This might or might not find its way into Scene 6. It is, however, the product of an hour or so of my investigation into a 3d modeller that only does architecture and is very frugal and easy to use. I simply went into MilkShape3D and built this house using mainly the mathematical methods. I also tried to keep track of exactly what I was doing and what would be hard for a program to do. One thing that is very important in architecture is ability to place doors and windows. MilkShape3D has a tough time, but since it is very flexible, it allows me to make a very low-polygon house. Two windows and one door, Indoors and outdoors, 100 faces with a single 256x256x8 texture. That is a frugal house. Of course, if you want to render 100 of these houses, you'll slow down your cpu majorly. And that is a frugal house. A five room house would take about 200 faces. That would bring a GeForce2 down to 20 fps or less. So what does a person do? Number one: portal culling. You simply split the house into two meshes: indoors and outdoors. The indoors can be very, very complex because they won't be displayed when you are outdoors. The outdoors has to be 10-20 faces. The outdoors will be displayed along with every other house when you are outside. When you walk through the door of a house, though, the indoors for that one house is rendered. It can be up to 5000 faces on a GeForce2. This is a version of what is known as portal culling. It is usually done with indoors-only games like Quake or Anarchy-Online missions and such. When you walk through a door or open a door, the program notices it and will display the stuff inside. As I said, each indoors can have 5,000 faces and plenty of textures if the target platform is a GeForce2. Windows like the one shown are a problem, though. How can you have windows if you aren't rendering the indoors? Well, check out the other windows. They are grey -- that is how. Perhaps a program could be made to render the indoors of buildings which you can see the window, but that's a bit much for me. You see, a city could have 2000 buildings each with 2000 faces indoors and 20 faces outdoors. Then at any time, you only render 20 outdoors and 1 indoors. You may think that I'm just blabbing about this "idea" I have for a new demo screenshot, right? Well, today without the aid of a c++ compiler, I wrote most of that lossless terrain compresser I was talking about. It's super fast (I assume since it's only 2 million if statements total for a 20 k triangle terrain) and it is very simple. I also wrote the code for a Accelerated Particle-2D Terrain Collision prediction algorithm. That will not only work for automobiles, but also NPCs, characters, and cameras. On the topic of cameras, I wrote the idea for a perfect camera which I have most of the code for. You see, cameras are hard to do. The FPS WASD system does not work well enough. I have an idea for a camera that will reduce calcuations by 1000%. It will use accelerated particles, but that's all I'll say for now. What I will say is today's lesson: produce. Even if your computer crashes while you're typing an inspirational paragraph, you must produce to be creative. Notice that the root word for creative is create. A misunderstood slacker is just a loser, but an artist who is misunderstood for his/her deranged work is creative loser. Even if what you create is "deranged", "evil", "stupid", or "ugly", go for it. Everyone who is creative must start somewhere. Those who are not creative do not have to start anywhere, but that's because they go nowhere. Must I brag about building my autobiographical website at age 14? What about AltSci.com at age 16? What about getting my AA degree 10 days after I graduated high school? It is the fruit of a creative mind that is the best stuff on Earth. I would not trade for money, fame, or power. Of course, I would trade javantea.com for my next month's rent, but that's a different story*.
Here are two of the four things that I've worked on today. I'll explain the two in the picture, I'll give you a little lesson and then I'll explain the other two things that I've been working on. First off, The text is something I did for fun and possibly for use. You probably can guess where I'll put it. I can put it on CD covers, website splash pages, banners, and wherever can hold something that big and currently uses the lame Verdana font. So here it is. I'll probably color it some wild color, too. I tried using emissive, diffuse, and ambient color to make it look cool, but I didn't take a picture of it. How did I make it? By hand. I took boxes and extruded them a bunch. This is the end result. How did I make the "a"? I simply took a box and extruded it upward twice. Then I took the top and the bottom squares of its left side, ne doso? I extruded them to its left. Then I took the vertexes and welded them. Then I took the new left side and extruded it rightward. Then I extruded up, up, and left. It's just like DDR, ne? Okay, the more important thing that I worked on was the driver. The driver is simply DA 14 in a driver position inside the car. I'll make a new skin when I can. Not yet, though. What is cool about this are two things: first, the animation is perfect. First, he turns the car on. You'll find out why the SUV isn't running at the start of Scene 6. He turns the invisible steering wheel to the right, looks right, hits the breaks, and shouts. Then he hits the gas pedal. Then he looks forward. Then he looks left, hits the break, turns the steering wheel left. This will be perfect for both the manga and the anime. For the manga, I'm going to make a subplot of him being the type of guy that GTA3 is based on. He's driving this SUV full of AK-47 wielding maniacs after Jav and he's going to actually get to talk. Not much, but a bit. You see, I've given far too much monologue to Jav and no one has really talked to him except sensei and each scene has a one-liner. JF Final will be stretched out to many, many pages. I've written down in my dev XML all about how I'm going to expand Scene 1 into 5-10 pages instead of 3. You see, I was afraid to expand my manga for some reason and I still am. Part of that is that the software hasn't been perfect. Another problem is that it takes a lot of disk space. I'm a panzy when it comes to disk space, especially with this handicapped computer. You see, my workstation has a 40 GB hard drive. 10 GB was filled with JF/AltSci stuff alone. Ten more were filled with games (each game is a gig these days, sheesh). Ten more were filled with videos of mine. Of course, I have all the videos on CD and DVD, but I feel vunerable when I'm forced to use a CD-ROM. So everything goes on the hard drive. JF is one of those things. 10 GB would fill 16 CDs. I have fifty blank CDRs, but it'd also take about a week non-stop. Also, one wonders what to keep. Of course, I don't have to keep any of the screen capture bitmaps. I could zip them or even leave it to the 3D .asd files and my models. Also, there's the question of keeping source files for Making Of JF files. Should I keep them zipped, on CD or not at all? If I lost it all, I could simply download it from my website (which I did on this most recent crash). I also keep CDs of JF around just in case. But I guess Scene 6 will be the first scene that is longer than it should be. I'll be happy. I'll just take twice as many screen shots as I usually do and use them much less frugal. Then I'll delete all the source once I've gotten the page done. My plan is to have the first page done in one week. It shouldn't be too hard. You see, all I need is that new Jav40f model to open the door, give a huge expression, and run. Then I need the SUV and it's four occupants. If I do one model per day, I'll have it done in five days. No problem.
