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Quake had the best mods, ever. Hands down. Threewave CTF absorbed much of my time i should have spent studying and can be directly attributed to my poor ACT scores (I spent the entire night prior engaged in a ferocious clan battle against a german clan. We won, but the price paid was evident on my ACT scores...which I'll refrain from disclosing ;)).

And what about Quake Rally ? Jesus, those were some memories there. Really innovative control scheme that's just now catching on in other games. It did some really fantastic stuff with the Quake engine, but it just didn't seem as off the wall as.... Target Quake !!! God. A side scroller built on the Quake engine.. fucking _golden_ stuff there. Brilliant idea.. kinda reminded me of Abuse but in 3D.. :)

Oh hell, and what about the movies available for Quake? Remember Blahbalicious ? How about Operation Bay Shield ? Apartment Huntin ? Hell, the massive 4 hour Nehahra ?

Seriously, I haven't uninstalled Quake since 1996, i just keep transfering it over to my new hard drives whenever I upgrade. How the hell could I risk losing the ability to play Zerstorer or Scourge of Armagon ?


hehehe, i bet you thought i was going to forget the Quake Done Quick movies, didn't you? ;)

Quake had the best mods, ever. Hands down. Threewave CTF absorbed much of my time i should have spent studying and can be directly attributed to my poor ACT scores (I spent the entire night prior engaged in a ferocious clan battle against a german clan. We won, but the price paid was evident on my ACT scores...which I'll refrain from disclosing ;)).

And what about Quake Rally ? Jesus, those were some memories there. Really innovative control scheme that's just now catching on in other games. It did some really fantastic stuff with the Quake engine, but it just didn't seem as off the wall as.... Target Quake !!! God. A side scroller built on the Quake engine.. fucking _golden_ stuff there. Brilliant idea.. kinda reminded me of Abuse but in 3D.. :)

Oh hell, and what about the movies available for Quake? Remember Blahbalicious ? How about Operation Bay Shield ? Apartment Huntin ? Hell, the massive 4 hour Nehahra ?

Seriously, I haven't uninstalled Quake since 1996, i just keep transfering it over to my new hard drives whenever I upgrade. How the hell could I risk losing the ability to play Zerstorer or Scourge of Armagon ?


hehehe, i bet you thought i was going to forget the Quake Done Quick movies, didn't you? ;)

This thing is called "Machinima". Here is a link to a page dedicated to this stuff.

I used to be quite into the whole thing back when Quake2 was new. There were some weird films out there (especially for quake1) and even a talkshow.

So if you still have the old quakes lying around somewhere you might want to check out some in engine entertainment.

IIRC there was a problem with doing films in Quake3, because the specs to the demo format werent published. The author of a video editing program for Quake1 and Quake2 said that doing a version for 3 is not possible. I do suppose that a lot has changed since then, though.

Bounce ya' boobies.

--
WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

Pre-rendered movies are on their way out...

Machinima, projected real-time via a backroom server (using datafiles d/l'd or streamed from the net) onto the screen by an HDTV projection system, will take their place - it is even possible that such movies might take over the roles conventional movies fill.

Square has shown the level of realism a computer generated movie can take on - but what happens when you can generate it real-time, rather than pre-rendered?

Sure, you still need the voice actors - but with speech synthesis rapidly becoming very realistic - I can imagine a time when voice acting will go away for these type movies, and that dubbing will be a thing of the past - voice synthesis would just use another data file, after all.

Would voice acting transition to "phoeneme" (sp?) acting?

It isn't here now (outside of amateur efforts), but when it hits - it will be like the transition from silent films to talkies...

Worldcom - Generation Duh!

For those who don't have Quake installed, here are the RealMovie files:

QdQr1.rm
QdQr2.rm
QdQr3.rm
QdQr4.rm

For those who don't have Quake installed, here are the RealMovie files:

QdQr1.rm
QdQr2.rm
QdQr3.rm
QdQr4.rm

For those who don't have Quake installed, here are the RealMovie files:

QdQr1.rm
QdQr2.rm
QdQr3.rm
QdQr4.rm

For those who don't have Quake installed, here are the RealMovie files:

QdQr1.rm
QdQr2.rm
QdQr3.rm
QdQr4.rm

Currently, most 3D animations are pre-rendered. Its only a matter of time before pre-rendering is a thing of the past & we will be controling the elements in a 3D animation via human operators (like puppeteering) & scripts. With this, its easy to see how it will intrude on traditional filmmaking. Sets will be digitally created as well as they more easily modified & less costly to make. And as 3D technologies advance, those sets & characters will become more realistic as the blurring line between real world filmmaking & the digital recreation/representation becomes moreso.

Is this going to put Arriflex out of business yet? No way. But in the evolution of passive entertainment, the technology will pave the road to make it wider & smoother.

P.S. |>ro$$er - Yes, all the dialogue in HW was improvised. Which may explain why some people liked it & others not. I created all the visuals for Hardly Workin' solely on my own, which to me, is another example of the benefits of Machinima. You could argue that anyone with a 3D proggie can do the same and that would be correct, but it was easier for me to build placeholder models first, direct the "actors" through the diner environment using those models, record those actions & then swap back in the finalized characters @ the editing stage so that the production could happen in parallel form rather than with a serial approach. For future productions, those finalized characters can now be re-utilized.

