Yesterday and today, I've been getting ready for a short little video I'm making. This is probably as close to real editing as I'm going to get, at least for now.
Basically, it's inspired by dorftrottel. I have a camera path that goes in a circle around the platform, and a custom .bsp with a green clip at one point, and everything else red. The idea is that I'll capture the same camera path on each map, then turn the green into a mask for transitioning to another map. I'll be cutting out the last 2-3 camera points and adding them to the beginning of a cam on another map, so I can transition smoothly from map to map, without the need for tracking or any kind of editing.
So far, I have the camera path for aerowalk, and that's about it. I somehow let myself capture it on the map while it was full of missing and broken textures, but I'm not sure how to fix them, so I'll have to wait for someone else to fix them for me :P Until then, however, the second map's camera will be in production. I have actually captured the path on each aerowalk, so I can test those in Vegas and figure out how to do this, then work on the second camera, then maybe fix the textures and capture this.
Hopefully, I'll also be able to play around with some video compression and make this even more fruitful.
I played some dude's E+ map, and it was quite fun, albeit buggy. This mod has huge potential, and some impressive entities (to be expected, since it's a mod based around entities). Basically, it's a single-player map where you fight a bunch of dudes, get some keycards, and beat a boss. It's simple, Q2-style, fun. There are balancing issues, along with general bugs, but overall it's surprisingly NOT buggy, considering what's being worked with.
I'm going to be playing some LoL, along with Terraria, Quake 3, and hopefully Baldur's Gate/2 over the next little while. Should be fun, since I'll be playing most of them with friends, and if not, there's always pubs/pugs!
The Pando Media Booster thing for LoL was a bitch to get working, but after I did, the download was pretty smooth I guess. I'm horrible at this game, so I'll be raged at and carried for a while, but hopefully I'll become competent after a few games. Only time will tell.
I feel like I'm using this blog like it were Twitter, but without character limitations. I should stop doing that.
I was bored today, with nothing to do, so I decided to fire up TuTu (it's basically Baldur's Gate 1 inside the Baldur's Gate 2 engine, which is funny because I have a mod that returns a lot of the BG1 functionality to it), and start a new game.
I read through some of the class descriptions, and almost considered playing a Lathander Cleric, but instead read up on a few more classes. This was a great choice in the end, because I found out about the fucking amazing Monk class. They're pretty shit early-game, but my god are their bonuses amazing when they get to level 10+.
Anyway, I rolled some badass stats, made my character, and started playing. Monks move much faster than any other class, so I breezed through Candlekeep with ease. I met up with Imoen to start kicking some ass, but on the very first group of monsters, I got two-shotted. Four times. I figured something must be wrong, so I checked my settings, and sure enough, the difficulty was set to "Insane". I moved the slider down to "Normal", and tried again. This time, I died in only one hit, so I just closed the game and read some forums.
I've since read a tiny bit more about monks and how their full potential as badasses can be achieved, so I'll try again later. Monks are awesome, though I still think spellcasters trump them.
This has been probably the only project that I've stuck with for this long: a measly 3 days. I keep downloading movies and updating this page, changing things, making it look slightly better.
I wanted to do something with this page, so I asked my good friend TaTooKa, who has helped me out with HTML coding a few times in the past, to walk me through this one as well.
Sure enough, he agree, and we embarked on an epic quest to make my page not suck balls. Basically, all I did was add mouse-over dropdown menus for each of the items, so you can see more detailed info on the movie. It took about half an hour to fix a bug in our code, and then a bunch more time for it all to actually be written. The page is only about 1/4 done right now, because I'm writing everything by hand, and it's not very fast this way.
The only thing to be wary of is that these filesizes are the sizes of the movie files ONLY, so if the download is a .rar or .zip, it's probably bigger than what's written on my page, because there are other files inside. Or, it could be up to a few megabytes smaller, because there's only one file, and it's been compressed (although most of these use incredible compression, so there isn't much more space to be saved).
I'm thinking of adding the MD5 and editor's names to the info sections, but I don't know if that's the best idea. Editor's name, sure, but MD5 seems pointless for most of these because you won't know if your file is broken or anything unless you extract the archive, but if you extract it without errors, then your file isn't broken. Even if they weren't pointless in that respect, it just seems like an unnecessary waste of space. Nobody really cares, anyway. If the video doesn't play, or gives an error, then try fixing it, or re-download it.
