11°C

Boontybox, a notorious piece of software that requires some considerable getting rid of.

Actually I don’t think it’s as bad as the forums’ writers claim.

This is the error message that the new files generate when the game crashes. Note there is no option if you think it’s NOT OK to terminate.

 

 

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Peska review: nice review of the new patch with more detail that I’d ever write. Non-geeks keep away!

16°C

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Ubisoft paid addon is now available for Forgotten Battles. Pe-2

It’s a massive download at 160Mb, so it better be good. Ubi are using a nasty little download manager, which is probably good for dialup people who suffer broken downloads. It’s a shame we can’t download another way.

boontybox is the program they use, there are rumours on the forums about it installing spyware on your machine, UBI forums are populated of paranoics though, so who knows?

 

Still, it’s curious the patch being so big. there must be a language pack or maybe a new map or something ni there.

13°C, clouds- mostly

More cycling today.

Photobucket: have made a massive upgrade to their free accounts. It’s shot up from the origonal 25Mb to 1 gigabyte. Aaannnnd, it will accept video now. the video clips are converted to the Flash format ( *.flv). I suppose it’s a shrewd marketing move on their part, they can sell DVD compilations to users.

Nevermind, I can still make use of it to side-step my own isp’s refusal to provide more web-space. shame on you Claranet.

Rain @ 11°C

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Flash: Drawn a bloke’s head and animated some short movie-clips- one looking down, the other to look up.

the idea is to play the clips when the mouse rolls over defined areas of the stage. It should look as if the head is following the mouse. It’s possible to use actionshcript to make the head follow the mouse, but that doesn’t give controll over sub-animations as it moves.

If I can get this wqorking, then I can make the sub-animations in Poser. How neat would it be to have a poser character oin on-screen presentations. Eventually, I want to phase out PowerPoint in favour of Flash.

 

Wait! I never use Powerpoint anyway.

6 to 2°C, cold NE wind

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Far Cry level now has some vegetation! Nevermind the fault with the ground texture, now I can place objects and am formulating a kind of plot for the mission. Trees bend in the breeze- and there’s a setting to make them flex more in the wind- this shows up on screen. not only that- there is a brush tool for "painting" various trees and other things onto the landscape. This is neat, shame we can’t have this in a 3D application like 3Ds max.

6°C.light grey.

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Sandbox turns out to be a very capable and relatively easy to use game editor. The interface is remarkably 3dsMax-like. Here is a basic landscape and begun texturing it so far. Heightmap editor has excellent tools to work with rather like Sitni-sati Dreamscape 2. The height brush is especially neat- since it works in the perspective viewport (which incidentally is fully textured with an animated saea surface). Beat that!

6°C

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Removed Far Cry to make space for Brothers In arms on the PC yesterday. Unfortunately, my first impressions of BIA is not overwealming. It’s all a bit boxy- and resstrictions in movment are quite frustrating. You can jump but not over a low gate, there are ladders but you can’t climb them.

Cryek hae released a much better manual for the Sandbox editor– it’s the level editor for Far Cry which makes the possibility of making my own level more "do-able". So it looks like I’ll be re-installing Far Cry – even though I have actually overplayed the game somewhat. Perhaps, with a bit of luck, if the plugins are available, I can make my own objects to insert into the game.

 

I dunno.

2 to 9°.

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Firefox: the more I use this the better it seems. Obviously ( odpheusly) the tabbed pages are an improvement, but the download manager is much more controllable.

relevant? I’m downloading Far Cry missions for playtime later. They are big files- not the 50Kb of a Il-2 mission. Some over 60Mb!

Cycling: maybe tomorrow! My limbs want to stretch a lot right now, so they want to go, I want to go , but has the virus gone? Batteries on charge.

2°C, sun & rain

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Far Cry: some interesting sites for "modding" the game.

There is a free exporter for 3ds Max, so it’s possible to make models for the game.

Crysource: mostly in German, but that’s not too much of a problem.
I don’t know if I will follow this up or not. Who knows?

Far Cry maps.com: page of downloads to play in Far Cry.

2°C, windy & some rain

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Cycling: started late after the time it takes to fit a new cassette. Even with new gears it doesn’t change gear that well. Sometimes it needs a double-click. Shimano gears have never worked well for me, not like Campagnolo which are always excellent.

Flash: testing Curious Labs Poser to see what swf files look like exported from there. It’s come out quite small at 210Kb. Even this seems to need a pre-loader; so if it seems to stick after you’ve pressed play- then just reload the page, it should be ok then. There must be some way of using templates to generate new Flash projects, that could include a standard preloader as well as credits at the end.

I’m very tired now, so it can have a preloader added tomorrow. It’s a nice kind of tiredness though, brought on by cycling up steep hills with icy cold air in my face.