Correct me if Im wrong, but the sledgehammer runs 32bit code native and so it seems to me that linux should work right now(might need to be recompiled?).

The only real work that should be done is to optimize the source to make use the the new 64bit operations. This is needed so that the sledgehammer can compete against itanium and so linux can compete against win2k. This will also force ms to produce an optimized win2k version unless they want to loose a boatload of server installs.

Watch movies made with the games you play http://www.machinima.com/

Ooh, look at those flames go. Brief intro to point out biases: I'm Hugh Hancock, the CEO of Strange Company mentioned above (although I should point out that we're far from the only motivators of Machinima- other groups like the Ill Clan have been instrumental in its growth). I'm also, I think, even more extreme in my views on IPR and its upcoming demise than Jon.

Yes, Intellctual Property Rights as we know them, or indeed at all, are doomed. Count on it. Why? Because they're not "rights" at all. They're abberations forced upon us by the primitive nature of the distribution media we've had, up to now, available to us.

I think that a key point of Bruce Sterling's brilliant Viridian Manifesto is apposite here: ideology doesn't transcend technology. Technology transcends ideology. And technology, in this case digital distribution, is forcing a change in thinking, back from a top-down distribution model, where a few companies crank out CDs for the masses to a, well, distributed version.

Distribution is only the first stage. The thing that's really going to do horrible things to the whole concept of owning either and idea or an expression (thanks to the poster who pointed out the difference) is the freedom to not only copy, but copy, alter and release your own version of a song, a film, a TV series- whatever. It's not the freedom to distribute an unaltered version that counts- it's the freedom to find something you like, take bits out of it, change it, combine it with something else and then release it.

That's where Machinima comes in, of course. In the next year, there will be the technology to allow Star Trek fans to create their own episodes of Voyager or Deep Space Nine. There will be the capability for fans of the Heavy Metal series of comics and films to go and create their own movies in that universe. There will be the potential to take any fictional universe, any story, and extend it, re-tell it or alter it, and then distribute it, in a way that's almost impossible to stop until it's too late. (For the curious, there's an article covering this concept in more detail over at http://www.machinima.com)

At the same time, we should look at other ways in which the concept of "plagiarism" is being destroyed: with fan-fiction, distributed over the Web. With "re-mixes" and "covers", now an accepted part of modern music, where an artist takes an existing track, changes it or re-records it to suit himself, and re-releases it. Hell, even with sophisticated photo-manipulation software: are you sure you haven't seen a similar picture somewhere else before?

So, does that mean that we're entering a new age? No. It means that the abberation of the last 400 years or so, and most pervasively the last 80 years or so- the concept of "intellectual property"- is about to come to an end.

Intellectual Property as a concept grew up with the spread of books as a means of recording information, but it became important with the creation of the printing press: a device that allowed mass reproduction of identical copies of a work. However, the important thing to note here is that IP is tied very closely with the notion that reproduction and distribution of a work, whether it be the printed word, music, a picture or a film, is difficult, and that distribution of the same is even more difficult. In every industry where there is a major fight currently underway to prevent "piracy", there is the situation where the monopoly big players had- the monopoly of distribution- is suddenly being undermined, as the ability to distribute freely is given to every player in the market.

The last time that was the case ended around 200 years ago, with the printing press and common literacy started to spell the end of the oral tradition of storytelling.

In many ways, the oral tradition mirrors the current situation on the Internet very closely. There was no ownership of an idea- a particularly famous storyteller may have been credited with the creation of a story, but that didn't mean he had the right to decide what happened to it, any more than nowadays Linus Torvalds has the right to decide what you, gentle reader, do with his source code to Linux. There were no "royalties", and by the very nature of the distribution medium- the human tongue- it was kinda hard to stop people changing a story to what they thought was an "improved" version.

Many people have conceptualised the Internet as a "group mind". It might be better to think of it as a "group campfire": a place where we can trade tales and ideas with, rather than just the people of our village, the people of (oh, horrible buzzword) the global village. And in that situation, the concept of preventing people from distributing the latest film or the latest CD becomes as idiotic as George Lucas trying to prevent someone from recounting the story of Star Wars in a bar to his friends.

I'm seeing a lot of posts here along the lines of "well, they might not be huge, and they don't offer much bandwidth, but they have all these features...". That's cool- I'm with my current hosts for exactly those reasons. However, there's another sector of hosting requirements that I've never seen mentioned anywhere, and being that I just moved into it, that's a problem.

The sector? Simple site (static pages, no CGI, blah), HUGE bandwidth.

A bit of background: I'm the editor and maintainer of http://www.machinima.com, which has just launched and is getting a huge amount of traffic. We've got, or rather we had, a large file archive, which I prefer to host seperately from the site to avoid massive slowdowns when I lot of people are downloading files (and given that we hit over 30Gb traffic in one day last week, that's a real concern). However, I've had to move the archive (remember that 30 Gb traffic? My former hosts do.), and I've been shopping around for somewhere to put it. With very little success.

I can't believe I'm the only one in this situation, but it does seem to be pretty much insoluble without spending vast quantities of money. So, does anyone have any suggestions for people in this fix?

(Oh, yeah- quick plug for good webhosting company. I'm currently with DSVR- all the services I need (shell account, access to root, access to httpd.conf and all the rest, PHP, MySQL, PERL...) and superb technical support. If you're in the UK I'd currently highly recommend them.)