ricardocabellov5.5

The adventure starts again! :S Is this time going to be the last one? More information in the next posts! ;)

The legend is back! The guys of lionhead (best UK game developers imho) released the 2nd part of that game that addicted me so much years ago!

Say WOW!

I just modified the website, the blog/news is now the homepage as I update it more than not the porfolio.

Also, If there is anything new on the porfolio I should let you know from here. So that's why.. If you find a broken link, please, let me know. :D

Looks like latelly I'm doing quite a lot of flash stuff. I'm doing almost every weekend improvements to phodoob (used in mrdoob and spring) for the admin section and also the optimizing the viewer, but It still have a lot of bugs :(.. I'm trying to do it for anyone as quite a lot of people did ask me to release the files so they can use phodoob for their galleries.

This weekend was a bit different, I have been studying 3D transformations/matrices and all that boring stuff ;) And trying to understand the theory by my own, and first using a base code done by gargaj I was adding the code to draw triangles and also I did an ASEparser with PHP (woow! ;)), but later I found another base code that was working much faster than the original one so I decided to implement it. And then added some more features. The result by now is that:

Knot + Backface culling + Flat Illumination + Hypnoglow (with zsorting fucked up) \o/

As you can see, flash just die after drawing 400+ polygons :( The next I will try to do is instead of drawing vectors, use the latest Flash8 BitmapData feature, so I can draw pixels in an object and create the 3D drawing pixel by pixel, but I think that will be even slower.

Some may know that some weeks ago I was testing again osx86 on my laptop. I didn't have time to report the status of the "project" yet...

As I said previously, someone kind of "hacked" tiger osx86 so is quite easy to install it in any pc. Since the last try I did, the people did like a SSE3 emulator so now you can run Rosseta, that means that doesn't matter if the program was compiled for OSX or for Tiger, everything runs now (Itunes, Photoshop, even Reason!! (quite slow tho :P))... At this point I started to wonder about using Tiger OSX86 instead of Windows.. but I'm afraid I will have to wait a little bit.

The next step is doing drivers for ATI/Nvidia cards, so you can have the 2D/3D Acceleration, and also I can have my lovelly 1920x1200 resolution screen properly, as know is just stretched :(

If you want to know a little bit more about the progress for those drivers, check out these links:

NVIDIA Driver effort ATI Driver effort Discussion about the Drivers ideas

Ok, I was wrong. The firmware downgrader (from 2.0 to 1.5) for PSP was released a week after to the one I said ;). There was a lot of gossip on it, there someone called yoshihiro that was saying he did it, and others saying he didn't and blah blah.. "WHATEVER!! i just want the downgrader!" I thought..

So, I waited until the final release of it and tested it, and wow! it worked just fine. Hours later I was downloading a pack with a lot of retro machines emulators and minutes later playing very happilly Final Match in the pc engine emulator.

At this point I just didn't find any difference between PSP and GP32, I was using PSP for the same thing I was always using the GP32, but in that case with a much better screen (better contrast). So, the next step is get a bigger memorystick (1g sandisk) and then I will be able to play to a backup version of wipeout o/!

Then, going back to the gp32, probably because that PSP scene menace, and also because GP2X is going to be released soon, makes that latelly the scene is starting to really develop good stuff for the machine, i mean 3Dengines, 3Dgames, blah blah.. As an example, check out that, and that. So the scene is looking really nice again.

But, just writting that post I found that memon /moppi just released psp flower demo (port of Assembly Invitation 2004). And also, yesterday I received at home a UMD disc with Spiderman2, as I registered as soon as I bought the psp in yourpsp site.

Looking good man! looking good!! ;)

Somehow, I just found today these series of demo-DVDs that abyss are developing.

Looks like the videos on it have really good quality (thanks to kkapture). I'll try to check them out this week. The selection in some of the volumes are too commercial for my tastes. But hey! It's always good to have demos on DVD in hi-res!

Download them from here:
Demo or die! Vol 1.
Demo or die! Vol 2.
Demo or die! Vol 3.

If you read this blog, probably you already know kosmoplovci. If you don't, check this out.

