Decorgal, one of the more influential filmmakers who has made work in The Sims 2 in the past, had an opportunity this past year to spend some time playing with The Sims 3 before any of us could hope to see it: at an EA-sponsored series of events called “Creator’s Camps.” They gathered up a variety of Sims-related content makers of various experience levels, and gave them a test drive of the new game late in its development cycle (after having solicited quite a many of us for suggestions over a year ago on what we think is important for the game to have).
They produced a quick video about each of the Creator’s Camp participants. Judy’s video is below:
The Sims 3 is out today, this latest trailer shows off some of just how pretty and wide open the new game will be.
So, assuming The Sims platform is or has been an attractive machinima platform for you, did you preorder the game? Do you plan to buy it? Do you plan to use it for machinima, and if so, now or later down the road?
I’m a major flip flopper on the topic, I confess. I still don’t know where I stand.
These promo vids (most or all of which are the handiwork of Todd Stallkamp and his fellow teammates) are really great. Here are two more recent ones you might have missed:
I was reading a really fascinating article over at Digital Urban about creating a Procedural Cityscape, and an idea occurred to me. A Procedural Cityscape means, in essence, that the computer is provided with a logic framework - a set of rules - and then sets about designing an often Manhattan-like view of a city, gradually filling in greater and greater levels of fine detail. If my understanding is correct, there is a bit of a random element to how the city comes together, in order to create that natural lack of uniformity that makes it seem all the more “real.”
Now step with me for a moment back over to machinima land. I’ve been working on a project called MScoper, a third-party tool being made to operate as a companion to Moviestorm. MScoper will provide a pleasant user interface for conducting some otherwise fairly complicated manipulation of the XML data that holds together a Moviestorm movie, allowing for some advanced functionality that is very likely too niche or too specialty in nature to work its way into the primary program any time soon (if ever). I won’t get into specifics of those functions just yet, but they primarily revolve around the ideas of replication of paths, keyframes, etc. between scenes or between movies.
The more I’ve studied this XML underbelly of Moviestorm, the more ideas seem to surface. This procedural city thing got me thinking.
Moviestorm already has a really nifty modular building system one can employ within the program. It pretty much has all the textures and basic street decorations (including lighting) in the Town Buildings and Street Dressing content packs that one would need to create a basic machinima cityscape. Understand, it’s not going to look like New York City unless you really get busy with some modding of textures, but it’s a city no less. Get really ambitious and you start thinking about the keyframed move-on-a-path cars which are available in the General Cars addon. (Get all three packs together in the Streets Bundle, if you like.)
All these parts and pieces have measurable dimensions. The actual building parts lock together like Legos. So theoretically, if one studied these things and developed from them a logical framework of how things can fit together, one could conceivably construct a random-yet-logical cityscape generator that would fill the gridspace of a blank Moviestorm set and save an incredible amount of construction time versus placing all those objects one at a time manually. It’s theoretical because it hasn’t yet been tried, but it is wholly within the scope of the kind of info that could be inserted into the XML hierarchy and work within Moviestorm.
Interesting to think about, no? What other possibilities lurk in the shadows of the platforms like Moviestorm and iClone that open some of their architecture to us via XML?
Public Domain Photography + Improv Comedy + CrazyTalk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Marcy
See Also:
Previous episodes:
The whole series in one playlist: On YouTube
It’s been a slow several days here on the blog, precipitated by a slow several days on this blogger. Apparently I am the cold/flu’s raggedy plaything this year, having been knocked squarely on my behind by it several times in the past eight months or so.
Today, I’m feeling back to about 80% of normal, so I should be fully recovered this weekend. Quite a bit of catch-up to do at work and at home, including a video for this week I’ve had ready which I’ll be uploading tomorrow.
The month ahead has me very excited for a number of reasons:
- The microseries finale of 1000 Words is shaping up nicely, and I think may surprise you a bit.
- The ZenCub3d film I’ve been honing for a couple months now is in the final tweaking stage. It’s looking like a June 12 release for that, and I couldn’t be more excited for you to see it.
- Next Friday, June 5, I get to go see Jim Gaffigan live for the first time. I’ve been a fan of his comedy for years, since before he hit it big. He puts me in stitches every time. (You might know him as the guy who plays Andy on the TBS series My Boys.)
- Last week I finished a musical theme for Sam Midwood’s new series. It’s debut is imminent, can’t wait for you to hear what we did there.
- I expect to complete filming on the second chapter of Umbra in the month ahead. (The first chapter was Apology). Significant amount of post production to do there, but still, it’s getting close.
Stay tuned!
Part 4 of 4 of the overcast grand finale is now available:
http://theovercast.com/overcast-054/
Just some of the features in this one…
- Phil and Ricky spend some time talking about various machinima games and tools
- The gigantic group conversation comes to a close
- Phil interviews Roger (adult machinima director) one more time
- The overcast finale remix: quite possibly the raunchiest thing ever released on the show
