High res textures (especially normal maps) and higher quality/coverage audio really made game sizes take off. Unreal's new "Nanite" tech, where models can have literally billions of polygons, actually reduces game size because no normal maps.
MoonMelon
joined 11 months ago
Sucks, but sounds like they're taking the right steps. I have a little experience with animation graphs, but enough to know that making major updates to the player graph in a live, multiplayer game is a fucking nightmare to debug. The complexity increase is exponential because new states must play nice with many, many existing states and transitions. It's also hard to automate testing. Also parts of the animation system run in background threads so you can get race conditions. Players find that a particular input fails to trigger some flag that it should and you are now in uncharted territory, and fixing it potentially involves large logic reworks. Fun times.
Sorry that doesn't drive MAU, DAU, or ARPPU. Also we want users on our walled garden data harvesting service that's just "Steam but Worse", so I'm afraid you need to close your studio. What's that? Sorry you're breaking up, must be something wrong with the phone here in the Swiss Alps. Ok ta ta.
Back in the day TCL was used in a few places in Pixar's Renderman renderer (called PRMan), and in its connection to Maya. You could write little TCL scripts within the Renderman Artist Tools (RAT) that would be evaluated during scene export. I think this still exists in some form inside Tractor, which is their renderfarm management software.
It's been a long time since I used prman but generally Python has replaced everything as the "glue" language, which honestly makes things a lot easier. VFX and game dev used to have a hundred different scripting languages rolling around.
Hah, nope. Shrek was made in Glendale, so they probably had everything on site or right next door.
In the early 2000s I worked on an animated film. The studio was in the southern part of Orange County CA, and the final color grading / print (still not totally digital then) was done in LA. It was faster to courier a box of hard drives than to transfer electronically. We had to do it a bunch of times because of various notes/changes/fuck ups. Then the results got courier'd back because the director couldn't be bothered to travel for the fucking million dollars he was making.
The same thing happened to me with a few memories:
- People turning into blocks and interlocking to form a city. It turned out to be Unico: Island of Magic.
- Some evil guy crawling into a painting, and something about hair growing. This was a fucked up movie called The Peanut Butter Solution. This one legit scared the shit out of me as a kid and I had nightmares about it.
- A guy being surrounded with evil looking puppets. This was a stage show called In Search of the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wazzie Woodle Woo. I didn't remember this one until the youtube channel RedLetterMedia made fun of it.
These must have just been random VHS tapes my parents got in some bargain bin. I have no idea how we got them or what became of them.
DisneyToon, BlueSky, Circle 7, Imagemovers Digital... could be a lot more doors.
Or I click a link to story about a cat stuck in a tree and it takes me to small, local newspaper I've never heard of called "The Sawfly Gazette - serving South Western Maine since 1975!", then it immediately tells me I've hit my "article limit" and must subscribe for $14.95.
The article doesn't really do Tim justice. He's a bodger who is basically a genius for what I can only describe as Goblin technology. His projects are as much about fun and experimenting as having a result. In the first windmill video he acknowledged that he could just buy a small electric windmill, but that's not the point.
I mean, this is the dude who made a narrow gauge railroad and a compressed air locomotive to transport wood to his terrifying biochar chopper and crucible.
Years ago I was on a flight where you couldn't turn this screen off. You could turn off the programming, but the screen still glowed. I discovered that if you take an advertisement from the back pocket and fold it, it can be inserted perfectly into the cracks around the screen and block it completely. Use the ads to block the ads.
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Yep, I remember the same. It's the same phenomenon as beatniks and hippies. They cast a large cultural shadow because of art and media that came from the subculture, but at the time it wasn't that many people.
Also it's easy today to forget about the reach of radio. Radio basically dictated what was popular, and even in the 90s there were still regional radio markets that were totally independent. I remember only the rich kids had MTV.