Taniith’s Relto

Well, before it is over, I just thought I’d wish everyone a happy “most depressing day of the year”. Stupid day….

Though it was slightly less depressing because of the snow. I was going to stay home today (Andrew is out all week because of a death in the familly), so when I woke up in the afternoon and looked at the CDIA website, I was happy to see that school had been cancelled anyway! Yay! Apparently it is the second snow day/unplanned closing in the history of the school.

I’m staying home tomorrow though…. since today didn’t count and I will still be able to get more work done at home than with the people slacking off due to lack of Andrew. Oh, and the ice outside doesn’t help me want to go.

Oh, and the whole tomorrow being amazing and me not wanting to miss it thing…. that too. Did I say I’d be doing work? I kinda may have stretched that truth a bit… a smidge… un peut if you will.

More on that at midnight.

-K

Well, it looks like I started to loose the update momentum I got going. I guess I have to fix that. I come up with all these great thing to blog about, and then I just never get around to doing it. Of course, that’s all Unreal’s fault. Yeah, thats right, I’ve been playing Unreal Tournament 2004 thanks to a suggestion from a friend of mine. It is just the sort of game designed around shooting the living daylights out of every fracking guy you see; you know, just the sort of game I don’t want to be making…. I love playing this thing ;p. I guess there is a lot of strategy and teamwork to it though, so its not all bad O_o

Lets see, what else. Oh right. So Marty and I had a chat, and it turns out there was a bit of a misunderstanding… they still want me helping out with Into the Woods in some manner (though I think I may have inadvertantly lost the Money I might have been paid… oh well). Now I just have to hope these damned highschoolers can pull themselves together and actually do the play. It seems that many of the people (or so my sources say) are still complaining about the choice of play and now there are only going to be 2-3 males doing the show. I don’t know whats wrong with these people…. a play is a play and at Beaver you only get 4 musicals before you’re done.

I know if there’s one thing I learned from Marty (and there are many more than that!) its that you have to find something to like about what you’re doing. Case in point for him, he generally hates musicals but he has to do them given his job so he finds something about the play to like (a scene, a song, a character, etc) and gets on with it. Andrew said the same sort of thing a month or two ago with regards to 3D (maybe you don’t love the project, but just find something to like about it and at least make that the best part). These people at Beaver just need to figure out that they’ll regret missing one of their very few opportunities to do a show before they are outof highschool where the parts aren’t so forthcoming.

Ah well, time to get ready for school… I leave you with this ten minute piece of amazingness courtesy of Youtube:
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Here be another set of fun online videos. If I can’t take the time to actually write a poast, at least I can put up videos ;p.

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Thats right, you heard me. I was totally excited about Vista! It seemed like a very interesting piece of code with lots of spiffiness. However, the rug was just pulled out from under me!

Let me back up a bit to explain a few things. Most people have heard of DirectX… it is Microsoft’s answer to the question of a graphics API. However, it only works on Windows. The alternative way of doing graphics is through an older and much much better API called OpenGL. OpenGL is used in everything from video editing and compositing to 3d applications to actual games. Well, now that Microsoft finally has DirectX to a half decent place, they decided it is time to try to get people to stop using the open source competition; OpenGL.

Lets see, what software do I use? What software did I just spend a lot of money to learn? What software is completely and totally based on OpenGL from the ground up? If you guessed Maya, you guessed correctly!

Microsoft made it so that OpenGL pretty much didn’t work in Vista… but then people complained up the wazoo, so they ‘re-added OpenGL functionality’. The only problem is that they really didn’t. What is available is a crappy version of OpenGL that is locked into an already outdated version. There is no way to upgrade. Vista essentially shunts OpenGL rendering thorugh Direct3D (part of DirectX) so that software that uses it runs realy slowly and uses a ton of CPU power.

It isn’t even that it would have been difficult or complex to get it to work alongside DirectX like it did in Windows… they just wont do it. Even the graphics card people, big supporters of OpenGL, have said that they are totally willing to do the extra work to get OpenGL to work with Vista, but Microsoft wont provide the needed documentaion of Vista’s code to allow that to happen.

So essentially, Microsoft has just alienated a large portion of the graphics industry. People say that Vista’s greatest competitor is not Mac and it is not Linux… it is instead Windows XP. XP is already a great OS, and it doesn’t do this stupid OpenGL crap like Vista. Any 3D companies who use OpenGL software would be very stupid to switch to Vista, and so Microsoft will be losing a lot of buisness on this screw up until they get their act together.

