LyCheSis op:inion

Latest WIPs

I must admit that even I was not immune against the onslaught of music games. And that's when I let myself get talked into Guitar Hero III and Rockband right after that, with me enjoying the latter rather more music wise.

Standing in front of the TV with a plastic guitar trying to look like a rockstar is something that takes getting used to but it has it's charm and by now I think I am quite decent at this game. It has this incredible feeling of achievement and it is really something different than sitting on the sofa frantically pressing buttons on the Xbox360 controller.

One fun thing with Rockband was that you can customize your character much more freely than in Guitar Hero III. I have created two outfits until now that I quite like and I thought I'd share them here.

The "Angel" outfit was first and the final configuration after many experiments with white clothes.  The "Devil" is more openhearted (not all that easy if you look at the stuff available in the Rockband shop) and I think it works perfectly together with the facepaint and tattoos.

One thing that bugs me with the Xbox360 is that it is not really possible to make screenshots except by taking photos of the TV. I'd love a photo mode like in GranTurismo for the PS2 where you could pose and save your pictures to a USB stick. The Xbox360 ought to have a screenshot button that would do this for you anytime you needed to but I guess that would be difficult because of copyright restrictions.

I also bought a couple of DLC tunes vom the XBLA. Part of this list consists of tunes that came with the european version of Rockband and some songs where (kind of) accidents but I'll add descriptions to this list later on. I can simply never remember which songs are in my list so here it is, for me and anybody who is interested

Song	Artist
Beetlebum	Blur
Monsoon	Tokio Hotel
Manu Chao	Les Wampas
Moving to Seattle	The Material
Promised Land	Vesuvius
Still Alive	GLaDOS
Countdown to Insanity	H-Blockx
Perfekte Welle	Juli
Tell Me Baby	Red Hot Chili Peppers
Kickstart My Heart	Mötley Crüe
New Wave	Pleymo
Rock'n'Roll Star	Oasis
My Curse	Killswitch Engage
Hier Kommt Alex	Die Toten Hosen
Hysteria	Muse
Snow ((Hey Oh))	Red Hot Chili Peppers
Constant Motion	Dream Theater

"Symphonic Shades" was Chris Hülsbeck's dream of bringing a whole concert with his videogame music to life with a proper symphonic orchestra into reality. The first concert was sold out within days of it's announcement and I was one of the lucky ones to find out in time to get a couple of tickets (later a second concert was announced for the same evening, three hours later, which sold out just as fast)

I was very excited to be at this concert as this was my very first videogame concert. I had already listened to renditions of Final Fantasy from Nobue Uematsu, but never live, and I was used to these concerts and remixes sometimes sounding a bit strang.
I am a great fand of Chris's Amiga music and I have also bought nearly all of his Soundtrack CDs, although I have to say that his Style worked better with the rough and gritty sounding Amiga soundchip. Even the remixes of his own songs seldomly reached quality of the originals.

That said I can safely claim that "Symphonic Shades" was worth it. The songs that were played worked well with the orchestral arrangement (most of the songs were arranged by Jonne Valtonen aka "Purple Motion") with only the odd deviation into the strange.
"Gem'X" had a man hitting coffee cups for percussion which sounded a bit strange and den symphonic rendition of "Shades" had a real synthesizer playing lead which sounded a bit out of place and ever so slightly out of tune.
The only real letdown was the Turrican II theme which was supposed to be some sort of journey through several classical ages which was either to high for me or just simply failed to recreate the atmosphere and 'power' that was behind the original. I also expected the Turrican 3 Piano Suite to be good but it was souly played by a finnish piano virtuoso called Jari Salmela who raced through the theme rather faster than his fingers could move and I rather missed the orchestral accompaniment which would have given the ending theme so much more emotion.
Apart from these small gripes the songs were very good. The X-Out theme was great, R-Type was fantastic (although a slightly jumpy beat struck me as weird), Tunnel B1 was brilliant despite being fronted by a 5 minute percussion solo.
"Karawane der Elefanten" was the only new song and as such failed (in my eyes) to convey any sort of Hülsbeckiism, but that may only be me wanting to hear something I can recognize.

The complete playlist:

1. Grand Monster Slam - Opening Fanfare
2. X-Out - Main Theme 
3. Jim Power - Main Theme
4. Tower of Babel
5. Turrican 3 - Piano Suite
6. Gem'X - Main Theme
7. Apidya II - Suite
8. R-Type - Main Theme
9. Licht am Ende des Tunnels - Suite
10. The Great Giana Sisters - Suite
11. Tunnel B1 - Suite
12. Symphonic Shades
13. Karawane der Elefanten
14. Turrican II Renderings - Main Theme

There will be a Soundtrack CD of this concert in late 2008 which is supposed to feature all Songs from this evening. As it will feature recordings made during the week up to the concert itself it should probably sound more balanced than the live concert and maybe the timing issues will also be corrected (I'm no expert in symphonic music but there were parts where some parts of the orchestra semed to lag behind the rest but because I have seen this happen in professional soundtrack recordings I am not quite sure if this isn't some kind of special rhythm thing).

