daniel-lim.co.uk

Loads of new stuff came out of Gamer Day last week, a summary of which you can find at GamesRadar.

Obviously, the most important thing there was Heavenly Sword! We even have a new official homepage for the game, which is particularly nice, given the lack of updates on Ninja Theory’s website (that said, heavenlysword.eu seems not to have any of the recently released stuff on it )

There’s a couple of new images and screenshots (none of which I took this time), oh and a rather tasty trailer, all of which, you can check out on Playsyde!

Today, in response to the “down-scaling” of E3 (”Electronics Entertainment Expo”) to a much smaller, trade-focused event out in LA during the summer months, giant super-developer/publisher Ubisoft has launched it’s own event called Ubidays, which has seen loads of new screens, gameplay footage and trailers hit gaming websites during most of today. LOADS of great games were shown - will talk more about those later!

Oh yeah, the Mini! Marie bought one at weekend. It’s sweet. I’ll try and take some photos soon because it is just tooooo cool. It’s a black Mini ONE (2005), with some rather fetching grey racing stripes (the white ones are ugly and are waay too overpowering, but these grey ones just break up the black a little bit). It’s got some pretty awesome features, such as racing seats and Cooper-style chrome petrol cap.

The only problem with it, is the radio. The cassette radio. We need something a more “this decade”. I’ve put in a staff sales order for one of these babies: the Sony CDX-DAB6650, but there’s loads of other stuff I need to make sure it all goes in properly.

So far I’ve established that I’ll need a fascia adapter (£5 on eBay) and from what I can gather, I’ll also need an ISO “harness lead” (another £5 on eBay) in order to go from the custom connection of the Mini (BMW) to the standardised ISO connection - can anyone confirm that’s definitely the case? The guy selling fascia adapters said the PC2-75-4 is the one I’d probably need. I was just a little bit put off by the “probably”.

Also, anyone got any advice on how to actually fit a new radio? Since it’s a DAB one, I’ll also need to work out a way to run the separate DAB aerial up to the windscreen - hopefully it won’t involve having to take the entire dash off! Erk! Will I also need an aerial adapter for the normal FM/AM aerial?

Someone please bestow your knowledge upon me!

Photos soon!

Well, I’ve run out of stuff to do again. I would upgrade Wordpress to version 2.2 (as predicted last week), but I’m at work, so obviously firewalling and a distinct lack of FTP program are somewhat restricting. Plus I have no idea if it’s against the rules or not.

I’ve finished animating some hair that was going crazy-mad. I know it’s hardly the most interesting task you can be set, but I did get to write an awesome script (even if I do say so myself) to combat the crazy-madness.

Basically some of the hair needed baking (i.e. all the dynamic movement was recorded and stored as keyframe information) and fixing, so the script basically takes in the number of joints running down the main strands of hai and creates IK splines with a number of clusters (it has to be an approximation otherwise there’d be a hell of a lot of clusters!).

Essentially this means that you can now animate the hair using IK, rather than trying to do it in FK one every single joint, which gimbals like nobody’s business!

The second part of the script, counts through all the joints down the hair length, switches off the IK (otherwise there’ll be trouble!) and snaps the clusters to every other joint and sets a key.

This means you can exactly match the IK hair strand to the dynamic (baked) FK one. So if you’ve got any points where the hair goes a little crazy (or, more often, pokes through her face) you can IK either side of it and just blend over it, providing a very quick and easy fix!

I was very pleased with myself anyway

Oh and I bought the new Maroon 5 album this afternoon. I’ll give it a listen and let you know what I think!

It would seem that the Crackdown DLC (DownLoadable Content) is up and available for a-getting! Which would be great, if Marie wasn’t obsessed with Catan (which is actually fair enough, given how awesome it is). There’s a huge list of features that they’ve added with this release, so the 800 MS Points their asking at the door definitely seems a worthy price for entry! Screw you Guitar Hero II DLC!

Be sure to check out the videos on Major’s site, they look amazing! Can’t wait to try out the harpoon gun, lobber and camo! That said, I’ve spent AGES playing this game - should I really invest more time in it? YES! It’s become my “most complete” (in terms of gamerscore) game that I own on the 360.

EDIT: Seems as though the DLC is having a few problems! Ah well, as long as you follow the advice, you should be able to avoid it!

Rumour has it that version 2.2 of Wordpress is out soon, so I may just hold off until that comes out before upgrading again, despite the floods of explicit spam comments I have to clean out every so often.

Anyway, on to what’s been happening for the past 9 months or so. I finished my degree, did my showreel and went to the degree show at MPC on the 14th of July and by August 28th I was working for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe at Cambridge Studio. Not bad eh? In fact 7 of us managed to land places here and it’s great! I’m currently working on Heavenly Sword as an animator (along with Matt and Marie working on environments and props) and whilst it’s been quite the trial by fire, it has been very beneficial to our skills. We really were dropped in at the deep-end somewhat, but we’ve all managed to keep our heads above the water and now we’re all permanent members of staff!

We did have an issue a few weeks ago however… hurray for cost-cutting! Fortunately all the grads survived the “cull”, but we did see a few friends leave the premises, which really made for perhaps the worst week ever! It was kind of like waiting for exam results only 10 times worse because a) it actually matters and b) no one could really be deemed “safe” until we got it in black and white.

Regardless, “The Sword” is starting to slow down quite a lot now and we’ve basically run out of tasks to do for the moment, so I’ve spent most of today and yesterday playing through the latest build to hunt down bugs and other issues that need sorting out before release. It’s all coming together pretty nicely and it’s getting better with every day that passes. No idea what will be coming next for us, perhaps Killzone 2.

Heavenly Sword will be releasing in September (as reported by ThreeSpeech). Check out some screenshots that were posted on Playsyde recently. I think I might have taken that second one!

For the record, I am promising to make a massive effort in updating my site more regularly, it’s been a little ridiculous over the past few months but now everything has settled down a little bit more, I feel I can finally take the time to do it properly.