Like visiting an old friend
They’ve released the 7th Guest as a VR game. And actually, no – it’s not like visiting an old friend. It’s a completely different game. They’re both haunted house puzzle games, and there the similarity seems to end.
The original 7th Guest was released in 1993 and even my non-game-playing readers might remember it. It was a literal game changer.
It was one of the first games to be released entirely on CD at a time when not many people had a CD player. Adding one was hundreds of bucks. The game itself was a Benjamin. Remember when anything to do with computers was stupid money? There must have been significant buzz about the game because, according to this short video about it, CD player manufacturers said sales went up 300%.
It was one of the first first-person games and one of the first to use Super VGA 640×320 graphics with 256 colors. It was stunning at the time, which is hilarious when you see it now.
Doom came out the same year and was amazing because you could move freely in a 3D world. The world of 7th Guest was in a much higher resolution than Doom and you thought you were moving freely in it, but it employed a very clever trick: the motion was accomplished with hundreds of pre-rendered video clips. CD made this approach possible.
So for any given spot in the game, you had stand on A and look left, stand on A and look right, move from A to B then repeat with B until you’d built all the possible paths.
I thought that was a wonderfully clever idea, so I stole it. I built a simulation for work where you’re an engineer moving through a warehouse. And because my simulation could live on the hard drive, it was in much, MUCH higher resolution. Like, damn near photo-realistic. Nobody had seen anything like it.
In the end, the idea came to nothing, but I got to spend several years working on it and everyone thought I was a sooper genius.
Dark, dimly lit warehouse. All linear paths. It was actually very easy to make it look amazing. This must have been after 1995, because that’s when we first got 3D modeling. Also, I would never have spent a hundred bucks on a game.
You can watch a full playthrough here of the original game. The comments are hilarious. I was a grown-ass woman when this came out and it was camp and stupid and fun. A lot of the commenters were little kids and it scared the shit out of them.
June 6, 2024 — 7:45 pm
Comments: 2
How many fingers am I holding up?
The is AI, naturally. I don’t know why, but it really cannot work out fingers, teeth and how many legs a cat has got. (Pinched from Reddit, where I believe the key phrase was “The correct number of fingers”).
I spent an enjoyable hour browsing this Twitter account for funny AI generated images. It’s amazing what it can do, and what it can’t.
Then I spent another happy hour playing with the AI programs themselves. That is, until I uploaded a picture of myself. I AM NOT THAT OLD AND WRINKLY – thank you! – stupid computer program.
You can try it yourself on Craiyon or DeepAI or DreamAI. I’m sure there are many others. Just…be careful uploading a selfie.
February 8, 2023 — 8:28 pm
Comments: 5
A heroin habit would be cheaper
I still buy bits and pieces from my local art store. It’s more expensive than the online, naturally, but I don’t want him going out of business so I prop him up when I can.
I dropped by for some stuff this afternoon, and he’s hosting a watercolor competition. The prizes are selections of Daniel Smith watercolor tubes. You won’t laugh when you see what this stuff costs!
It’s handmade and they use a lot of genuine minerals, like lapis and turquoise. A little 15ml tube of the lapis will set you back, like, £25. The sets aren’t much better. They also sell sheets of paper with little dots of paint on, so you can try them out, and even those aren’t cheap.
I said to the guy, it’s come to something when Winsor and Newton is the cheapest brand you stock. And it’s true — other than the student grade sets, everybody seems to be going in for fancy hand-made fru-fru colors. Me, I’ve always been a Winsor and Newton kindofa gal, but hey. Free paint.
Anyhoo, the deal is they give you a card with, like, a dozen paint dots and you paint something using that. I didn’t hear about it until today and I have to get it done by Thursday and I picked a subject with a lot of fiddly background (foreground: chicken). So, if you’ll excuse me…
Have a good weekend watching planes and boats and stuff!
March 23, 2018 — 10:55 pm
Comments: 16
State of the Union 2018
I didn’t watch the SOTU. I never do. My spleen won’t take it, no matter who’s in office.
I caught the pictures of Nancy’s face, though — holy shit! Who was THAT performance supposed to appeal to?
p.s. Wow, just noticed how overcontrasty this picture is. I think my new toy needs a bit of adjustment.
January 31, 2018 — 9:32 pm
Comments: 8
I am now officially cooler than all y’all
Oh my god, you guys — I have wanted one of these since…since it was invented. That’s maybe 20 years ago now. It’s a monitor, but you draw directly on it.
Maybe that doesn’t sound all that keen, but it solves the big problem with computer tablet: you can look at your hand, or you can look at the monitor, but you can’t look at both at once. That makes it extremely hard to draw. Or write legibly.
As with other tablets, the main brand is Wacom and their monitor version is the Cintiq. And that sucker, in its 20″ form, is almost £2,000.
Enter the Chinese. I’ve bought a cheap knockoff — for all I know, made in the same factory as the Cintiq — for less than a quarter of the price. And it came with a snazzy glove. Well, part of one.
