Blocks

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Nacimota

Every now and then I play around with 3D modelling software. I love being able to create something that is so visually rich, a world you can sculpt and explore. Level design – especially for first person shooters – appeals to me for more or less the same reason. Lately I’ve had the chance to jump back to one of my old favourites, Autodesk 3ds Max.

When I’m not building levels in Valve Hammer Editor, or playing around with architectural design in Google SketchUp and the like, I tend to do more abstract work.

A couple of days ago I rendered a scene that had thousands of blocks varying in height laid out in a grid. With tens of thousands of polygons in the scene, as well as ray-traced reflections, the render actually took far longer than creating the blocks themselves, which were created via a script. While pretty simple in design, I found the result to be quite appealing so I shared it with some people and was surprised by the positive response. I must say, it does make a nice background. Feel free to do with it as you please:

Blocks (Reflective) 1920x1200

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First Impressions: Windows Live Messenger 2010

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Nacimota

Windows Live MessengerMicrosoft has just released a beta of their upcoming 2010 version of Windows Live Messenger. I decided to download it and explore. The first thing I noticed was that much like Internet Explorer 9 and some other Microsoft products, Windows Live Messenger 2010 appears to be exclusive to Windows Vista and Windows 7 users. Whether this is an attempt to encourage users to upgrade from Windows XP or an actual prerequisite for the product to work correctly, I can only speculate. Alas, it appears that Microsoft is starting to completely neglect its XP users when it comes to developing future products.

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Windows 7 in .Net – Jump Lists

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Nacimota

Editor’s Note:
This article was originally written in February 2010, and at the time the released version of .Net (version 3.5) did not implement features new to Windows 7. These features are now accessible in .Net 4.0 which has since been released with Visual Studio 2010 but require the use of WPF, which means if you’re planning on staying with Windows Forms this is probably the only method still open to you. I hope to cover accessing Windows 7 features via WPF in the future.

Since its release, Windows 7 has had a very strong uptake with consumers across the globe (that is, in comparison with other operating systems in the past). This should come as no surprise to anyone, as Windows 7 is pretty awesome.

Windows 7 introduces tons of new features which are pretty cool individually, but together add up to a huge improvement over its predecessors. One of the coolest of these features – or at least the one that had the most media attention – is the new task bar.

There are a lot of new components introduced with the new taskbar, but for the purposes of this article, I’m only going to focus on Jump Lists; further on I plan to talk about progress bars in taskbar buttons, and image overlays on taskbar buttons, but those will be in future posts. These features are particularly handy for 3rd party developers and I’ve noticed a lot of people looking for ways to access them in the .Net environment.

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New Theme and E3

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Nacimota

Okay so despite my promises of content two months ago I haven’t really posted anything. WordPress 3.0 came out very recently which gave me yet another excuse to update this site. The new default theme is fittingly titled “twenty ten” and takes advantages of a number of new features in the WordPress API like custom menus and featured images for posts. It seems a lot more flexible and customizable than earlier WordPress themes. They’ve also improved WordPress in a number of other ways which have little effect on me personally, such as making it possible to manage multiple WordPress sites using the same admin interface.

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Still Alive

Posted on April 5, 2010 by Nacimota

It’s been months since my last post here; I’ve been tied up with work, trips to Brisbane and other issues such as pure laziness. I decided about a week ago to start working on this site again but I figured posting so close to April Fools’ Day would be a hilarious and/or sad coincidence.

Some significant events have occurred over the last two months regarding Australia’s IT industry. AFACT lost their lawsuit against iiNet. AFACT appealed the decision despite the fact that judge Cowdroy explicitly stated that “… it is impossible to conclude that iiNet has authorised copyright infringement…”

Meanwhile, Michael Atkinson stepped back from the front bench, giving up his position as South Australia Attorney-General for personal reasons right after he was re-elected. The move was significant because Atkinson has been the main opponent against the introduction of an R18+ rating for video games. Australia remains the only western country without an adult’s only classification which has prevented more intense games from being sold here. A move to amend the current classification system has to be unanimously accepted by all Australia’s attorneys-general which essentially gives any one of them the power to veto such a move. Now that Atkinson has stepped back there’s much higher chance of an adults only rating being introduced.

Speaking of games, Splinter Cell Conviction is finally being released next week after being delayed countless times since its original release date of late 2007. Being a huge fan of the Splinter Cell series, I will be sure to pick up a copy either on steam, Xbox, or both. There is a demo available on Xbox Live Marketplace, which I have of course played repeatedly.

Portal 2 will also be coming out later this year which will be great fun. Valve has apparently found a way to implement cooperative multiplayer in a way that’s fun and challenging, which is fantastic. The news on the Portal sequel has sparked a renewed level of activity in the portal mapping community. I might write a Portal related Hammer tutorial soon, so stay tuned.

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The Carve Tool and You

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Nacimota

There’s something I’ve always wanted to discuss in regards to mapping with Valve Hammer Editor, and that is the use of the carve tool. As far as I’m aware, the carve tool was never intended to be used with anything other than a rectangular brush, because when given a more complicated primitive to work with (such as a cylinder) the results become quite messy.