I will have an eye out for the CD and I hope there will be new opportunities for videogame concerts when (or if) the Games Convention comes to Cologne next year (but there have been signs of Leipzig putting up a fight so there may be two events next year very close to oneanother that'll both be only half baked).

  It was nice seeing Chris Hüslbeck personally attending this event and we even managed to get him onto the stage for the final applause as he prefers to stay in the background. But as a musician he has made a name for himself and an impressive legacy ranging over two decades in the videogame industry.

One last thing that struck me when seeing the audience at the concert was that they were all round about the same age, my age, all with their love and enthusiasm for Amiga and C64 music and one thing dawned to me:  man, we're getting old

This is a project that I have been wanting to do for a long time. It features graphics and animations made by various artists and information surrounding the Commodore Amiga computer - the computer that really got me started into making everything that I am doing today. I have been slaving away grabbing images, searching for information and putting it all together to make a gallery full of everything that made the Amiga as astonishing now as it was 20 years ago.

I hope that you will enjoy the new site and that you will come back frequently as I am full of plans on things that I want to add to the new site:

Amiga Graphics Archive

I have started a new spaceship project called Poseidon. It's a heavy bomber that originated from a couple of design ideas I had long been wanting to do. I also decided to make this WIP more public than my previous ones by posting it on www.scifi-meshes.com.

http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/3d-wips/42914-poseidon-large-bomber.html

I think it is working out quite well at the moment. I'll keep my forum post uptodate.

 

Here's the new and improved AnimA-TV logo. It will be featured on the redesigned www.anima-tv.net as soon as the relaunch is complete.
The logo was completely rebuilt and now features highly detailed bevel edges and creases. This catches the reflections and specular lights much better than the old logo and also looks much better with the new nodal surface settings.

Hi, this time I have measured my Xbox 360.

I had heard quite drastic numbers so I was prepared for anything but as it turned out it wasn't quite as bad as I had feared

Xbox 360 (Normal PAL Version with HDMI) 

Application	Consumption	Comment
Standby	3W
Downloading	80W	Console in standby turned off while downloading over XBLA
DVD Playback	90W
Dashboard	100W
Playing	100 - 125W	Tested it with Burnout Paradise and Lost Odyssey

A harddrive can add 5W to these numbers but they also vary by that amount so it could be irrelevant.

Another thing I noticed was that this loud noise which the Xbox360 makes doesn't come from the harddrive. It seems to be one of the fans which is weird since it is a sound that I normaly would have linked to that of a harddrive. I wished Microsoft would have taken as much care with the internal design of the Xbox360 as Sony had with the PlayStation3 but, hey, you can't have everything. Still - for a game like Lost Odyssey the noise level of the console is very close to ruining the whole gaming experience. 

I have started to play around with Microsoft's XNA Framework in C# and, as a first project, started porting my old puzzle game "Colours". I created that game 1992 on my Amiga in AMOS Basic and have ported it successfully to HTML/JavaScript round about 2004. Several attempts to port it to the PC in Blitz Basic / DarkBasic Professional failed because the languages were a little bit to basic for my likeing (and because I accidently deleted a prototype version that was quite close to getting finished).

Starting with C# wasn't quite as easy as I had hoped because I am used to PHP and doing everything myself. C# has load of features for handling variable scopes and breaks pretty fast if you try to be smart and ignore all that, which is what you can do in PHP. Also, the XNA Framework is huge and does loads of stuff for you, but if don't know what structure it expects then you're a bit lost.

There is a very good list of tutorials and websites for XNA and the basic things are very easy to understand. But some of the more advanced examples work very differently and aren't documented very well which leaves you out in the cold as soon as you have understood the basics. Maybe the Creators Club is better but I haven't yet decided if I will manage to keep going long enough so that the 100$ membership fee won't be wasted.

At the moment I have the blocks, playfield, gravity, colour reactions, cursor movement and score counting running. I still need lots of graphical effects (such as exploding blocks, score overlays and the whole gui) on my todo list as well as everything outside of the actual game. I also have lots of ideas on how to extend the game from it's 1992 feature set so that will be quite interesting to see those coming along.

