A Pixelated Point of View

 So, last Friday, Saturday and Sunday I wanted to conduct three livestreams concerning APPOVTALK #3 - Breaking Magical Boundaries. Unfortunately I had to cut the first live stream short and cancel the remaining live streams earlier due to technical difficulties. Although I did not experience many problems during the dress rehearsals I did experience quite a few frame rate drops during the stream. Live troubleshooting did not give the desired effect. I went ahead and purchased a Shadow (a private cloud based gaming pc) for a month and did some additional testing last night. I even pushed it to the extreme by streaming and recording simultaneously and did not receive a single frame rate drop since the emulator is running on an external machine.  Therefore, it's time for take 2 for the Breaking Magical Boundaries live streams (and take 3 to get this entire show on the road). I've set the livestreams for: Part 1               Wednesday May 1...

Time for the first update of 2023! Ever since the last update in December a lot of stuff happened. Like, all at once. Before writing this post, I had a A4 page and a half full of things I wanted to mention in this post. This is most likely the most extensive post I've shared thus far on this blog. There's a lot of cool stuff to share and a lot of things I'm currently working on behind the scenes. Let's get right into it. Kicking off Let's start off with some small and personal things. I'm doing great. I feel highly determined, strong. I don't know what exactly is going on, but I like this feeling. I hope it stays all year! I finally (seriously, it's way overdue. I had it on my agenda since last september already) updated all of the thumbnails so that they accurately reflect the laurel count for every film. Some backgrounds on the laurels were also updated. A lot of films were seriously lagging behind. I really like the new thumbnail for IGNIIITIION Insta...

After eight months it's time for a new installment in the APPOVTALK series. Episode two steps away from the Quake universe (just for now) and discusses the highly popular online game 'Habbo Hotel' in tandem with one of its most popular features from the past: 'Trax'. APPOVTALK 2 briefly discusses the roots of the hotel, the Trax feature in general and finally follows up with a demonstration of how Trax used to work on an externally operated 2009 Habbo Retro server that showed the game just before the merger from Shockwave to Flash; which unfortunately broke the Trax composing feature irreversibly in its wake (existing songs could be played again a couple of months later - yet, no new songs could ever be produced again). The video is pretty lengthy, around 30 minutes, but I prefer this kind of format as it allows me to truly speak my mind so to say and to really dive into the matter at hand. In addition it allows me to reflect a bit on the good old days of Habbo Hote...

  Did you know that depth of field maps are present in certain Source games by default, such as Half-Life 2 (2004)? By using a console command 'r_depthoverlay 1', your in-game view changes to 'depthmap view', or how Valve likes to call it: a depthbuffer. Not all Source games contain depth of field information (like Left 4 Dead for instance) and so far I have only gotten it to work in Half-Life 2. There is some interesting information on the Valve Developer Wiki about this topic, yet I must say the information remains highly technical. It would take me quite some time to decipher everything that is on offer on the Wiki. Luckily, I don't have to decipher anything, as much of this information is obsolete (at least in my eyes if you take the purposes I use depthmaps for into account, as depth of field maps are implemented by default in the Source Filmmaker. So, in a nutshell, what is the Source Filmmaker? First I'd like to give a bit of context of Source machinima-m...

 Allright, some more Source and Source Filmmaker updates. Also a post with some more technical stuff for those interested. I've started experimenting with Source in early february, since I wanted to do more in Source Filmmaker, wanted to experiment with the Source Demo Smoother (basically the only way to create cinematic playbacks of demo's pre 2012, before SFM was officially released by Valve) and eventually I wanted to move on to making my own maps and models for machinima in Source. Learning Source and understanding Hammer has been a very interesting process so far. And to be fair although I've experimented a lot I have not yet built a custom map of my own. For some reason that's just the way how I like to do things. Just spending hours on decompiling maps, reading books, watching tutorials, reading mapping forums/discords/blogs, loading game maps in Hammer and understanding how they consist of various brushes and in/outputs is more interesting to me and also in addi...

Back in 2019, I had no idea that the original DEPTHMAP would even be considered creatively and artistically relevant until I started to put all of the pieces together in post-production. While the properties of the depth of field maps themselves were adjustable to some degree through console commands in Q3MME, it was simply impossible to get an idea about the end result until the capturing process was at least some time under way. Every batch of frames was a necessary evil in that regard as parts of the picture were either black or white and shifts in image were not directly visible. There was nothing in between. If a shot did not match the perceived outcome, I would need to resort back to my notes containing all of the numbers assigned to the depth of field properties and start over again. While repeatedly watching all of the footage and interpreting their usability and respective roles, I realized how interesting this particular project could be. During early post-production, it was ...

 The first pieces that led to the creation of 'Hyper Reality' trace back to late august, early september of this year when I played Capture the Flag within Quake III Arena a few times a week. I used to prefer a Team Deathmatch or Free-For-All match, but during the past few weeks I became to seriously like and appreciate 'Capture The Flag'. So much so that it became my favorite game mode in just a few weeks. A significant contributor to this shift is the website 'quakejs.com'. One day I jokingly googled if it was possible to play Quake III from a internet browser, simply because I was too lazy to switch onto a different computer. It turned out that 'quakejs' had created a Javascript port of Vanilla Quake III Arena and the CPMA mod. The website offers possibilities to play offline against bots, or to play online on a select number of custom-made servers. Guess which server was almost always full? Right. The Capture the Flag server. One reason why I used to...