Machinima Festival and News

Hugh Hancock writes: "Machinima (real-time 3D film-making in game engines, what used to be called 'Quake Movies') has a bit of a grab-bag day today -- the New York Times (registration, blah) is running an article on it, prompted by the announcement of the first Machinima-only film festival, sponsored by NVidia!"

Comments

No fun in watching

[Ignavus Anonymous]

What's the fun in watching interactive movies? The thing is that you walk around by yourself to get a 'personal experience'. Its like watching someone else play Quake; a lot of people get sick from that..

A good thing

[r6144]

Quake (1,2) movies is still one of the few ways to express oneself in video. Of course, it takes a lot of time to make one, but I doubt a DV film will be any easier to make.

I have watched A Warrior's Life and Hard Workin'. The first has a good plot, but is a little slow-paced. The second is IMHO just a laughmaker, but its graphics looks good. I think they are worth watching if you have the time (and the bandwidth to download them), especially Quake* level designers, modellers, etc.

Great for Sub-professional Animators

[bjb]

I remember when Hardy Workin' first came out, I was trying to explain to a co-worker why this was so cool. It wasn't that the graphics were rendered completely in graphics hardware, it wasn't that the file size for a 16 minute movie was only a handful of megabytes (most being reusable textures and audio samples) compared to a comparable MPEG that could be played CLEAN at 1280x1024, it was that someone is doing a Pixar on their home computer.

Think about it. You spend the time creating the backgrounds and characters (basically "cells" for animation, in a sense), and then you direct their movements and so-forth. Sure, there have been home animators for years making their own cartoons, but aren't most cartoons done on computers these days? I just think it is great that someone is making the computer one more way to express themselves. Last wave was the home musicians, now movie makers. What next?

Interactive Story...

[Junta]

When I had AI, my professor was working on a project using the unreal tournament engine. The idea was to have scripted events triggers, and an evolving storyline affected by the viewer who is allowed the most freedom the engine allows. The demo shown in class was an aquarium where the 'plaques' were generated on the fly using some basic facts, in whatever language the user requested. The plaques never looked the same
twice and always offered different facts. The english sentences generated were pretty good and convincing enough to think things were scripted, but weren't. Character actions and dialog are not scripted, but instead they have a knowledge base and goals and rules of how goals can be acheived that influence their speech and action. Truly a gargantuan project but really neat to see it in action. Agents showed visible pauses at decision points in the demo. I have a friend who still works on the project with the college. Now this sort of stuff could make for some really interesting experiences when brought to its ultimate incarnation. Currently it requires three high-end systems to run, and even then the pauses are rather annoying, but given time this could be really exciting. Imagine an RPG with this technology where NPCs have goals and knowledge bases instead of scripts... .("Sigh... Times are tough..."). That would kick serious ass.