Movie Review Smorgasbord Round-up Extravaganza - The Complete Collection Part 10: Cowboys & Aliens

And, friends, we once again return to the town of blogville, blogsylvania, narrowing avoiding the unspoken tragedy that is "not updating your blog in a year" by "updating the blog the week before you haven't updated it in a year," or the Oh Crap I Knew I'd Forgotten Something method of blog writing.

A great deal has occurred since last we wrote. Or at least, since I wrote. You don't write. You just sit here and read everything I've written down, without taking the time to write back. Not even one letter at Christmas. You bastard. But that great deal is a story for another day. As a brief recap, I'm still working at the same office, having been kicked out of the project I was in, asked BACK into the project I was in, promoted, sidemoted, and then promoted again in a slightly different way.

I'm still working on games (though the hl2 project has been sidelined until we know more about how to make projects in hl2) and we are currently focusing on smaller scale project that is making great progress and nearing the completion of the pre-alpha stage. I don't know what you'd call that. Noughtpha or something.

I'm still single, though not the same single I was last time. C'est la vie, as you say. If you're French. I'm not French. So I don't say it. Except I did. Chew on that, paradoxes.

But I didn't come to talk to you about that, I came to talk to you about Cowboys shooting Space Ships with Ray Guns.

Allow me to elaborate.

A week ago I decided that I'd quite like to get into the habit of seeing a movie once a week as a nice little tradition for myself. Sure enough, one week later, I found myself at the cinema. My choices for the evening were a movie about aliens overthrowing humans that were cowboys, or a movie about apes overthrowing humans that were jerks. Cowboys and Aliens won because it was on first. Good odds on Rise of the Planet of the Apes next week.

Cowboys and Aliens is directed by Jon Favreau, a man I had never heard of until I rather excitedly saw his name in the credits for Iron Man, and then rather less excitedly saw his name in the credits for Iron Man 2, a film that proved that more of the same thing can be a bad thing. More of EXACTLY. THE SAME. THING.

Perhaps being rather embarrassed when he realised that he'd accidentally grabbed the wrong script on the way to the film shoot for Iron Man 2, Favreau decided to drop out of Iron Man 3 and instead make Cowboys and Aliens, a film that tries as hard as it possibly can to not be Iron Man. Here's a quick comparison:

Cowboys and Aliens (C&A): Gruff silent hero that can beat the crap out of anything with his bare hands.
Iron Man (IM): Wise cracking talkative hero that can beat the crap out of anything with his bare futuristic power suit covered hands.

So far so good.

C&A: YeOlde Western Type Times with horses and shotguns.
IM: Modern Times with fast cars and fast women (I've never understood that expression. Surely the women are considerably slower than even most reasonably priced cars. I mean, I saw a woman running pretty fast the other day, but she wasn't THAT fast...).

Still on track.

C&A: Evil Aliens.
IM: Evil Jeff Bridges.

Yup, we're on to something.

C&A: Vague under explained motives for villain with a convenient and somewhat contrived resolution.
IM: Vague under explained motives for villain with a convenient and somewhat... bugger.

One rather definitive point in Cowboys' favour is it undeniably gets the point. The film opens, Daniel Craig wakes up in a field with no memory and a strange device strapped to his arm. Then he shoots some cowboys. Then he gets arrested. Then aliens attack. All in the first 20 minutes. No time wasting exposition here!

Somewhat refreshingly, you go into Cowboys and Aliens and will see EXACTLY what you expect. There are cowboys, and there are aliens. They shoot each other a lot. And if that's all you're after, this film will serve you well. I don't think anyone is going to a film called Cowboys and Aliens and expecting Shakespeare. And if you were, which Shakespeare have you been reading, because I must have missed that one.

Great it is not, but Fun it is not isn't.

...wait, what?

Rating: 2.5 out 5.

"Does Not Compute" My Eye!

Work on the room project was put on hold for the week last week, as I dedicated myself to the exciting and laugh a minute activity that is reformatting my computer, combining technical work with data entry and a clever logic puzzle, fun for ocd masochists everywhere.

Allow me to elaborate.

