I've been quite lazy recently, I didn't even write any blog posts. What happened?

University lectures went on until mid-January, followed by exams at the the end of January/beginning of February. Even the harder exams turned out surprisingly good, with my worst mark being 2.3 (or B-, I suppose).

And after that? Nothing. Holidays. Well, I did finally finish some of my games, like Assassin's Creed 2 and Brotherhood, Sam & Max Season 3, Damnation, Bastion and Alice: Madness Returns. I also finished replaying Mass Effect 2 (I had lost my savegames) and got Mass Effect 3 on release.

Mass Effect 3 was an interesting experience. Awesome for the most part, but like many others I find the ending to be a huge letdown. Barely influenced by your decisions, a Deus Ex Machina and unanswered questions - here's hoping Bioware's going to change that, a lot of fans stating their dissatisfaction might help. Still, it gets the full 5/5 from me. (I recommend playing the predecessors first though. It'd be like watching only the 3rd Lord of the Rings (but switching to something else at the end) otherwise.)

I also got a job, which will formally start in April. Delivering croques. I rather like it so far, I can use the car driving experience and I also make money, which is pretty nice. And a little more than I need for university, too. So I'll be able to buy some nice things.

I'll probably get some new hardware soon, in some games my CPU doesn't quite cut it anymore but new ones for socket 775 have gotten hard to come by, so I'll probably upgrade all the essentials in a couple of months or so.

Another thing I now have the money for is a Kinect. Why would I want a Kinect? I don't even have an Xbox! Well, it's just an idea I've recently had. I'd like to experiment with Motion Capture using the Kinect (since that seems like the cheapest way). More specificially, I was thinking about doing Jedi Academy cutscenes with motion capture. The animations really helped Devil May Cry 3's cutscenes and I was fantasizing about getting a similar level of quality in the Jedi Academy SP mod I'm working on.

Of course, in order to get MoCap animations into Jedi Academy I need to be able to get any animation at all into Jedi Academy. I can't afford 3DS Max, I won't pirate it and I don't want to learn XSI Mod Tools, I'd much rather stick to Blender.

So I'm sticking to Blender. I already started working on a Ghoul 2 (Jedi Academy's model/animation format) plugin for Blendera couple of months ago but had only finished the importers. Well, my MoCap thoughts made me come back to it and I spent the last 2 days or so writing the animation exporter. It is now done.

The only remaining missing part is now the export of models. That's more complicated than animations though, I don't really feel like doing that right now. But that's how I often feel about something until I start working on it, at which point I actually really like it.

The second semester will start in about two and a half weeks - I could probably finish the .glm model exporter until then, let's see if I will.

So long,

Willi

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