Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: "Nigel Critten" Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Cool Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 23:15:23 +0100 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 91 Message-ID: <7p7e72$i8s22@chuka.playstation.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: gameware.demon.co.uk X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Can you believe it all this time with no job (well except electrician) and now 2 opportunities present themselves, first is working on more TV and Film projects as a 3D Artist the other is working back in the games industry as a Playstation programmer. The problem is and it's happened before nothing will come of either of them and I'll be stuck here for the rest of my life waiting for Yaroze 2 to come out (with USB connection please :-) stuck between being a programmer and an artist and not doing either :( Life History everyone please turn over NOW... I started way back as a 2D artist on the Spectrum and got a job just before leaving school converting some C64 graphics over to the Spectrum & Amstrad (remember those) things were going well (I got the job because I went to school with the programmer working on the spectrum / amstrad version) and then all of a sudden THE letter arrived "please stop all work on **** **** as the programmer has left so that was that, I tried other places nobody would have me, after fiddling with the C64 graphics and programming and producing a nice little BASIC shooter featuring the then hero of the day "Thing On A Spring" I sent it to Gremlin they didn't like it :-( so I carried on producing another BASIC game "ICE Warriors" you had to pick up lumps of ice from one side of the screen and move them to the other without getting killed (Yes a shit idea but I was young) and then I started programming in Amiga BASIC got a workable version of Flying Shark running in BASIC - only one level - (Not an easy thing to do just ask anyone) then I found STOS on the ST and hated it, then found AMOS on the Amiga and loved it, I got into Assembly programming here never looked back (well yes I did) I wrote a couple of extensions for AMOS the wonderful Sticks extension which allowed you to use Sega's MegaDrive pads on the Amiga (using all the buttons) and a thingie that allowed you to plug another 2 joysticks into the parallel port. The next extension was my crowning glory the AGA Extension, this started out after joining the AMOS Club with Aaron Fothergill we got talking about stuff and his new game Jetstrike, he wanted to do an AGA version so I said yeah I can do an extension to help there (lying through my teeth) but he sent me some info on AMOS I hacked around I ended up replacing the AMOS Copperlist (remember those) and replaced it with my own sparkly one that allowed you to carry on using AMOS functions to draw to the screen but in 256 colours, we then went on to do the CD32 version (remember those, are these remember those things getting annoying yet ;-) and I upgraded the Sticks extension to support the flashy new CD32 joypad and all 11 buttons (OHHH) and that was it game released did nothing special my AGA extension was sold to someone who marketed it after paying me to finish it, through all this I was learning Lightwave then 3.5 it had just been unbundled from the Video Toaster and was the hottest thing around, so I let my programming drift a bit, I never finished a game in AMOS despite starting a couple, I was contracted to speed up a couple of games for the same people who published jetstrike and was asked to re-write Harold the Hairy Hermit (cool platform game) but they went bust just after I started work, I finished one level and an ECTS demo (I have since converted it to an ADF file so I can run it under WinUAE (I might even put it on the web site one day) (BTW It's a bit broken but funny, it even had a real-time shadow on the title screen). The PC came into my life when newtek released version 4 of Lightwave, it was faster on the PC so I followed it, I still used the Amiga as it was as fast as the PC in those days (a P75) but the display was lower-res. I've been working with Lightwave ever since, last year I went to work on Lost In Space (using Lightwave) and then as I said at the top nothing. So I'm now in that what to do situation, I love programming, apparently the system this company has is great, some top guru's hack out the 3D Engine and Dynamics Engine and the rest is a case of moveforward X etc. I'm certainly not up to writing a 3D Engine, they are also down to work on the new consoles, Nintendo, Sega and Playstation2 which is very very tempting, I certainly want Yaroze 2 and if it was released tomorrow I would buy one. But this other job is another love of mine working on TV and Film CGI it's just such a cool thing to do... Now if you actually read all that all I can say is WHY, I only wrote it to see if I could work it out as I typed ;-) but I couldn't... There is always a part of me that says it would be more fun to keep these as hobbies and get a proper job (as everyone told me when I was at school) I would love to be a producer or something like that telling everyone what to do that sort of thing, I would also like to stay in the same area, the only company around here is Promethean Designs and I've already worked for them (it wasn't in the above history as I would rather forget that particular year of my life, shit conditions, shit money, shit game--- VR Powerboat (remember that - no nobody does) and I hear there latest game was rejected by Sony's testing procedure, laugh I certainly did. LOVL (that VERY LOUD) So it goes on will this post never end... I can imagine everyone seeing the number of line/size of this a thinking it is something really important about the Yaroze 2 but no, I bored, the newsgroup has been REALLY quite recently and I'm about to run this through the spell checker so that must be the end. Expect my biography to be on Amazon.com very soon :-P Nigel.