Archive for May, 2005

Reforming Digital Radiation

Begun the process of reforming DR and finding new people to work with (GDNet Help Wanted Post). No replies yet. I’ll mirror this post to other, more art-oriented forums soon.

Currently, not doing much programming, playing Homeworld 2. I bought it a few months back, but haven’t had the time to play it until now. So far I’m pretty impressed. The graphics are, of course, much better (since HW2 was released about 4 years after HW) and it’s especially nice to see the higher level-of-detail in the ships and the prettier special effects. I won’t go into all the details about the game, but one feature in particular that I was impressed with was the idea of “strike groups”. Basically, you can group a bunch of different ships together and they form a strike group which moves at the rate of the slowest ship. I have dreamt of this since the first RTS game I played (Total Annihilation) and have wished for it in every RTS game I’ve played since. I’m sure anyone who’s tried to pull off a strategic attack involving multiple unit types in TA, Starcraft, Age of Empires, etc. knows that it’s increadibly difficult and what usually happens is that your units go towards the enemy from fastest to slowest and w/o the units reinforcing each other, your plan falls apart, you units all killed in a few seconds, you do almost no damage to the enemy, and your world domination scheme fails 🙁

One thing that did annoy me a bit in HW2 is the controls. The right mouse button now also allows you to move ships with 2 clicks (one to show the movement disc, second to move). This is nice, but the right mouse button is also for camera rotation and there seems to be a bug where, on occasion, if you rotate the camera while a ship is selected, the movement disc will pop up. This is very annoying, but I seem to have gotten into the habit of deselecting units before rotating. Oh, speaking of the camera, I’m so happy the guys at Relic added the ability to pan the scene.

ok, that’s all for now. I’m leaving for Georgia tomorrow night and I’ll be offline until Monday.

Portfolio and new resume

So busy with school that I haven’t had time to update. Anyway, finally got around to getting my portfolio online and I updated by resume as well (behold my amazing frontpage web design skills).

If you’ve checked the DR front page, you probably saw my news post about Nilesh leaving DR (well, he’ll be back in 2 months) and NZ being put on an indefinite hold. After I finish my finals I’ll be looking around for new team members, and I’ll basically try to rebuild the DR team from the ground up.