machai-umno

Samhain or (sa:win) is an old Gaelic festival to celebrate the end of summer, now known as Halloween. As a child this was my favorite holiday, I just loved making a costume and heading out for my yearly sugar rush. Now I head out with my niece and nephews and enjoy their expressions. Leviathan update: We are close to production! I am working on the last of the weapon arms... After that I need to make masters of all the molds and then complete the instructions and box art. best guess of release date stands mid to late November. Why has it taken so long? I think we will top out at 30 to 32 molds, using about seven to seven and a half gallons of mold rubber. It has been a LOT of work and I'm looking forward to moving on to the next set of Leviathan in the series. Thought I would share some AMAZING pumpkin carving!

I just saw on Miniature Review that Jon over at Khurasan  is releasing the heavy tank I worked on a few months back. I have to say, I think it looks great painted up in desert tan. I missed this one as well.... Here is a pic of a missile AFV I worked on just before the Siler tank. SpaceJacker at Tinysoldier painted up the AFV. It sure is nice to see Jon busy releasing these and I just love to see them painted. With my head buried so far into the Leviathan mold process, I'm lucky to catch any of these ;)

Now that northern hemisphere people move into darker times what can be better than to indulge in some horror! Read along to get some tips on games, books and movies to check out this Halloween! What to Play? First of all we have to recommend our own creations that are now available at a very low rate! Amnesia and Penumbra can both be gotten for as low as 50% the price on several online stores. Right now discounts are available at Our Own Store , Steam , GamersGate , ImpulseDriven and the voices tell me Direct2Drive will have discount very soon too. I would also like to put special attention on our newly launched Mobile Store . It is an ordinary internet store where you can buy the game by simply sending an SMS. It does not get much easier than that and is especially nice for anyone missing a credit card! All our games are on sale there too and if you are lucky they might cost you less than half the normal price! So do not hesitate and check it out now: http://mobile.frictionalgames.co...

Introduction After writing the previous post on pre-pass lighting I started doing some tests, to see how it compares to the old deferred renderer. The results that I got where pretty interesting, so thought I might as well share them. Also note that this post might be a bit more technical than the previous. The good thing with these renderers is that they both share the basic material data. So I can use the same data for both HPl2 and HPl3. HPL3 comes with the few more features for decals but for tests, it is easy to just skip them. When setting up the test I went with a very simple scene, it just the same box model rendered several times, a floor and lights. Some times it is best to test with proper game scenes, but I wanted to something that could be easily tweaked and gave simpler output. This means that the tests are not 100% accurate of in-game performance, but even testing a level in game is not that, as framerate varies a lot depending on where in a level one looks. So usually...

Progress on the new engine, HPL3, is coming along nicely and recently I changed the core rendering system into something called Pre-pass lighting. This switch has been made for a number of reasons, but before I got into that and what pre-pass lighting exactly is, I need to explain how we did it back in the "old days". Forward Rendering The engine powering Penumbra (HPL1) uses something called forward rendering. This type of rendering works by rendering the entire scene on an object basis. So when rendering a chair, wall, or any geometry in the world, this was done by drawing it one time for every light that touches it. So an object that is lit by three lights has to be drawn three times, and so on. This technique can be quite limiting when setting up scenes as you need to be very careful when adding lights. It might not actually be clear exactly how much impact on performance a single light will have and levels usually require quite some tweaking to get right. The complexity ...

When John at Moddler contacted me about working with JBR on a commercial gig, I was very excited about the opportunity and jumped at the chance. My Leviathan molds would need to take a back seat for a bit. This was a CAD model that JBR and I worked on for a Land Rover commercial. Moddler printed the CAD model and sent it off to an ad agency in NY, Hornet Inc.  to have the physical model painted and ultimately used in a stop motion commercial. Here are a couple of links to the final product.... Land Rover :30sec Behind the Scenes This was my first bit of work as a small cog in a big commercial deal. Very exciting and very tight deadlines. I am amazed to see the end results.   The Model needed to be 100% with all details of the real world vehicle captured, all the way down to working headlights. You cannot see it in this render but even the interior headlight bezels needed to be created. Here are some shots of the modeling work in progress. A couple of pics of just some of th...

