Author Archive

Since my internet connection kept breaking up (it’s fixed now by the way) I thought that I should get back in learning to use the Torque3D Engine ( I’m a licensed T3D indie developer since years now! ), so far these few days have been very painful. But little by little I’m slowly inching along.

I started from the “empty” project with the goal of getting a few of the things I wanted for my game down, a crude template of sort. So far I achieved the following things:

• Rough landscaping
• Day/Night cycle
• Pretty Night skies (the moon is still kind of odd…)
• Importing various objects from 3dsmax.
• FPS Style player object (walk jump and stuffs like that)
• A proper client with some server browsing capabilities.
• A proper dedicated server… I think.

I thought i would post this, for fun, so whoever is reading me can have a little idea of what’s going on.

Explanation: this is my ping time for google taken every 5 minutes, the green bars are packet losses. the blue is the average ping time.

• If the ping time goes to 0, that’s bad it means during this period i had no connectivity.
• If the ping goes up, it’s bad, because it means my connection took ages to connect to something as trivial as google.
• If the packet loss goes up it’s terrible, because it means my connection is actually losing information, which have to be sent again.

The long period from 11pm to 2 pm is a period where i was either sleeping or away, so … low activity, less data to fuck up. The rightmost period from 1 to 5 am is basically “now” and it’s all jittery because I restarted a few traffic heavy services to see how it would behave under a semi regular load. And well, this is the result. it’s BAD.

For those who care, my DSL connection has been acting up for the past 2-3 weeks, as a result I’m not very active, it’s difficult to work in SL when your connection drop about ten times a day.

I hope that I can get this solved quickly.

It’s done, finally.

I just completed a big texture pack for the KDC Institutional straitjacket, in a single add-on script, you get ALL the KDC latex colors for the jacket.

This version of the latex has a much improved aspect and i intend to make more products out of it, but for now, this will do.

I hope this will make a lot of Peoples happy, considering it was requested over and over since the release of the leather pack.

Well here it is fellow rubberists, and i hope you will be satisfied 🙂

Come check it out in Second Life !

See it on the Marketplace!

I thought I would give her a little kudo about her Windlight settings for second life that you can read all about here.

I built this earlier today and it looks pretty nice with those settings.

Here is a little teaser for all the SL rubberists out there 🙂 I’m sure you will find it interesting.

I’m pretty much done making the textures of the pack and preparing the script add-on, it will come in the 15 classical KDC colors, so as usual it will perfectly (well nearly perfectly) match all my other latex products, with independent base and details, hell you can mix latex with the canvas or leather if you have the corresponding packs.

It’s also a slightly tweaked version of my latex, which, I believe greatly improve its look. I will be using this variation from now on as i believe it’s more subtle and realistic.

Now this isn’t really a product but I’ve been optimizing some more prims in Dead Realm and replaced all the ugly boulders over the tunnel with a few of the sculpts i initially made for floating islands. I also added one or two more trees. Only 3 sculpts were used instead of 10 spheres, so that’s a few more prims to spare and a much better looking mountain.

I completely forgot to update this mod for the past few versions, this is now done:

Version 1.1.2

• Applied the changes to NPCs brought by the Bison Steeve quest version 1.6

You can grab it here.

Today i did some more work on my latex tool set, the plan is to have a latex texture pack for the Institutional Straitjacket before the end of the week. I solved the main problem i had with the latex materials, mainly that i had to use a different reflection environment for the black latex because the details where not coming out properly.

I also added some color changing automation, so now I can make a complete set of colors in a single operation. This way I can do the final rendering at night and use the remaining time to… get more work done.

I also tweaked a bit some of the colors that where saturating a little too much, it shouldn’t different enough to cause color mismatch in outfits.

For those who don’t know it yet, the regions that are on the RC list can handle mesh prims, you can see and upload them if you are using the developer Viewer , otherwise… I’m not quite sure what they look like for normal viewers. Also, for regular prim fiddlers, this viewer let you size prims up to 64x64x64, you have to admit it’s kind of handy to cut prim usage.

Here is a screenshot of the first mesh ever to enter the dead realm region.

I made all the different LOD levels by hand because the SL client really isn’t too good at preserving the original shape of the object.

The table came out with a nice 5 prims weight.

