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Wednesday 30 April 2008

GTA IV

Bought a nice shiny copy of GTA IV yesterday morning for my PS3 (still keep meaning to buy a 360, but lack of cash and the red rings of death keep putting me off).

The game is very similar in feel to old GTAs (which is no bad thing), but the polish level has been turned up to 11. This is the GTA i've always wanted to play. The only current bugbear is the slow acceleration of the cars, but I imagine when some more beefy cars are acquired this issue will melt away. The old frustrations of saving the game and restarting a mission have evaporated, as these functions are a couple of button presses away.

As I heard someone say they were surprised when they found they couldn't do something - and that really sums it up. The attention to detail is exquisite. The depth is astounding.

I haven't even touched multiplayer yet - the urge to drive me through the singleplayer is too strong. The value for money with this game is insane.

Well done Rockstar - you've lived up to the hype.

Monday 28 April 2008

Sketchup

Sketchup is becoming widely used by designers in the games industry for creating 3D visualisations of level designs.

Originally designed as an Architect's sketching tool, the workflow allows you to very quickly build up 3D space by drawing and extruding various elements.

Best of all the basic version is now free since google bought the product:

http://sketchup.google.com/

Personally I would never use it for building in game geometry, even though the pro version is capable. Maya, XSI and Max are much more powerful tools for building geometry. We use it at Ninja Theory as a tool to help build documentation and to provide a walkthrough of the level for the whole team.

Moved blogs

Well - my old blog keeps running out of bandwidth because of spam crawler thingys that keep attaching trackbacks in the vain hope I will purchase Viagra or a penis extension.

So I thought I'd start again over here. It looks nice and warm and less likely to be flooded with crap. It might actually encourage me to use the damn thing too!

I'll copy a few of the relevant posts over to make it more exciting with little work :)