ironhive / gamerux

Autodesk Combustion 2008

Years of sweating and hoping I could still upgrade my license of discreet *combustion 3 have now been laid to rest. Tonight I finally purchased my official upgrade to Autodesk Combustion 2008. That means one very important feature to me, Timewarp. I’m finally totally excited about getting my Mongol Rally footage together. I have all the technology I require at my fingertips! (as soon as the box arrive.. no digital download??? what is this, 2003?)

Got to attend DATA POP 09 last night. I’ve been all over this chiptune music scene since checking out Re-format the Planet at the Alamo Drafthouse. I even dug up my old Game Boy and have a modded cartridge with LSDJ on the way to see if I have any talent at all. I shot a couple minutes of Sievert performing, enjoy.

DATA POP 09 - Sievert from Bryan Walker on Vimeo.

Recently I had the opportunity to work on some 3D composite images with one of my co-workers, Michael McDaniel. Michael’s been working for several years on some very cool designs involving emergency housing. We worked to get one of his designs, the Exo, into some high resolution images for print.

This was the first opportunity I’ve had for 3D work in about 8 years and it was fun to get into it again. I built the models in 3dsmax and rendered with mental ray. Camera-matched the virtual units to some actual photographs of likely emergency shelter sites, matched lights, shadows, reflections and rendered out multiple passes to be composited in Photoshop. The images should be published in an architecture book this summer.

I’ll get a sample image up soon.

You can read more about the Exo here.

It’s time to at least give my 360 community game a temporary designation, so its unofficially official name is “Geopong”. I’ll be tagging any posts relating to my progress with this moniker.

Updates today:

• Primary analog movement via left and right triggers
• Movement modifier via shoulder buttons
• Began moving from 2D space to 3D

Recently I purchased Sony Acid Studio to assemble music for my upcoming XBOX Live Community Game and I’ve had way too much fun. Tonight it became time to get my lovingly-crafted beats into the game. I hadn’t delved into XACT yet, so I figured it was time.

XACT offers some very convienient features at the expense of some time spent configuring your code. It’s nice to have a seperate tool to control looping and audio effects. By setting up seperate Cues in the XACT tool, you simply need reference the appropriate Cue in XNA and tell it to play.

I went for a very straightforward approach in my AudioManager class:

public class AudioManager
{
    AudioEngine audioEngine;
    WaveBank waveBank;
    SoundBank soundBank;

    public enum AudioCue
    {
        Level01,
        PlayerShot
    }

    private Cue level01;
    private Cue playerShot;

    public AudioManager(ContentManager contentManager)
    {
        audioEngine = new AudioEngine(@"Content\sfx\GameAudio.xgs");
        waveBank = new WaveBank(audioEngine, @"Content\sfx\Wave Bank.xwb");
        soundBank = new SoundBank(audioEngine, @"Content\sfx\Sound Bank.xsb");

        level01 = soundBank.GetCue("level1");
        playerShot = soundBank.GetCue("playerShot");
    }

    public void PlayCue(AudioCue cue)
    {
        switch (cue)
        {
            case AudioCue.Level01:
                level01.Play();
                break;

            case AudioCue.PlayerShot:
                playerShot.Play();
                break;
        }
    }
}

Last week I received an invitation to the new World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to play it, and after experiencing how laggy the beta server is, I’ve decided not to spend too much time with it besides exploring.

I have been snapping screenshots as I go, you can find them here.

I’m back from the Mongol Rally and I had a perspective changing if not life changing experience. I’m waiting to get the full set of photos back from Steven, and I’m still sorting through the hours of video I took. In the mean time you can peruse the following links for visuals from our trip.

Bryan’s flickr set
Steven’s flickr set ‘A’
Steven’s flickr set ‘B’
Short YouTube from the launch in Hyde Park:

Sorry for the bad timing. What with me going on a trip through eurasia and my hosting shutting down just as people might have a reason to see what I’m up to.