The physical shape is a simple box, at the size of the table itself, i figured it would be good enough. I had to fiddle with the final size multiplier, it seems that too big or too small makes your prim equivalence go up for some reason.

I found this today in my Tweet list, granted I’m not Texan, nor do I plan to play BattleField3 (unless it’s really that good), regardless, I do have an opinion on the subject.

A large launch party for Battlefield 3 … women disallowed from attending to protect them from misogynistic insults http://bit.ly/pfoPHE

This actually brings a pet issue of mine that isn’t so much about this kind of events, but the women representation in video games. There seems to be a vocal player community opposed to gender parity (mens and women in equal proportion) in FPS shooters, especially those who slide toward the “military simulation” type of game.

Everytime I made a request, either for a mod, or for a future sequel of a MilSim game to include the ability for the player to pick his gender, I met some enthusiast but also a lot of hostility which could more or less be summed up into the following “bulletproof” arguments:

Female Addon for ArmA 2 OA

• Women are not allowed in active duty positions.
• Just because it is realistic doesn’t mean it has to be included in the game for the sake of realism.
• You can’t see your soldier anyway so it doesn’t matter.
• Being able to play as a girl do matter for girls.
• It’s a waste of time and money to create twice the amount of characters.
• In most cases it’s just a matter of creating an extra set of heads.
• Women don’t care about playing their own gender.
• I know a lot of girls who won’t buy a game that doesn’t let them play a girl without a valid reason.
• Games that allow you to shoot women are the kind of games mens do not want to play.
• An enemy player is an enemy player,
  

  Rainbow Six: Vegas 2

  why would his gender choice matter to you?

• Women are statistically less fit than mens for being soldiers.
• A lot of mens are unfit for active duty too.
• Random misogynist comments (women’s place is in the kitchen, etc…)
• Do i really have to answer to this one?

A few sordid facts on the state of the US Army

I cannot help but wonder if this is the kind of society that we are pushing left and right across the world? In the end is it really this much better than the treatment of women in religious extremist countries? Ultimately by allowing this sort of discriminations we only show that our so-called “gender equality” is only some sort of “gentleman concession” where we only allow it because it’s not causing problems.

Why does the US Army get to pick the rules they have to obey to? The law of equal opportunity should just be the same whether you are the department of defence or the department of education.

There is some fundamental ground work to do to reconstruct the standards under which the US Army lives, currently engaged women are pressured not to report when they are submitted to sexual assault or rape in their own unit for fear of being demoted or removed from their unit.

It’s no wonder that women do not want to engage in the army when the second pass time of soldiers, after killing people, is beating off all day. The pentagon estimate that 80 to 90% of the sexual assaults go unreported and on all the veterans sent in Afghanistan and Irak the number of female soldiers who admitted being subject to sexual assault where up to 25%.

A female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. – Representative Jane Harman

What does this has to do with a LAN party?

Nearly nothing, other than in this case, one of the role models of realistic FPS players are those same soldiers, the US Army may have trouble to calm the sexual urges of its troops because of a hyper masculine ideology but it doesn’t mean that simple gamers have to copy this mysoginistic system simply because they are playing games that mimic a world whose chain of command decided that women have no place in.

There is a very well-known effect called “group of ideas” where the mind tend to more easily accept an idea that is unacceptable if it is bundled in a group of more acceptable ideas.

That’s pretty much what we are seeing here, Peoples admiring a specific ideology (enough to play video games that are all about it) who also accept the more “noxious” ideas that are bundled with it.

Denying access to women because they will be subjected to misogynist behavior is such a backward view, you should encourage good sportsmanship by sanctioning the person who is obnoxious, not silence the potential victim. Peoples who cannot comport themselves as evolved human beings in front of a woman will never realise that their comportment is inappropriate if you remove the person they are offending from the equation, if anything, this reenforce their belief that they are right. Taking such preëmptive actions is never a solution because you deny to an already small part of the community from sharing an event with the others but you also comfort obnoxious sexist jerks in their own beliefs.

But i could be wrong, maybe the organisation team actually believe that women have no place in this sort of event?

Sources:

Powergaming BF3 launch party informations
(It appears they replaced the content of the post entirely as I am writing this)

Sexual Assaults on Female Soldiers: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

The private war of women soldiers

Female US Soldier for ARMA2 OA (v 3.0)