daniel-lim.co.uk

In light of the awesome European victory against the US in the celebrity All Star Cup 2005 this weekend in Wales, it’s really about time I mentioned this game. The game has received a small mention in the latest issue of Edge Magazine and despite the timing, I swear the URL has been sat in my drafts box for a number of weeks: EDGE did not get there first, promise. I simply can’t put it off any longer. That, combined with the fact that I’m at work and don’t really have anything to do. Golf? is perhaps the only First Person Golf (FPG?) game in existence. It’s certainly the only one I’ve ever heard of and definitely the only one I’ve ever played.

The makers’ of this wonderfully conceived game have left their site sufficiently devoid of information to plant the seed of curiosity. Set against a stylised monochrome version of The Great Outdoors™ (something we animators often forget exists), the golfers start at the tee (naturally) and proceed to… er… whack their balls towards to the hole (much like in real-life golf, of course). The game comes with bot-play and both LAN and Direct IP multiplayer. I have no idea if players must wait their turn or if infact all the players can whack their balls together (ok, I’ll stop now! ;)). In the latter case, I imagine great could be fun had playing ‘who can complete the hole the fastest’ as opposed to who can do it in the fewest shots. I’ve yet to test either but I look forward to playing against my housemates in a few weeks when we move into the new house.

The graphics are simple but graceful and stylish (this game will seriously run on any OpenGL-capable PC) with the keyboard and mouse controls easy and intuitive for anyone that’s ever played an FPS - that said, knowing which club to pick will inevitably involve a bit of trial and error on the player’s part. Oh and you’ll need a fair bit of space on your desk for a decent swing (Marie, you will find it impossible :D). In the event you forget what is you’re doing or what you’re meant to press to do a drop or rehit, there’s a handy text menu listing all the keyboard commands. My main problem with the game is that none of the foliage seems to affect the ball in anyway. This might just be because I’m amazing and never leave the fairways, but if the scenery were there to cause problems and force the occasional drop, it’d be all the better for it. One of my favourite aspects of the game is the bright, coloured trails that accompany your ball strikes. That and the ability to drive wireframe rocket/nitro-powered golf carts that look like carriages straight out of Pride and Prejudice. What more could you ask for?

Indeed, nothing beats getting out onto a real golf course and driving for all your worth (the ball, not the carts!), but Golf? does provide a wonderful alternative for the exoterically-challenged.

As you may have guessed by now I’m using this (wonderfully extended) Bank Holiday weekend to get my site in order. It was either that or go to the Notting Hill carnival. I was tempted; it’s a beautiful day outside but alas, my family are having a barbecue. The carnival is Europe’s biggest street party; about 1 million people are expected to turn up today. Thinking about it, I did actually go to the carnival one year. The problem was, my friends and I got the wrong day so we just spent a day walking around a busy Notting Hill Naturally it wasn’t my fault: one of my friends decided we should go - I just turned up when I was told to! The other reasons I can’t go are because 1) I can’t be arsed and 2) I’m watching the cricket, which is all getting very exciting!

As I type, Australia are 378-9 with the tea break fast approaching, having suffered the embarassing follow-on - The first time they’ve had to follow-on for 17 years. That means the Aussies are only 120 ahead and our chances of winning the match is looking pretty good! If you don’t have access to Channel4 in the UK, you can listen live on BBC Five Live Sports Extra (as I do when I’m at work) or get desktop updates from the Channel4 cricket website.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand: I’ve made sure the site is now Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and W3C CSS Validated as well. I’ve also made the site XFN-friendly. In case you were wondering:

“XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel‘ attribute to their <a href> tags, for example:”

<a href="http://daniel-lim.co.uk" rel=”friend”>…

This should hopefully get the site a bit more publicity and will mean if my friends get round to setting up blogs, linking between all the sites should be pretty easy. I’m not sure if I’ve set up the site properly for this yet, so I have to keep checking back here to see if my site makes an appearance over the next day or so. I’ve also added graphics for each fo these buttons, more because I felt like making some buttons than any other reason and I’m looking for ways to replace the Register and Log-out text with buttons too.

Another graphical addition is incorporating the Gravatar system. After signing up with an email and uploading an 80×80px image, your gravatar can follow you round any website or blog that supports it. I’ve added it into my site code, so now anyone who’s signed up to gravatar.com will be able to see their uploaded avatar when they write a comment. Which I think is very nice. All the gravatars must go through an certification process whereby they’re rated on their content (using the US film certificate system). My authorisation is taking some time (perhaps they don’t work on weekends?) but I imagine I should receive a G-rating (the lowest possible) because, despite what some people might say, my face is not a piece of offensive material, profanity, violence, sexual imagery, or a rude gesture I can then decide what ratings are allowed on the site. Being as liberal as I am, I probably won’t put any limit on it.

If you’re not signed up to gravatar.com you’ll get the ‘No image’ image (shown above) next to your name when you post - So go and sign-up to gravatar.com now!

