Why Software Needs QA

(or Blow this for a Game of Soldiers)

Yesterday, I returned my copy of Medal of Honor for a refund due to it being faulty. I went prepared for a fight as refunding software is notorious for being "against policy" at many places.  The reason for this attitude was that my complaint was that the software was faulty, not the disc.

I had only played the game for a total of a few hours, but had hit two very similar, critical issues. In one mission I was instructed to infiltrate a warehouse only to discover I couldn't open the door. After some time searching for another way in, I became suspicious and checked on-line. It seemed many people were getting stuck in all sorts of places due to issues like this. Restarting from the last save point made no difference, I had to start the mission again from the beginning. This time, another member of the squad, who was MIA in my first run through, opened the door for me.
In the next mission, a team mate said "follow me" and ran into a building. I tried, I really did, but for some reason I could not walk through the open door! At this point I popped the disc and took it back to the shop.

Anyway.
There is no way I should be hitting bugs like this in released software. As a developer I can understand and forgive the odd issue (coding is a complicated business), but glaring errors that affect many people should really have been picked up before release and any competent play-testing should have found these issues.

I can only imagine that it was tested by people who knew what they were supposed to do and followed a precise path as it seems that some sort of event was failing to be triggered. This has been my argument for QA or testers for software in the past. Programmers should not be trusted to be the only testers of their own code, they will only test for paths they can think of and it is was they didn't think of that needs testing the most.

Star Wars RPG, What Next?

Since Wizards decided not to renew the Star Wars license for their RPG (and minis game) I have been waiting for an announcement from some other company to say they will be releasing a Star Wars game instead. So far none has been forthcoming.

I have recently been wondering about the possibility of trying to drum up support for a community written/supported RPG. I'm sure the fan base is there, we just need a few individuals to get the ball rolling and to start working on a system and rules. The eventual aim would be to become officially licensed in some way.

I had been thinking along the community driven development for my own system (which may see the light of day sometime), but with the name Star Wars there should be more people interested in getting it started.

Android 2.2.1

It's here, but no-one seem too sure about what has changed.

Well one thing has definitely been added, the ability for android to force a PIN or password on access if requested by an exchange server. Our server at work does such a thing, so while I am happy that I can now access my work e-mail, I am saddened by the fact that I no longer get to use the 9 dot pattern login.

Retro Weekend

This weekend I decided it was time to free up some space under the TV and get rid of my old Nintendo consoles. Since I had not used either the SNES or the N64 for over a year I decided it was time to move on.

Having decided to get rid, I spent some time this weekend dusting off the consoles and games and checking they were in working order before putting them on eBay. As I worked my way through the collection, checking things worked and deleting save games, I got a little misty-eyed as I recalled old friends whose save games I deleted and remembered some of my favourites from years gone by...

The upshot of this is that once the consoles and games were tested and packed up ready for sale, I decided to browse the marketplace on my new(ish) xbox and see what I could find of those games that I ended up playing more than testing. Seems a few are available for download, while others have modern-day sequels, I'll have to take a look when I have more money.

Still, I did discover the Game Room, a virtual arcade, on the marketplace and spent a little too long playing asteroids and pitfall on my modern wonder of entertainment.

XBoxing

Last night I discovered what a pain an xbox is to set up.

Maybe I'm getting soft and expect too much to just work. Maybe I was just unlucky. Maybe I should just stop whingeing and play some games.

OK, first I must admit that I did not read the instructions. I just plugged in cables where they fitted and then switched it on. That worked fine.

What came next proved more difficult.
I squeezed some batteries into the controller and pressed random buttons until something lit up. I then tried to sync the controller with the console.
I found the sync buttons pretty easier (if in doubt, look for small, unlabelled and out of the way buttons for syncing things), but I could not get the controller to sync with the console. I pressed the contoller sync and the light started flashing, so I pressed the console sync and the light started flashing. Eventually they stopped, but there was no connection. I tried in the other order. Same thing. I tried pressing both together. I tried holding one down while pressing the other. At this point I decided to read the manual.

