Buffalo Bill

In yesterdays meeting it was re-emphasized how important it is to the project to get people in the world, that don't look like zombies or seductive femme fatale. The best way of altering the appearance of a character (by "best way" I mean the only feasible way we can think of in the time frame and resources available to this project) is to create a different "skin" for existing characters. A character in the game is made up of a model, and a skin (among other things) The model specifies the dimensions of the character, and can also contain animations for the character. The skin is then applied on top of the character to make the character actually look like a human. So by modifying the skin the look of the character can be changed, as well as the cloths they are wearing. The problem however is that the images which contain the skin can be hard to modify (picture 1. Glasses were drawn on the skin, picture 2 shows the result in the actually game)

As can be seen from the pictures the skin looks like the skin provided by Buffalo Bill in "The Silence of the Lambs" all laid out flat. This makes it very hard to edit in such a way that it looks even remotely believable. The cloths are done in the same way. As can be seen from the first picture the skin is very detailed, and anything I would be able to produce wouldn't be even close to the quality provided in the already existing skins. If we had thought of it earlier on in the project we could have got professional artists to create the skins we need. I believe that it will be hard to get it done it the time frame left though.

Another VERY annoying thing today was that the computer keeps repeatedly crashing. I can be working away when all of a sudden with no warning the monitor goes black. I choked all connections and they are all plugged in. The only thing you can do is to restart the computer. I don't believe it is a software problem since it crashes very randomly, regardless of what software I am currently using. My theory is that something in the computer overheats, and as a security precaution shuts down. My guess is that the CPU or Graphics card is the culprit. The labs in Kevin St. Were much cooler, and might be the reason they didn't crash during the college term. If this continues tomorrow I will have to go to the technicians in the morning, as it is very frustrating when all of a sudden the computer just dies, and a few hours work with it.