Philbywhizz

Spent some time a few weekends ago making a few adjustments for an old Apple iMac G3 I had lying around.

I saw a few converted G3′s into fish tanks, and thought I could do something similar.

After a hour or so applying some customized ‘patches’ I have finished the final product, which I call the iCat.

I think ‘Melodie’ will get far more use out of this than I ever did. May have trouble loading software on it though (it is now missing a mouse *grin*).

I started working on a new character in blender tonight. I call him Ferroman (like Iron but softer)

I was having a little bit of trouble with my original empowerman I did earlier this week with the rigging and the way that the mesh was deforming while animating. I’ve decided to use this guy instead for the time being as I become more experienced. He is rigid so I can concentrate on the animation rather than the deforms.

Hopefully in the next few days I’ll post up a few animations of this guy.

Just playing around with blender the other day and as a test I recreated my wife’s mascot for her psychology business. This is what I’ve come up with so far

It’s quite cute. Not bad for a first attempt.

Rigging and Animating him is another issue though – time to read the manual and my blender books to learn some more. I’d like to have him walk around the screen and wave ‘hello’.

While on holidays, I’ve been looking around for some old school games to play on my new Mac to pass the time and I’ve found a gem (no pun intended) – Dwarf Fortress.

It is an ASCII roguelike game that has a number of different modes. There is an adventurer mode, which is similar to the classic nethack games, but there is also a Dwarf Fortress mode, which allows you to build and design a fortress.

It is like the old dungeon keeper PC game, but with ASCII, and far more detailed (and addictive).

Ok, the graphics are pretty ordinary (it’s ASCII), but if you go to the wiki you will find heaps of information on how to customize your screen with graphics, as well as lots of hints and tips to play.

You start by first creating your own little world, creating mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, and then it populates the game with cities, heros, legends.. 200 years of history.

So far, I’ve lost many a fortress to those pesky goblins, but I’ll build up one to the likes of Moria without getting too deep for the lucrative adamantine.

Each time you lose a fortress, it saves the world state, so you can always go back to your existing fortresses as an adventurer and recover all your stuff.

It just proves that you don’t need fancy graphics or mass marketing to make an enjoyable game – it is all about the gameplay and replay.