Old Tech, New Moves

Today was the day of the terrorist attacks in inner London. Thankfully everyone I know (including myself) is fine, and things seem to have been brought back to a reasonable level of order.
I tried to keep my mind occupied/distracted by working on Machinima, but this was ofcourse impossible, and I spent a fair portion of the day following what was going on.

Now that it is nighttime, and the world around me has gone to sleep, I've been able to return my attention to the project.

So many aspects of Bouncers are beyond certain limitations of the Quake 2 engine (or more specifically the tools made for it).
Although the Engine's source has been available and we've been able to take great advantage of this, some limitations have had to be left in, in order not to render certain, very necessary tools useless.
The most problematic thing at this point in time has been the interior of 'Club SD:NT'. As you can imagine this club needs to look rockin, which means we need slightly more than 10 people on the dancefloor. By trade, I'm not a mapper, and I personally think I'm quite bad at it. However finding a Quake 2 mapper in this day and age is tough, let alone one who has good experience creating modern urban settings with the antiquated tools (why would anyone carry such a skill in their bag?). Fortunately Dreaded Kane (good ol' Kane) is quite proficient in the arts of Quake 2 (being a big fan of the game), and is helping, as you might know, by making the "Evil Bouncer's Lounge". However as he is still somewhat unfamiliar with certain aspects, the role of main mapper still falls on my small shoulders. Two considerations during the insertion of the punters has been polygon counts and max entity limits, which prevent me from placing too many actors in a scene. Yes, it sounds strange that I'm concerning myself with polycounts in Quake 2, but fill the scene with a whole nightclub full of low poly models, and yes, you will encounter some slowdown, which on it's own is not debilitating per se, but definately annoying. However, couple this with the entity limits, and u got urself a bona fide problem. I spent a good hour or two taking loads of pictures of the "general male" and "general female" models from different angles, and stacked up loadsa sprites in the room (which don't occupy precious entity slots). The hope is to spread the actual dancing actors around the club strategically to make it appear that there's a genuine bustle.

I don't want to release the messy test pictures that I've been floating around to people (for their opinion) but it's a pretty slick result.

Sky Mawbsta has been doing the lipsynch skins for some of the main characters and decided to redo some of the main character models, so I've been trying to make sure the animations make a smooth journey onto the new models, which is going alright.

I decided that the opening scene of the show just wasn't as energetic as it needs to be (as Wesly Snipes said after reading the script for Blade 2, "There's not enough action in the front... I need to do more") so I thought "throw in some jumping". Nothing better and simpler to beef up an action scene than some guys jumping over a wall, or through a window or something equally as uncomplicated. While not trying to make too many changes soo far into pre/production, I definately think these simple last minute changes can add significantly to the final product. Pictures soon (of the club interior, Lounges, and intro scene)... just not yet :-)