My current computer is a couple of years old but still performing well, thanks to a possibly not entirely wise splurge last time I purchased. As it turns out, it's the computer that keeps on giving. At the time I purchased 4gb of RAM, which was the maximum that the operating system that shall not be named could support. (*COUGH*Vista*COUGH*) And all was well and good. However, doing some diagnostic checks earlier in the year (and speaking to my brother who Knows Stuff(tm) about this sort of thig) I discovered that the 4gb limit includes any memory included on my video card, which turned out to be 2gb. The upshot was that my video card was fighting with my memory for control of the available space. Actually that's far too dramatic and now I have a story idea for computer parts fighting for control, although in retrospect maybe I should call it Tron...

Anyway, the end result is I had approx 2gb of memory that I wasn't able to use, and on the whole it would be quite nice to. As it turned out that there was an easy (in theory) way to fix this. My current operating system was a 32 bit system, but I had a 64 bit processor. If I reinstalled windows as a 64 bit operating system, I would then be able access the extra memory. All I had to do was back up my software, then do a clean install from the installation disc, and we'll be right as rain.

After a number of obstacles, partially that I didn't HAVE an installation disc as I'd purchased windows 7 through a downloadable upgrade, and 2nd and more importantly, that it took three tries to get the correct operating system installed (it turns out that while Microsoft can create a new and well designed operating system capapble of runnings the computers of millions of people around the world, what they CAN'T do is label their installation discs correctly), I was finally up and ready, with a brand spanking new 64 bit system installed, and all of my hardware available for use.

3 days and 45gb of downloads later and I'm only just finished reinstalling all my various software and updates. Turns out theres a lot more on a computer than just an operating system, who would have thought.

At last, though, it's done. Which is just as well, as I have, you know, work to go to and stuff and can't sit around installing programs all day.

The end result? A computer that looks the same, sounds the same, and for the most part runs the same as before. But now it's 64 bit!!

...I'm such a geek.

A Room Without A View: Week 2

Last week was a relatively light week in terms of construction. As I near the end of the current phase of building I'm eager to begin the next training course as soon as possible so I can continue into creating the props for the room with as little downtime as possible. So most of my time was focussed on painting the walls.

Allow me to elaborate.

As previously mentioned, in order for my room to look like my room I would need to find textures that match the wall paper, carpter, and the wood beams. Half Life 2's textures are on the whole an excellent and professional looking lot, but do conform to the theme of HL2, which could charitably be described as "a renovator's dream!". So nothing especially matched. About the only thing that looked closed was the fireplace, and that was only because I found a "wood" texture. But if it were to be an accurate rendition of my room, improvements would have to be found.

A couple of online tutorials later and I was all set. Downloading a communuity made program called VTFEdit (there are some very nice smarter than me modders out there that believe in sharing the tools they've created, which makes my job so much easier) which could convert any image into a texture for HL2, I set about photographing the various walls of my room.

This wasn't quite the simple chore I had imagined, and in the end I had to do quite a bit of careful light placement to ensure I found a balance between shadow and glare, and even then I generally I could only salvage a small square out of the photo, tile it to make it repeatable, and then paste that in. Fortunately this actually works very well as all of the things I was photographing were "repeatable", ie. flat slabs of blue or white. Still, if I'm going to do this professionally it's going to require a good camera and some studio like conditions.

But that's a thought for the future, as to start with I'll be working exclusively in the engine and the textures included therein.

The change was a small one, but it results in a dramatic difference to my eyes, as it is actually starting to look like my room.

I did do a small amount of construction this week, as I decided I was not at the level to be able to create the skirting boards and wall design as a texture, and built them using brushes instead.

All that's left to do building wise now is texture the doors and cupboards, and make them both open, and then it'll be time to start placing props...

A Room Without A View: Week 1

One week in and the room is proceeding well. The main architecture of the room (walls, roof, cupboards etc.) are complete, and textured, though not with the correct colours yet. I have found the work immensely satisfying and may have found a new hobby/career option, and have learnt many things, most importantly to never put fireplaces in your levels.

Allow me to elaborate.

Monday: Only had an hour to spare between work and a social engagement, so I spent the time taking some reference photos of the room and balancing precariously on a chair with a tape measure trying to make my arms grow another fifteen cm so I could reach the roof.

Managed to get all the measurements I needed based on the age old method of "measure a bunch of short things and add them together", as it turns out the tape measure I thought was absolutely massive when I was ten is in fact, only 2m long. Now I feel old. But also tall.