They are (still) doing sort of an experimental stuff as they sometimes can look like not from this planet. The typo they use (do), the music they use (do), they videos they use (do). Really experimental, and (imho) fucking great.

Two months ago, domin8tr from kosmoplovci contacted me (I was very happy that the guys who did the music for the second part of kolonija contacted me :D) regarding one of my "old" tunes I did under the label minimalanimal (terminator) as he just played it in one of their transmissions and wanted to know if it was still online. I was very surprised, since I did the tune nobody gave me any feedback about it. Well, yes, the typical stuff "trace style", "you're mad", blah blah.. But I was proud of that one because the mood/style and progression, but looks like at this moment nobody understood me. Some year later, I finally have some feedback! :)

So, if you like autechre / squarepusher / noise / experimental stuf.. You should download all their transmissions, and also, enjoy the brand new winamp radio they just setup!

UPDATE Regarding to the kind of music I'm talking in that post, I just realized that the guys of mfx now have a link in their site to download their CD1 for free. do it!

As some people are these days talking about it, I'll give a lot of background of what minimalanimal was.

minimalanimal was like a joke to all those "art" demogroups that were appearing in 2002 (like kosmoplovci). It was suposed to be like a unknown group where each member had the word "art" in the nick, as.. stARTtix, mepARTo, kickstART, McARThur, Dr.fART, nculARTe, ecART (guess who was that one ;). It was a great time, probably the most active time for the spanish demoscene. Yes, spanish, you knew that, we were just all the spanish groups making jokes. It started on the #demoscene channel in irc-hispano (as usual), and 2hours later I had the first joke, but under the group threepixels. As I was working on the prod, I didn't realized that they chose the name "minimalanimal" for that. Some weeks later I started to do some other demos under minimalanimal.

threepixels sux (a totally destroyed version of the demo minimalanimal sux by threepixels, actually, the effect is just an invert each frame without cleaning the screen.. hehe..

Until now I was using commercial tunes, but on the next one I decided to use my own one doing a live recording (as I didn't know how to use the composer in Reason ;). So for kosmoplovci / minimalanimal that's what I did. Really mental audio, mental visuals, and also I added a piece of the book "Don Quijote" to keep any watcher attention ;) Doing that one I started to understand all the noise/experimental stuff, I really worked a little bit on that one to get a nice felling and new sounds, also like a new style. Also the name for it was like dedicating the prod to kosmoplovci. It was a very insteresting prod. Some months later, at breakpoint'03, they released minimalanimla / kosmoplovci as answer, miles away from my approach tho. But was nice to see that somebody was listening ;)

The last prod I did with minimalanimal was messiah, released as well at breakpoing'03, again I did the music for it (live recording), less noise and more melody (as melodic as some people doesn't believe that I did it ;). This time I had the idea to add great demos info files as textures to keep the watcher attention. The mood of the demo was quite nice and the feedback for that one was really good.

Somehow (mainly because I moved to london after that one, and the days of nothing to do living at my parents flat were over), that was the las prod I did for minimalanimal, just when I started to understand everything.

I have to say that all that was thanks to 3pxstudio, so, kudos to mac, tho I think he wasn't really proud of me for using his tool to do that kind of stuff O:)

Some weeks ago, sergeeo started an interesting topic in escena.org forums. He was complaining about the concept of live nowadays. Now, anybody can do a live, get a copy of Reason, some presets, a MIDI input and that's enough. Years ago a live was a couple of people performing each one with a different instrument. Actually, the rock scene is still being like that as you know.

I guess the problem is just calling the reason live, as live. I think we should just call perform / performance / gig, instead of live.

However, that idea inspired me to do a real live with Reason. How's that possible? Well, just record the output, and just improvise/compose in realtime. Add sounds, create rythms, modify, destroy.. Try to make a music in realtime, quite similar to what I do with the VJ stuff, but as the main channel now (If you do a mistake doing visuals, is not really a big deal, the main channel is the music).

So, If you're wondering what exactly I did, start downloading the live! :D robk live - sergeeo's fault.mp3 (100mb+)

Btw, I don't expect you to listen more than 10min ;) but minute 39 was alright.

Enjoy!