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The benefits of going to "work"

I work a job on a week on week off roster, which affords me the luxury of working fulltime on my models/games every second week. I treat this as an opportunity to "dip my toe" into the work-at-home-as-a-desperate-indie-dev lifestyle that I am clutching at strings to obtain. The problem is finding the line between leisure mentality and work mentality.

When working round the year and having only the weekends and after work to model, I would have to smash out my models at top speed just to keep up. This attitude translated fantastically to working with lots of time, oh man did I get some shit done, but lately I have noticed that with plenty of time to spare, I have more time to waste. It's hard to admit, but there are real downsides to fulltime home work, and subsequent upsides to what I call "work work".

Blender to UDK: How I do it - Static Meshes

I have finally got a handle on making base-featured models. That is, a model with accurate collision and LOD data. When exporting from blender to UDK, you have a few options for format. I have been using the ASE exporter made by MCampagnini, one of the UDK community members, and up till today it had been going ok. My main issue with it was that the error messages were vague and unpredictable. In a fit of frustration today I decided to switch to the FBX exporter, which ships with blender 2.62. After a few hiccups here and there I found out how it works, and I gotta say I like it. However, it does have some very nearly fatal quirks for the uninitiated. Before I forget what they are, I thought I had better write them down.

Benchmarking Models

For a while I have been wondering how to find out just how resource-hungry any model is. Obviously the more details in a model the harder it will run the PC, but exactly how much, and what is the hungriest, is somewhat of a grey area for me. I was hoping that perhaps someone had made a program into which you could load a model and it would tell you how much cpu it takes to load, how much ram it requires, etc. Unfortunately it doesn't appear that this exists. This is understandable considering the different needs of engines, the different PC environments and I assume a whole range of other crap. But I still want to have something to benchmark my models against, dammit!

Australian food culture, or lack thereof

Australia is a young country

A part of that is that we never really had much time to set in a deep rooted culture like the more ancient civilisations have. As a people, we emigrated from European miscellany and tried our best to live in Australia as we had in Europe. This involved things like killing the native animals, people and trees, importing our own food stocks and generally doing our best to destroy the natural harmonious paradise that we had set our enterprising foot on. This approach not only irreparably destroyed much of our newfound utopia, but ensured that all the adventure of moving to a new country, a hitherto unknown landmass, was decidedly negated. So how has this affected our food, the most recognisable tangent of any culture? Do we actually have a food culture, and if so, where did it come from?

Metabolism changes

I have an awesome metabolism. I'm one of those people who can eat a whole pizza and not see a kilo gained. All my life I have been a heavy eater, I have gorged myself on whatever I could get my hands on, often taking pride in how much I could eat. All this time the most fat I put on was a little layer over my gut, the rest of the calories just dissipated. Fat people hate me.

I recently decided to see if I could take advantage of my metabolism to tone up and trim down a bit. Up until recently I had been training to maintain fitness, and dieting to drop a layer of fat. I watched what I ate closely and exercised every day. 5km runs and 15kg dumbbells were the order of the day.

Ambiguous Package Name error in UDK and how to fix it

So I've been playing with UDK

and I came across a shit. After compiling my scripts UDK would pop up with an ambiguous package name error on startup. After some googling I found that this is because I had been making my scripts in a folder with the same name as the package I was working on. Seems like a pretty standard idea to me, name all your stuff the same, but UDK doesn't like that. So here's how to fix it.