And Six Months Later

So, it's been a while since I made my last blog entry, oops?  I've been very busy with work for the last few months and completely forgot about this blog.  To be honest, I've not done that much at all tech wise since I started my new job,  I've messed around with a few sensors and what they do when I hook them up to things but that's about it!

So why am I back here all of a sudden?  Weeeell, I recently bought myself a Raspberry Pi and have begun experimenting with it.  I've managed to view my webcam feed over the net using my IP address and I've also purchased something called a Pi Face (created at Manchester University, England) whcih enables you to hook sensors up to the Raspberry Pi.  I've decided to resuscitate this blog and make notes on what and how I do everything.  Some of the notes and guides I've found online are good but for complete beginners using Linux and the Pi they just don't cut it.

And so, being the complete beginner I am, I will make sure I record all of my triumphs and failures here.  This is just a resurrection post though, I'll try and get the beginnings of my Raspberry Pi adventure down this weekend.  Work calls!  Ttfn =D

New Job, New Problems!

So, two weeks ago now on the 29th June to the 1st July I was in Brighton with my friends Lizzy and Charlotte.  On the way to the train station on the 29th I had a phone call and it was Studio Liddell (the studio I previously toured earlier that month) and they offered me a Junior Games Development role!  And I took it!  So, even though I've known this for a while, I didn't put it on here mainly because I've been too busy sorting things out for myself.  Learning one or two new plugins for Unity being one of those things as well as looking at houses for rent.

I start work this Monday and cannot wait.  Ten months roughly I've been searching for a job in the games industry and although Studio Liddell is mainly a "media" company, it still has a small team of games developers.  No more lie-ins though, which will be tough since I'm not used to getting up at 7:45ish every morning,  but I'll get used to it!  Anything to have a job.


HOWEVER, I did mention that there are new problems as well as a new job and one of the problems is finding a property to rent.  I actually have found the ideal one, but due to me not yet knowing my wage, there's no guarantee I'll get it.  Apparently I have to earn a certain wage or have a guarantor that can help me out to get some kind of certainty.  I find out on Monday how much I earn (I hope!) so I can make a proper application, but until then I'm stumped!  The house has been on the market for a month now so with any luck it will stay there for me until I can get things sorted, but the tension from now until Monday is going to wreck me!  Ooooh, what am I to do >_<


For now though, I'm happy with the knowledge that I have a job, that will sustain me!  It's not like I'm currently homeless or anything, it would just be perfect if I could get my own place in an ideal location.  Anyway, guess I'll leave it there, I'll make another entry soon about how my job is going no doubt, as for now ttfn!

Fathers Day and Typee!

Hey wanderers!  Just thought I'd make a quick entry since I came up with something fun and simple the past two days for fathers day that other peeps might like too!  I made a game instead of a card this year for my Dad and it said 'Happy Fathers Day' when it opened up.  You basically shove letters around the screen, imagine a fridge magnet game using physics to zoom letters about; there is actually a magnet mode too!

The instructions for the game are simple.  Enter a number into the power box from 1-99 and use the left mouse button to push letters about.  The right mouse button will erase letters and you can type in new letters by just pressing a letter on your keyboard (numbers and symbols to come soon!)  Also, you can turn magnet mode of and off by pressing the "Magnet Mode" button, this allows you to click and drag letters about.  If it all gets too messy for you, just press the reset button and start again =)

The link to the game is here: http://bit.ly/LYFxGE

Lemme know if you like it!  Ttfn =D

Studio Tour!

Should have entered a new entry in here earlier this week, totally forgot though since I've been both busy and ill!  I'm still working on the game I mentioned last time that I'm aiming to sell to schools (or maybe give away for free to get my name about) and yet again I'm still not going to put what it is yet!  However, once I get some feedback from a friend of mine who's a primary school teacher I will no doubt begin to explain my madness.

For now though, I managed to get a tour around a studio at an undisclosed location and I think it went quite well!  The location is being left a mystery because competition for jobs is fierce and to be honest, I REALLY want this job!  The studio itself was very nice and had all the necessary tech to do great work with!  The job itself is a games developer job and the studio itself was looking for someone with a range of talents, from designing levels to coding to 3D work.  All of which I can do plus more =)  They aren't hiring right at this moment but they are looking for people, I'm just lucky I came across someone who worked for the studio who offered me an informal interview/tour!  Always nice to meet a fellow techie, especially one with far more experience in tech related stuff than yourself (since there's a massive chance to learn new stuff), the rest of the team seemed friendly and hard working too!

Apart from that, I've been working on creating player profiles that save player options and data for my game and being ill!  Hayfever caught me off guard, suprise attacked me out of nowhere and I had a runny nose for the rest of yesterday, along with some sort of stomach bug =(  I'm better now though, so back to work!  Twas also my birthday a while ago (18/05) and I got a nice new A4 notepad from my Dad which I've now begun to fill with notes and code, so much more space than the A5 one I was using before.  Finally, I've started to eat Kellogg's All-Bran cereal and believe me, it's so much better -without- milk; I'm pretty sure with milk it tastes like what wet cardboard would taste like.  That's all for now, no work to show as of yet since all the work I'm doing is for the primary school game!  Ttfn!

Currently...

