If you haven't looked, Scene 5, Page 1 and low res version are up! Look at that before you look at what is below. Comments on Scene 5 are in paragraph four.
You like movies, don't you? Then why are you cringing? Don't worry, it's only 56 kB. It's far less than the picture above.
If you haven't looked, Scene 5, Page 1 and low res version are up! Look at that before you look at what is below. Comments on Scene 5 are in paragraph four.
You were expecting maybe Santa Clause? Certainly not. This is the famed Scene 5 and it's almost all it is cracked up to be. The first page is pretty decent if I do say so myself. A little bit of a lesson for this. Even though this is not actually the Making Of section, I slept through last night's Making Of, so I hope you won't mind having Scene 5 and a lesson to that. I'm really only 5 hours behind. It's not like you'd have read it by now anyway. Anyway, I really had some big stuff going on. As you may remember, AS3DMD version 2 is not cooperating in the slightest. So I'm working with version 1 and it is nice yet primative and buggy. Not that version 2 is any better. The main bug that I fixed tonight is the alpha blending bug. You see, whenever I do Alpha blending, certain important objects (Jav, Shotty Guy, and Co) are hidden by it. The funny thing is that I can see the thing behind it. So it acts like a window to the soul of Jav. Hehehe. Not what I want. I looked at all the code and tried one thing after another. Finally I try messing with the order of rendering. I can't seem to figure it out when finally I make the connection, there are two frame objects. One is being rendered before the other. Guess which is being rendered first? The one with the transparent stuff. Do you understand the logic? If you render transparent stuff and then render stuff on top of it, the stuff on top won't show up at all. There's the z buffer and the alpha and no blending unless the blended is rendered after the unblended. Get it? Well, it's important. Just look at those beautiful shots! Jav's Shot Scattering Song blasts those shotgun pellets into the walls. I'm going to redo a few of those shots when I can get AS3DMD1 working again. It hasn't worked in over an hour. Thank goodness I got enough shots for Page 1 before its brain flew the coop. None of the skinned meshes are being loaded. The next few paragraphs are kinda tough to understand, but you'd do good to read it.
Today, I will tell you a story of a grenade launcher that spit fire. I was in the trenches of WWII 1944. My platoon had been wiped out by weakly armored, heavily gunned panzer tanks weeks earlier and I hadn't seen a single person friend or foe since. I could hardly say that I had before either. But that is neither here nor there. I was walking in mud a foot deep in a wet trench four feet deep. I didn't know at the time, but there was a river feeding my current situation two hundred yards to my left. To find anything was my only goal. I could not see a single thing besides myself and the trench I was stuck in. I wasn't literally stuck, but I wasn't going anywhere. Certainly I would walk upon an enemy troop at some point and be happy as I was shot by the only people I could call my friends. Upon finding any enemy no matter how crude, I will announce to him in his language as best I can that he is my best friend. I am no traitor or coward, but here I am. I am in a trench built to protect soldiers from an ever-coming onslaught of evil troops. The troops that were supposed to be protected by these trenches were long killed. The evil that had killed them are hundreds of miles behind me. Why should I have to follow them to be killed? Surely I'll never catch them at my pace. The best way to find someone would be to head right into where I am sure that evil lurks. I dropped my rifle during the mess. Perhaps that is why the tank didn't strive to fire an expensive round at me. Or perhaps it's because I was headed bravely in the exact opposite direction of the entire world. Indeed I had drifted far into the place where it is impossible for people to go. I knew that for a fact. How did I know that? Because I stopped hating. There's no better sign. Well, well, I've found a muddy ramp out of the trench. I'm not going to make a quip about getting out of a rut in a bad place. I can only think of myself and I don't know why. Isn't there someone else out here? Can't I mail-order a Popular Science magazine? This is my dilemma. Being alone makes me more afraid than staring down a tank or a rifle. I believe that it's probably only because I'm not staring down a tank or rifle. I was afraid then. Would I be afraid when I saw the next row? It doesn't matter. Throw myself on the ground. I'll be missed if I don't make myself big enough a target, I'll sit up. As my arm pushes off the ground, I feel something metallic and laminated pressing against my hand. Not a rifle. This is thick. I look down and to my horror, a terrible machine of war is in my hand. A grenade launcher has been ditched by a fleeing enemy troop. Empty of course, but it's quite a piece of work. Really a portable horizontal mortar. It had no real practical use. It made an impressive bang and put a hole in the ground. People always run away before it explodes, but it certainly makes people run. Perhaps the grenade is the weapon of the enemy coward. Firing a weapon that will ensure your target will retreat. But of course the enemy could advance, but who would want to? Picking up this hefty piece fo metal, I can understand what the soldier who carried this felt. He was young and ready to die. It's a perfect combination for those with money on their mind. I look down the barrel expecting to see some gory detail. There is none. I could tell you that the barrel has been violated by the ammunition that has fired from it, but I don't think that counts. Innuendos hardly mean anything on the battlefield. When your CO tells you, "Come here," you hardly care about adolescent puns. Indeed that was my fireteam leader's famous last words, but he said it with less conviction in his voice. Certainly he found his words as fitting as I did. On the horizon, the sun is rising. Orange and green mix in a waving diffraction pattern. A physicist such as myself can make comments on the irony of the fact that this is my first and last time to see such a sight. I squint to get a better view and my pupils dilate to the size of the bullet headed my way. My eyeballs detach from my head, and I get a perfect view of my beloved grenade launcher behind the sun. My vision was blurred, but that is to no matter; my best friend stands above my corpse checking my pulse. He stops a built-in reflex to seal the wound; he must have been a nurse. But he thinks it is a good idea to pretend to his friends that he got a kill as I bleed to death. Don't worry, I'll thank you on the flip side, bud.
