EDIT: So I might have lost something about Langkawi in the database replacement… I wouldn’t worry about it!

My main issues with the move relates not to where we’re moving from, nor to where we moving to, but to the sheer number of things that you have to organise just to be able to move. I’ve got a list in my notebook of over 20 different people/companies/governmental bodies that need to be notified of my new address and the stress of trying to organise it all and actually move all the stuff is killing me. Thankfully, I’ve about half way through the list and the others shouldn’t be too hard to sort out, but just trying to think up all the people you need to tell is really hard.

What’s really adding to the stress is the fact that we’re also going on holiday. For 3 weeks. To Malaysia. Yeah, tough break I know! If only it wasn’t planned for exactly one week after our moving in date! So basically I’ve got to try and get everything related to house moving (including the actual moving) sorted before we fly off to the other side of the planet. It’s gonna be tough, but boy, there’s going to be plenty of time to relax once it’s all sorted out! I think we’ve moved almost everything, bar a few remaining items, but we still have to do “the big clean” (which is planned for this evening, yay!) and then pack for our holiday on Thursday evening. Friday night we’ll be heading off to my parents’ house and we fly out from Heathrow on Saturday.

I think I’m just resentful of the fact that we’ve just moved into this awesome new apartment and we’re not getting any time to spend it whilst we’re constantly going back and forth in the Mini ferrying stuff and once all that’s done we’ll be out of the country for three weeks! Naturally, I’m hoping to flood my Flickr account (currently overrun with Forza 2 screenshots) with plenty of images from out there too!

The title says it all really! Hopefully I can have it finished before I go on holiday! Hope you like it!

I could fill some space and say all the other Guitar Hero 2 designs I’ve seen so far have been pretty poor and that mine is going to be ace. But I won’t.

Just a quick one from me this time! Thought I’d let you know that I sold my latest colour variation, yellow as you can see on the left, sold for 5.25 million credits! From what I can gather, there was an even more intense bidding war than the last time. The eventual winner after 236 bids was Bipolar Dolphin, who has the most ridiculous GamerScore I’ve ever seen! I’ve already had interest in the next colour scheme from one of the other big spenders who didn’t win the last auction, so there’s hope that the next one should also be quite profitable. At least, I hope so! Naturally I’ll be posting up when it goes for auction (both on Eurogamer and the Forza forums - check the previous thread for links).

I’ve been spending quite a bit of recent playing trying to tune up an Audi RS4, my new favourite car. I’m trying to keep it right at the edge of it’s group (B) and pushing it as far as I can. Spent hours running round Laguna Seca tweaking values… but man, it takes ages! Even longer than painting!

Speaking of which, I started a new design last week… it’s gonna be a big one! I’ll have a teaser image for you very soon!

Yes, I am aware there is a spelling mistake (answers on a postcard)! I have actually fixed that now, but obviously I don’t have an updated action screenshot.

Having a lot of fun in Forza 2 at the minute (when I can find the time to actually sit down and accomplish something)! I’ve been doing quite a lot of driving (I’m only level 15 at present), not very much tuning/upgrading and (comparatively) LOADS of painting! It’s so much fun, it’s just like a little jigsaw puzzle since you can’t import any graphics (despite some of the amazing designs that can be found).

Anyway, onto the main event! Last weekend I spent almost two whole days completing my first (proper) car design. As you might be able to tell from the screenshot, it’s a theme based on the character Andy from Advance Wars: Dual Strike on Nintendo DS! The main character decal is comprised of 342 decal layers!

Advance Wars (Red #01)

The design is for the Honda Civic R, which is a great little D class car; nice and easy to drive and reasonably powerful compared to some of the other D classers… So far, I’ve created two colour variations; red and blue. The red one, sold to halfsky, went for an unfortunate 16,606CR - not an ideal amount given the Civic itself cost me probably 12,000CR, plus a hefty fee on top for having it as a “Featured” auction (i.e. it appears at the top of searches)! Still, it was my fault, I didn’t pimp up the sale enough and I didn’t have it ending at an ideal time for most people to reasonable buy! Oh and I only set my starting price at 5,000CR! Big mistake!