Tuesday: Took a couple of final fiddly measurements such as "width of cupboard door" and "depth of the lower fireplace shelf at the centre compared the the diagonal line of the edge" (deep breath), and then using my rudimentary Adobe Illustrator skills contstructed an architectural plan of the room showing the scale and measurements of the walls, which served as a reference and also something to make architects fall on the floor and laugh their heads off.

Then started building the room in Hammer, the level editor for the source engine.

Firstly, the Hammer editor is AMAZINGLY intuitive and enabled stupid people (ie. me) to build quite complex objects with ease.

Secondly, Never try and build a room facing north starting from the west wall when you're currently facing south, or expect to get confused by compass directions every few minutes.

Completed the walls, roof and floor, then called it a night.

Wednesday: Started with the wardrobe as the single largest feature of the room, but also the boxiest. Made one of each of the wardrobe and cupboard doors, then copied them accross. Copy and paste is your friend.

The bedroom door posed a quandry, I could quite easily do a thin pretend door and leave it at that but given I eventually wanted the door to open I had to take into account the length of the frame on the OTHER side of the wall. Hammer helpfully has a 'carve' function which allows you place an object through another, and use that to cut a hole through it. So by placing the door frame into the wall and then carving, I was left with a perfectly door shaped hole. Win.
Thursday: Thursday was fireplace day.

I have what I always assumed to be a relatively plain and unassuming old fireplace in my room, which has long been sealed. As it turns out there are lots of little slats and supports all over the thing that I had previously taken for granted. To make it a bit more difficult, most of them have rounded edges. 3d technology has come along way since the days of, say, Quake, but the general rule still applies that curved edges and video games don't mix. The solution is to do lots of little straight edges, and enough of them that it effectively looks curved.

The upshot of which is that the fireplace took me longer than every other part of the room combined, but fortunately it did look the spitting image of my actual fireplace when done. A currently unsolved problem is the mirror just above the mantlepiece. Reflections are a bit of an issue in the source engine (particularly as the main character is never actually seen in Half-Life 2), but there are solutions. I just need to find them.

The main architecture complete, I threw in some placeholder textures ( the 'skin' that objects in the world wear), added a simple light, and loaded up the level in the actual game to see how it looked.

The first thing I noticed is that lighting makes your level look infinitely better.

The second thing I noticed is that the editor is actually more powerful than the game, and so all my carefully curved edges had been transformed into diagonal or straight lines. Still looked good but rather frustrating nonetheless.

But the room was done! Walls, fireplace, cupboards and doors, the framework was complete. I leaned back, breathed a sigh of relief, looked up and realised I had forgotten the roof.

Bugger.

Friday: Taking a break from the roof, I decided to solve another question I had been wondering. Half-Life 2 has a number of built in textures, but of course if I'm building MY room, I should probably make sure it's the same colour as MY room. So I needed a way to create my own textures.

This is slightly hindered by the fact that my drawing skill is almost exclusively limited to cartoon fish, which falls slightly short of the ability to create a bump mapped texture with virtual depth and inbuilt material properties.

To the internet I would go. A quick search later and I had downloaded a program a helpful modder had made that allowed images to be converted to source engine textures with relative ease. Using an image of a white plaster ceiling that I... "borrowed" from the internet until I had time to photograph my own roof, I ran the program, added a view properties to tell the game it was plaster and would react as such when shot or walked on (neither likely in this scenario but you never know) and restarted Hammer.

Sure enough my new "whiteceiling.vtf" file appeared, and I was able to replace the roof texture with this new one. Still looked nothing like my actual roof, but important milestones, people.
Saturday: Having successfully procastinated design work with learning work on Friday, I returned on Saturday to the roof. My roof has 4 cross breams running accross with whatever you call the roof equivelant of a skirting board running around all edges, which includes both the edge of the roof and the cross beams. Now this is the kind of thing you'd normally reserve for a texture but I wanted to go a bit all out on the room to know my limits, so I decided to build them using geometry instead.

The loyal tape measure was brought out once more and some quick measurements were taken of the beams and the skirting boards. From there it was a relatively simple affair of building the beams, building one set of skirting boards and then copying it 33 times to the other edges on the roof, doing a little trimming here and there to ensure that the edges blended appropriately. I also took this opportunity to trim the door frame as the top is two slanted diagonals rather than a single straight line.

On Sunday, after creating my world, I rested, and played video games instead.

A Room Without A View: Introduction

I have decided to build myself a bedroom.

Allow me to elaborate.

