daniel-lim.co.uk

One of the games I’ve been really excited about for a long time, Prey by Human Head Studios, is having it’s demo premiered on GameSpot today (if you stay up)! In just under 18 hours, we’ll get a chance to play in the insane looking levels with gravity-defying walkways and the really rather spiffy looking portal-system! You can check out the preview on EuroGamer, but if you can’t be bothered to read and would rather see this awesome looking game in action, you can check out their videos:

E3 Trailer

Trailer 2

Gameplay Footage (Portals and Gravity-Flipping)

More gameplay footage

God I hope this game is good. Apparently we’ll get to play FIVE whole levels! I hope there are lots more in the full game!

EDIT: Edited the title because 18 hours actually puts it out tomorrow… but I imagine I’ll still be up

I’ve got all my sodding frames rendered out from Shake and looking sexeh, but now I have to wait a whole f*cking hour to copy the 4.4GB worth of images from my area to the media machine. Of course, I didn’t have enough space in my area, so I rendered out to the transfer drive. Then I find out that you can’t copy the files from transfer to the media machines, so then I have to make space somewhere on my area and copy them back! Gah! This is so ridiculous, I just want to be done with this project and forget about it!

/rant

Phew. Sorry about that. Just venting. Hopefully Marie will be coming soon and my DS will be winging it’s way into my loving arms. In the meantime, I may carry on with the website design stuff I’m working on. Having been using Dreamweaver for so long now though, it feels really painfully slow to code it by hand, particularly when you don’t get an immediate visual feedback to changes you make.

I don’t really have much else to say, I’m just killing time. Because this post has been more or less all negative and depressing, I shall reward you for reading with a “shaked”/”shook”/”shaken”(?) image of my major project: ENJOY!

I was just checking the my archived posts on here and realised that the site is one year and a week old! Woo! Happy birthday! With this wonderful revelation, I thought it might be a worth pointing out that I’m about to begin work on the ‘work’ subdomain, basically collating all the stuff I’ve done and putting it in a format suitable for easy viewing, something the blog doesn’t lend itself to. It still has it’s uses though: showing work in progress and rambling incessantly among other things!

I’m going to start working through some possible designs, something that fits in with the overall look of the site. Now that I’ve got Lightbox up and running, it should provide a nice sound base for showing my work off to people. Stay tuned!

I’ve finished my Masterclass project. We had to do the concept drawings (front and back) ages ago, but then circumstances beyond our control put the deadline after the exams. 8 days after the exams to be precise. Naturally, having not had the foresight (or time) to make a start, there was a fairly tight timeline to work on it! As if I was going to change my working practices for the final deadline of my degree!

The design of the character isn’t that original (I was playing a lot of Prince of Persia at the time) but my ulterior motive was to have a fairly athletic character that I could eventually rig and skin for some game-style animations I want to do. Essentially the character has been latched onto by some parasite that’s trying to take over his body (think Venom from the Marvel comics) and since it needs him alive to survive itself, it helps to defend our hero. I’m toying with the idea that it can do Carnage-esque transformation into various weapons (swords, axes, whips etc.), but I’ve no idea how I’d model and rig that suitable for a game engine! Perhaps in the future!

Here’s the default pose renders (click to expand):

Here are the various texture maps (click to expand):

And finally some dynamic pose shots for you troubles (click to expand):

I may do some more work on it in the future, tidy a few things up and what not, maybe skin it properly, but the hand-in is over and I think I can safely that it’s the 3rd year project that I’m most proud of (i.e. I actually liked how it turned out :P). It was a really fun project (even if I was a little rushed) and I learnt loads of new stuff about Photoshop and have done some proper texturing for the first time in 3 years! Goodness!

I’ve finally managed to get Lightbox installed on my site. Well, I say finally, I’ve only spent the morning doing it - now that there’s no more work to do (bar the submission of the degree show video), I’m free to do some work on the site at last! Thank goodness! Anyway, back to the point. What the hell is Lightbox? Well, it allows me to do…

THIS!

It’s not hard installing Lightbox, apparently nor is it to install the Lightbox plugin for WordPress but alas, with the way my permalinks work, it to breaks so I had to go into Website Admin Hardcore™ (WAH!?! for short) and do “teh funkeh adm1nz0r shiznit”. Ok whatever.

Since it’s a bugger, and perhaps someone will find it useful (various people here can’t get it to work), here’s what I did - I can’t guarantee it will work for everyone and don’t blame me if you don’t know what you’re doing when you screw up, but here goes. To install lightbox such that it will work with Wordpress AND use “date and name-based” permalinks, I did the following:

THIS TUTORIAL ASSUMES YOU HAVE NO PRIOR INSTALLATIONS OF LIGHTBOX OR THE LIGHTBOX PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS AND THAT YOU’RE NOT WORKING WITH A HEAVILY MODIFIED VERSION OF WORDPRESS

YOU ONLY NEED TO DO THIS IS YOU ARE NOT USING THE DEFAULT PERMALINK STRUCTURE

1. Download the latest version of lightbox (not wp-lightbox for wordpress!) by going to the Lightbox JS 2.0 site
2. Upload the package onto your website as instructed
3. Check the index.html file that comes with the package and see if it Lightbox works correctly (you might want to rename it to something else other than index.html if you’re uploading to your root directory). If that works, then you should be able to get this working with no problems.
4. Open lightbox.css and lightbox.js and edit them to make sure you have an absolute link to the image files (i.e. wherever either file refers to a .gif, replace the relative link with the full http:// one). For example, if your lightbox image files are stored at http://myserver.com/images/ then the absolute link will be http://myserver.com/images/filename.gif, where “filename” is name of the file that you’re working with. This is a complex bit:

In lightbox.css:

• On line 48, replace (../images/blank.gif) with
  (http://myserver.com/images/blank.gif)
• On line 53, replace (../images/prevlabel.gif) with
  (http://myserver.com/images/prevlabel.gif)
• On line 54, replace (../images/nextlabel.gif) with
  (http://myserver.com/images/nextlabel.gif)

In lightbox.js:

• On line 62, replace "images/loading.gif" with
  "http://myserver.com/images/loading.gif"
• On line 63, replace "images/closelabel.gif" with
  "http://myserver.com/images/closelabel.gif"

5. Close and save both files.
6. Upload these files back onto your server, overwriting the old ones.
7. Now you need to manually edit your theme’s header file. Log in to you wordpress site, go to Dashboard|Manage|Files and open the header file (Normally located at ???/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/header.php???) and add the following lines after the title tags:

   IMAGE LINK

   (I had to make it an image because WordPress wouldn’t accept the code with the code tags).

   Now this is the really important bit! The number of “../” you need to add to your code will vary according to your permalink structure! My site uses “/year/month/day/postname/” so I need four lots of “../” for it to work. You need to work out how many you need for it to access the javascript and css files correctly and edit the code appropriately.

8. Click “Update File” to update your header.php file. We put the code in this file because it will ensure it is called on every Wordpress page that is shown.
9. All being well, Lightbox should now work perfectly! Simply add rel="lightbox" (and title="My Title" if you want a caption) to the href of a link to an image in Wordpress.

I hope this helps/works for you! Please leave comments or suggestions.

Yes, I apologise for not updating in a while, my Masterclass is heavily underway and frankly, I’m too tired to do any sort of anything. But I have updated to the latest version of WordPress. Some bugfixes and security blah-blah-blah apparently. You too can download the latest version from wordpress.org ot you can read about it on their development blog.

/sigh