I already had Rez on the PS2 and loved this little gem. When I heard that is was going to be released on the Xbox360 in HD (720p) I was quite excited to see what they had made of it for this new iteration.

The graphics look wunderfull and the sound is great. The game has been converted very faithfully to the Xbox360, including the controller rumble which you have to enable the first time around.

Improvements to the original are mostly with it's enhanced resolution although there are also a couple of minor details that seem to have been added including some extra effects (one spectacular glare effect that makes fighting the area 4 end boss quite taxing).

Overall the game seems a little bit more difficult than the PS2 version (having not played the DreamCast version I can't really tell how faithful it is to the original).

I am not sure that it is worthy it's 800 Microsoft Points pricetag having already bought the PS2 version (although it would have been terrible if it had been a full price game). It does have a limited long time playability with only 5 levels to unlock but it also has a uniquely fun gameplay that just works wonderfully on HDTV with a good surround sound setup.

For a rail-shooter remake this is very good (I don't think we stand a chance of Starblade or Starblade: Operation Blue Planet getting released on any next-gen console) and if you haven't had a chance to play this one before it is certainly a recommended buy. If, like me, you have the old version this still is nice to have, but just keep in mind that this is only a remake, not a second part.

My Achievements

	The EARTH Play mode area1 cleared! Area 2 unlocked!
	The MARS Play mode area2 cleared! Area3 unlocked!
	The VENUS Play mode area3 cleared! Area4 unlocked!
	The URANUS Play mode area4 cleared! Achieve 100% analyzation in areas1-4 to unlock area5!

Here are a couple of models that I have been working on for the last couple of months. The Veloque fighter has been in the albums for quite some time but hasn't been announced properly. I created it from a sketch I made on paper and I made it to test modelling techniques for subpatch modelling with Lightwave. I deliberately tried a couple of difficult shapes to find solutions for the usual problems and I think I succeeded quite well in solving a couple of them.

It may have become a bit overloaded in the meantime so I may have to reduce oder modify a couple of shapes.

 

 The second WIP is a long one streaching from an idea I had for a couple of years in the shape of the Titan carrier (or Damocles as it's predecessor was called). It's purely polygon modelling and therefore not as demanding as the Veloque. It is based on the basic shape of a two bladed broadsword and will be (once completed) over 1km long. I have planned to launch the SpaceHead and Veloque fighters from it's hangars but it will be quite some time until I will be able to do this. It is very likely that I will port these meshes into XSI before hand because LightWave isn't quite as good at handling and combing complex mesh objects in one scene, so that will further delay the completion of this project, but I will keep you posted.

After playing this part in the Final Fantasy row since it's release in germany (23. February 2007 - yeah, thats half a year after the US and nearly a whole year after japan) I have finally finished the game.

After my failed attempt at defeating Vayne a couple of months ago I took some time off finishing most of the hunts and getting all of the espers. Usually in Final Fantasy you have quite a good chance in defeating the big boss if you manage to defeat most of the extra beasts before hand and therefore this time Vayne didn't stand a chance.

In addition to the higher level I also had quite a good and demanding time gathering extras for my sky pirate's den. This is quite a simple thing to implement for the game developer but it somehow adds a nice incentive to the game. Quite similair to the achievements you get on the Xbox or Half Life. I'll just show you has become of mine:

Quite crowded by now, but I did leave out a couple of things, including the Tiamat and several other things just because I thought it was about time to finish .

My final stats are just over 4.000.000 clan points with all characters being at level 68 (and Vaan leveling to 69 inside the Bahamuth). Final playtime was about 170 hours which must be the longest time I have spent on a Final Fantasy (or any game for that matter).

Now let's just hope Final Fantasy XIII isn't going to be late. 

I am a big fan of Square's Final Fantasy series since it came to the PSX with the brilliant FFVII. The current iteration (FFXII) is, although very short on story, still very enjoyable and therefore I'd like to share my progress so far with you:

I have been playing since the game came out in germany this year and my play time counter is at 133 hours with round about 3.000.000 clan points. My party is at level 60-61 and I have already had one try at defeating Vayne (obviously I was defeated, otherwise I wouldn't still be playing )

My goal at the moment is to complete as many parts of the game as I can possibly do, without straining myself. Until now I have always found something to do if an enemy was to difficult so I will probably keep on wandering the streets of Ivalice for some time.

This is my progress so far: 

 

So we all want to dive into next-gen high def entertainment, but somehow the raging format war makes it difficult to decide which side to stand on. Although I have been somewhat of a Sony fanboy since the original Playstation my support for Sony's console has had several dents since it's announcement a couple of years ago.

The current situation however is really quite frustrating. Especially if you put the numbers next to each others.

