X9

I got this unexpected news from slashdot.org :
“Kotaku is reporting that Infinity Ward, the development studio behind Modern Warfare 2, has been at the center of strange events recently. Jason West and Vince Zampella, two lead developers, have been fired by parent company Activision for ‘breaches of contract and insubordination.’ Speculation is rife as to the reasons behind this; following Modern Warfare 2’s spectacular sales figures, it seems unlikely that the studio’s performance could be to blame.”

I really think that IGDA should push foward for more cohesion in this industry. As of the moment we should look at the movie industry for answers about the futur of our profession. It is really sad to twist the passion of creators in this industry : “We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.” Kotick later stated he tries to promote an atmosphere of “skepticism, pessimism, and fear” in his company and, “We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.”.

Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision, dies and goes to Hell. The devil greets him when he arrives and says “Bobby, out of all the people up there, you remind me most of myself, so I’m going to let you choose your punishment for your first thousand years.”

The two start at a short hallway labelled “First Timers” and stop at the first door. Inside is an old man, screaming, having his skin peeled off in 1 inch strips. The devil explains “At the beginning of the day, his flesh is renewed. By nightfall, he is nothing but a pile of organs hanging onto a skeleton. This is the only punishment where you get a few hours rest every night.” Bobby feels a bit nervous about the long future ahead of him.

They walk to the next door. Inside is an even older man, screaming louder than the first man, and he’s slowly being lowered into a vat of acid. The devil explains “This punishment lasts all day. It starts at the toes and works its way up. When you are completely burned away, it starts over. Some say that after the first 800 years, though, it feels more like a massage than a punishment. I suppose it’s not so bad if you really enjoyed hot tubs when you were alive.” Bobby starts sweating at the thought of his eternal reward.

They come up to the third, and last door of the hallway. Inside is an EXTREMELY old man, screaming at the top of his lungs. A gorgeous young woman, chained to him by the ankle, is giving him a passionate blowjob. The devil grins “This punishment may look like fun, but after the first few hours, you get tired, but you may never rest; not for a thousand years. This punishment is one of endurance. Now that you’ve seen your choices, which one will it be?” Bobby Kotick doesn’t take long to decide which of the punishments he’ll undergo.
“I’ll take the last one. The blowjob one.”

The devil accepts Bobby’s choice with a nodded bow, and opens the third door. He enters in, unlocks the chain on the woman’s leg and whispers in her ear “Your replacement is here, you’ve been relieved.”

Quoting from the forum here

Until we work out the final licensing terms this summer (after I’m out of school), we’ve made a special UDK product key for nFringe that will enable the debugger for UDK-based games. The key will work until June 18, during which time we are allowing all UDK development (we aren’t distinguishing commercial/non-commercial for UDK development until that date).

Studio Name: UDK
Product Key: DB8K-6JF6-7TCW-DVMG-BBBB

To access it go to Help Menu – nFringe Licence Manager

Some things to note:

• Make sure to build your scripts with at least the following flags or debugging won’t work: UDK make -debug -full
• Set your launch executable to Binaries\Win32\UDK.exe.

After announcing this tutorial a few weeks back, I finally put in online for your learning pleasure. I do not know if I will be adding more chapters to this long tutorial, if any of you have some leads, you can always post a comment and I will look into it when the time permits me to indulge in UDK. I want to take the time to thanks again all my readers, some of you are really helpful in finding bugs that I miss. I have made some leaps and bounds in UDK thanks to everybody that shares their knowledge of this beautiful platform.

I added my test map and the source code for chapter 6 and 7 merged together, so you can look it out as a reference. Remember to support me with my annoying ads

Without further comments, here are the quick links

• chapter 7 – Creating the follower
• chapter 7 – Spawning the followers
• chapter 7 – Assign commands to followers
• Chapter 6 and 7 source code and Navmesh test map

Hi all, somebody was kind enough to supply his fix to the problem. It is indeed strange that I did not noticed that this problem disapeared while implementing the navmesh in chapter 6 of the UDK tutorial. By setting the collision cylinder, it seems the character now falls to the ground. I suspect that without this object property, there is simply no physics applied to the character each frame. I may be wrong like always we are on a course to truth anyhow. Get the fix at the end of the page here.

I have splitted a tutorial I am working on. Its about implementing navmeshes and doing some basic squad following a leader (playercontroller). I will be adding chapter 7 probably this week since I will be after most of my mid-term exams. I am thinking about changing the layout of the website as it is difficult to find the tutorial pages directly. I will probably split the website into two section, one for the wordpress blog and another for all the tutorials. I will also be working to fix some issues with the blog itself and maybe open some sort of small forum for questions although I like the fact that people can get hint in the UDK forums. I am also planning to do a small section on Ogre3d. I have been playing with the squirrel language and am trying really hard to make the eclipse debugger work. I have been inspired at some level by Unity3d and would like to try to match its editor in some way. I envision also having multiple user connect to a scene and work on it in real time, it will probably be my school final project (thinking 3 years ahead). I know all these are available at some level when working on MMO’s, but what about not working on a MMO, no such open source project that I know of exist like that.

So anyhow, you can check the new chapter 6 of the UDK tutorial. It expands on the chapter 5 code. It may contain some errors and I do want you to understand the theory more than simply copy/paste, after the 5 first chapter, you should be able to make it happen by yourselves. Send me corrections if there is something bad, I will correct it asap.

Enjoy my blog and please click on my sponsors to motivate me more for tutorials, at any rate I might be able to buy myself a beer after a successful tutorial LOL !

Chapter 6 tutorial