Spiffworld | Blog

Cheered by how smoothly Phase 1 had gone, I thought Phase 2 would be smooth sailing as well. Didn’t turn out that way.

My original plan to keep my old WoW installation and make a second one which I would then update to WotLK didn’t pan out. When I inserted the WoW discs, the installer offered to either upgrade my current installation, or uninstall it completely. No option to make a second installation. So I went on to Plan B, which was to physically copy the contents of my WoW folder and call it “Old WoW”. That way I could point the Model Viewer at the old files and still update WoW to WotLK. This actually worked (after I increased the size of my Parallels Vista partition to make room for two separate WoW installs), and the old Model Viewer is just as happy as ever pointing to the “Old WoW” files. So far, so good.

First snag — the Map Viewer has no way to change where it’s reading the 3D files from. For some reason, that info looks to be hardcoded into the app itself. So my Map Viewer is dead, since it can’t be changed to point to “Old WoW”, and it can’t read the updated WotLK files.

Updating WoW to WotLK went relatively smoothly. There’s always lots of updating even after you do the upgrade, but to my surprise, I can actually play WoW in my Parallels partition now. Even though I could install and update the files before, I could never actually play the game (and why would I want to, since I had a perfectly good WoW installation for the Mac?). But I guess Parallels 4.0 really brings the mojo, ’cause I can play the game in the PC window if I want to.

However, the good news stops there. I downloaded and installed version 6.0.3 of the new WoW Model Viewer, and that bad boy won’t start up. I get this error — “The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more details.” I can’t find any event log, and even though there could be a million reasons why it won’t launch, I’m figuring the main one is probably that I am running Vista and 6.0.3 specifically says that it’s not tested for Vista.

So where does this leave me? I can still use the old Model Viewer, and I can use the WoW game itself, so I’m not completely cut off from video making. The Map Viewer is dead though, so that’s one capability I no longer have. And I still can’t use any of the models from WotLK in a Model Viewer, which was the big thing I was hoping to be able to do. So I guess in the end calculation, I’m slightly worse off than I was before, but I’m not completely dead in the water.

If anyone out there has any suggestions for getting the new Model Viewer to work (that don’t entail “get rid of Vista”, because that’s not very helpful), please let me know. Hopefully the suggestions won’t involve screwing around in registries or installing service packs or anything. I use a Mac specifically so I don’t have to dig around in the guts of my operating system just to get things to work, and I really don’t want to have to do it now.

So, after having finished my latest video, I started the long overdue process of updating my computer’s OS and the applications I use to make my videos (as I’ve discussed in previous posts). Phase 1 went surprisingly well. I updated my Mac to Leopard finally, and even though I find the way the Dock now spills the contents of folders out so that what you see in the Dock isn’t the folder but instead is the pile of applications that are in the folder (very annoying. I just want to see the folder I put the apps in, please), everything works perfectly. Then I updated my copy of Parallels to 4.0, which I fully expected to completely break the Map and Model Viewers I’d been using. But it didn’t. They work just as well as before. Or at least, they seem to be working correctly even though I haven’t had time to really test everything in the apps (remember, I’ve been using the old Map and Model Viewers with a pre-WotLK WoW installation, which is why my viewers were working).

I had fully expected to get through Phase 1 and have everything broken, thereby making it easy to just push on through Phase 2, which is to update the WoW installation I use for videos to WotLK, update the viewers, then pray that it all works at the end. But now that I see that I’m through Phase 1 and everything is actually still working, I’m thinking maybe I should proceed a little more carefully. What I’m thinking of doing is keeping my current pre-WotLK WoW installation and my current Map and Model Viewers as they are. That way if something goes wrong, I’ve still got apps I can use to make videos. Then I’ll make a new, separate WoW installation which I’ll update to WotLK, and I’ll install the newest version of the Model Viewer, the one that is supposed to work with WotLK. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be able to use the new Viewer for WotLK content, but if there’s anything screwed up about it, I can always use the old pre-WotLK apps and still keep cranking out vids.

It’s a solid plan on paper. Let’s see if it actually works out that way in real life…

“Tom Cruise Crazy” is finally finished. This one took forever to complete, for no good reason. It was long, but not too long. It had some complicated shots, but not that many. Mostly, I just spent more time actually playing WoW than using it for making videos, and that really cut into my production time.

I forgot to put this into the scroll at the end of the video but I want to do it now — special thanks to Nick Bayhi, my Co-Creative Director on this video. I’ve liked this song for a long time but could never figure out how to make it into a clever video. Then I got some good ideas but couldn’t figure out a good ending. Nick’s the one who came up with the, “if he’s so crazy and narcissistic, he should just marry himself”. Genius!

Now that I’ve finished this vid, I have no excuse not to upgrade my computer’s OS and the applications I use to make videos, as I discussed in a previous thread. I’ll let you know how that goes. Hopefully it won’t ruin everything and spell the end of my video-making career.

All this time, I’ve been living in fear. I haven’t upgraded my Mac to the Leopard OS because I’m afraid it will break the tools I need to make videos. And I haven’t upgraded the version of Parallels I use to emulate a PC on my Mac so I can use the PC version of the Model Viewer for fear it will break those tools too. But, since the Model Viewer itself broke and I’m going to need to upgrade that anyway, I suppose now is as good a time to upgrade everything at once and see what happens.

I guess there’s a chance that upgrading everything will break something important and my video-making days will be over. How big a chance? No idea. Probably not very big, but still there’s a chance (maybe). In any case, I won’t be making the change until after I finish the video I’m currently working on. Given the glacial pace with which I seem to be progressing on this video, I may not have to make the change for quite some time now, but I’m hoping to finish the video soon and then make the switchover. It’s the not knowing that’s killing me.

I’m actually sort of considering giving myself a self-imposed deadline for finishing my current video so I can just be done with the dumb thing, get everything changed over, see what happens, and maybe even start a new video. Of course, I’m not going to tell any of you what that deadline is, just in case I decide I don’t want to meet it…