Today I'll make a post that isn't purely based on ideas and whimsical thoughts!  That's new isn't it =D  I'm currently working on a simple PC game that I think, I still need to do more research, I will be able to sell to schools.  I'm not going to put down what the game is yet, as I'm keeping the idea under wraps since I think I'm actually onto something useful for once, but when I develop it more and get my target audience interested, I'll definitely post more stuff up =)

Apart from that, things are going pretty slow, the heat makes it super difficult for me sometimes as it drains me of all my energy.  It's nice to get out and walk about in the sun though, as we pale folk in the north of England don't get that much and it always seems like a time of celebration when we do!  It's a time when people wearing fake tan might actually get away with it for once, unless of course they are orange, the sun over here won't do that to you really unless you lack responsibility.  Maybe I might get tanned this year by the giant glowing ball of fire in the sky, but to be hoenst I doubt it, my skin seems quite resistant to the rays.  I'm going to go off to a roman event at a local park later, whether I go in or not will depend on how packed it is; can't stand going to events and then waiting around for ages!

Anyways, I don't really have that much to show this time around, but I do have a screenshot of the game that I was working on that inspired me to create a game for schools!  I created a full demo before moving onto the school idea, but I'm not making it available for the public to play just yet, as it has a few bugs still left in it.

That's it from my today, enjoy a sunny Saturday!

 

Later Note:  I walked my dog and went up to the roman event (my dog is now KO'd and is lying near a fan to cool off), wasn't very impressive though!  No legionnaires or anything, just some "gladiators" hitting each other with shields and swords and spears!  There were a few stalls, but to be honest, I was expecting something four times as large; it only took up a quarter of the park!  Ah well, maybe I'll have a roman army BBQ or something to appease my need for ancient times, bake some chocolate crunch shields =D

The Search for a Job!

Not put anything up here recently because I've been occupied looking for the ideal job, which I've found and applied for.  It's at Traveller's Tales in Knutsford, which isn't too far from where I live and from the look of it they have a Junior Artist position available; at least it's listed on their website!  So I sent in my application about a week ago now and I'm waiting to hear back from them, I've also been working on a galleon since it's been ages since I've done any interesting modelling.

The light project is on hold for now as I've not had much interest in it and without any income I can't really justify working on it.  I do such projects to try and get peoples attention/inspire other people, but if I don't have a crowd or can't find one then I can't really spend money on it.  I'm going to put my experiment up on YouTube to see if I can find any interest there, but I guess it might be just plain old uninteresting to other people or perhaps there's no true practical purpose for such a technology.  If however I do get interest in the idea, then I'll resume my work on it since I'll be able to justify the expenses I come across in developing such a tool.  It'd be great if I did get the job at Traveller's Tales, that way I wouldn't feel so guilty about spending money without having a way of recovering it!

For now, I'll upload a few pics of the galleon I've been working on, I only just started texturing it yesterday and so it's not fully complete yet.  Took me about 6-8 hours to model and tweak it, consists of 4842 quads / 9434 triangles and has five different UV/texture maps to it.  One for the cannons, one for the ship's hull, one for the sails and one for all the other wooden bits of the ship like the railings.

The above render along with the two lower renders show the ship with plain colours applied.  Two different versions are shown, one with three sails to the stern of the ship and one with two.  I'm still deciding which I like best, but three sails seems to be quite popular amongst the people I've asked.  The ship itself isn't meant to be a perfect representation of a galleon, just something similar to one, I might use it in a game also when I've finished it.  Some simple sailing/pirate game, where you have to go collect different crates bobbing in the water whilst destroying enemy ships.  Who knows!

  

The two lower renders show two screenshots of the ship as it currently looks, I'm just testing out different wood textures right now, like I said the galleon is meant to be a simple representation more than an accurate one and slightly stylized so I'm not going to be putting loads of detail into the textures!

Right now I'm experimenting with decking, I think it's too dark right now so I'll be playing around with lighter planks.  The outside of the ship definitely needs a lot more work on it, still haven't decided the type of wood texture I want to use for it yet, right now I prefer it without any since it looked slightly better as plain colours.  I'll have to mess around with it and see how I can make it look better.

Here are a few more screens of the ship, this time wireframe shots of the cannon, sails and hull.  There are places where I can make the mesh slightly more triangle efficient (you could say tris efficient, instead of tres efficient =D) but I've decided to go against that since it would mean having more pieces of geometry to group together.  Here are the shots!

 

The three different blocks for the cannon base have varying heights, I could separate these and have simple cubes there instead which would take away the edges that cut across the sides to join the geometry into one piece.  However I think it's better to use those few extra tri's to make the base one whole mesh, less faff when moving stuff around in either Maya or a game engine.

The sails for the galleon are also double sided, not to say that they have faces overlapping each other perfectly (I can't stand models that have those), but instead they are thick and don't consits of jsut one poly plane cut into pieces.  I gave them depth to give them a bit more life, I tried using single planes but they looked to thin and didn't suit the rest of the ship.

With the hull of the ship I could actually take the holes for the cannons out and replace them with just a dark rectangle of a dark brown colour, but since I've not really got any limits to my modelling here I thought I would put some holes into the mesh.  From the lower image it looks like the main deck of the ship is just a rectangle, meaning that all of those divisions it has would be pointless, but there is a slight curve to it's side edges meaning that I need those divisions in so that the deck suits the shape of the ship.  If I ever wanted to have more detail on the ship, I would most likely separate the deck's UV map from the galleon's UV map and have two separate texture maps for them both, but right now having them on one suits me fine.

Finally I'll upload the current UV maps for the ship.  I say current because sometimes as I go along and texture something I find that the UV maps aren't efficient enough or something isn't placed right so I need to go and change them!

 Cannon UV Map

  Sails UV Map

Hull UV Map

Wood UV Map

Look-out Posts UV Map

That's it for now, didn't want to leave this blog to get dusty like one or two others I once had!  If you have any questions or are interested in my work please leave a comment here and I'll get back to you!  I'll try and upload more stuff soon, ttfn! =)

Unity Light Experiment - Video Demonstration

 

Here's a quick video demo of my Unity Light Sensor experiment in action =)  Excuse the goofiness, I don't often do videos for the web!