The manual stated they should already be sync'ed (but mine was second hand) I eventually found the right page. It explained what I had already done. I tried again. It still didn't work. I kept trying. On the 4th attempt, the flashing stopped after a shorter amount of time and things moved on the screen when I waggled by stick.

I hadn't even started on the internet connection and half the evening had gone. Still the wired connection to the internet worked (although it seem rather slow to connect, hopefully this is just a first time usage issue) I don't plan on buying a wifi card for it as it costs more than a more generic (and useful) wifi-ethernet bridge.

Anyway, everything seems to be up and running now. All I need now are some games.

And a live gold account to play online.

And, apparently, some microsoft points.

And the wifi-ethernet bridge, of course.

Experiments into 3D Video

Now I don't have any fancy 3D TV or projectors, but I do have some old amber/blue 3d glasses lying around, so I thought I'd have  go at 3D  video on no budget.

I have experimented with 3D images before, using Poser and Photoshop, but this time I would be working with real-world video (not CG) so I needed 2 cameras for my DIY 3D rig. I have 2 cameras. I have a very nice Sony-Z5 for high quality video and I have a cheap little JVC Everio for anything else. The way that the amber/blue 3D glasses work (so I am informed) is the the amber image has most of the colour, while the blue provides the depth. So I decided to use the Sony for the amber (left) and the JVC for the right (blue).
The first task was to patch together a 3D rig to hold both cameras. I didn't have much time, or materials, so I came up with an interesting workaround. I set up the Sony on a tripod as usual, then used a Joby Gorillapod to suspend the JVC, upside down, from the microphone mount on the right of the camera. With a bit of trial and error I got both cameras at about the same level and zoom and started recording.

Once I had my footage I imported both into After Effects as separate compositions, created a parent composition containing the two and began the work of lining them both up. Obviously, the first thing to do was to rotate the JVC footage 180 degrees so that it was the right way up. Once I had done that, I created a solid layer in the parent composition and applied the 3d glasses effect. I will not be using this effect for the final result, but it is useful to set it up to interlace the videos while aligning.
While displaying the interlaced view in one window, I scaled, rotated, resized and distorted the JVC footage, until it was a close match to the Sony footage (as the Sony footage was to contain the details I did the work on the JVC footage).

Once the clips were aligned, I hid the solid layer and tinted the JVC composition so that it appeared in greyscale. Making sure the Sony layer was above the JVC layer, I used the Set Channels effect on the Sony layer, setting the blue channel to be sourced from the JVC footage's lightness.

Et Voilà!
(obviously you will need amber/blue 3D glasses to see the effect)

3WR: Inception

Cinematic and engrossing.

3WR: Toy Story 3

Must... not... cry...

3WR: IMAX 3D

Not very impressed.

3WR: Predators

Wanted everyone dead.

3WR: Shrek Forever After

Good. Not great.

Too Much Bluetooth

I set up my bluetooth headset to work with my laptop today for skype.
I also set up my nexus one to play music on the TV through the dock (which, it turns out it does using bluetooth).
Imagine my surprise when my laptop suddenly started talking to me! It seemed that my laptop had connected to my phone and set itself up as a headset. It then automatically answered an incoming call and put it through the laptop's speakers (and microphone) without any sort of prompt!!!
On top of all that, disconnecting the laptop as a headset caused the phone to dial my Dad!!

I think I have it sorted now by completely disabling the laptops ability to be a headset. Hopefully my work phone is not involved in this conspiracy.

