This and that and stuff and things

Hello, I'm Scott, I'm in my early 40s and live in Nottingham, UK. My main hobbies/interests are computer graphics and machinima, also software developing using Java / Javascript / PHP / JQuery. I make CGI videos using Moviestorm, iClone, Muvizu and Blender... short films, a comedy series called "The Duleks" and general geekery with Blender. As for software developing, I wrote "Satscape" a free satellite tracking program for Windows, Mac and Linux. "Unifuze", a web-based all-in-one social network website (twitter, facebook and other social sources all on one page). Also making two Minecraft add-ons "Twinecraft" - a twitter client for Minecraft, and "Sim-U-Kraft" adds helpful AI characters into the game that will help you build, mine, farm etc. Also currently working on my own 3D action/strategy game written in Java using the jMonkey game engine. Anyway, that's me... so, how've you been?

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Bryan Fuller Interested In New ‘Star Trek’ TV Series Kevin Yeoman, screenrant.com

Even though his hands are plen­ty busy work­ing on the Mun­sters reboot titled Mock­ing­bird Lane, and now that his plans for the Han­ni­bal tele­vi­sion series have revealed an ambi­tious seven-year sto­ry­line, one would thi…

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bbc.co.uk

Sci­en­tists claim to have invent­ed their own ver­sion of Doc­tor Who's famous sonic screw­driv­er.

Finally!

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BBS version of Google takes you back in time, won't hog your phone line James Trew, engadget.com

If the third digit of your birth year is a nine (or heck, a zero), you'll like­ly never have expe­ri­enced the true agony joy that was BBS or Bul­letin Board Sys­tems. Well, thanks to nos­tal­gic devel­op­er Nor­bert Land­stein­er, you can take a…

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IKEA to Build Entire Neighborhood Alex, neatorama.com

Con­cep­tu­al design by Land­Prop Ser­vices

You can get fur­nish­ing for your home from IKEA. Heck, you can get an entire house from IKEA, but the giant Swedish com­pa­ny ain't done yet: it wants to build an entire neigh­bor­hood!

The peo­p…

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Gosh, it's been ages since I made any animation/machinima videos. I've been busy playing with my other hobby; writing software. I've been making an add-on for the Minecraft game called "Sim-U-Kraft" that extends the gameplay with aspects of The Sims and Sim city. The minecraft community have been amazing providing suggestions, bug reports and even helping out writing a manual and wiki for it in their own time! I've been very inspired by the creator of Minecraft, "Notch", who single-handedly (until recently), created this game on his own from scratch and went on to release it as an indie game making millions of Euros. So, I'm having a go at writing my own game from scratch, probably going take a year to get to public beta, but I find coding a very enjoyable pass-time, pity it sucks doing it as a job ;-) I'm using the jMonkey game engine, which is 100% java, which means Windows, Mac, Linux and Android platforms, I did try the Unity engine, but I don't think its suitable for this project, and I don't particularly like the C# programming language. The game itself will be a 3D action/strategy/open-ended game with lots of silly humour, set on an alien world that has lots of similarities to earth. Here's a screenshot of what the game area looks like so far, perched on top of a sky-scraper.

Added fog and depth-of-focus effects yesterday, which make it look a lot more professional, although I am aiming for more about the gameplay and less about how cool/sick/wicked the graphics are! Anyway, still a long way to go.

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Been playing around with the Mac speech recognition, seems to work great, even AppleScripted my own 'whats the weather like' command....oh, and theres nothing funnier than getting your mac to swear.

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Yay! Fixed my PC. The CPU fan had rattled slightly loose causing the CPU temp to rise to a toasty 85ºC, which caused the CPU to slow its processing down. Now idling at a more confortable temp of 30ºC.

Shame I missed the Machiniplex Forum in Second life, I was looking forward to it.

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The latest Duleks episode (4) seems to have gone down well, 260 views on youtube after 2 days and quite a few more comments than I usually get, most of my videos get 260 views after several months!

Not sure why, but it seems "The Duleks" is more popular with my non-machinima friends/followers than it is with Machinima friends/followers. Now obviously the Moviestorm community isn't going to be huge fans of the show, as its made entirely in iClone.

Anyway, Episode 5 is written, cast and ready to start making, but I'm putting it to one side and going to do a 'serious' project next - not going into details yet, but it will hopefully be another "lovely" short video that might even make you cry. Also for this project, I'm going to try out a technique I've been playing with which will blend iClone and Moviestorm seamlessly, no, not just regular green-screening, a little more advanced, I want to have the best of both worlds, the ease of animating characters in moviestorm combined with the soft-shadow-photo-realistic loveliness of iClone.

If you haven't seen the new episode yet, here's episode 4 of "The Duleks" - enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWIR1sYohbw Oh and BTW, I've switched off Google Buzz, its ok, but Tumblr currently does it better, maybe once google work on it a bit more things will change, but for now, it goes on the wait-and-see pile along with Google Wave. :-)

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My sister was supposed to be on the BBC show "Crimewatch" tonight... no, not as a criminal !! She was going to be "woman pretending to type" in some b-roll footage of a police station, but it looks like she was cut out of that particular segment of the show.

I never realised how funny Crimewatch is, I didn't think it was a comedy. The reconstruction videos are hilarious. I must parody it one day :-) and of course the lovely Kirsty Young co-hosting the show with "token asian-bloke", she did a brilliant performance with 'some chief inspector'. Very convincing, it's as if she was about to cry at one point. Brilliant! oscar-winning!

Hang on, that photo-fit looks just like me...maybe I should hand myself in?

EDIT / CORRECTION : She was in it after all, 3 frames of out of focus, 'depth of field' footage, basically she's a pink blur....Yay!

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The Duleks : Reallusion Blog Film of the week... YAY!!!

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Mmmm, my favourite kind of dumplings... Cassette dumplings. :-)

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This was the view outside my window today.... No really! It's not fake! #UKSnow

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Prodding a cat, sleeping on the warp-drive core.

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New 'Lovely' short film

Originally posted to my old blog 22nd August 2009

I’ve was working away making sets for my ‘in production’ Sci-fi machinima mini series, when I was struck by inspiration to make a kind of music video/short film for Julianne Regan’s rendition of the traditional Irish folk song “She moved through the fair”. I’d actually made notes about it a year ago, but never got around to making it.

I dropped what I was doing and made it over the course of about 4 days (Been off work on leave this week, which was handy). It’s turned out to be quite lovely, and a vast departure from the usual machinima that I make. I’ve been getting some great responses from the machinima community, could be my most popular peice so far! THANK YOU EVERYONE!

Anyway, here it is, hope you like it too…