The Ball is available for 75% off today and tonight only! And it actually is my birthday today, so if you feel like buying something for me, buy The Ball :)

Not much happening otherwise, I am taking it easy. 2011 looks like it will be a busy year. I am slowly making progress on my book about The Ball but I am not sure at all when it will be done. Progress goes slow, and it is a bit too random right now. It is covering the story behind The Ball and its art style and all, how to set up and organize an indie team, and how to practically use the UDK. That is too much. Too unfocused. So I am going to see if I can fix that, possibly split it up or remove parts. If I can’t I might just dump the idea, or recycle it into something else.

Also if you haven’t already, feel free to add me on Facebook!

I am almost there! I made a big push over the weekend, and I have now fixed up all tutorials but the three material tutorials!

InterpActors

Lightmapping

And I fixed up the layout of all other tutorials. If only I could force myself to wrestle through the material tutorials now :)

Teaching means lots of vacation. Three weeks of nothing coming up, which I plan to spend on making the start on my new book, and reading through some game design books I borrowed from school. Also came across this blog today Making Big AAA Games: Not The Dream Job (Anymore), which pretty much sums up my feelings as well.

And I saw this Photoshop plugin float by today as well. vTools, with a bunch of useful scripts, whatever use you may find for it. People interested in Photoshop scripts should also check out my ex-colleague Teddy’s script nDO by the way, if you haven’t already. It is neat!

Goes really slow, I lost so much time the past two weeks on all kinds of other things. I have barely had the time to work on updating all my tutorials. I have made a big push today though.

Physics

Sound

Streaming

Also I fixed some of the formatting of the Soft Physics and Foliage and Deco Layers tutorials.

Completely unrelated, but I just built a super tiny PC. I have been wanting to do so for a long time and now I finally got to it. Mini-ITX. The thing uses just 20W to operate, and the only moving element in the PC is the on button! In fact, my TV, which it is hooked up to, makes more noise than the PC :)
I can now reply emails from the comfort of my couch, and watch YouTube on my TV.

Also, here is something cute. MakeHuman. It is a free character generator, like found in RPGs. It generates a base character which you can then export to a 3D program to further work on. Gets you up and running much faster when modeling a character. The export function doesn’t seem to work very well yet, but still a very nice tool!

I have had very little time the past week, much less than I had hoped, and I have pretty much spent all my time on typing emails and documents, and it is set to continue for a while as it is looking now. Fun! I had three interview about The Ball pop up, and I have been so smart to make my students write design documents, which I now have to read through. Totals about 200 pages :)
I also had to write my monthly column for Official Playstation Magazine Benelux. I have been writing a column for them for about a year I believe, so if you happen to read Dutch check them out. The one I just wrote is about how I see the retail and digital markets evolve in the future, and an insight in digital pricing.

I pressured myself to do get one new piece for my website done however, to at least somewhat keep myself on schedule. I highlighted some cool tools and programs I use for UE3 in Cool Tools. If you got any other tools that come in handy when working with UE3 feel free to tell me!

Also, two my The Ball programmers, Markus Arvidsson and James Tan just got back home from Dubai, where they had a bunch of workshops about the UDK at Epic’s booth. Here are some pics of them two, together with Jay Wilbur from Epic.

Thanks for the opportunity Epic!

And lastly, The Ball could really use your vote over at IndieDB.com!

And going on… This is actually quite boring to do :) I can’t wait until I can get started with new things.

Light Functions

Fog

I also updated lots of tiny things in A Simple UDK Game, Decals, Cutscenes.

There is some seriously crazy stuff in it, and it is really interesting to read this and develop an insight in society of 50-60 years ago. They were obsessed by uranium for one, and didn’t really seem to understand the dangers of messing around with it. The magazine is full of uranium topics. Uranium Hunt By Jeep Vacation Geiger Counter “If you are looking for a vacation in the open with adventure thrown in, why not consider prospecting for uranium? In on evening you can assemble a vacation geiger counter!”

And the best one of them all: Forestry in 2005.

“Like a giant eagle spotting supper from the air, the helicopter hovers over the densely timbered mountainside. As the pilot checks instruments, the logger members of the two man crew refers to a memorandum dated that day – August 12 2005…. Watching every flick of the helicopter’s supersensitive geiger counter, the pilot begins to “zero in” on a big pine. The tree is one that had been radioactively marked by a ground crew. With the helicopter over the marked pine, the pilot nods, and says “Hooks away!”.

They actually believed we were going to mark trees with a radioactive material in 2005, then detect such a marked tree from a heli, and then pull up the entire tree, roots included, right out of the ground with that very heli! “Not only possible, but probable”

I updated my Modeling 1 tutorial.

Changes:

And I updated the Material Expressions tutorial.

Changes:

Work on my tutorials is otherwise progressing slowly. I am fairly lazy at the moment, after having gone through two and a half years of development on The Ball. 2011 will be a well filled year probably, so taking it easy these final few months of 2010. I am teaching at Future Games at the moment though. My longest teaching assignment yet actually. I started in with this assignment in early October and as it stands now I will be there at least until early February. I am taking care of the new group of Game Design students, and first thing I had them do was mess in Unreal of course :) I will show their work here later!

The Ball is available for half the price this sunday by the way, due to Thanksgivings. Fancy my game at -50%? Check out our website tomorrow! Just 10 USD for my game!

Now that I’ve finished The Ball I finally found the time to get back to my website! An all new website and a fresh start!

So what is new?

The tutorial pages are currently WIP. Everything else should work. If there is anything that does not work please shoot me an email/tweet so I can fix it.

Hourences.com is a pretty major website. Here are some interesting numbers from the past 365 days:

For a website that I updated pretty much once in that entire time I am not unhappy with that… :) I really intend to do more with it, as time allows, and have it grow in size even more.

My UDK Game tutorial I posted on www.theballthegame.com rather than Hourences.com in itself pulled in another 152 714 visitors for that single page (that page will be moved to Hourences.com now by the way).

Thanks a lot to Ryan Watson – 1clickwebdesigns.co.uk for redesigning my site and setting it all up!