3WR: Prince of Persia

highly entertaining fi... wooosh...

action packed enter... wooosh...

time travelling

First Impressions: Rotobrush

Following the (relatively quick) install of Production Premium CS 5, I imported the project files I used for producing my latest DVD into the new versions of Premier Pro, Encore and After Effects. All of them loaded fine and I saved out some CS5 versions for later use. I then jumped straight into After Effects to try and implement a shot using the new rotobrush I did not have the time and patience to do with manually controlled masks.
At one point in the show, the 2 leads are singing a duet, with a pretty full stage behind them. The problem is that to make things easier for the cameraman, and due to the camera positioning, the depth of field was pretty big. This was OK for most of the show, but in this one shot as the leads sing to one another, one of the background characters is right in the middle of the shot looking out from between them. Now I could have fixed this in CS4 if I had a lot of time. I could have created an adjustment layer and focus blurred the background, leaving the two leads in focus. This would mean manually masking out the two leads for each frame of the shot.
The shot is about 40 seconds long, that would mean manually drawing the mask for 960 frame!
With the release of CS5 the rotobrush was announced, and for me this was the decider as to whether I upgrade or not. I will be using this tool a lot.

The red will be blurred...

So I loaded up the clip, drew a stick figure over the two leads and "hey presto" they had a nice purple outline around them. It wasn't perfect, but it didn't take long to tidy up. I then hit play and watched as it process each frame in turn. When it went wrong, I corrected it then continued to play. After a while, however, it stopped tracking and simply played back, there was only a purple box around the whole screen. After some trial and error, it seemed that it would calculate 9 frames each time I made a change, then stop. In order to progress, I would make a minor change to the rotobrush area every 9 frames, while reading the manual in between.
It was some time before I realised what I was doing wrong. When the brush is used, it creates a base frame. All the changes are tracked from this frame for a limited time, so as to preserver resources. In the rotobrush view, there is a track under the timeline that highlights the base frame and displays the span (the frames that AE will rotoscope for you). By default the span was 9 frames. I simply had to click and drag the end of the span to where my effect would end and it would do it all for me. (The reason I had missed this before was than my source clip was much longer than the bit I was editing, so the track seemed to be showing a single dot when zoomed out.)
Unfortunately, due to the way it works, all changes are calculated from the base frame. Once that is set and the span extended for 40 seconds, when you click on the last frame of the span, all of the frames before that must be calculated for it to display. It still takes a long time to create the mask, but at least now it is my computer doing the work and now me!

Well, at least I know it's working in 64-bit now...

What A Wake Up!

Having watched the election results with fascination for some time last night, I was awoken this morning by a banging on my door and a very nice delivery man handing over the CS5 version of Production Premium.
I sit here now, listening the the fact that we have a hung parliament, still bewildered by the fact that hundreds of voters were turned away from the polling stations, swigging coffee to stay awake and installing new software (only had 5 hours of sleep after following the election results).
The biggest election surprise for me (and many others by the sounds of it) is that the Lib Dems have actually lost more seats than they have gained and that their overall votes have increased by only 1%.
On a local note, Oxford East is looking like a spot of Red in a sea of Blue as Oxford West has now gone from Gold to Blue.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/constituency/d47.stm

Important Note:

When creating DVDs, do not forget to credit the director.

3WR: Iron Man 2

Iron Man, improved.

3WR: Date Night

Very, very funny.

Android

So yesterday I decided that I would look into what is involved in writing an app for Android, Google's mobile phone OS.

I downloaded the various SDKs, eclipse plugins and emulators and spend about half a day setting them all up (Tip of the day, if using this in a Jazz client, change the Jazz client to use a Sun JVM instead of the default IBM one).

Once the set up was done, I jumped right in at the deep end and started to put together a UI for a very simple app designed to display a D&D character builder save file. I originally tried to build the UI using java, but nothing appeared. Puzzled, I looked through a the docs and tutorials and nearly everything used XML files to define the UI instead, so I tried that and quickly got something up and running. It wasn't pretty, but it did the job.

I'll reserve judgement until I see how hard it is to make it pretty (including the support of changing orientation to landscape).

Silent DVD?

I recently completed putting together a DVD of the Appleton Players last show, following some changes I made after review the first version. This time everything looked fine, but there was no sound on the footage of the show!

The extras I had put together had sound, and the previous version I had produced had sound, but for some reason this copy did not.

So, this morning I went back to the project and looked (and listened) to each stage only to find that the sound was not playing back in Adobe Encore. The clip in question was a Premier Pro sequence, included into Encore as a dynamic link. Opening the sequence in Premier Pro revealed that the sound existed there. I started trawling the web for answers and found that there may have been an issue with transferring the data from Premier Pro to Encore, and this is related to the cached files.

