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Monday, January 14 2008

WoW PaperIdol unveiled

For the past few months I've been working with my friend Pixel on a web based World of Warcraft model viewing application. The basic idea was to create a system to create avatars based on WoW characters that would always be in sync with their in-game version (and not having to refresh it manualy everytime you change your equipement). In the original plan, we were using the guild rosters to fetch characters equipement, but soon afterward Blizzard announced the Armory website as just to fit our needs for a more practical access to the character data.

With most of the data now accessible, we started working on a prototype website that gave interesting results. I was responsible for nearly everything related to character rendering, while Pixel worked on a custom lua-based web server, that would be fetching data from armory, manage character rendering request and tie everything-up.

To start testing things a bit in more depth we opened an early website that will allow you to generate a character representation that should keep itself in sync with your in-game equipement...

Using this page, you can create a link to your character. You can now use the link where you want at the image will update iself to match you in-game character.

Keep in mind that it is still a very early version, that your character may appear glitched and a handfull of things can go wrong. For the momment your character special features (like face/hair/...) will not appear correctly due to a limitation in Armory. Also your cape/helm hide option will be ignored for the same reasons.

We just opened a forum here for bug reports and updates.

For exemple, here is an image of my current character:

C

Thursday, January 3 2008

Omohide Poro Poro

Thumbs up to Buena Vista for releasing Omohide Poro Poro (Memories Like Falling Rain Drops) on Dvd. It seems it did hit the street back in october, but I didn't notice until today. This 1991 Ghibli movie is probably one of their lest known work due to it's nature. I never had the occation to watch it before, as the versions I found floating on the internet back then were in such bad quality that I had given up ever seeing it.

It is the kind of movie with a minimalist scenario, talking simply about people and their own little story. Taeko, 27, is taking a few week leave from her Tokyo office to enjoy the simple life of countryside. There, she starts thinking about her childhood, with it's good and bad memories. Don't go looking for action in there, there is none. The story focus only on Taeko and her memories that helps her to grow into adulthood. Having just turned 27 myself, I fell quite close to Taeko and her story...

Wednesday, December 19 2007

A new game in scummvm soon ?

I think it has been 4 years now since I started working on that engine... It is now close to completion.

Cruise

Sunday, November 11 2007

Cruise for a Corpse in ScummVM

Years ago, I started makeing a Cruise for a Corpse engine rewrite. The main reason was that the PC version was plagged with a graphic bug, making it flicking most of the time. This rewrite took a long time to build as the original engine is relatively large and tricky and was eventualy integrated into ScummVM even in its incomplete state. Recently, I resumed working on it, to get rid of one of the worst line on my todo-list, and today, I passed a major milestone on this project, as the game is now playable to some (yet unknown) extend (might be even completable, but I doubt it). It's still full of visual bugs and don't look for it beeing officialy supported by ScummVM before I get the time to polish and fix a long list of already known issues.

Friday, August 3 2007

AFK

I'll be off for 2 weeks for some long-waited holydays. Comments are now moderated as (big surprise) I got a few nasty ones. Sorry guys, but that's not helping...

Friday, July 13 2007

Blog reset

For some reasons, I decided to completly reset my blog and remove the forum. I'll not be discussing my previous tools here or provide link to them. Those are things of the past. Also, any comment asking (or begging) for those will get deleted.

I turned the page and I'm not going back.