Tuesday May 06 2008

Bots is coming along swimmingly. I really cant set a firm date yet, (and theres still a lot to do) but the amount of stuff that is done and ready for 1.0 is steadily growing. I threw together a little animation over the weekend. Its VERY crudely animated, but its new non-story based bots and hey...it moves!

I think you'll enjoy it.

Right click and save.

You will notice ALX and CNR look a bit diffrent then they did last time around. These are the 1.0 versions, none of my trademark darkness and volume lights making them barely visible.

Also, as a favor to me, do NOT go stick this thing up on youtube. It'll get there eventually.

Friday, March 14th 2008

And yet another year between updates. Ugh.

If you enjoyed Bots .9, aka, the version of the comic that is currently up, I highly suggest you browse through it and possibly download any parts of the comic you wish to see again in the near future. My webhost is going to make some changes that I strongly suspect will break the current Bots comic scripts.

This has forced me to begin redesigning the site a bit sooner then I wanted, although in all honesty my time right now is being consumed with building stuff for the comic itself (yes, I know. STILL.) and I don't really want to take time away from that to fix or remake the site untill there is a good REASON to. The update is happening at the end of march. If the site keeps working, great. If it doesn't it'll probably remain a broken and flaming wreck on the internet for a while. I was planning to redo the site while I was putting together the first few comics for Bots 1.0, but thats still a ways off. This *may* make that happen a little sooner. Despite the fact that Bots .9 stopped a long time ago I still enjoy showing it to people and going "Hey, I made that!"

When I first made this site I was somewhat emulating sluggy-freelance's original comic site which was a very spartan white space with buttons. It worked well in a world where highspeed bandwith wasn't the norm. Well, its 2008 now, and I'm not worrying about those with dial up this time. heh heh heh.

Monday, March 19th 2007

Geeze. Loooooong time between updates here. Comic aside, you might have figured I'm dead.

This'll be a fast update. Things continue to progress, rather well actually. The bots are being rebuilt. New bots are being added. A few of the sets are under construction, although a woeful amount are still waiting for attention. But last night I finished stuffing bones and programming back into ALX proper and he is alive again, which is to say, he can once again move, wave, wink and stick out his tongue. Except for those last two being things he couldn't do before.

I'm yanking my e-mail links off the site. I am getting hammered by spam, and I'm still months away from starting bots so I figure it shouldn't be a problem. I'm going to try updating the forum software and restarting it yet AGAIN, so if you want to get a hold of me, do so there. Otherwise, I still have the same e-mail, it just isnt on the page now.

In other news I work for Sony now. Its a little strange, it takes some getting used to realizing I actually work in the game industry, even if at the bottom rung. Well, maybe that's gamestop employees. Anyway, I am a vital part of the process of making games, I get to delay your games if they suck.

Its kind of fun actually.

The new website will go up first. I've done a little work on it, and compared to the things still remaining for bots it should be relatively simple. I'm not sure if I'm going to transfer the existing archive over right away, so when the new website goes up it might disappear for a while.

So if you dont want to risk loosing your favorite comic you might want to download it soon.

Sunday, Semptember 11th 2005

The forums are alive again. Should you have some till now un-expressed wish to comment on or complain about bots, you may do so within.

Sunday, August 28th 2005

So the short of it is: I'm finally graduated, my piece of paper came in the mail, and I have now kicked around europe in an exciting excursion to France that lasted most of the summer.

Me. In France.

Anyway, so I have my degree and tales of wacky happenings with girls in a foreign country at three in the morning. Now...I have to get a job. As some of you might guess from my comic, I want to get a job in animation. (and if you happen to be a potential employer in the CG field, I would like to take this oppertunity to point out that my comic is in no way representitive of my capabilities and should not by any stretch of imagination be considered my portfolio.) I'll probably be putting up a website with my actual portfolio (small though it is right now) sometime in the next couple of months.

I know, I know. You could care less, and want to know "What about bots?!" Or maybe you're thinking something along the lines of "Mmm. Oreos and orange juice." in which case, I really can't help you, you sick demented person.

