Next Wednesday, March 25th, 2009, Ricky Grove and I will be meeting on Skype at 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time (9:00 p.m. Eastern Time), and will be on for the next couple hours recording our final episode of The Overcast.

The next Machinima Audio Conference will take place on Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 2:00pm PST (that's 5:00pm EST and 10:00pm GMT). While this is a bit early for the California people, I'm hoping this ends up being a time where we can get a good representation of participants on both sides of the pond. We'll continue to keep the time fluid for future meetings until we find just the right pocket.

Speaking of the right pocket, there's been some lively discussion of the choice of Second Life as a venue for Conference #05 which we're trying again for this next one. At both this forum thread and at this comment thread (feel free to join in at either), those most vocal about the subject appear to be those unenthusiastic about SL. The jump in actual conference turnout, however, seems to suggest that at least some are okay with the decision.

I'd set out to respond to the most recent comment on the Conference #05 notes, and it turned out a bit longer than I'd anticipated, so I'm going to lay out that defense / explanation of the decision for you here:

Joe Rigby of Mellanium (previously talked about here) gave me a guided tour of their product recently. There are many things to be excited about with this technology, but one of the most significant breakthroughs is with regard to the quality of 3d models. Since its inception, real-time 3d rendering's trade-off has been low poly models - a necessary evil which is ever so slowly becoming less of an issue.

Overcast #025 features a brief interview with Matt Kelland and Dave Lloyd of Short Fuze / Moviestorm, conducted by Hugh Hancock and Johnnie Ingram. If you, like many, felt #024 with the BloodSpell crew was painfully too short in duration, you'll likely feel the same about this one... but fear not.