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Nihilistic Software
www.nihilistic.com
User Name.........Innerloop
Full Name.........Robert Huebner
Description.......Lead Programmer
8/28/99
Haven't done an update in a while (other than to whine about our email crash,
which has been healed nicely, thanks for all the cards and letters of support..
We've been pretty much putting our heads down and cranking out a lot of gameplay
elements in the last few week, which is pretty exciting stuff, actually. I've
been having some fun with networking and AI, and we're getting tons of new art,
models, and interface screens in every day. One of these days we need to snap
some shots specifically of the UI -- its gorgeous. And the new skies for the
modern day levels will floor you, trust me. We were driving to go see "The 13th
Warrior" tonight, and when I saw the full moon out, I couldn't help thinking,
"Ours looks better than that"...
I've also been working a bit on the side on a presentation I'm doing for the
Game Developer's mini-conference in LA next month. When I signed on for this
it seems like years away, and now its like exactly one month from today, so
as usual I'm cramming. It should be interesting though, I'll be talking about
the entire life-cycle of our character modeling system. Character modeling
systems aren't particularly unique or anything -- every game has one -- but I
thought it would be interesting to talk about the different phases ours went
through and how it constantly got improved and morphed along the way. For
example, we started with a real basic closed-mesh system like we used in Jedi
Knight, because it was what I was familiar with in the past. Well, after about
1 day of that the artists the ability to do proper soft-skin meshes, so we
added that. Then we heard from some friends that Requiem was doing WEIGHTED
soft-skin meshes, so after playing with the math a bit, we added that, too.
And so it went, feature by feature, until now we've got this huge thing with
continuous automatic LOD, shadow volume rendering, material shaders, skeleton-
attachments, etc. Its interesting to take a step back and see how lots of
tiny, incremental improvements got us from where we started over a year ago
to where we're at today. Hopefully other people will find it interesting, too.
The title of the talk is "Breathing life into the undead" or something like
that. Hopefully anyone who's down in LA will have time to come check it out,
its always fun to hear other people's ideas on this stuff. Most times I start
to talk shop with other programmers I end up getting a few new cool ideas. The
LA show is in Orange County (but they still call it LA) on September 27th.
I'm also planning to give the same talk right here on our home turf at the
Marin (San Francisco) conference later this year (like December-ish). Probably
the Marin one will be the more polished performance, but it seems everyone other
game developer up here has already stopped by for lunch to see this stuff...
Check out www.gdconf.com and look for the "roadtrips" link. Its like $90 for
the day, and it would suck to give this talk to like 5 people I already know..
Also, they're starting up another session of the UC Berkeley extension class in the
city, which is more of an intro-level game programming thing than the Roadtrip
deal, but its still fun. Last semester's went really well and a couple of
people ended up landing cool new jobs. The UCB extension in the City (and there
is only one City, as you well know) has moved to a new location, so hopefully the
traffic getting in is better. This semester's class is 5 weeks on Tuesdays, 9/14
to 10/12 from 6:30pm for 3 hours. The URL for Berkely extension is
www.unex.berkeley.edu. The course is something like "Game programming in Windows"
(catchy, huh?).
Which reminds me, I'm dying to buy a new laptop to drag with me to the class.
Anyone have any comments, pro or con about those slick Sony Vaio mini-notebooks?
Serious techno-lust is setting in. Email me.
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