enemies in Blender.  I also have to spend some time working on "ground" and props.  I'll probably spend some time learning more about the compositor in Blender this week if all goes well and I don't get swamped with chores.


New Dev Comp specs if anyone is interested in techno garble.

Vid card    -   Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2 GB
Processor -   AMD FX Vishera 4.00GHz
Ram         -   G. Skill RipJaws X series 16GB
Case        -    Corsair Carbide Series 500R Black Steel structure
Mother     -    GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3P AM3+/AM3 AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s
HD          -     Western Digital WD10EZEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache
CD          -     ASUS 24X DVD Burner - Bulk 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 12X
PWR       -     Corsair 750W (Ripped it out of the other comp)
OS          -     Win 7