This has resulted in many veteran mappers adopting a viewpoint that is essentially “NEVER USE THE CARVE TOOL”, which is then passed on to new and aspiring source mappers who read those kinds of comments in tutorials and forum posts. Despite this, the carve tool remains a useful technique for quickly creating rectangular holes in a brush and shouldn’t be discarded from your mapping arsenal.

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Upgrades and Stuff

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Nacimota

So after waiting a whole week, I finally got myself a copy of Windows 7 (and two gigs of extra RAM). I used the public beta and release candidates so I haven’t seen any big surprises but I’m definitely enjoying the experience. Windows 7 has a bunch of cool features like Jump Lists and progress bars in the taskbar (not sure what they call that exactly). They’re actually unexpectedly easy to work with, so I’ll probably write a tutorial on those within the next week or so.

Speaking of unfulfilled promises, that carve tool article still hasn’t been published. It is of course, my prerogative, to blame the aforementioned delay on preparing my machine for Windows 7. It should be on the site later today, so stay tuned if you’re waiting for that.

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Australian gamers left for dead by the Classification Review Board

Posted on October 22, 2009 by Nacimota

Left 4 Dead 2 Box ShotThe Australian federal government’s Classification Review Board announced today that Valve Software’s Left 4 Dead 2 will not be awarded an MA 15+ rating, which the game requires in order to be legally sold in Australia.

The board originally refused classification for Left 4 Dead 2 last month, which forced Valve to appeal the decision and quickly throw together a less graphic version of the game in order to meet the November release date. The three-person panel, which voted unanimously to refuse classification to Left 4 Dead 2, explained their reasoning in a press release made available today on the board’s website.

The computer game [Left 4 Dead 2] contains a level of violence which is high in impact, prolonged, repeated frequently and realistic within the context of the game.

In addition, it was the Review Board’s opinion that there was insufficient delineation between the depiction of general zombie figures and the human figures, as opposed to the clearly fictional ‘infected’ characters. This was a major consideration of the Review Board in determining the impact of this game on minors.

The decision has reignited the debate concerning Australia’s lack of an R 18+ rating for video games. Video game classification in Australia remains the strictest of all classified media due to its lack of an R 18+ rating. Valve plans to submit a modified version of the game to the board for review.

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Excuses and Litigation

Posted on October 10, 2009 by Nacimota

Okay so it’s been just under three months since I last posted and that has been for a variety of reasons, which I will now outline.

I was briefly sucked back into the world of MMOs, first by playing EVE Online and then World of Warcraft soon after. I managed to get a Hyperion in EVE (a battleship roughly 1.7 kilometres in length) and a level 80 Death Knight in World of Warcraft. Having achieved these goals and essentially selling two months of my life to CCP and Blizzard, I decided I was done with these games for now.

I’ve also had some web hosting and development work for various people that I’ve been dealing with and I’ve been writing a DirectAdmin skin for the guys over at Honest Networks.

On that note, I’d like to say that writing skins for DirectAdmin is a bitch. The fact that there appears to be a relatively high demand for DirectAdmin skins with very few people making them seems to reflect this. The skinning system works, but it’s unnecessarily complicated. You can read more about it over at http://www.directadmin.com/skins.html.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time on IRC as I’ve been writing an IRC bot in C#. I may or may not cover some of that in the coming weeks but who knows.

I also received a whole a bunch of messages and emails in regards to the SketchUp video I made, there seems to be a substantial amount of people who can’t find the plug-ins that are ostensibly now included with the regular SDK. Not to worry, you can still download them right here by clicking this link:

http://files.nacimota.com/sketchup_plugins.zip

Speaking of Hammer, I’ve got an article I’m planning to write covering the use of the carve tool, probably the most controversial tool in Hammer. It won’t be particularly long so that should pop up on this page soon.

An epic battle of Good vs Evil; Who will win?!

In other news, the iiNet vs. AFACT trial officially started last week with both sides giving opening statements and explaining the BitTorrent protocol. For those of you who are overseas or just living under a rock, AFACT is the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft; iiNet is an internet service provider that AFACT is suing on behalf of several major film studios and the Seven Network. Their complaint is essentially that iiNet is infringing copyright by not preventing pirated material from being downloaded by their customers.

AFACT sends thousands of emails to various ISPs across the country each week that accuse their customers of pirating copyright material. Many ISPs including iiNet have chosen to ignore these emails on the premise that they can’t cut off a customer’s internet connection based exclusively on an unproven accusation made by a third party. The essence of this argument is essentially that their customers are “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law”, a concept that so enrages AFACT that they chose to go after the ISPs instead.

The concept that an ISP is responsible for what their customers do with their internet connection strikes me as completely absurd. It’s not unlike suing a telephone company for allowing a customer to make threatening phone calls.

The case continues on Monday.

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Creating Source Maps with SketchUp

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Nacimota

Valve released the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools recently, which included some plugins for Google SketchUp. In this video, I’ll show you the basics of exporting SketchUp geometry into the .VMF format. The plugins export generic VMF data, so it works with other Source games too. Contrary to what I said in the video, valve has included the plugins with the regular SDK now.

I have a cold so my voice is a bit off in places. Send plugin feedback to sketchuptools@valvesoftware.com.

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