Did I say "The short of it is...?" In fact, this is going to be a long drawn out explanation. Here's a quick version: Bots is taking a pause till the end of next summer(2006) while I hammer out some kinks in how I'm doing the comic. I'm considering doing something else a little less grand in scale in the meanwhile, check back around, oh, christmas and you'll probably catch me in the middle of it.

Bots isn't going away, nor is it going to turn into all those other webcomics I've seen where they SAY they're not going away and then just disappear. Come back Elf Only Inn!! Bots IS however going to take a loooong pause while I get a job, and then proceed to rebuild almost every single model I have created over the past two years or so. Thankfully, it will not TAKE two years to do this, but it will probably take untill next summer.

Why?! What the hell is wrong with all the models you've been building? Why are oreos and orange juice bad?

Ok, most important question first: Oreos and orange juice...just...wrong dude. Wrong.

Its stated in a number of places that Bots was "in beta." Basically this was my trial run for what I wanted to do in the comic. It was also me trying to figure out what the heck I was doing on a number of levels. I was learning new CG software (as is painfully obvious at the beginning of the comic) after having worked with 3dsmax for years, I was also trying to figure out how the story would work, how I was going to tell it, and how this whole "comic" thing went anyway. Fitting panels into pages was an idea that I was cool with in theory, but had no practice with. (and later on in the comic I got really lazy about. *cough*)

Basically, this was to work out the bugs.

Well, I found some.

Right now, I have the serious problem that I cant really render more than 3 complex articulated bots on a set at a time without everything slowing to a crawl. A big problem because most of the time I want to have at least 6 or 7 bots running around at any given moment. This is a city of machines we're talking about here.

In the past, the comic has been accomplished on days off in-between classes (best part of college EVER.) and by being assembled at 3 am in the morning. This is due in large part to the fact that rendering out single images for the comic have been taking up to an hour lately for some of them. When you've got 11 images to do...well you can start to see the problem. I think only five comics in total weren't finished in a mad rush at four in the morning.

Honestly, this is all MY fault. You see, I started making 3d geometry for Half life mods where EVERY SINGLE TRIANGLE COUNTED. When I started bots I went: Hey! This is CG now! I can do things in-efficently! So ALX has a few hundred thousand more triangles than he needs to, and for the most part is built in the most horrifically in-efficent way possible. Everything in bots is that way, from the sets to the "props" to the other bot models. I thought this would be fine as long as I wasn't tacking wires and pistons and motors and crap all over the bots and making everything as super hyper detailed as I wanted it to be.

Nope! Wrong answer! Thanks for playing!

Everything in BOTS would be fine if it were intended for one of those 3d sci-fi galleries or something. Heck, 30 minutes to an hour is GREAT for most CG renders. But when I need to be able to come home and put together a comic in 5-6 hours...not so great.

So I'm going to streamline things. A lot.

I also want time to get everything finished and ready before I start again. If bots WAS just the matter of putting 12 hours into a single comic, I could break it up over a few days. (and kiss my social life goodby on a 2 a week schedule. But hey.) But I was too excited to get going on Bots and started it before everything was ready. As a result, I was constantly rail roading...throwing down track in front of the train before it de-railed. Which it did a few times. Almost everything in the comic was finished JUST before I needed it, instead of ahead of time so I wasn't spending extra time building that pulse rifle or creating that mantis drone instead of putting the next comic together.

The good news is, when I DO start things again I'll have everything finished and rebuilt. No more railroading. I'm also gonna taken down the "beta" sign, having hopefully worked out all the bugs. I know what I want to do and how to do it (I think)...so here goes.

In the meanwhile, I'll be putting my portfolio up online so you at least have something pretty to look at should you feel so inclined. I'm also probably gonna do something comic wise between now and when bots restarts. It'll be a lot smaller, ALX and CNR running around by themselves I expect, but much more do-able. Probably also not "cannon" bots stuff, but who knows.

Till then...

-Chris Knight