Blizzard's 20th anniversary contest

So, I made a movie for Blizzard's 20th anniversary contest in 48 hours.

I really hadn't planned to enter, but Paus convinced me that I had to, at least, try if I actually came up with an idea. So I fooled around with some thoughts, but then gave it a rest, not really liking anything. Then I suddeny had a silly little idea and banged it out.

I learned that perhaps the most important thing is not to rush, though- I nearly killed my computer trying to multitask too much. I ended up losing more time with rebooting my computer and poking around inside it to see why it wasn't giving me a display than I did waiting for a render to finish to move to the next part.

Voice acting was done on extremely short notice, completely by amateur talent(including myself!), and thanks to Rob(the guy who plays the original Cad character) for wrangling some actors up for me while I was busy animating. Sadly, my usual suspects like TotalBiscuit wern't free on such short notice(can't blame them there, of course) which probably would have slammed th.

Given all the problems I had(including having to replace a video card during it) I'm pretty happy with the result, though I woulda liked to have had longer especially for dealing with the voice acting.

Assuming it gets into the voting round, I'm gonna need all the help I can with the votes!

Memories of days gone by...

Alienware, part II

So now, the gripping finale! I promised everyone I'd finish it by the time the Dell laptop arrives...

Where we left off...

Well, now that I've installed the replacement RAM in the Alienware(the big spiky heat sinks on them were a bit frightening to install though!) it is pretty awesome.

So, here are some more pictures!

I've gotta say, when this guy turned on it sounded somewhat scary. It made an unholy wail...


And promptly failed to boot.

Turns out that the unholy wail is the Alienware equivalent to bios beeping, and the RAM had loosened in shipping.

That taken care of, a spooky glow suffused the machine- it looks really cool in the dark.







It's a lovely thing and for once I'm glad I don't have a cat- given that a good third of the computer is fans and intakes, I shudder to think how must dust the thing is sucking up even without having a feline sucked in like a pigeon with a jet engine.

And of course, the most important part... The interior!

This is with the original RAM- I'll take a picture of the super saijan gundam spiked replacement RAM sometime soon.

And of course, the dual GeForces SLIed together like a tasty layer cake of hardware acceleration.
Yum.


A huge thanks to WeGame, and to both Gorndt and Oxhorn for keeping tabs on things, and to Alienware for promptly replacing the bad RAM! Now I need to get a couple games more recent than wow to try out on it(though it is really nice to see the WOTLK beta with max graphics/shadows enabled and still get better frame rates than my old computer with FRAPS running!). My rendering is super fast too, especially with multithreading.