Nov 24, 2008 @ 12:58 pm by Spiff
The guys over at WeGame.com are sponsoring a new machinima contest, this time with a Christmas theme. Almost $3000 in prizes. Big Time. But just like last time, they only want new machinima, which means that my “Podsafe Christmas Song” and “Chiron Beta Prime” aren’t eligible since they were released to the wild many moons ago. That’s a bummer because even though I’ve got a video in production (although “in production” is starting to feel more and more like a euphemism for “who knows when it’ll be finished?”) it’s not Christmas-themed, and there’s no way I could get a Christmas-themed video ready in time for the contest. So I’m going to have to sit this one out.
I think Jonathan Coulton only has one more Christmasey song, “Christmas Is Interesting”, and I doubt I’ll ever make a video for it. It’s too bitter for my tastes and I don’t know how I’d turn it into a WoW video. Paul and Storm have their “Way-Too-Early Christmas Song”, but that one’s not a good candidate for a video like mine either.
I guess that means I’m pretty much out of Christmas songs waiting to be made into videos at the moment.
Nov 14, 2008 @ 10:27 am by Spiff
It’s just… nice. New environments to explore, new people to meet, new things to do. I’m not hurrying through the WoW expansion’s new content in any way, because I want to soak it all in as I go. I’m reading every quest and luxuriating in the greatness.
I played in the WotLK beta for a while, but I was smart about it — I spent most of my time in Borean Tundra, one of the two starting zones up in Northrend. That left me with Howling Fjord (the other starting zone) nearly completely unexplored by me. So even though I was in the beta, I’ve still got lots of new stuff to check out.
Also, I’m expecting that eventually the WoW Model Viewer and Map Viewer will be updated to handle the new 3.x content, so I’m also keeping an eye out for new locations or creatures that I can use in videos. Never hurts to keep your eyes open. 
Nov 10, 2008 @ 10:32 am by Spiff
People are asking, so I guess I should be saying — I’ve taken a semi-extended break from making videos after cranking out three in close succession (Bacteria, Live, The Captain’s Wife’s Lament) over the summer. I’ve got a video that I had actually started way back before I dropped it to work on “Bacteria”, and I plan on finishing that bad boy up over the holiday breaks coming up. I think that will be all I’ll be able to do before the end of the year though (although, who knows?).
So, look for one more video to come out either this month or next. I’m hoping to get it done during my Thanksgiving PTO, since things are always so much more crazy around Christmas. But no promises.
Nov 10, 2008 @ 10:27 am by Spiff
People have known about this for a while, but the latest WoW patch (3.0.x) breaks the Model and Map Viewer programs. This means that all the people who rely on those programs to make their videos are now out of luck. But I wanted to point out that faithful fan Morton has found a forum thread that claims to fix the problem. Reading through the “fix”, it sounds almost like too big a pain in the butt to be worth it, but what are you going to do?
I haven’t tried the fix, and I’m not sure if I’m going to. I have a Mac precisely so I don’t have to edit registry files and do all the crap they’re describing in the thread. The WoW patch did break the Mac version of the viewers, but since I’ve got a PC partition that I run with Parallels, I’ve got a separate installation of WoW there that I haven’t updated. So I can still make videos, although I can’t use any of the 3.0.x models.
Everyone in the machinima world is holding their breath, crossing their fingers and hoping that someone who knows what they’re doing steps in to fix these vital programs. If no one fixes them, I guess WoW machinima will die a sad little death (oh sure, you can still make videos using just stuff you can capture in-game, but that’s not the same).
When I was at Blizzcon, I mentioned to the WeGame.com folks that they should take up maintenance of the program and build it into their suite of tools on their site. They seemed lukewarm to the idea though, so I doubt it will happen. But I wish it would. It would be nice to have an actual entity responsible for this important tool rather than just hoping that the Interwebs will fix the problem for us.