DEATHMAPS

Unusual Half Life 2 maps with visualised player death stats

I've stumbled across some very interesting statistics gathered by STEAM from some of their games. Obviously they keep statistics on who is playing online so people can check their ranks etc but I had no idea that they kept stats on players during the game. Hmmm...

Still, they produce some excellent, if slightly haunting images. For example, there appears to be a high death count around a cliff, obviously a number of suicidal players out there.





I just have to do something with these images...!

Watch this space

FORTHCOMING

Here are some images taken on my phone of two paintings completed this week.

Both paintings are typical of my eerie empty landscapes taken from Half-Life 2. The paint equates to reality in the eye of the spectator and through painting these images they become more real than the source that they came from. They also relate to historical painting but approach the nature of paint from a contemporary perspective.




Expect some better photographs on my website in the forthcoming weeks.


These will probably be the last paintings I'll be doing for a while.

SKYBOX

Some new work based on skyboxes in computer games.

Basically the skybox is a six sided cube that is created around the game environment to give the illusion of the surrounding area being larger than it actually is. Therefore, many of such skyboxes don't include foreground detail.

What I have been doing is drawing references to romantic painting and creating (some ridiculous) panoramas based on four of the six panels of the skybox (minus the top and bottom). Without the foreground the landscape details such as mountain areas often disappear into hazy lakes or Friedrichesque mist.

Click for full image...

CLIMAX

The Picture of Dorian Gray and... well, Starwing.

Having never before completed Starwing (SNES, 1993) I was amazed at how the end boss employed different 3D technology to the rest of the game. You see, the entire game engine renders wireframe shapes with basic coloured flat textures, whereas the end boss is the only thing that has a full colour texture wrapped around its wireframe. The sudden split in technology gave me quite a shock, and it truly made getting to the end of the game worthwhile.

This brought to mind the 1945 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the film is in black and white up until the final scene, when the painting is revealed in its terrifying colour.

An unusual comparison, yes, but I have always been interested in such changes in technology and how they can be manipulated.







Yes, I get all my info from Wikipedia.