It came this morning. I was going to use it as a second monitor, but I’m awfully tempted to use it as my only monitor. It is Just That Good.
My main concern is going blind. No, really…I’m sitting with my nose practically pressed against the screen. And I’m loving it. My optomowotsit told me that my eyes weren’t deteriorating, they were just…stuck in the peasant lace-makers position from all the close work I do.
p.s. That is not my computer. It is not my hand. I stole them from here, and added my chicken. Because that’s the kind of thing you can do really fast WHEN YOU HAVE AN AWESOME MONITOR TABLET!!!
January 25, 2018 — 7:23 pm
Comments: 18
He’s nekkid!
I told you guys I managed to sell both pieces I put in the art show, before the doors even opened. I underpriced them, I’ve been told. As a result of which, I am now a *full member* (and I was able to pay for that frightfully self-indulgent map case and paint box).
Even better, as a direct result, I’ve been asked to join an invitation-only life drawing class. I’m having a blast.
I need this kind of eye training. Because the drawings I did in my last gig were mostly very technical, nearly everything I did was traced in some way — either the old fashioned way, or Photoshopically. Tracing is bad for fine art. Not because it’s cheating — honestly, there is no such thing in art; it ain’t football or canasta — but because it results in boring pictures.
When you draw from life, you’re forced to process what you’re looking at. You have to figure out what’s happening and then you have to figure out how to explain it to someone else. This makes for a much more persuasive and interesting picture. It’s hard as hell, though.
It also, of course, makes for more errors. There’s a classic in this drawing – his hands are way too big, especially his right hand. The human brain exaggerates anything it finds interesting but it’s a rookie mistake not to catch it and fix it. In my defense, they were all thirty minute poses today; shorter than I’m comfy with.
At least they haven’t done any 5 and 15-minutes poses yet. Brrrrr…I hate those.
September 20, 2017 — 9:33 pm
Comments: 12
First!
Finished my first miniature. Not sure how I feel about it. It’s not the ‘painting small’ part — most of the things I’ve painted in the past had patches of super high detail. It just feels a little cramped. Closeup here.
I liked working on vellum, though. Watercolor doesn’t actually stick to it, so you can lift the paint if you make a mistake. But to make an area super dark, you have to go over it and over it with tiny dots or streaks.
Trying to apply a heavy, wet color wash on vellum is a disaster. It rumples, then dries hard. Live and learn, but whooeee that stuff is an expensive sacrifice to the gods of the learning curve.
Anyway, for a first effort, it isn’t awful. A bit boring. I can’t really do anything with this first one, though…I was getting so wadded up with artist’s block that I finally threw up my hands, went to Google Images search and typed “crowing rooster.” Not usually how I source my subject matter!
March 16, 2017 — 9:13 pm
Comments: 21
I love this
This isn’t mine. The caption, I mean. I did the artwork, but someone else — I know not who — put the words on it, and now that’s the most common version you’ll find on the web.
I cannot tell you how much that tickles me.
Sometime commenter bikeboy wrote me last night looking for the Hillary! poster I did. Turns out, the ‘steal my art’ button broke when I moved the blog. It didn’t even occur to me until that moment that NOW-NOW-NOW is the very last chance to recycle my Hillary! campaign art (and I devoutly hope I will not be making President Hillary! art, ever).
So I figured I’d gather it all together for you. Feel free to steal, alter, recaption, get a tattoo, eat a piece of cake, scratch your butt. Honestly, I don’t care. Have fun.
The original hag (there’s a bigger version of that somewhere, used in the picture above, but I can’t find it), the one for the election poster, the election poster, big and in color (this is the only one I have in a much higher res version, if you want it for anything), with a walker, derping, as Kang (of Kang and Kodos), as Queen Elizabeth I, as Humpty Dumpty, more derping, with a beard, taking a bite out of her blackberry, Hillary Clinton.Δ16, lizard woman.
There may be more, but that’s all I could find in a Google images search (anything but fire up Adobe Bridge).
July 28, 2016 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 9
Just for fun…
Heh. Deborah HH suggested this pitcha in the previous thread comments. I had fun making it.
Problem is, I don’t think Che would object, I don’t think Bernie would object and I don’t think Bernie’s supporters would object. And, honestly, if a picture isn’t mean-spirited and off-pissing, it kinda ruins the game.
March 15, 2016 — 8:39 pm
Comments: 20
Only his hairdresser knows for sure…
Heh. I’d forgotten this pitcher. I did it years ago. There’s a story that goes with the wolverine.
Trump’s remarks about Muslim immigration are making them go howling batshit boo-boo over here. Worse than the US. If you haven’t checked out the UK papers today, do so. Then read the comments section.
We’re headed for civil war, folks. I’m telling you.
Meanwhile, we’re going to a concert tomorrow night. Might be back late. Might not. Band’s even older than we are and we all need our forty winks.
December 9, 2015 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 9