Mmmm. BTS spacefold.

If, like my coworker, you're wondering what the thing in panels four and five is... see here, here, aaaaand here for in-use shots of the Cheops CSM.

Last page for awhile - time to model the rec area.

08:31 <xeno> XD
08:31 <xeno> i forgot they were floating around out there
08:31 <xeno> that rules

Though the Cheops and the Terran Templar defensive "net" (which is really more of a "sharp stick") are a relatively minor part of the story, they're still a part, even if it's just for a laugh in this chapter.

20080513 : Forked this log into its own News entry. I'll keep rolling the date forward as I make updates. This will doubtless annoy a few of you who check ATC through RSS, but them's the breaks.

Since it's going to take nine billion years (internet time) to produce, this is what passes for updates until pages resume.

20080507 : File started. Took the base set of walls, cleaned a few things up (and reworked a few), added doors for the suit locker and bathroom, textured the doors and the door interface panels, modeled the escape pod hatch (still have to texture it) and ejected about forty megs of unnecessary geometry from the file (central corridor, cargo transfer lock, wardrobe, etc - oddly enough, max stopped crashing and screaming bloody murder about how the file might be corrupt every time it was saved after that happened...). The rec area is now primed and ready for the serious heavy lifting, which will begin early next week. I'd start, like, now, but I've got company and an air show (weather permitting?) this weekend, so.

20080512 : Mapped the escape pod hatch door - which I'll probably need to remap before I'm done. It looks great, but there's only so much rust and corrosion you can have on a ship before people start thinking "how is this thing still in the air?!". Started work on the i/o for the bathroom, which is taking much longer than expected. Odds are that finishing this bit alone will eat up most of tomorrow. It's a bit depressing, given that I'm spending over a dozen hours on one relatively tiny section of wall.... but that's how these things go.

20080513 : Hauled ass. The "plumbing cabinet" is done and has its light added in. The plumbing has been extended aft, below and above deck, and the pipes have been covered. This formed the first chunk of the starboard deck of the rec area - the rest of that section of deck followed immediately after. It's been textured and still needs some geometry detailing - after I get that done, the first order of business tomorrow will be extending all of this over to cover the port deck. I hatehatehate extending existing texture maps to cover new geometry, but in this case, it covers an extremely large chunk of deck, which I'll be building on throughout the rest of the environment... so while I'm not looking forward to it, I'm definitely looking forward to it being done!

20080514 : Deck plating is done. Small parts of the ceiling are done, as well as a couple of bits of wall. The goal for tomorrow is to get the hull sections between the central corridor blast door and the rec area proper completed.

I finally have a more or less complete "blueprint" and objects list for the the latest production bottleneck.

After a month of "Need to get started on the rec area. At some point. After I do this and this and that and the other thing," the above two pages just fell out of my head at Dee's Wednesday night. "Coincidentally" the first weeknight I'd been out in a couple of months. During that span of time I took a couple of notes, but a whole lot of nothing happened until I got sick of the isolation and popped out to Goth Night a couple of times, during which very nearly every single squiggle forming the current chapter of DCR fell out, complete.

I suppose the one good thing about being mentally incapable of doing serious development of anything (including a project I'm working on at work, which was developed using the same method) outside of a bar is that it means drinks are theoretically a tax writeoff.

It's not the booze per se, I don't think. I've had the exact same results at the Beehive - the major difference is that when I've had a few jack and cokes I feel fuzzy, whereas after a few cups of coffee at the Beehive I have to piss every ten minutes for the rest of the day and my clothes smell like the cigarette equivalent of vomit. Personalities at the various establishments are roughly equivalent with said results. Hence, more time in bars. Bars with a 15% chance of some drunk being an idiot, or coffeehouses with a 90% chance of the caffeinated equivalent. When they autopsy my corpse I'm certain they'll find the ATC ligature scarred into my liver.

I'm in mixed company - variants of this production technique worked for Earnest Hemingway and continue to "work" for Rob Liefeld.

Fortunately, I'm not into fishing or spandex.

The current crop of hurdle-juggling is nearing its apex. Production of the rec area should start this coming week and will probably take all of May, if not a bit longer. Huge parts of chapters 2-4 take place there, so it has to be Better Than The Bridge. While I'm struggling with all that that entails, there will be 16 or so new DCR strips to fill the gap.

And now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

I've just finished uploading a cropped and corrected version of Dead City Radio chapter one ("Whitehouse"). The most obvious change is the new cover (left), which spanks the crap out of the old one. Other changes include global correction of Whitehouse's glasses, some minor compositional and dialogue changes, and a fairly thorough general cleanup that would only be obvious if you looked over the previous and current editions at 100% scale in Photoshop.

The old pages, full print size with gutters and everything, were 3300x5040@480dpi. The new cropped pages are 3094x4725@450dpi, and the only difference in terms of Actual Pixels is where the left and right borders are. The actual size of the artwork hasn't changed at all. That's pretty awesome. What's pretty awesomer is that now ATC exists in two aspect ratios - 3x4 for The Dualist and 6x9 for everything else - instead of three. Win. Win for everybody. Vast, fertile fields of win.

The next step is to make Yet Another Pass, forking the chapter into a "clean" pg-13 version for print - I figure Comixpress won't have too much trouble cranking out a 28 page grayscale comic. Most importantly, neither will my wallet.

This whole operation is being done now for two major reasons - the first is that it has needed doing, and I'd rather have it out of the way now than have to do it and the web re-design after I finish TV.1. The second is that after having spent the past few months slogging away at the bridge (which took approximately a month of soul-sucking tedium to model followed by almost two months of rendering to produce the scene), the idea of immediately diving into modeling the rec area made me want to throw up. A few weeks of work for the FIVE WHOLE PAGES I'll need it for in this chapter? Tell me another one!

So I did one thing that needed doing in order to put off another - and altogether different - thing that needs doing. If that isn't a textbook example of tactical slack, I'll eat my hat.

If I had a hat.