Machinima for Dummies

A few pieces of news for the Azerothians in our midst:

• Uber-Machinimator Baron Soosden has been hired by the venerable Machinima site Machinima.com. He’ll be acting as Community Manager there, and also producing new Machinima for them - at least one new series, apparently. Full post here.

• There’s another feature-length Machinima piece on the horizon: MMMovie has released their first 10 minutes. It’s a pretty good piece, with great writing and voice acting, in a very “Scary Movie” style - I laughed quite a bit. Having said that, I’ll be interested to see if they can keep it up for a full 90 minutes, or if it starts to drag.

• Finally, there’s a new Blizzard Machinima piece on the horizon: they’ve released the trailer for the new Fury of the Sunwell patch. As always, it’s quite impressive Machinima work, although I didn’t feel it was as polished as earlier efforts like their Black Temple backstory piece. Some lovely shots, though.

It’s interesting to note how even high-budget game creators like Blizzard have trouble competing with their own fans - certainly, you could argue that Baron Soosden’s work has been of higher visual standard than some of Blizzard’s!

Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life) , will step down as CEO. Rosedale is quick to confirm that his work with Linden Lab will continue, so this is more of a “step sideways” than a “step down”.

A lot of changes and disruption recently among the familiar Linden faces. What repercussions this will all have for Second Life remains to be seen.

Via Massively and LinuxInsider.

That was not the best time for our longterm trackback problem to blossom into a full-fledged Denial of Service. Still, we seem to have fixed it now, I hope.

Apologies for the breakdown in service.

This is the worst news I’ve ever reported in a blog post.

Peter Rasmussen, director of “Rendevous”, “Killer Robot” and “Stolen Life”, has died.

I held Peter in great regard both as a friend, a colleague and an extraordinarily talented filmmaker. Everyone involved in Machinima is lessened by this loss.

And it’s another Second Life post. Damn you people, stop creating clever stuff!

One of the huge downsides of Second Life for a while has been the lack of lipsynching - there’s a fake you can do by playing a video on the face, but that’s about it.

However, MM Alder has recently released a new tool which offers limited 3D “lip flap” - no phoneme recognition (voice recognition-based lipsynch) or even Half Life-style volume-controlled lipsynch, but at least it does give simple 3D mouth movement when a character is talking.

There’s a very detailed and interesting post over on the Second Life wiki talking about the approach behind this lipsynch tool, some tweaks that Machinima creators can use to create better lipsynch, and the limitations of the current techniques. Sadly, once again this tool is limited by access to source code - the SL Voice code is apparently not open right now, and so it’s not possible to make the lipsynch more accurate.

We’ll add it to the list of things that will suddenly get better as and when bits of SL become Open-Source…

Even so, this is a great tool, and should be a lot of use for SL Machinima creators.

Thanks to Frank Fox for the tip.

I’m not doing a very good job of taking some quiet time, am I? Still, this one definitely deserves a post. It’s sad news, but it seems to be true: Stage 6 is shutting down.

Stage 6 is one of the premier choices for top-quality (divx) video hosting. It’s popular throughout the machinima world, but World Of Warcraft machinimators in particular are absolutely in love with it. The loss of this site is going to be a major blow. The site will close its virtual doors in just a few days time, on February 28th 2008. All hosted videos (and everything else besides) will be lost.

The official announcement on the Stage 6 site gives the reason for the shutdown as basically financial:

“So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that.”

There’s not a lot of time to make alternative arrangements, so if you currently host on Stage 6, you need to stop what you’re doing right now and investigate some alternatives. Thankfully, there are several available.

Yet again, we thank moo Money for this one. She gives good suggestions for alternative hosting in her original post on WoW Insider.

I know Hugh said we’d be going quiet for a wee while, but I had to make a quick post when I saw this: the Havoc physics engine (which is the physics engine behind all the games that tout realistic physics as one of their selling points) will be released for free in May.

Now, this is not the quantum-shift for the machinima world that you might at first think. Make no mistake – Havoc is a stunningly complex beast. It’s effectively a code library on which to build game engines. It’s unlikely to see much use in the machinima world, even from the hardest of hardcore hackers. Nonetheless, you never know. The community has surprised us before, and it’ll do so again. Maybe a dazzlingly clever use of this free physics toolkit will be the next way they do so. So, I’m doing my civic duty and posting about the imminent release of the code, just in case somebody far clever than me is reading and gets inspired. Fingers crossed.

Via kotaku – thanks to Chris Ollis for bringing this to our attention in the first place.

You may have noticed we’ve gone a bit quiet. This isn’t because the Machinima world has suddenly stopped, or we’ve dropped dead, or decided to stop writing. Far from it.

We’re just taking a short break. Johnnie’s working like a mad thing over at Moviestorm, whilst I’m taking some time off after four and a half (!) years of BloodSpell. But we’ll be back soon.

See you then.

A fairly mundane post on the official Second Life blog yesterday kicked off a discussion about the merits and practicalities of open-sourcing Second Life (a prospect which we’ve discussed on this blog previously). Unusually, a Linden Lab official chimed in to explain that open-sourcing Second Life is something that they’d still “dearly like” to do, but a number of practical security considerations have to be overcome first.

Whilst I might take issue with the assumption that open-source = untrusted, this is still very encouraging news, especially after the shock did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed departure of Cory Ondrejka last year.

Thanks to Tari Akpodiete for flagging up this comment thread for us!

Boingboing has just reported that Second Life’s Chief Technical Officer, Cory Ondrejka, has just left Linden Labs citing “irreconcilable differences”.

Since he was the man behind the movement to Open-Source both the viewer and the server, I can’t help but wonder if those differences had something to do with the apparent reversal in policy on open-sourcing the SL servers which we reported on recently. If so, things don’t look good for Second Life Open-Source right now.

EDIT (Johnnie): The original story was broken on Massively by Moo Money. There are a few follow-ups linked from there too, including Cory’s official response.