For the past few months I have been working - slowly but mostly surely through a dvd course on level design in the Source Engine (the engine used to create games such as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and many other games with 2 in the title). I am nearing completion of the course (whereupon I will start one of the 6 OTHER DVDs in my drawer), and am looking for a small project to test it out. I could create a multiplayer map, and indeed I have a couple of plans to do this. I could create a single player map, and this is our eventual goal. But first I'm looking for a project, small in scope but allowing for expansion and improvement as I practice and learn.

My brother (as we develop our attempted buisness we continue to set each other goals and deadlines as an encouragement to productivity) set me the innocent sounding goal of building a recreation of my bedroom as a test. At first this seemed simple enough. As I learned more about level design and the tools involved, it began to seem far to simple. As I learned even more, I began to realise that there was an amazing amount of potential for this simple idea to become wonderfully complex.

This will need to be done in several stages.

Stage 1: Creating the physical space itself. This is easy enough apart from one corner (my room is not a perfect rectangle, it has a dip in one corner behind an old fireplace), but for authenticities sake I will need to do some measurements of the real bedroom and convert this into in game units.

Stage 2: Adding non-moving parts. My bedroom is an old room that's been renovated a few times over the years, it used to be a dining room that connected the front hallway to the back study, but has had an extra wall added in to make it a seperate room that connects onto the hallway. As such it has a few quirks such as an asymmetrical roof design (beams and plaster), an old sealed over fireplace, built in wardrobes and a wall pattern that juts out from the wall slightly. As these are all fixed and don't move they can be added in using fixed geometry, along with the window, which I will leave opaque for now.

Stage 3: Adding moving parts. Door to the room (which, unless I build the wallway, I will need to leave locked), wardrobe and cupboard doors.

Stage 4: Placeholder props. Bed, TV, Various shelves, desk and computer. These will be placed using in engine props, meaning the bed will not look like MY bed, etc, but this will certainly do to start with.

And that will complete the room. However, there's plenty more to be done. Firstly, I have a course in designing 3d content and props, so my eventual long term goal is to attempt to create props that match the content of my room, so I have my bed, my computer, rather than whatever the source engine has available. If I feel particularly crazy, I can even use photographs as actual textures to ensure they match adequately.

Once that's done, I will look to see if anything can be done to fix the opaque window. The simplest solution seems to be create as much of the outside as can be seen from my window (fortunately this is very little, just a fence and a portion of the neighbours house), and then leave the rest as blank, as it will never be seen in game. The same approach could be used for the hallway to allow the door to my room to be opened.

I'll be uploading pictures to my facebook (and here) as I go, to show my progress. Work will hopefully begin tonight.

Why Advertisers Should Fear Me

Dear Universe,

I have been told on occasion that I have an excellent memory. I forget who by. However, over the years I have noticed that, while it definately has its moments, at times it seems to be rather selective in its excellentness. For example, I cannot remember What I had for breakfast on the third wednesday in February. You could argue this is because this counts as unessential information not worth remembering, an admirable explanation that sadly falls flat when you consider the amount of childrens television show theme tunes I know by heart. But whatever else you can by say about my memory, it has always been good at remembering advertising, and my father, in his speech at my 21st, told with some relish (and a slice of cake) the story of how, as a child, I would always tell them which product they should buy and listed all the reasons why it was superior, quoting the ad word for word. I suppose it raises interesting questions about retained memories, and how memory is affected by perceived cultural significance, plus the effect of advertising on children and/or suspecptible personalities. Or maybe I just saw a weird ad this morning.

Allow me to elaborate.

As I walked out of the train station, listening to a rock band singing tragically about how nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy, I noticed an ad promoting 'The Biggest Aussie Pie Night', showing a lot of Typical Australians(tm) at the football, whooping and holloring at the sight of a meat pie with sauce. While I enjoy a meat pie as much as the next person, perhaps more so, it did seem an overly generous reaction to a baked meat and pastry product, even one with tomato sauce. However this soon was forgotten when I noticed that one of the men (who from the look on his face hadn't seen a pie in years) was yelling out at the top of his lungs: "Support kids with cancer!"

This struck me as possibly the oddest thing I had even seen someone yell at a meat pie. Leaving aside the fact that I've never understood how giving kids cancer could be considered supportive, there was the question of why he was shouting it at all. Was he perhaps so excited by the prospect of pie that his vocabularly had failed him and he merely shouted the first thing that came into this head? Is it a bizarre speech impediment that made him shout "Support kids with cancer! instead of, perhaps "Yay! A pie!"? Or was he ordering the pie to support them?