Supposedly the Graphics card people are able to squeeze out some more juice with OpenGL on vista, but it still isn’t perfect. Regardless of the supposed ‘beta’ vista graphics drivers, the biggest change has to come from Microsoft. As reference, here is a blog post I came across that discusses this problem very well. It is a bit outdated, but it is the easiest to read and get the gist of what I am talking about without going through lots of silly forum posts and small blurbs which I’m not about to go dig up a second time.

Oh by the way… I just benchmarked my workstation, and in the process I found out that I have a 64bit proccessor. Maybe I should start dualbooting to a 64bit OS. Of course, I mean XP 64bit, not Vista.

This info, btw, was first brought to my attention by my friend/classmate Dustin, who is in the process of buying a kick ass BoxxTech computer. He was going to get Vista, but now that Boxx tipped him of to the fact that even their own benchmarks and tests show that Maya runs at around 30% of its speed on XP, he is going XP 64bit. His computer has two quad-core processors… yes, 8 fracking cores! 8! Holy Shit!

-K

(Just to note, there will be a substantial poast following this one… I’m angry!)

I feel the need to write a poast on this. As I alread said, Myst Online is going live in a little over a week. However, today marks the closure of what was once known as Until URU. I would show you the site, but even that has now been taken down and doesn’t resolve with my DNS.

Until URU was created by Cyan as a way for the fans to keep the dream of Myst Online going while Cyan went through some tough times. Essentially, they ran a data and authentication server, and they gave people the code and documentation needed to run the game roughly as it was when it was first shut down. There were plenty of servers, both public and private, and they were great fun. People loved meeting up with friends in URU, partying with streaming music, etc. Some people even banded together to write tools for server admins to do such administrative jobs as messing with ingame objects and physics, making an online ‘flymode,’ and even a user version of the code to help with warping around to spawn points and cool new chat stuffs for fun.

Cyan went under after Myst 5 was released, much to the chagrin of us fans, but soon thereafter they were reopened with funding provided by Gametap. Gametap had seen what devotion we fans had to URU and the Myst series (the Until URU shards, wrintg plugins to make out own ages/worlds, etc), and decided to help give URU another chance. Cyan opened up an official shard known as D’mala, and that was used to judge how much support Myst Online would have, as well as to fill the void while they ported it to upgraded code and a new physics engine.

A short while ago, there was an in character meeting with some memebers of the DRC (official Cyan actors) on D’mala that had a surprise ending that signified D’mala no longer being cannon. Well, now not only is it not cannon, it no longer exists. In one sense, this is a good thing because it means Cyan can focus all of their energy on the live game, but it is also the end of an era.

Goodbye UU…. you will be missed.

-K

So, you may have noticed a lack of updates from me. Well, the last one was my attempt to get back on track here, but that seems to have failed. I’ve been super busy, and when I’m not workingI’m all tired and such. Of course, it is obvious whose fault that is……

View the culprit ▼

(On a side note, I think I know what happened to Taniith all that time ago… it was a little something like this: )

Gain sight beyond sight ▼

Hopefully we can find him some day…. but until then, I carry the banner (*stops himself from breaking out into Newsies…)

Anyway, as I said I have been hard at work creating my own version of the Fourth Doctor. Of course, that means that I ended up having a dream about the real fourth doctor. From what I remember, I was at Beaver taking a seminar on Photoshop taught by Andrew (my current teacher). At the end of it, among other things that I cant remember too well, Tom Baker (the actor who played the fourth doctor) came in. I showed him my character in Maya, and he thought it was cool and asked if he could give me his autograph. Then we had some trouble because no one had any paper and so he ended up trying to give me an autograph using Photoshop and a Wacom Tablet… but I woke up part way through ;p

The Doctor (mine) is going well though. I have to finish up the textures this weekend along with making my storyboards (yeah, like all of that will be done by monday……), and then on Monday we start 2 weeks of rigging (skeletons and what-not). I also eventually need to make my environment and the Dalek antagonist. Picture will (hopefully) be forthcoming.

In other news, they finally announced the release date for Myst Online: URU Live. On Febuary 14th, we will all celebrate the most depressing day of the year. Then, on Febuary 15th, it will be the happiest day in many years as Myst Online moves from final open beta to release status…. a day that has been awaited by many since open (prologue) beta first happened in fall 2003 (and was shut down in Febuary 2004). Look out world, here comes the greatest online gaming experience of all time!

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find a Megacondenser to go with my Somoflange…. erm, I mean work on the Doctor….. ;p

-K