Sketchy rants

The M-77 ‘Toasty’ Mech, with dual flamethrowers. Generally used to cut off routes and destroy buildings at close range. It has an armoured fuel tank and uses a special type of propellant that will not be ignited by conventional arms fire, to prevent detonation during combat, but the ‘Toasty’ still has lighter armour than most mechs simply to reduce the weight. The fact that not only are it’s flamethrowers exposed, they also take up the entire side of the head means that it’s primary weapons are prone to being damaged to disabled with depressing regularity. Despite this, the Toasty is (ironically) often considered the most reliable light mech in terms of stability and the possibility of overloading.

(WIP texture)

I drew some concepts for stuff. Why? Because I was bored, that’s why

Tonight, I got to sample the wonders that are memory leakage in the JailBreak Source mod for Half-Life 2. Basically, it means that the game was gradually corrupting and collapsing around me as I played. It was trippy. It was also quite amusing, in a roundabout and probably unhinged sort of way. Bizarrely, it didn’t crash: I was able to play three full games (ie the map switched three times - I’m not talking about rounds here) until it got to the point where it was simply unplayable: [i]everything[/i] was corrupted, making it impossible to see where the hell I was actually going. In any case: pictures! (note: black walls and textures are from textures that were corrupted during the game. Corrupted GUI elements, meanwhile, are quite obvious.)

Other fun things I didn’t get a chance to take screenshots of:

• Broken animations (which just reset to the ‘default’ reference pose), most notably with the minigun thing.
• Corrupted GUI for the points listing in the top corner, making it impossible to tell how many I actually had
• Spray tags that weren’t
• Sprites that lost their transparency at random parts of their animation

Bleh. Been bug hunting in the latest dev version of Spring. It seems someone messed with the render, it’s resulted in some really bizarre results…

Using the latest PURE alpha, the game is utterly unplayable.

Using a random WIP mod of mine (I have several), the results are even more confusing.

Ingame, things look normal, and the frame rate is sound… until you notice some weird errors such as below

Then, when a unit is selected, the framerate just keels over and dies, only to recover when the unit is unselected:

(selected. Note the FPS counter in the corner)

(unselected. Again, note the FPS in the corner)

Less overdone version of the AK

This was going to be a remodel of the AK for the CA project, but I got a bit carried away. I think I overdid it.

Concept art for:

Dagara, from Last Flight of the Icarus: the ‘Sergeant’ (technically Major) leading the ThunderFlash team.

I think I captured him quite well. He’s a bit like a toned down womanizing version of Kamina. He’s also a pretty decent person - a rather rare find in the Last Flight of the Icarus world.

And Alex from the Projector Club: the highly cynical and sarcastic club president

Messed up the shadows around the legs.

This was done for a variety of reasons:
1) In the test comic, Alex was frequently mistaken for male by the people I showed it to. Hopefully, this version is more feminine
2) Fix the damn proportions!
3) Muck around with art styles (I’m starting to take after the Code Geass and Ouran Host Club style)
4) I haven’t done any Projector Club stuff for a while
5) Fun.

Incidentally, Alex is meant to be looking rather sarcastic/cynical here, but it’s too hard to tell. It’s my own fault: the size here is the actual size she was drawn. If I’d used a higher resolution (such as in the test comic, which uses an actual A4 size canvas) I’dve been able to make her facial expression a little more obvious, along with all the other benefits. The eye’s would also be more than just circles of colour (which they are at the moment, due to the low resolution)

Things various sites and folk did for April fools:

XKCD, Dinosaur comics and Questionable Content all redirected to one another

The Phoenix Requiem had a joke page revealing the main character is actually the Doctor (+ Tardis). What’s even better is that, given his personality, this would actually work quite well.

Deviantart messed with everyone’s avatars: “so i herd u liek mudkips?”

Wikipedia: Two words: Ima Hogg

The BBC: Flying penguins. They also started rickrolling people

…As did Youtube

Unencyclopedia made it’s main page the featured article of the day (plus the peanut-butter snake thing)

And I pulled an April Fools joke with one of the Library computers: a fake error screen (made using powerpoint) that would only go away when you pressed escape. It worked quite well.

Google: a plan to colonize Mars. (It seems youtube was also in on this, but I wasn’t able to check due to it being blocked on the school computers)

This is a random APC I made on sunday for the hell of it. It’s loosely based off the American Stryker APC. I also have it ingame, but I can’t be bothered getting pictures right now.