The first part (of two) from my Specialist Project in the second year (BACVA2). The brief for this project is quite broad and you can pick more or less any topic you wish. As a result of the character animation work I did in the Group Project (link to come later), I wanted to push my animation skills further and see what I was capable of. I was also adamant that I wanted to try lip syncing: yes, this is my first foray into full facial animation with dialogue.

I actually found this to be the fastest part of the production: I drew up dope sheets (images to come later) for both sound clips and whacked out the lip movements in a day or two, after completing the body movements (which took considerably longer). This animation (being the second one done in terms of starting, the first in terms of completion) took my a lot less time than the Metal one - this is probably due to the fact that the character is sat down in this clip which significantly reduces the amount of animation required, not to mention the soundclip was much easier to work with.

In this soundbyte from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, we have Emperor Palpatine (played by Ian McDiarmid) informing hero Luke Skywalker that the Rebels are inevitably doomed so he might as well just give up now and join the Dark Side. The great thing about this clip/character is that the Emperor really enunciates every single word. This means you have great fun really over-doing the mouth movements and it all still fits perfectly.

Emperor Palpatine
“I’m looking forward to completing your training… In time, you will call me Master…”

The rig used for this project is the famous free-for-use Generi Rig by Australian animator Andrew Silke, creator of Cane Toad. I chose this rig as opposed to modelling and rigging a character myself because I wanted the project to be solely about animation. This is an excellent rig, with fantastic controls and only a very few niggling limitations. It’s a popular choice for animators submitting work to the 10 Second Club.

The second half of my Specialist Project in character animation from the second year (BACVA2). This soundclip is from the animated feature, The Iron Giant, directed by Brad Bird. The clip sees (or should that be hears?) scrapyard owner and part-time Beatnik Dean McCoppin (voiced by Harry Connick Jr.) trying to explain to the Iron Giant (whose diet consists of metal, metal and yet more metal) that he can’t just go eating anything he likes!

Dean McCoppin
“There are two kinds of metal in this yard. Scrap and art. If ya gotta eat one of them, eat the scrap. What you currently have… IN YOUR MOUTH… IS ART!”

This animation was a lot more stressful than the Master piece. I actually started this production on this animation first, got incredibly stressed out by it, started Master and came back to it after Master had been completed. This is probably due to a lack of planning on my part and constantly rethinking what it was I wanted my character to do (not that rethinking ideas are bad - it’s just when you rethink but don’t replan what’s going to happen!).

If you would like to read more about the project, please go here.

The rig used for this project is the famous free-for-use Generi Rig by Australian animator Andrew Silke, creator of Cane Toad. I chose this rig as opposed to modelling and rigging a character myself because I wanted the project to be solely about animation. This is an excellent rig, with fantastic controls and only a very few niggling limitations. It’s a popular choice for animators submitting work to the 10 Second Club.

Goddamnit! Why am I still awake?

Gotta love the word ‘galore’ really, haven’t you? Awesome. Great stuff. Just added my calendar working (finally). It took flipping ages to find the necessary code and even longer to find exactly where the code was supposed to go! It’s because Michael Heilemann (creator of the awesome Kubrick theme - upon which this blog is based) didn’t see the point of the thing (I just happen to think it looks nice) and hence removed it from the theme. Since I spent so long looking for it - I thought I’d do the right thing and help you lot out, just in case you need it too! For the code, please check the comments for this entry! Make sure you put it within list tags otherwise it’ll look odd. If you don’t know what file to edit, it’s called sidebar.php and it can be found within your theme directory (e.g. /wp-content/themes/default/). You can then choose where you want to put it. Experiment! See what happens - just make sure you back-up first!

This public information broadcast was brought to by the letters ‘d’ and ‘x’ and the number 32. Normal service will now resume.

Whilst I’ve been mucking about the calendar, I’ve also been knocking the rust off meh photoshop skills (the .psd file is provided by the aforementioned Michael Heilemann) and then you can change the colours and the header image and whatnot. Unfortunately I don’t have a decent enough image suitable for the header so until I find one, it’s staying dark grey. What do you think about the colour scheme by the way? I quite like it but I admit that a bit of colour wouldn’t go amiss. I like the blue of the links and (as suggested by the lovely Marie) a bit of orange could look really cool. She also suggested electric pink. But we’ll leave that one where it lies.

WordPress have released the latest version of their excellent blogging tool (the one that powers this site, if you hadn’t already guessed):

“We’re happy to announce that a new version of WordPress is now available for download. This set of improvements and security fixes is in line with our commitment to maintaining an extremely stable 1.5 series. In addition to fixing a number of bugs and adding requested enhancements for plugin authors, this release also addresses all of the security issues that have been circulating the past few days. This is a very straight-forward upgrade, you just need to upload the new files over the old, but as always the Codex is the best resource on upgrading.”

I’ve already upgraded to the new version and everything seems to be in order. I also managed to move the blog to /blog/, keeping the domain name free for an actual site with other stuff that isn’t the blog. I should be working on that a bit later. Expect quite a few changes to the site over the next few days: I’ll be making the most of my Bank Holiday weekend!