08.12.08
Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 14:15
I knew before I even got there that it was going to be a busy weekend. In preparation for our 2½ day recording session, Jeremiah’s colleague Friedrich had turned our exported Trestkon script into a tidy database to be read by VoxGrinder, T-Recs Studios‘ proprietary batch recording tool, and the script counted just over 6300 lines, slightly more than half of which could be expected to belong to Trestkon.
Trestkon, our player character, has about 34,500 words of dialogue, which at a business standard of 10 words per “line” is 3450 lines to record, otherwise known as a ludicrous amount of work. Our saving grace was that about 5-600 lines were duplicates, and only needed to be recorded once and then saved to different folders, so we “only” had to record a bit under 3000 lines. Even so, there were still serious doubts about whether we’d be able to record them all from Friday night to Sunday afternoon.
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- Game: Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer
- Music: Rammstein - Ich Will
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08.07.08
Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 01:07
Or: Indiana Jonas and the Quest for Voice Acting.
…okay, just Heading to Hamburg then.
A couple months ago, our prospects for having Trestkon’s lines recorded were… a little bleak. Our original motivation for choosing poor Lawrence as the protagonist of The Nameless Mod, at the risk of his being forever regarded as the source of one of the most gratuitous acts of self-insertion fiction ever, was that he had a lot of time to dedicate on TNM so we reckoned he’d be able to record the many lines the protagonist would doubtlessly have. I mean the player character might have hundreds of lines!
Six years later, the situation is a little different for a couple of reasons. Lawrence now has a girlfriend, a job, and a college education, and our player character ended up with just over 3550 lines of dialogue (a grand total of 34,466 words by last count). It also became apparent during the creation of our first two trailers that while Lawrence is not a bad actor, he is not an actual actor, and our quality standards have increased substantially since 2002.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: LeoBad - Sol's Bar Ambient 2
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07.11.08
Posted in Humour, Personal at 15:01
My house has temporarily been turned into a game. The rules are pretty simple: Don’t touch the floor in the kitchen or the stairs - they’ve just been lacquered. Upstairs is my room and my parents’ bedroom. Downstairs is food and drink, the toilet, and the outside. Until the lacquer dries, there’s only one way to move to and from my room (and more importantly, my computer):
I have to climb on the railing.
By most standards, this would be an inconvenience, but for some reason I find it pretty entertaining. It’s a throwback to the games we used to play as kids, where we’d chase each other around on the playground pretending that the ground was poison and touching it would kill us. Now it’s a challenge just moving through the house. I guess when it comes down to it, I’m still just 8 years old inside.
- Game: Jorden er giftig
- Music: Nine Black Alps - Shot Down
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06.08.08
Posted in Personal at 14:50
I’ve replaced my old captcha script with ReCaptcha because the old one seemed a little b0rked and the new one helps digitize dusty old tomes! So that’s nice. Let me know if it causes you any grief, such as prohibiting you from posting or somesuch. While I was at it, I also weeded out the spam user accounts. I was pretty careful not to delete any of my subscribers (I have so few to begin with 
), but in case you’re a lurker who just happened to create an account with the word “viagra” in it, I’m sorry I deleted you, and please feel free to create a new account.
As a handy tip, if you wish to make absolutely sure you’re not deleted when the spam accounts reach critical mass, please type in your name so I can easily see you’re real.
- Game: Still GTA4
- Music: Rock Hard Power Spray - Distinguished
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05.27.08
Posted in Hardware/Technology, Personal at 08:43
I’m gone for a week, and I manage to get 12 spam comments in the mean time. I think my CAPTCHA is broken, time to finally switch to ReCAPTCHA. Of course… I need to get my ‘net connection back first.
Our connection went mental on Wednesday - it didn’t die, it just sort of lost its mind. About half the pings we send time out, and when we do manage to connect to a site, it goes incredibly slowly. Most of the time I can’t connect to MSN, and when I do, about half my messages are never delivered or received. Worst of all, I can’t get my mail. I had 41 mails waiting for me when I last tried to check on Friday night, and surely I will be drowned in mail when I finally regain my connection.
