Wanton Hubris

• fixed a bug where the player would sometimes end up rotated oddly after upgrading
• sent the game to Ray so he can start looking at graphics options
• pick ups have a rotating ambient effect now

• added new kind of enemy.  looks like the bombers except these ones will lazily home in on the player.
• tweaked the spawning code so that enemies don’t spawn on top of the player anymore
• tweaked pickup spawning code so that pickups spawn at least half the screen width away from the player
• played around with a textured background for the game (nebulous clouds for now)
• optimized some code by moving non critical stuff out of the core game loop and into the fixedupdate loop instead

The secret project is coming along well but it’s not quite ready to show.  On the plus side, my wife finds it “satisfying and fun”. She’s kinky like that.  Hope to have something to show soonish but the schedule just seems to drag on and on.  What I’ll probably do is post a version with the basic graphics I’m doing and then plug in better graphics later.

I’ve also been hitting my drums lately but nothing worth hearing has come out yet (picture a monkey slamming sticks against a tree and you’ll be close).  I’m hoping that once I get my MIDI cable that I’ll be able to record some samples and splice them together in Garage Band to make something resembling a song.  That would be great!

Here’s a look at the original Zombridge render before I applied the Photoshop stuff to it.  This isn’t exactly the same as I’ve tesselated the ground patch a little more and changed the camera angle slightly but it’s basically the same.  You can see the difference that Photoshop makes:

Fantastic book! I’ve been an atheist for years but always felt somewhat closeted by it. No longer. Christopher Hitchens puts into words every feeling I’ve ever had about religion, its origins and its effects on society at large. Highly recommended.

god is not Great

I bought a small, electronic drum kit the other day. It should be arriving sometime this week. If I end up actually enjoying it, I might post some of my epileptic spasmic stick work. I have no idea how to play. This should be fun.

My weapon of choice.

I actually have no idea how this will turn out. My wife thinks it’s cute that I’ve decided, on a whim, to try something new like this. I think it’s a desperate cry for attention on my part.

We’ll see who was right.

I’m carrying on a little with the zombie babies.  Now they’re crossing the bridge into town.  This might get ugly.

I’m experimenting with using Photoshop to enhance the renders after they’re done and I LOVE the results so far.  I’m digging the old timey photo look of these pictures.

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 While I was doing this I decided to do a photo version of the older zombie render as well.  Check it out:

 :: click for a larger version ::

Everything modeled and rendered in Cheetah 3D.

I’m not doing a render this time but something else entirely. It’ll be fun, I think, but it’s going to take a little time. It’s getting there but I’m going to be real busy this week at work so I’m thinking that this project will see the light of day sometime this weekend. I hope!

Edit:  OK, so maybe I did another render first!  New project is still coming although delayed a little.  Gotta get down the grindstone on it…

This is a render I’ve wanted to do for awhile now. It’s based on this picture from Boring3D. Using that girl as inspiration, I created an army of zombabies.

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Everything modeled and rendered in Cheetah 3D.

Crikey. I picked up one of those beautiful 30″ Cinema HD Display monitors from the Apple store today and I can’t believe how amazing it is.  It’s lightweight, yet the screen is so huge I could almost curl up on it and go to sleep.  I’ve never had this much screen real estate before.  It’s a ltitle disconcerting.

The guy at the Apple store got real excited when I asked if he had any of these bad boys in stock. He eagerly ran to the back to get it for me. I guess they work on commission.

At the very least, this should make modeling easier since I’ll be able to see a whole hell of a lot more on the screen at once.