gigsdevupdate

[gigsdevupdate]

What I meant by short leave of absence..

What I meant by short leave of absence is... long leave of absence... anyhow I am more or less back to the grind of blender, work and updates... I have kind of let the blog hybernate a bit but a number of things have happened since the last update. Too much stuff in fact to cover in one post... but I will be posting another update as I finish up a comission I have taken on for sure.. and post screenshots as I finish the work up. At current, not right at this moment I am cleaning up the UV maps, and making it way easier to work with or around rather..  so yeah.. that is taking a little bit of time but hopefully screenshots will come soon as I wrap this project up and move onto the next. 

[gigsdevupdate]

Short leave of absence, I am still working and doing stuff...

Okay, so I have been a little MIA and not with it a couple of days there are reasons for this aside from oversleeping and missing my stream times, which I totally did. However I took the time to eyeball the works in blender and see how it would translate within Second Life since I did the measurements to match it as best as I could and Unreal Engine, the result... well second life was closer to the sizing as anticipated... I took the mesh work and uploaded it to OSGrid, which running an Open Source Simulator version that mimics Second Life in every way which is OpenSimulator, I do not have a server myself otherwise I would of used that. However the sizing was a little bit off, but I was not convinced it was all sized correctly so I imported it into unreal engine, while the measurements and units I can use are usable.. the scaling was way off. Things were bigger than intended, which was a good and bad thing at the same time so some width, and depth adjustments can be made the main part that was throwing it off was the height of the object, everything stood too tall in relation to the default avatar. 

The reason why this is a bad thing when I go to make the initial characters I plan on using unreal engines default avatar to use as a basis to get dimensions, movement and skeletal work implimented easier, kind of as a shortcut to do part of the work. The reason why I am trying to take shortcuts is to increase the workflow and provide a steady enough pace, but realistcly I am doing all of this all by myself so to show progression in some sort of sense I do have to take shortcuts then compensate and optimize them that way it doesn’t inhibit the experience of the stuff that I am working on. Shortcuts are like a double edged sword, you do it poorly it can end up stabbing you in the back later, and with shortcuts laziness can become a thing. Or you get people who push you into another direction without doing any finalizing touches on it to make it less apparent you took shortcuts with them assuming the work is done. As of this moment I don’t have any screenshots to share, however I will come back and add some in on another post. 

[gigsdevupdate]

Did a little bit of work, was late again and possibility of adding in Wednesday as a stream day...

That is right, did a little bit of work today, not too much but quite a bit I feel like, I wish I had gotten more work done though because it doesn’t feel like I have done enough of work today. I did however goof on my stream, when I thought I was streaming 1000kbps i was actually streaming 3500kbps... and it was having trouble staying at that high of a speed so the whole thing went into chaos...

I did however start working on some channel artwork and to speed up the process I am going to be working on swapping between gimp and kirta, going to be using krita to hand draw some of the artwork out and landscape and design and gimp to kita keep the layout and everything into a cleaner state. I will be finalizing it in gimp though so that will be the final program that I will use for the channel art when it comes to finalizing the pictures before I upload them and use them. Currently I am working on the stream offline image that I will be using and doing some of the ground work and structure as I progress usig black as a color before I start working on colors really. I cheated with the clouds though to start off with and am going to do different clouds and such... possibly.

As far as the 3D art goes I did some work on one of the houses and am going to be doing more work on that as time progresses. Also as the title says I am going to be adding Wednesday as a stream day as well, I did not do it yesterday because I was taking care of some art cleanup that I was going to be using elsewhere and did not really want to stream that work so I opted to not stream that day since it was quite a bit of clean up work on the art itself I am kinda 50/50 on the turn out of it anyhow.. whether I like it or not. 

I will also be possibly swapping saturday as a half and half day of gameplay and work, possibly to run down and do an overview of what i have been doing what everything is going direction wise and such... but if you want to watch todays stream there are two parts to it for sure... Part 1: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/336290784 Part 2: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/336332337 Part 3: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/336352891

I will however be putting some screenshots as to some of the work and the progress I have made thus far into flickr, to kind of show off the progress work as I go along with everything. I also need to work on the devupdatelog layout a bit to include that and reference to my artstation account to show off portfolio work and work I plan on and am going to be working on to finish and complete as well. Artstation is going to be updated more slowly than everything else though because there is a lot to catch up on and even finish since I am doing alot of things in bulk. 

[gigsdevupdate]

Again with the tardiness!!

I need to stop being late when when it comes to streaming, I need to stop it and start being on time. However I did do some work for about a couple hours of work in blender, working on getting a few things done as far as progress goes I worked on the chapel for salem, did some seating work, though I may or may not use the style of the seating’s that I have put together rather quick.. it is kind of... clumsy made but mainly was working on a spacing of sorts.. 

