Been thinking about how we should synchronize the visuals and the music in our demo… So I went and watched some of the classic demos, paying some extra attention at how they do it.

Synchronization aside, the demo that still touches me very deeply is Gerbera by Moppi. It’s old (2001) and already starting to show it’s age visually, but the whole mood, ‘storyline’ (whatever that is), the tiny writings and the music is fascinating.

Directions makes us unable to choose our paths. Wonderful.

I’ve done some very basic walk/run animation blending. The results are pretty neat!

We have several walk animation cycles, each for different walk/run speed. Now I can smoothly move the character at any speed, and the right animations are selected, synchronized, mixed; and the walk is mixed in/out of another animations.

As a basis I’ve taken Tom Forsyth’s talk from GameTech2004 and Charles Bloom’s rambles (dated 3-13-03). Of course, our case is somewhat simpler (e.g. we don’t have manpower to author all turn left/right, accelerate/decelerate, etc. anims).

Try it yourself - it’s good! :)

BTW, I was thinking about putting our full engine/tools/whatever somewhere, in case anyone is interested or maybe would find it useful. Well, I know, the naked sourcecode is not useful at all in the real world, but still :)

A must read article for any game developer wannabe here:

Your industry heroes work like dogs too. Ask a Blizzard employee what their “core” hours were for the last year+ before WoW launched. Or a Bungie employee leading up to Halo shipping. And those are the lucky ones. For every studio that turned out a brilliant game, multiple other teams of equally cool people ended up wasting years of their lives working on games that never saw the light of day, came out stillborn or got pushed out early and died an ignominious screaming bug-filled death.

Don’t even get me started on the core work hours for Japanese studios.

How sad, and how true…

Some 6-8 years ago I’d think hey, games programming is all I want to do. Right now I’m more on the “let’s see” side.

One thing is: I don’t really play games. Last time I seriously played a game was, like, 7 years ago (IIRC). Some of the modern games I’ve seen or tried a bit are HalfLife2, Doom3, DungeonSiege, GTA3 and… that’s all! Wanting to be a game developer when you’re not really interested in games would be pretty weird, right?

Right now I’d think that my main interest is (realtime) computer graphics. I know that sounds pretty familiar - everyone starts from doing rendering engine - but hey, I’m still interested in CG now, and my first attempt at it was ~9 years ago, a mosaic-drawing-program on ZX Spectrum…

Would I want to work on a game? It depends. I don’t really like the current state of the industry at large; and working on something that’s not directly a game (like at IHV, or middleware, or research) would probably be more interesting.

I guess that’s why I’m trying not to work fulltime and leave some time for demoscene and similar stuff. Ok, my daughter has got the scissors somehow and now is trying to cut some books. Gotta go :)

Boring3D is back with new semi-daily images. That stuff rocks the christ child (*).

(*) The phrase is invented by Casey Muratori :)