A Bit of Half-Life 2

28th September, 2008

So I’ve been playing through the current Half Life 2 series backwards, starting with Episode 2 and going back to the original. It is interesting to do this because you get to observe the subtle changes made to the overall visual quality of the game as DirectX and graphics card capabilities have improved.

But let’s face it, the original was so good the changes are pretty hard to spot so really all I was doing was enjoying a bit of classic gaming before heading back to university. But when I reached the Grab-the-Gravity-Gun and head for “Don’t go through Ra…” Ravenholm point, having completely played Episode 2 using mostly the Gravity Gun as a killing machine thanks to the Hunter’s resistance to bullets, I decided that keeping hold of Dog’s rollermine toy ball would be a fun experiment.

And what a BRILLIANT option it is!

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Programs That Can Destroy You

24th September, 2008

I looked away from a page for a few seconds and when I looked back this was the rather disturbing message on my screen. As adverts go, it certainly got my attention.

It was only after it had looped once that I saw that this might be being directed at viruses.

Playing with 3D in Flash

16th September, 2008

So for a few days I’ve been experimenting with various bits of code, using a Kirupa tutorial as a starting grounds, in order to create the effect of rendering 3D objects in Flash. It has been a bit hard trying to figure out how to do things but eventually I wrote a few functions that basically put a cube of cubes (the basis for my flash game idea) onto the screen and could be rotated in three dimensions.

This was all well and good but now I have been stumped by figuring out how to sort the z-order and making the drawing more efficient by ignoring parts that are hidden behind other parts.

Random Dark Photos

13th September, 2008

I felt like playing around with my camera by taking a few more long time exposures (ten to fifteen seconds) of dark scenes where the light source might be my glow brick or some other faint source.

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Finished Matt Wreford Site

12th September, 2008

I have completed the production and implementation of a new site design for Matt Wreford, which can now be viewed on the website at http://www.mattwreford.com/, with only a few significant changes to my initial idea.

I have based the site on WordPress, using it as a Content Management System allowing for the quick adding of portfolio entries and amendments.

Essentially the pages have been used for each section with their own templates, and posts can be categorised so that they will fall into each of the three portfolio sections and with a bit of PHP will display in the right portfolio page.

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Oblivion

7th September, 2008

Thought I’d throw in a couple of screenshots I’ve taken of TES4 Oblivion. I absolutely enjoyed playing it the first time around, and it had a similar wow factor to the extent of when I first tried out Half Life 2. Once I’d got as much out of the fighting and looting aspect I turned to simply exploring the absolutely vast landscape and admiring the scenery.

(Vilverin is one of the first sights a player gets emerging from the prison/sewer tunnel at the start of the game.)

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