Then it occurred to me that perhaps he wasn't shouting at the pie, but rather to the footballers he had supposedly come there to watch. As far as sporting cries go it certainly ranks as one of the strangest, but there is a certain nobility to it. Instead of shouting "Caarn the Bombers!" or "The Eagles are a group who are indiscrimate in their choice of sexual partners, and in particuliar we are insinuating that their mothers may have been considered appropriate!" (or words to that effect...), instead this man decided to tell his team that he supported supporting children who are suffering from cancer.

What a kind man. If only more could follow his example. Imagine it. Football fields would be transformed from a cacophany of cheers, insults, and slurs into a place of social commentary and political debate. The place would come alive, fuelled by the passion of people's views and beliefs.

You could even change the names of the teams to causes. Instead of the 'Brisbane Bears' or the 'Essendon Bombers', you could have the 'Brisbane Save The Bears', or the 'Essendon Stop Bombing Iraq'. Their fans could support them by yelling their team names and creating banners. It'd be great television too. I'm excited about this.

Of course, things could get a bit ugly when West Coast Pro Life face off against Port Pro Choice...

In conclusion, don't have people shout slogans on your pie ads, or I will make fun of you.

Yours Sincerely,
Sam.

Attack Of The Mini-Blog 2: Return Of The Killer Mini-Blog

An Ill Wind Is Blowing. And Sneezing.

I always get rather guilty when I get sick, much in the same way that other people get blocked noses. Ok, so I get those too, but I also get guilt.

Allow me to elaborate.

It can be argued that I am rather tougher on myself than I am on other people. A friend has kindly put this as "You hold yourself to a very high standard", which is much nicer than saying I do not esteem myself highly. Part of this materialises in a desire to not let other people down, which reflects in my day job just as much anything else. So whenever I'm sick, I start to worry (frequently as I'm busy coughing my lungs out) that possibly I'm just putting it on and I should really just get back to work, you slacker.

My doctor, bless his quite-possibly-although-I've-never-actually-examined-them-in-them-in-great-detail cotton socks, does his best to talk me out of this point of view, and when I took Monday off due to ill health and went to see him fully expecting to be told to get back to work and stop wasting his time (despite being sick for 4 days already) he subtly asked me if I could take a little time off work and when confirmed he leapt on the chance and told me to stay home for the rest of the week.

Though I was initially against the idea in the long run it's turned out to be a very good thing. I was reaching burn out point and this seems to have headed it off at the pass, meaning I am pretty much back at full energy. It also in some says feels like a fresh start, as work, writing, and my current self tutoring projects were all put on hold in favour of giving this whole rest thing a shot, and can now approach them with a fresh eye after the break.

Bring it on. Of course, bring it on-in-a-slighty-less-hectic-way-than-before, but the on shall nevertheless be brung. Or brought.

It's good to be back.


It's Important To Have The Heart Of A Child. I Keep It In A Jar.

Recently I attended a 21st birthday party that could be described as atypical in that it started reasonably early in the evening and didn't involve the consumption of alcohol. Instead it was filled with Pinatas, Junk Food, Board and Video Games, DVDs and Theatre Sports.

In a word, it was awesome. (That's actually three, but lets not mince words. It'd make a terrible mess) And it made me consider that many of the my preferred activities are probably atypical to conventional stereotypical adult society, to whit, I don't drink, don't do drugs, don't follow a football team, don't go out to pubs or parties, and instead prefer the company of small groups of friends, and spend my time with films, video games, and general hanging out.

This is, in fact, pretty much what I did as a child, and pretty much what I did in high school. To be honest, most of the typically "adult" activities don't interest me for the most part, and if I enjoyed the things I did when I was younger, I don't see much of a reason to stop them and start doing things I don't enjoy simply because I've passed the 21 year mark. There are certainly things, such as work, relationships and future long term plans, that are definately the focus of my adult life, just as "going to school" was my focus while I was going to school.

But my hobbies are unchanged, and are in all honesty unlikely to change. Because I'm an adult now.

You can't tell me what to do. Stop it. No you stop it. MUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!


A Short Review Of The Film Inception, By Sam Mellor.

Inception was INCREDIBLY AMAZING. See it.


Also, I like milo.