Now I am pretty much done with the first major feature for HPl3, the engine that will power our upcoming (and so far super secret) game. This feature is global sunlight along with shadows, a feature not implemented previously. And since it is now implemented you can bet it will an important feature for the secret game ;) First up was making the Ambient light nicer. Below is screenshot of how it looks in HPL2: This is just a uniform color blend that has been added and does not look very. It is quite hard to see any details when there is a uniform texture such as in the screenshot above. To get nice ambient lighting what you need to do is to somehow simulate global illumination. Light does not just hit an object and then stop, but bounces around and scatters color from nearby on each other. There is a lot of research into this and most of it require one to pre-calculate the result in one way or another. I settled with something really simple called hemispherical lighting, which basicall...

Introduction Upon hearing the word story , most people probably think of a chain of connected events. For example: "A princess is kidnapped; a brave knight rides to save her; the knight faces a dragon, the knight slays dragon and saves the princess; finally the knight gets half the kingdom and marries the princess". Most likely, one also thinks of even smaller details as integrated parts of the story; the way in which the princess is kidnapped, how the knight struggles against the dragon, and so on. This is not the right way to think of stories. The chain of events is just the plot , and it is a device used in order to get the story across to an audience. What really lies at the core of the story are themes, locations, emotions, and so on. Pretty much all stories we have heard in our lives have been plot-based, but this is because this has been pretty much the only way of telling them. Now that we have videogames as a widespread medium this is no longer true. Still, the ide...

Introduction It has now been pretty much exactly a month since we launched Amnesia: The Dark Descent . And since the post on a week after release was quite popular, we have decided to do a new overview on where we stand now. This time we will mainly focus on the sales and give some more accurate figures on how things have turned out for us. The big picture So, with one month of data to analyze, how did things go? I think it can be summed up with: Better than expected on all accounts ! As of today we have sold a total of 36, 000 units (including pre-orders, but excluding boxed sales in Russia), and our goal, which would determine if we would continue or not, were 24,000. Having met and exceeded that goal already feels quite nice. Frictional Games will live to create another game! 15,000 (41.7%) of all sales were in the form of pre-orders, which is quite significant. Part of the explanation for this is that there was a 20% discount during pre-orders and we also believe that people are ...

The wonderful and talented Pat over at Senji Studios made a stunning vignette for the Leviathan box art based on a crude sketch I sent to him. Please pop over to his site to see his process and more photos. I can only hope my painting skills on the Leviathans can do justice to his stunning work. The Diorama and box art will display the first two Leviathan models. The Eisenkern Leviathan Mortis and the Commonwealth Leviathan Crusader locked in battle on an Eisenkern held planet. The architecture is of Eisenkern origin with a decidedly gothic feel. The buildings are slab construction, cast off world and shipped to a planet for a “colony in a box” method of quick assembly while retaining the architectural interest and distinct retro-gothic feel of the Eisenkern society.

Tonight a watched a fantastic documentary called Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father , and it was a true emotional roller-coaster ride. The film is a about a film-maker starting to make a movie in memory of his murdered friend, when some unexpected developments ensues. It is an experience, straight from reality, that swings you between laughter and heartbreaking despair. I urge you all to see it. The reason why I want to bring this up, is because this movie has something that video games lack: it has been made with the intent to share something deep and meaningful. It is has not been made to create a fun experience or for commercial gain. It has been made from love and with a very serious goal in mind. The passion that was put into this movies seeps through every frame and it really brings the movie home. Kurt Kuenne, the maker of the film, has something he is truly emotional about and pulls no punches in driving that point home. This sort of thing just isn't found in ...