However it did seem like I did get a little bit acomplished in the ways of work today as far as how everything looks so far. I will be working on getting some of the buildings done and finished as far as layout, dimensions and workability goes as the days progress, I need to put in at least 4 hours of development time or 5 before I get side tracked into doing something else if I do at all. Tomarrow I do plan on doing a souls sunday with twitch and playing a game in relation to souls. This could mean Legacy of Kain, Dark Souls or even Dark Siders. However tomarow when it comes I plan on hitting up Dark Souls III another game of which I want to get good at. Today I did a little bit of La-Mulana and a little bit of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition I think both went rather well considering.

Tomarrow after the Dark Souls time, original time is scheduled 3 hours, I might pick up more develpment work though I may be visiting krita in this quest, or gimp... I have not decided yet as far as which one it might be that gets my attention, probably Krita. I need to work on stream layout and such as well.. get a more updated, modern look and something that is not just splewed out together as it is such right now. 

[gigsdevupdate]

Was a little late starting the stream but...

Was a little late starting up the stream for today, however it was a good one so far... was two hours late from when I was supposed to start streaming but it was a good one for sure. Instead of AFKing like usual, I ended up vaping on stream, I am going to attempt to keep the afk times to less than they have been in my previous twitch streams and keep on working throughout the day and try to get more productivity in during my stream time. 

As far as I see it I don’t think I have been quite as productive since I was not doing this blog bit but on top of that I was going out for a smoke for about 30 minutes at a time. During this entire stream I was only afk for about 5 minutes or less, probably less. So I got quite a bit more done than I have in the past, I did get the church bell tower started, in an obscure way but it kinda makes sense to do everything this way since I am making mesh work in the masses and before starting up the actual meshes I am getting spacing and build work in from the prim work. I did manage to find the dimensions I needed to determine more scaling as far as how big the items I am making need to be, so that is a bonus. 

Aparantly the size that I was working with 256x256 is a size of a region, so 128 x128 is the proper scaling to fit things in a specific area as far as everything goes, I am going by the metric system and I am toying around with scalability and wide scale usage importing and exporting of the mesh items. There are reasons for doing this to match it to a grid like area that I can expand upon, of course the entire game itself is goiong to be bigger than a 256x256 region of space within gameplay, but I am trying to make it as low key as possible and build the game in such a way that it won’t take 50gb’s of storage space or more.... hint hint nudge nudge to some of those game developers out there... off of a persons hardrive. I mean some of those are pretty impressive and high definition, however really unessecery as far as file size usage goes. It takes forever to download those games off of steam and install them, hell takes quite a bit of space clearing just to be able to do it. 

I get that with newer technology there are things that cannot be avoided like bigger file size more detail and such as the industry grows, but I have to wonder what exactly the things are that make a game such as those so resource intrusive. One does have to wonder these things, plan around them and work around them so it isn’t a problem but try to aim for the same scale in a sense too. Anyhow, my development stream is done for the night, I was planning on hopping on La-Mulana however at this given time it is 9:10pm at night and it is late and I am so droopy eyed for the most part, tired I mean I don’t know why but after I ate I kinda started feeling lax about working and even streaming again, so who knows I might hit up more than a 3 hour stream tomarrow, since that is what tomarrow is looking like schedule wise as far as how long the planned stream is.

[gigsdevupdate]

First development log post, ;) Yay and stuff

First asset creation run as far as blender goes for Project Salem. I did kind of have a moment of coming on later than I initially planned, let’s chalk it up to procrastinating for a whole month as far as schedules goes and how I was going to do things and when and what time zone to go by. It turns out that I am going to be doing a number of things by the PST time zone, so people can join in at a localized time that people do actually follow because there a number of servers that I am going to be running by that are in California. 

So today’s stream I ended up from going from game play of Eve Online to a bit of Asset creation, sneak preview of the work that I put up within a  4 hour time span, mapping some things out, explaining as far as my process goes as far as how I am going to be doing things in building the assets for Project Salem, the game that I have supposedly been working on on and off. I am still getting the story and finer details straight out but as far as things go, there is no official documentation for viewing as of yet, and in a sense, I am using tumbler as an outlet to keep things of the mind... sorted out and such. 

However, hurrah for first blog post to the development log update area, I am mainly keeping my eyes closed while writing it out writing my thoughts down, I am sure many have noticed... from previous streams to more recent ones I tend to get a little ADD when it comes to working on stuff and I tend to go all over the place, one moment it is a website that I am working on, another moment it is blender work or some obscure project that has no relation to anything. I can explain that... I have ADD, and I don’t really do too much to have a focus point, and it has been slowly... getting a little worse I have no outlet and my work is all over the place. So writing blog posts out getting thoughts down like this I hope I can communicate to people what my thoughts are, where things are at and create a focus point for myself as I go along in making things. 

Anyhow I will be streaming tomarrow for sure when I get up, I may be a little late in starting my stream and after the 6th of november I will be stopping at a more regulated time so specific days will happen when I stream a game, or what not unless I feel like blowing the day off for a game that I really want to play at that given time or my mind is not clear enough for development work, I mean I might even do IRL streams on twitch. So even though there was lack of communication in stream from people coming in and talking I will be regulating stream time and do it on a more constant basis and come down with something that is workable like it is my job essentially.