Also, all of these files are hosted by Maverick, and they will continue to be. Every update I make to the list will be hosted only by Maverick himself, that means no megaupload, no youtube, no fileshare, nothing. This is best for everyone, though, because his site is "ad-free", he doesn't encrypt the URLs, and he has incredible speeds.
Any movie I download and consider high enough quality to add to this list, I will add. If any of the TWO or THREE people reading this even CARE, then suggest what sorts of things I should add to the info sections, or what I should add to the page itself. I might not replace the download buttons, just because they're so $$. I might add a stream one, though, and if the file isn't on youtube, I could upload it, or get Maverick to upload it (it would be nice to have both a stream and download available for all movies).
Since I now have limited access to Maverick's file tree, I might take a look at what movies he has there, and download any that look interesting.
This seems almost like a substitute for own-age.com! HA! AS IF! Still, it's pretty nice if I do say so myself.
I just spent about half an hour organizing all my Quake videos in a nice list, which I'm hosting on my dropbox (because dropbox is amazing, and I'm too poor to rent a site). It's a very crude list, with only the basics, and no nice styling.
All of them are alphabetical, although they use their filenames, rather than "actual" names. I might address that.
I've added download links where I can, most of which are from Maverick Servers and Gaming. There are a couple from megaupload, one from hotfile, and only one youtube link. I also only added the max quality versions of the videos, so if you download anything from that list, be aware.
Maverick has hosted a lot of movies on his servers, and his speeds are incredible. He also doesn't believe in "hiding" the URL, so all his downloads are download manager-friendly. By far the best file hosting I've yet to come across, and a great site as well. That's enough ass kissing for now, though.
UPDATE: Maverick has been completely and utterly badass enough to host ALL of these movies, immediately after I gave him a link to this list. The man is truly a wizard.
This one is similar to the cross-map cams that I've been trying to do over the past week or so, with an added twist: I'm going to be using 3ds Max as well. It might be easier, it might be harder, but I don't really know what I'll be doing.
I'm going to be using Camtrace 3D for my cameras, as usual, but I'm going to be using the camera script importer for 3ds Max 7/8, as well. The only problem is that I have 3ds Max 2012, so I need to get the earlier version, or find some way to make it compatible with the current version. The latter will definitely not happen, sadly.
What my plan right now is, is something like this: I make a camera on a number of maps (the camera is going to be about 30-40 seconds long, which is probably almost 5 times as long as any one I've made before), export/import it to 3ds Max, add the rocket .md3, then try and animate it (all I have to do is a slow rotation so it shouldn't be too hard), all the while keeping it in line with the camera in such a way that it doesn't turn or do anything strange.
Because I'm very inexperienced with anything to do with 3d modeling and animation, I'm going to need a lot of help, especially with the effects I'll be using. I know a lot of people who are very experienced in this, but their willingness to help might not be too high. That would mean lots of tutorials and imperfect work.
The other part of this project is the filters/effects I'll be using. I don't quite know what they will be yet, but it will be something like cel shading, or outlines/shapes only (sort-of like shadow art?). I might use some weird colors as well, who knows?
I really hope this project finishes, because it's the most inclusive one I've started (3d modeling, scripting, configging, and a couple other things), and it also doesn't seem like it will have many complications, at least not in-game, which is really nice.
To be honest, the only main problem I can see right now is lining up the rocket with the dude who shoots it, if it will even start like that. I only have a vague image of it in my head that needs refinement. I don't even know if I will need to animate the rocket in Max, if that's possible, or if I will even want to. I don't know what sort of demos I'll be using, if it will be through some action (that would be really nice), or just empty maps (pretty lame, but this whole thing is pretty lame), or what. With a bunch of players running around, making the effects properly will be a huge challenge, but without any action, it would be a boring video to watch.
The more I think about it, the more ideas pop into my head. For instance, I might try and incorporate my map-to-map airrocket thing, and have the video end with the rocket hitting a Keel. If I pull this off properly, it would be a really, really sweet video. I can't wait!
