Reel Expression

I was trolling the new products forums looking for designers to fill up the shops I’ll eventually finish when I came to this post. And yeah, for the first min or so I was a bit worried. Then I had to remind myself that the building tools are in the UI, but it doesn’t mean everyone is good.

Here’s the text of the ad:

Revolutionise your construction by designing custom poses IN-WORLD! No more third party guess-work, upload, annoying misfit, re-upload, ad infinitum. Build furniture, AND the matching pose at the same time, ensuring a perfect fit as you work! Or simply use it as a modelling studio where you have total, joint-by-joint, control over how your models pose!

* In-World Dynamic Posing, allowing unprecedented control over your own body!

* Design for real people, not the Average SL Shape! Big, Small, the Mannequin takes either in to account!

* Save and Export favourite poses and upload them back into SL as full-perms Animation Objects, to give away or sell, as you see fit!

* Give your items the finishing touches they deserve, with custom poses YOU add while you design!

Sounds nifty doesn’t it? Actually it is. The one(s) who created it had to have spent a long time on it. It also looks pretty cool.

The way it works:
You sit on it then on one side is a prim statue of an avatar with all the parts seperated. So you click on the prim representing the hips and a dialogue pops up. Do you want to rotate? Move? Ect. Then on the other side is arrows in prims to move the figure up, down, right and left. (See Photo)

Now the problem I have with it is that when you move a body part, its an extreme move. Bend the forearm once and its goes quite a bit. There doesn’t seem the ability to fine tune things like avimator, poser, ect. In poser, I can rotate the forearm by .01% if I want. To most that little of change isn’t noticable but its the difference between realistic and not.

Now for me personally, its that fine tuning that makes me reupload a lot. I’ve seen people selling poses worse then my first upload. So, really something like this wouldn’t help me due to small amount of choices.

The biggest problem with this is the collar bone/shoulder issue. This is what really aggrivates the animation community. How many times have you seen poses with the shoulders dislocated? Personally I can’t count how many times I have. The range of motion is very small and specific in this area. A “simple” arm raised up higher then the shoulder is a process of small tweaks to a number of different parameters. This product doesn’t take that into account. One click and I had some very strange things happening with no small movement possiblity to make it look right.

This Picture here shows the range of movement. The top series is the shoulder joint going towards the body. Each picture shows 1 full click. If I wanted a pose where my arm was next to my body, it’d be impossible.

The next series is the full range of motion of the shoulder joint turning away from the body. As you can see there isn’t much choice.

When I was playing around with it some noob animators were asking my opinions. Personally, I’d have no use for it. While with the effort and unique idea would certainly be worth L$9000, with avimator for free already I don’t see the need.

I admit I’m a bit biased. I hate poser and then SL treating my files like a 2 year old with a cookie, but I’m used to it. I’ve learned ways around things and been able to create some interesting stuffs. But I’m not sitting here trying to convice other’s that they shouldn’t animate or not to even try this out. Because I know people will still buy my quarkly poses because of my style, skill and anal rententive attention to detail.

Contest
I want to change my store name. It needs to have the word “reel” to start off with. The only thing I have come up with so far is Reel Geek, because it wont get out of my head. Then my wonderful customer service person, Sara, came up with Reel Inc.

I’m asking for help. Please throw me ideas. Either post a comment, send an IM or notecard.

• Ends 01 Feb 2007.
• L$ 5000 to the person who comes up with it.

So.. I finally decided what the new pose set will be. I am woman… hear me ROAR.

I have all these great ideas but I can’t seem to center myself enough to sit down and make them. So, today I did what I usually do and take a shower. For some reason I always get inspiration in the bath or shower. But all I could think about is how the name reel movement sucks as a name.

As I’ve said before I changed it cause my direction was changing into more movement things… but with all the downloaders, the crap that poser is, and the LONG amount of time it takes I don’t want to do that.

So.. here we go. I changed my blog back to the origional name Reel Geek. I’ve had it since before I started in SL. Im really geeky and I’m a film geek. So, its a play on words I guess.

Ceres today was so nice and made me a new logo. Yay!

I am really angry right now and if you don’t want to read a lot of cursing or just plain ranting then I suggest you skip this post.

So yeah, I like to beta test. I’ve tested a lot of games over the years and sometimes they get better and other times they do not. Some got boring super fast while others did not. The problem is is that they all have just about the same things and do the same mistakes.

