Oh, craaa...

5
Apr
20
nomad

We just finished the chapter of the book entitled “Engines, Engines Everywhere”, in which we go through 16 of the top Machinima engines today and talk about their strengths and weaknesses for movie production.

It’s 41 pages in total in its current form. Ouch. We might need to trim a bit…

(For the curious - the engines we’re covering are Sims 2, The Movies, Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, Medieval Total War 2, Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, MovieStorm, IClone, Second Life, World of Warcraft, Battlefield 2 and Company Of Heroes. Anything we missed?)

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  1. Avatar Overman said about 2 hours later:

    I was hoping “Theme Hospital” might make the cut, but I guess you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

    :P

    Excellent list.

  2. Avatar BenZS said about 11 hours later:

    Yes - IL-2 STURMOVIK! - the platform for the MFF2005 Nominee for Best Editing

    Pictures of War!

  3. Avatar Hugh "Nomad" Hancock said about 18 hours later:

    Thanks for the suggestion, Ben - I really don’t know a darn thing about the hard-core flight sim market. Is that the same thing that Bill and John was made in?

    Phil - we thought about Theme Hospital, but, you know, looking at the TV schedules we couldn’t see any demand for hospital-based drama… :)

  4. Avatar Johnnie Ingram said about 18 hours later:

    I really wanted to include “Hello Kitty Island Adventure”, but Hugh vetoed the idea completely.

  5. Avatar BenZS said about 20 hours later:

    Hugh: Kinda - actually it was made in a another flight sim called “Lock On :Modern Combat but they both are from Ubisoft

    Some of the films made are quite a trip (pun intended and not intended - oops) from IL-2 at least.

    Johnnie: I’m still clueless if that’s a real game or a joke from a machinima feature.

  6. Avatar Anthony Bailey said 1 day later:

    It would be great if you could get the polished-but-too-long stuff published on-line. Do you know what the arrangement would be in that regard with the book publishers?

  7. Avatar Tess said 1 day later:

    I know the IllClan guys are partial to using Torque lately, but I don’t know if anyone else is using it.

  8. Avatar Johnnie Ingram said 1 day later:

    Ben - Hello Kitty is a genuine character, but Hello Kitty Island Adventure was made up for the South Park episode Make Love Not Warcraft. Damn shame. I’d love to log in and grief that game.

    Anthony - we’re certainly intending to publish the stuff we cut eventually, most probably on this blog. We’ve constantly overshot our page count, on almost every chapter, so there’s a lot that we’ve had to dispense with. Obviously, we need to get the legal hoohah out of the way, but I’m fairly confident that we can get something online fairly soon.

    Tess - As far as I’m aware, Torque is a fairly niche-market choice, even for machinima makers, but I’m happy to be proven wrong. Can anybody point me at a few more Torque-based films?

  9. Avatar ILL Robinson said 2 days later:

    Not too much Torque engine Machinima out there. Recent series outside of ILL Clan (who are doing more stuff in Second Life since their being made part of Electric Sheep Company) is ”Hey Shipwreck” by Patrick Hrabe. There’s a few other Torque-based pieces floating around, but most small intro vids.

  10. Avatar Hugh "Nomad" Hancock said 2 days later:

    Hmm - interesting.

    My understanding is that Torque Machinima isn’t possible in any form without creating quite a bit of custom content and doing some in-engine programming - am I right on that?

    Currently, my feeling is that we’re not going to cover engine-only offerings that require programming an environment to use - otherwise we’d have to cover Quake 3, OGRE, BeyondVirtual, Lithtech, and all the other engines offered for game development out there, and that’s really beyond the scope of the book.

    We should definitely mention the engines like Torque that are available, though - it’s another approach to Machinima. We should also probably sidebar the most-likely-out-of-your-budget options like MotionBuilder and Softimage XSI.

  11. Avatar ILL Robinson said 3 days later:

    Yes, Torque, as its currently packaged, is void of any real assets, so anything of use must imported by the developer.

  12. Avatar BenZS said 4 days later:

    In other words - it’s ‘legal’ :-)

  13. Avatar Borkhan said 8 days later:

    plaforms to be included:

    Max Payne Morrowind

  14. Avatar Hugh "Nomad" Hancock said 10 days later:

    Hmm - interesting thought. Obviously OTSS was made in Max Payne - any Machinima we should check out in Morrowind?

  15. Avatar Borkhan said 10 days later:

    concerning Morrowind, they have some sites with a lot of stuff, but good machinima, well, not that i know.

    what about what Tom Jantol is doing with Cirque? thats for me a class of its own…

  16. Avatar Hugh "Nomad" Hancock said 10 days later:

    Cirque - yeah, it’s very cool.

    I believe he’s using MotionBuilder, right? That’s a few thousand dollars, and they’re pulling the Personal Learning Edition soon (ie, probably before the book comes out). We’re trying not to cover tools outside the average person’s budget, or I’d certainly have a section on MotionBuilder.

  17. Avatar Borkhan said 11 days later:

    http://machinima.com/PHPBB/viewtopic.php?t=7582

    Vanguard Saga of Heroes

    the above link is a discussion about usefullness of Vanguard for machinima, among others. just jump over my ramblings (yeah, im that borkhan) maybe welshrogue will know more, hes a beta tester for Vanguard

  18. Avatar elli said 19 days later:

    Hi,

    I wish your book would be out now. It’s very interesting and your blog is great. At the moment I’m writing on my degreee dissertation about machinima and the content similiar like yours. but I have not so many pages:). You do a great job:) and I look forward to read the book.

  19. Avatar Johnnie Ingram said 19 days later:

    @18 - You’re writing your dissertation on Machinima? That’s bloody brilliant! What’s your degree in?

    Let us know if we can help you out at all. You’d be amazed at the sheer breadth of obscure (and mainly useless to anybody who’s not writing hundreds of pages about Machinima) knowledge that Hugh and I can pull from the far recesses of our brains.

    You’ll be pleased to hear the book is on target for its August 2007 publication. It’s gone midnight, UK time, and Hugh and I have just finished writing the final chapter. Tomorrow we edit furiously before we hand in the last quater of the book, and then it’s all over bar the new edits, re-edits and final edits. Oh yeah - and the stuff that we can’t write yet because the software will just change before we go to print.

    Best of luck with the dissertation. Keep posting, and let us know how it’s going! Glad you’re enjoying the blog.

  20. Avatar elli said 19 days later:
    Thank you for the answer. I’m from Germany and my English is bad, so sorry:). My dissertation is about `How to integrate Machinima in our Lectures´ in the University for applied sciences (media engeneering) and I have to finish it in June. I hope more students will use it to learn about camera work and the procedure about filmmaking. And I hope more companies are interested in machinima in the future (so maybe I can find a job :)). Good Luck for the book and have a nice day!

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