	PlayStation3	XBox360
Price	400 € (with HD and BluRay)	350 € (base) 450 € (with HD) 620 € (with HD and HD-DVD)
My "must have" Games	Final Fantasy XIII	Ace Combat 6 Halo 2 Halo 3 Project Sylpheed

Ok, maybe the "must have" list is not everyones taste but it is quite clear that the XBox360 currently has the better games and the PlayStation3 only has a title that (in Europe) could be years away. In addition to this several games that appear on both consoles look better on the Xbox360 than on the PlayStation3.

So let's say i'd go with the Xbox360 for gaming... Microsoft has currently priced it's console in such a fashion that you would have a severly limited machine if you went for the cheapest version without a harddrive and if you wanted to add a harddrive later you are currently only able to buy a 20 GB model for 80 € (the 100 € more expensive Elite has 120 GB and comes in the much cooler black finish). There seem to be a couple of alternative versions which probable comes from the overhaul Microsoft did with their Xbox360 lineup but you will probably have to get lucky with them (i.e. getting a cheap HD Xbox) or unlucky (it ring-of-fire'ing out on you).

The Xbox360 isn't as cheap anymore as it was comparing it to the new PlayStation3 price. If you add to this the cost of getting a HD-DVD drive (which sits as another box next to the not-really-small Xbox360 console) you will soon get to a price that's not really close to a bargain. But if you think "oh, I'll get the PlayStation3 for HD movies then" you will be in for a surprise. The BluRay and HD-DVD war is still raging at full force and nobody can really say who is winning. The problem is that you as customer now has to decide which format to get by looking at which movies are released for it. I can understand that the movie studios don't want to produce everything on both formats and have begun taking sides, or switching sides. And as far as I have gathered it is here where Sony is loosing it.

So you can't really buy the PlayStation3 for it's games and you can't safely buy it as a HDTV player. The Xbox360 is now, with the price drop from Sony, suddenly pretty expensive and as HDTV player overly expensive and cumbersome.

What would have tipped me over to the PlayStation3 would have been Ace Combat coming out for Sony's console as well. But since there is nothing even close to an announcement from Namco (aside from a short comment that was quickly withdrawn) it is all very much guess work from here.

The conclusion for me would be to get the darn Xbox360 now to play Ace Combat, then get the PlayStation3 when Final Fantasy XIII comes out and get a HD-DVD drive for my pc.

I see this as somewhat of a defeat for me as I have never bought both contenders of past console wars. I had the SEGA MegaDrive, the Sony PlayStation and Sony PlayStation2 and I am still not comfortable with this outlook. Let's see if I will be able to wait even longer for Ace Combat to appear on PlayStation3 or if I will get weak and go for the Xbox360. Either way I think everybody looses currently because the longer this war rages the longer normal people will stay away from the next generation trying to avoid buying into the wrong format.

I decided to test the power consumption of my new PC today.

Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600
Gigabyte P35-DS3
XFX nVidia 8800 GTS 320MB

Application	Consumption	Comment
Idle	145W
Rendering	204W	Rendering a scene in Lightwave3D with all 4 cores maxed out
3DMark06	up to 247W	Running on default settings. 3DMark06 gave me 10586 3DMarks (SM2:4102, SM3:4229, CPU:4672)

This is my personal demo ranking. I am trying to keep track of my demo collections and what demos are worth watching. Choices may vary, of course.

Group	Demo	Year	Rating	Comment
ASD	Animal Attraction	2006	****	Nice effects and wunderfull slow and soothing atmosphere
ASD	Iconoclast	2005	*****	Fantastic symphony of effects and music
ASD	Lithography	2006	***	Starting out nice but all over to soon after 30 seconds
Farbraush	FR-41: Debris	2007	*****	Absolutely awesome, especially for a 64k demo
Still	Malewitsch	2007	***	Nice style, very cubey, but not much happening
Synesthetics	STS-03: Aeon Flux	2005	**	Nice design but ultimately boring and standard STS demo

just fiddling around with ZBrush. It does work, but I am finding it hard using it with a trackball. I'll have a look if I can find my old Graphire tablet but I am not quite sure that it will be up to the task.

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Hi, my name is Daniel Kluth and I'm a 3D artist and web designer currently working for Capture in Düsseldorf.
I work with Lightwave, Softimage XSI and several other tools.

• Rockband star
• Symphonic Shades
• Amiga Graphics Archive
• New spaceship in the pipeline
• New AnimA coming
• Power consumption - Part 2
• ColoursXNA started
• Rez HD - Xbox360
• Works in progress
• Finally finished Final Fantasy XII

• Games [6]
• General [3]
• WIPs [4]
• Demos [1]
• Hardware [3]

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