Not to balls it up a second time, I made sure I thoroughly pimped it in the Forza 2 Eurogamer group and I also set the starting price at a cool 50,000CR. I managed to sell it for a whopping 285,606CR to fellow EGer Shadow Thi3f! Apparently there was quite an intense bidding war going on, with 88 bids (not people) going on the auction before closing. There seems to be some system whereby if people place bids with very few minutes to go, it extends the auction time so more people can get bids in… quite a good idea (since there’s no eBay-style maximum bid) but it does mean the auctions can go on for way longer than scheduled!

Still, I made a profit, so I’m happy! There are going to be 3 more colour variations coming over the next week or so, so stay tuned!

Went to my first ever Swedish wedding last… well, two and a half weeks ago now. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they’re not unlike British weddings (certainly the ones I’ve been to anyway), except of course that every is speaking Swedish and I haven’t got a clue what on Earth is going on. To make matters somewhat more complicated, I also had never met the bride or groom (talk about a freeloader eh?) It was a heck of a lot of fun and thankfully, the weather was also very nice, which is to say, the sun was out, even if the wind made it feel like < 10°C. Landing back in the UK on Sunday afternoon, we were welcomed back with open arms and opened heavens. Typical.

You can view the full set of badly taken photos here: Emilia & Anders Wedding

Vietnam’s fiber optic connections to the rest of the world have been dropping like flies lately due to… fishermen? About 43 km of undersea fiber optic cable is now missing.

D’oh! From ars technica.

Sony have finally set up a blog! This is a great move, hopefully it prove just as popular and successful as Major Nelson! Added to my blogroll links…

A battle between a pride of lions, a herd of buffalo, and 2 crocodiles at a watering hole in South Africa’s Kruger National Park while on safari.

It’s ace.

LINK

Forza 2 Limited Edition Packshot
Originally uploaded by daniel-lim

Woo! My copy of Forza Motorsport 2 arrived this morning! Only 3 hours til I can go home and play! I got the Limited Edition version which includes 3 exclusives cars for the game, a HUGE accompanying manual with lots of pretty interesting stuff (including some driving school tips for taking corners properly and the like) all encased in a rather nice box with plastic sleeve.

I started a thread over at Eurogamer.net about the damn sleeves, which look nice, but why on earth can’t they have a bit of plastic at the bottom so the case doesn’t just slide through?! It’s really annoying!

Anyway, Forza 2… Really looking forward to playing it! The demo has been played loads since it came out and I bought a Microsoft Wireless Racing Wheel in anticipation! You can really tell (even from the demo) that the game has really been designed around the wheel, everything about it feels really good, every car feels different, unlike the recent demo for Colin McRae: DiRT, which looks great, plays really nicely with the pad, but is stonkingly atrocious with the wheel. Seriously. It’s f*cking bad. In Forza, I love when you start skidding (despite my car skidding normally being the precursor to ending up in the sand traps and losing) and you can actually feel the wheels losing traction and gripping again as they slow down. It really is very immersive, even if my wheel times come nowhere near my pad times just yet (although I’m generally rubbish anyway).

I’m also very excited about the livery editor, where you can layer up hundreds of different decals to create your masterpiece. And truly, we have seen some masterpieces in recent weeks (the Japanese and Americans got it a couple of weeks before us). Forums are getting filled with the awesomeness that is being stuck on the side of cars. Some of the best I’ve seen so far: Mugen (on a Mugen) from the anime Samurai Champloo, Marcus Fenix from Gears of War, some girl from the Japanese 360 game The iDOLM@STER, Batman & Robin, my absolute favourite that I’ve seen so far, an amazing paint job with a Paper Mario theme. Stunning. There are loads of galleries springing up all over the place, so here’s a few you can check out: 1 2 3.

Naturally, there’s loads of buzz about the game over at Eurogamer, so come and join the Forza 2 User Group and join in the discussion!

Oh and before I go, I have to show you this. Apparently there’s an option in the game to enable this mode! Of course, I don’t have the 3 Xbox 360s, the 3 copies of the game and the 3 HDTVs that you’d require in order to do it…

…but still!

EDIT: The guide for getting your 3-screen Forza action can be found here.

EDIT: Aaaaaand, we’re back! I love Wordpress. It’s just so easy!
Hopefully won’t get ripped to pieces by the spambots that make their rounds every few weeks now!

EDIT #2: Been messing around for ages now, finally managed to get my site back to valid XHTML Transitional 1.0 certified! Don’t know what that is? Well, I don’t either really, but you can read more about it here.

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.