Personally I’m looking for that one great game to play for a while. Had DnL actually worked it might have been it. But, it was a pile of shit. Anyways… I’ve said in my last post that I’ve been testing Vanguard since Sept of last year. It’s not that great game that I’m looking for, but it’s enough to hold me until something better comes out. It’s got a cool few things that havent been done or have been done baddly. BUT the devs suck. I mean seriously suck.

Here’s the thing. I usually play a rogue. During my brief stint in EQ2 (bleh) I started to really hate the rogue class and fell for the healer/damage dealer type. I had played glass cannons (mage) before and they aren’t really what I’m looking for. And healers are so dependant on playing with other people at all times that it just gets annoying. But that mix between the two seemed to fit with me. I heal when its needed and I attack when thats needed. Imagine my glee when faced with the bloodmage class in Vanguard.

The class is designed to heal through damage. It makes it a very very tricky class. I heal myself and or others by stealing health from mobs and giving it out. I heal by taking health from myself and giving it to others. Now usually, healers wear good armor. If we die, the group dies. And we do get a LOT of shit for when that happens. Cept when I play with Eems :) We used to wear medium armor but they stripped that away and gave us fucking robes. Ok fine. We deal a bunch of damage fair enough.

But that wasn’t fucking enough for them. A few patches ago they reduced our damage by 30%. Ok yeah, we were pretty overpowering. Fine. It didn’t upset me. Then 2 nights ago, they sprung this HUGE revamp on us. I logged in and couldn’t kill one single thing by myself. Not one. 1/2 the spells were bugged and they took the other 1/2 and gave them to you at WAY high levels. Like this shield rune thing that soaks up damage for who you cast it on, move from lvl 14 to 48!!! What the fuck is that? This is out of a possible 50 levels that takes AGES to get to. I am lvl 16 now and get maybe 1/2 a lvl in a night. (recently rerolled on the pvp server)

To add insult to injury, a health stealing spell I mainly use the damage was reduced from 200-300 to 38!! Thats really how much it hits for now. What in the fucking hell is that fucking shit? I am so sick of MMO devs listening to people of other classes and bringing out the nerf stick. I’ve seen moron sorcs complain about our damage when they can stun me for 30 seconds, one shot kill Eem’s pally, then one shot me.

You’d think they’d stop there. Oh no. They lessen the damage and increase the energy cost. They increased the cost of everything. By a lot more then they should when the mobs are tough and come at you in groups.

But.. just because they are suck fuckwits, they upped the amount the heals do. Oh fucking great. They were good enough as it was. I kept Eems alive through most of anything. I’d heal him, he’d heal me (he’s a paladin) and everything worked just fine. Granted he is one of the best players I’ve ever been around, especially in pvp.

Had enough? I know I have.. but they didn’t even stop there! They give us buffs. Which used to be if I casted when I was near my group, I only had to cast it once. It’s not like they show me who has what buff on my screen. They changed it. They upped the cost to cast and made it single cast. I cant imagine what a 24 person pvp raid is going to be like.

They had another patch last night that fixed a few issues that I haven’t even talked about. That’s how bad it is. So yeah, I’ve tested quite a bit and watched revamps and such. But two things worry me. 1. The game is released in 2 weeks. 2. I have never witnessed a class go from being good to being absolutly worthless. From interesting to just not. They changed the entire point of the class.

The next day…
Ok.. so they patched again and I’ve calmed down a bit because they say a lot of this is going to be tweaked again. The bloodmage class is supposed to be the highest in dps of all the healers. As it stands right now, clerics and shamens heal and attack far better then us.

The actual numbers:
HP=Hit Points E=Energy/mana

• The give blood heal. Our single target “major” heal atleast by lvl 17:
• Pre nerf: Cost: HP = don’t remember exact number… E= 38
• Post nerf Cost: HP = Lesst than before… E=138
• Before it used health instead of energy they changed it to be a 1/4 of my total energy pool. I heal or dps, not a lot of both.
• The take HP from mob give to selected group member
• Pre nerf: Damage = 200-350 Heal = 100% of that
• Post nerf: Damage=100-115 Heal= 130% - 180% (depends on a factor I don’t feel like explaining.
• Group Heal: I don’t know they took it away from my “low” level
• Major damage spell
• Pre Nerf: Damage = 300-400hp
• Post nerf: Damage= 150-200hp

Now, these numbers don’t seem as bad as it is. The numbers I remember from post nerf are fighting against mobs that were 2-4 levels above me. On these same mobs I was hitting them for like 38hps. So, Eems and I went to a different area to help me catch up to him.

Oh well.. they said they are revamping us again tonight, we’ll see.