The main problem is that my ISP, YouSee, has pretty terrible service. It’s not for a lack of trying, but their internal communication could use some work. It seems their support department and their technician department only communicate through some sort of helpdesk system, and I can’t contact the tech department directly. So I need to talk to the supporters, who then tell the technicians they should call me, and the technicians will then call “between 8 am and 4 pm”.
So, uh, I should just stay at home waiting for them to call…? The first appointment we made with them was for them to call us Monday between 8 and 10, but they never did. Then we called their supporters, who reminded the techs (via the helpdesk) to call on my cell phone, which they did 4 hours later. In the middle of my second viewing of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. At this point my dad was home, but they didn’t think to try the home number when nobody answered my cell phone.
So, uh, if TDC Cable wanted more customers, maybe they should’ve improved their customer support workflow a little instead of just changing their name to YouSee?
After a week without ‘net at home, I’m seriously starting to go a little crazy. Not a lot, I’m just constantly slightly frustrated, restless, and uneasy. It’s a mix of boredom and the complete absense of my social network. Sure it’s not a disaster for TNM if I take a week or so off from the project, but it’s a week I could spend improving the mod and fixing bugs which is instead being spent playing GTA4 when I don’t really want to play at all.
Three things I’d take to a deserted island:
- My computer.
- A solar power plant.
- The Internet.
- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Napoleon XIV - They're Coming to Take Me Away
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05.17.08
Posted in Game design, Game news, Games, Personal at 01:14
So this week has been relatively interesting. Events have occured that were worthy of bloggage. I will now try (and fail) to do them justice. I will also include photos, and this will possibly help. Buckle up, it’s gonna be a long one - even for me.
Insertion and Recon
The conference started Wednesday, but I went to Malmö (roughly pronounced Marlm-soundthatdoesntexistinEnglish) on Tuesday so I wouldn’t have to rush off to check in half-way through the conference. On my way to the hostel, I realized I could pretty much walk the whole way through parks, just occasionally crossing the road to get from one park to the next. This turned out to be a good thing, because I ended up walking that route 7 times throughout Tuesday.
After I’d dumped my baggage at the hostel around noon, I grabbed some lunch and then headed back to the station to meet Ruben. I was fairly excited about this, since I’ve known Ruben online for years ever since he tested my NWN module and recruited me to play in his massive DM’d campaign. For the best DM I’ve ever had the honour of playing with, I was a little disappointed to find that he wasn’t an enormous immortal being of pure light, but he was a nice guy, so I quickly forgave him for letting down my expectations. (Dunno if Ruben would want me posting a picture of him here, so I won’t). We took a few walks around town, then split up to relax before dinner. We met up again half past 6 and quickly found a nice but affordable place to eat. Then we wandered around a bit, had some coffee, and went back to sleep.
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- Game: All of them
- Music: Mindthings - Exponential Tears
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05.12.08
Posted in Games, Personal at 16:36
Following a really good review of GTA4 in my daily newspaper, Politiken, I was going to post a long-winded entry about the vast differences between game reviews in the mainstream press and reviews in the more specialized gaming press. Unfortunately, it looks like N’Gai Croal beat me to it. My entry was going to be a lot less opinionated and more observing, since I really liked Vigild’s review in Politiken, but apart from that, I don’t really know that I have anything to contribute to the discussion.
So instead, you’re going to get a random picture dump of photos I’ve taken over the last 2-3 weeks, because I love taking pictures and I love showing them off almost as much. First up is a batch of photos I took because the motifs remind me of various games - I’m really geeky that way. Then you’re getting a couple of random pictures too, because I’m a very self-indulgent person.
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| Half-Life 2, Water Hazard |
Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast |
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| Grand Theft Auto 3: San Andreas |
Myst |
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| Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare |
I’m going to put this in a game some day, mark my words! |
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| Clearly they’re developing a lethal zombie virus in here. Or they’re controlling the national surveillance grid. Watching us all. |
No game, really, the lighting was just hella good for photography that day. |
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| The inevitable cat photo! |
‘Tis I! |
Tomorrow, I’m leaving for Malmö to attend the Nordic Game 2008 convention. Expect plenty more photos and a rundown of speaks I’ve attended when I return, Friday.
- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Surfact - Step Into the Light
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05.06.08
Posted in Games, Personal at 17:17
It’s a pity I never got around to writing a post-mortem of sorts over the Quest for Glory campaign that my good friend Ruben ran in Neverwinter Nights over a period of three years. I have a couple of half-finished drafts lying around in WordPress, but nothing I write seems to really do the campaign any justice. How do you summarize the multitude of feelings stemming from completing a roleplaying campaign that lasted 3½ whole years? Search me.
It’s not a campaign that’ll be forgotten anytime soon, though, that’s for sure. Especially not now that we have a fantastic portrait of the group to treasure forever. After seeing how well Obsidian’s drawing of Trestkon turned out, Ruben decided to commission the portrait, which depicts all six major characters in the campaign, only omitting the character Alarah, who left the group after the second session. The drawing is an homage to the campaign the likes of which I’ve repeatedly failed to create in writing.
I immediately whipped up a wallpaper with the artwork for Ruben. I’m not using it myself because it obfuscates my icons too much, but I’m still pretty happy with it. I just wish I could claim credit for the drawing - in truth not even the photo in the background is mine (we have no mountains in Denmark), and the logo, I nicked from the cover of the Quest for Glory 5 box. That doesn’t make me any less happy with it, though. For a 1680×1050 version of it, and an attribution of which characters appear in the portrait, please visit my freshly updated Campaign Chronicles page, which also has a pictorial journal from the whole 3 years of the campaign in which I was fortunate enough to participate.
As for the title of today’s post… well, how much more glory could you possibly need than this? Job well done, I say.
- Game: Neverwinter Nights
- Music: Surfact - Scarecrow
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04.25.08
Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 09:53
I generally consider myself pretty proficient at reading and writing the English language. I put this down to a heavy exposure to English TV, English games, English books (thanks, mum!), and lots of time spent on the English parts of the Internet (something about the Danish corner of the ‘net seems oddly restricted and… rural to me, I can’t quite explain it - everything Danish on the ‘net just seems a bit pedestrian). It’s gotten to the point where my vocabulary contains words that many native English-speakers do not know, and where I certainly spell better than many of them - though it may simply be due to the fact that I care.
There is, however, one area in which I am always at a disadvantage and may always remain so: Idiolects. This is a frighteningly important part of writing, especially in English, which is a language distributed across several nations. A person’s idiolect describes so much about them, things we may or may not consciously pick up on, but which at least a native speaker will almost always understand at a subconscious level. From the way a person speaks (inflection, choice of words, and other factors), we infer their area of origin, their level of education, their social standing, and often even their ethnicity, among many other things. This is indescribably difficult to manage when you’re writing in anything other than your first language.
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04.16.08
Posted in Humour, Personal at 21:24
Today is my birthday. I am now 22 years old (yes I know! I’m, like, a kid!*). In fact I was born at 10 pm, so I’ve been 22 for exactly 22 minutes! I’ve worked on TNM more than a quarter of my life, which is completely ridiculous no matter how you look at it. It’s been a great day, but unfortunately I have got no presents.
Because one of the cats took ‘em.
Clearly there’s nothing to do about that. I hope she enjoys the Edge subscription I was supposed to get.
* Alternatively if you are 21 or younger: lol old fart!
- Game: Rainbow 6: Vegas
- Music: Metallica - To Live is to Die
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Trestkon, our player character, has about 34,500 words of dialogue, which at a business standard of 10 words per “line” is 3450 lines to record, otherwise known as a ludicrous amount of work. Our saving grace was that about 5-600 lines were duplicates, and only needed to be recorded once and then saved to different folders, so we “only” had to record a bit under 3000 lines. Even so, there were still serious doubts about whether we’d be able to record them all from Friday night to Sunday afternoon.