I have now spent most of the day clearing caches, reloading assets and reverting transcoded files to originals. Having tried several times, I finally have the sound back in Encore (it is writing to DVD now, hopefully the sounds will be on that too).

Lightsaber Effects

Being a Star Wars fan, one of the first thing I looked at doing when I started editing video was to create some lightsaber effects.

I trawled the internet for some examples and tutorials and found this excellent one from videocopilot.net. I tried it out on a simple animation I was working on at the time and was very impressed. Having got it out of my system, I left well alone and got on with other, more serious, bits of work.

While putting together the DVD for the latest show by my drama group, the Appleton Players, I took the opportunity to recycle some footage of a rehearsal of a sword fight and add the lightsaber effects for the amusement of all.

The clip I used was only just over 30 seconds long, but there was no way I was going to manually track both ends of two swords for the 900+ frames, so I decided to make things a little easier with motion tracking and expressions in after effects.

I followed the tutorial to set up the lightsabers and get the look that I liked, then I set about creating 4 trackers, one to track the tip and base of each sword. This was the time consuming bit. While the motion tracking tool in After Effects is OK, when you have fast moving items or light coloured items against a light coloured background, it has some difficulty. These swords were both fast moving and light against light (sigh). So, after many hours of correcting the motion tracking, I had my points plotted. By using expressions similar to the following I set the start and end position of each of the lightsabers to use these tracked points.

comp("mycomp").layer("clip.m2t").motionTracker("Tracker 1")("Track Point 1").attachPoint


With these expressions plugged in, my effects followed the action in the clip as expected. Unfortunately, I had to manually mask out items as they passed in front of the lightsabers, as shown in the tutorial, however I am hopeful that the new Roto Brush in CS5 will automate this too.


So I have my video, but a lightsaber just isn't right without that sound. So I went trawling again. I found a number of samples of lightsabers (and I already have some myself), but I was after a "clean" sound so that I can modify it as required. Eventually I found this site describing how to create you own sounds in a similar way to the way Ben Burtt did for the original film. While this is a bit too technical and long winded for what I was after, there was a download of a premixed lightsaber hum, so I grabbed that instead.


As I was using two lightsabers, I pitched one up slightly (the green one) and both slowed and pitched down the other (red), so that each had a unique sound.


The final part was to adjust the volume of the lightsaber as the sword was moved on screen so that the faster the blade is moved, the louder the buzz.


After some experimentation and research I created the following expression for the audio level of the lightsaber.


// Use the combined speed of both the tip and base of the lightsaber
totalSpeed = thisComp.layer("Green Saber").effect("Saber_Controls")("Start Position").speed + thisComp.layer("Green Saber").effect("Saber_Controls")("End Position").speed;
// Convert the speed to a volume, maximum volume of 2.5dB
vol = Math.min(totalSpeed * 0.05 - 12, 2.5);
// return the volume for left and right channels
[vol,vol]


My short clip, "Darth Mo", was finally complete.

3WR: Clash of the Titans

Original is better.

3WR: Alice in Wonderland

Not very Alice-y

Shooting Theatre (on the cheap... ish)

My purchase of a shiny new video camera at the start of the year happened to co-inside with the start of rehearsals  for this year's production of my amateur dramatics group's show.

As I have worked with our producer to film and produce DVDs of the last few shows, I naturally decided that this would make a good first project to familiarise myself with the equipment and to get a, hopefully, better quality of video this year.

I soon realised that shooting theatre, especially the amateur kind, is very different from shooting for video. When shooting for film you can set up your shots as you want them and shoot in an efficient order. With theatre, you have to work with what you've got. You start at the beginning and continue to film until the end.

I'm learning as I go along, but here is a workflow I am currently using.

