More Cocktail Teasers

A few more teaser shots for the new cocktail stuff.  Soon, drinks will be served by this nice gentleman, rather than teleporting directly into the hands of the partygoers.

Of course, eventually you could choose to be the waiter or waitress, and that would certainly make poisoning the Generalissimo’s drink pretty easy, however you might have a hard time hiding the microfilm in the book…

By the way, are these inline animated gifs (another one here) a good thing or a bad thing?  They’re certainly easier for simple stuff than uploading to vimeo or youtube1.  They are kind of big, though.

  1. You may have noticed I’ve switched to vimeo because their compression is much less objectionable at 4:3 aspect ratio.  For some reason, youtube doesn’t turn on h.264 unless you’re 16:9, which is idiotic. []

24 Comments

  1. Doeke says:

    I think animated gifs are perfect for these sorts of things. Keep up the good work! :D

  2. Jimaroonie says:

    animated gifs are the future but only if you let us know what you make them in :)

    • checker says:

      It’s a playblast from maya (which just means record the current viewport with the hardware renderer), output as a bunch of frames, and then sucked into an old copy of imageready, which will optimize gifs.

    • checker says:

      It annoys me that I forgot to rotate the two martinis relative to each other.  Sigh, perfectionism.

    • Jimaroonie says:

      Hey thanks. Good ol’ imageready, ah I remember missing that when they got rid of it… :'(

      Just discover PS3+ still has animated gif capability though you have to “trick” it to load the gif as a sequence. It seems to work fine after that.

  3. Guynoir says:

    When you upload videos it’d also be great if you didn’t use vimeo. They don’t let m mobile users (like myself) view the videos. 

    Youtube is much better. Gifs are good as well.

    Thanks!

    • checker says:

      Yeah, I just noticed that.  I think this is because of their new “iframe” based embed system.  Did their old flash one work for you?  I guess it depends on whether you have flash on your phone, which is probably not true right now. The problem is youtube’s quality is so incredibly horrible for 4:3 resolutions, it’s like night and day.  Youtube only seems to turn on the modern compressors for “HD” videos, and so you have to upload at 720p to get it, and then on top of that, when you embed at a different size, it aliases into a mess.  I wonder, would making the mp4 available help mobile users but still allow me to use vimeo?

    • Ian says:

      I’m in the same boat. The old flash ones used to work on my phone till they decided that because some users couldn’t see it no mobile users good.

  4. You’re such a cocktail-tease Mr. Hecker! *groan*

    • checker says:

      Hah, I didn’t even think of that.  It was late, and I couldn’t come up with a funny title, but I guess my subconscious had my back, humor-wise.  :) 

  5. You can save a triangle on that drink platter if you weld the middle vert to one of the edge verts. Same deal with the bottoms of the cups.

    • checker says:

      Yeah, I’m so not at that point yet.  For example, I think I’m accidentally outputing everything as double-sided triangles right now as well.  No time to clean that stuff up right now!  Think of it as performance in a bank account for use later.  :)

  6. Ron says:

    I think animated gifs work great as well. If you’re concerned about bandwidth, you could always do what awkward zombie does and submit them all to a image sharing site (eg: photobucket, imageshack, etc.)

    • checker says:

      I was mostly just worried about whether they annoyed people, not so much the bandwidth (hopefully I’ll eventually have that problem, traffic-wise :).

  7. Bara Kathawa says:

    The animated gifs are fine, but I’d prefer to see something a little more interesting than a simple rotation (perhaps an animation of what the above gentlemen’s walking animation would look like?) :)

    I continue to look forward to this game, and I’m very excited by it.  Good luck!

    Bara

    • checker says:

      Yep, I plan to post more real videos after PAX insanity is over (doing reasonable video takes so much time, sadly), I was just wondering if people minded the gifs for really simple stuff like this, but it sounds like people are cool with them.  I think they’re fun!  :)

    • Bara Kathawa says:

      If I may make another suggestion, it would be great if we could get email reminders when someone replies to a comment we make :)

      Bara

    • Chris Hecker says:

      Okay, I just installed a plugin that does this. This is my test post to see if it works.

      Yep, seems to work, enjoy!

    • Bara Kathawa says:

      Thank you very much :)

      Bara

  8. Remi Gillig says:

    Can’t wait to see how you handled IK for picking a glass from the tray :)

    You could still keep animated GIFs but also provide an mp4 version which is playable on most phones and even better try the new tag in HTML5 but I don’t know if you can put it on WordPress or even if there are any phones supporting it yet.

  9. Tim S says:

    I like the GIFs for single animations

  10. alfie275 says:

    Waiter’s face sort of looks like Matt Smith’s (actor who plays The Doctor in Doctor Who).

  11. Gavin Clifton says:

    Random question: What file format are you using for your meshes and animation? Is it a common format or have you rolled your own?

    • checker says:

      I’m using a really old and heavily modified version of Cal3D, which is an open-source animation system.  I used it in some of the internal Spore tools, and I wrote an importer for Maya for it (which I still need to put online), and I’ve extended the file formats in obvious ways (event track, ik markup, etc), and I’m actually going to rewrite the entire thing and open source that because the Cal3D runtime is a heinous mess, but that’s what I’m using right now.

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