Record the Rehearsals
As I am appearing in the show as an actor, I have employed a cameraman to help out (I say employed, there is no money involved, just a willing volunteer). By watching the rehearsals and making notes, the cameraman gets to know the show and knows what should be happening when. Having watched some of the previous footage we have shot, the constant zooming and panning to catch entrances can be nauseating and is caused by the camera operator not being prepared for an event and rushing to catch up.
Review the Recordings
Obvious really, but having recorded the rehearsals take the time to review the footage and note where various camera moves can be made. Also note where close-ups would be nice to have, you may not be able to use them, but it is better to have shots you can't use than to miss those you can.
Take Time Setting Up
It won't be practical, or possible, to change things once the show has started so make sure you take the time to set things up right before it begins. Work with the sound and lighting guys, or gals, to get the everything as it will be during the show. Ideally, do this for the first time during a technical rehearsal so that you have time to iron out any bugs in the system.
Record Close-Ups Beforehand
Take the opportunity to record close-ups and other, non-standard shots, during the dress and technical rehearsals when there is no audience to restrict placement of the camera. This should give you material you can drop into the video during editing to improve the composition.
Record Every Performance
Always plan on recording all performances, these are the only times you will get to record audience reactions. Besides, things can go wrong, and if you only shoot the last show, that is the performance you are stuck with. Remember also, that the more material you shoot, the more you have to work with when editing.

Creating a Bothan in Poser

As I have mentioned in a previous post, the latest RPG I am running is a Star Wars campaign with multimedia support, known as Fade to Black. I have now run the first session and will be posting some of the details of the preparation.
In the first of these posts I'll discuss the creation of a 3D character for a Bothan, a species in the Star Wars universe that one of my players is using.
The picture to the right shows what a Bothan should look like and what I am aiming for. As all except the head is basically the same as a human, I started with the basic Michael 4 figure from DAZ in poser.

The first step is to create a snout-like shape for the mouth and nose of the figure, I do this by creating a magnet with it's base located toward the front of the jaw as shown below. If you look closely, you can see the size and position of the magnet's area of effect in the image below, but you will want to configure this to your own taste.

Pull the magnet away from the head to stretch the lower face into a shape that you think is the right size for your Bothan. Once you have a shape you are happy with, you can spawn a new morph target and delete the magnet. Setting the new morph target to "1" should morph the head to show the snout.

While the basic shape is there, it doesn't look like the mouth and nose of a Bothan, but I'll come back to that later. The next thing to do is the simple task of changing the ears to the long and pointy style the Bothan has. Fortunately, the Michael 4 figure, and a number of others, comes with morphs for Elf ears, experiment with these until you find something that works for you.

OK, back to the face and here is where I cheat slightly. I bought a copy of the cat world bundle and applied the face morph to my Bothan, giving feline features to the nose and mouth.

Now that the facial features are more "Bothan-y", I need to make a few adjustments to the shape of the lower face. I created another magnet on the face and pulled the mouth down and slightly forward, one more magnet allowed me to flatten the mouth and nose as they had become pointed during the stretching.

At the penultimate step, I added some long hair. There are loads of hair props out there you can use, just find one that fits the model and suits your Bothan.

Finally, I replaced the skin texture with one of the textures from the cat world bundle and changed the colour of the texture to a more neutral tan shade. To complete the effect I also changed the colour of the eyes to a yellow-green to better suit the character.

Say hello to Teruft Tarvish, a Bothan scout and a member of Unit : Black.

Embedding Images in a Wave

OK, I'm sure this has been done before.
But after looking for a robot to automagically embed linked images into a wave, I decided to create my own.

It's pretty basic, just looks for URLs starting "http:" and ending with a known image extension. But after a quick test it seems to work OK.

If anyone wants to give it a go, just invite wog-embedder@appspot.com to your wave and type in some image URLs.

Star Wars: Fade to Black

I have been working for some time now on a new Star Wars RPG campaign named "Fade to Black".

This time around I am hoping to make it a multimedia experience and have been working away on character images, video, software and a number of other items to make the most of today's technology to enhance the role-play. Much of it is still being kept secret from the players, but once the first session is completed on Saturday, I will be looking to provide details on what I did and how well it worked (or not).