James Branston Lite

So here we are again writing about the things I’ve been doing… And things I still need to do. It’s a busy world you know!

Anyways so since the last update I completed my Deus Ex: HR project (Human Revolution… Not Human Resources) and Eidos Montreal even gave it a retweet when I presented my work to them. Thats always nice. The guys there are awesome… Want to hire me?

Project Lucid is coming along nicely. I have managed to get the first batch of sounds created. Although some problems did come up because of the weather and family being around over christmas. But none the less the first batch is done. I need to update my website to showcase this work. I’ve created just under 100 sounds so far for this game. Oh, also the game is going to be showcased at The Gathering (Norway) in March. So hopefully when the game is done, it could lead to more games and new indi game company in the future… Who knows.

Skyrim is another project I need to get started. I will start it when I get back from France. This will be my most ambitious audio replacement project to date. I have great ideas for the live action trailer and I hope I can do the game justice. I will try to get my old university orchestra to play the composition I come up with too… We shall see.

Finally a little update on my Halo Reach project… It’s on hold. It is a huge project but with life and work I dont have the time or resources to do this… Which is a real shame. If I had a budget I could open up a whole new world of stuff… But alas I do not. But I will get it done… One way or another.

Thats it for now I guess. I do need to update the website but thats a minor thing. I’m also still looking for jobs in the game industry but you all know how thats going. So until next time, take care.

So it’s been quite some time since I’ve written one of these, so I thought I would do a quick write up about projects and such I’m doing. Plus whats happened recently. You know, the usual.

So the reason I’ve been pretty laid back about most thing is because bad things happened in life. Yes we all get them and I’m trying to move past them. Work is actually helping out though since it keeps me busy.

In terms of an actual job to bring in money; I’ve managed to negotiate shifts at a TESCO warehouse near me. I work fridays - Sundays 7am-3pm. It helps pay for stuff like my new audio interface. I can now finally record a drum kit. HOORAY!

In terms of projects I’m still working on Stratosquare music. That is my next priority. I am trying to finish off a project I started a few weeks back on the Deus Ex trailer. The composition and sounds are mostly done so I should finish it up tomorrow and have it uploaded. Hopefully Eidos Montreal will like it.

Other projects include codename “Lucid” I cant reveal anything about it yet other than I am the sound designer and I’m working on footsteps for it.

In the next few days my website will be updated with all my new stuff so be sure to keep an eye out.

Take care

So I thought I would do a little blog explaining my projects which I have going on now… So in basic terms, this is my “to do” list. Which is ace to be honest. Since my life took a turn for the worst just over two months ago I had a really really hard time doing anything and I was bored and depressed out of my mind! Now my minds pulling itself together I can focus on things. And boy do I have things to focus on!

The first bit of big news is the possibility of doing the sound design to a whole new game developed by Haven Gaming. Its an online forum/gaming… place. I was part of it a while back when I went on some minecraft servers. I was approached by a friend of mine who started the whole idea off. It’s still in the planning phase at the moment but I think it’s going in an Eldar Scrolls kind of direction. I’m excited about this and I hope it comes into fruition. But it’s a huge project and could fall down before it even has legs.

The next thing on my list is “Oze”. This has now been renamed to Strato. I’m not sure why but I’m sure the development team have their reasons. Anyway I am still the composer for that game. It’s not a huge game so it shouldn’t take me more than a few months to get all the music I want for it. Yes I said MONTHS. Music is a tricky thing. When its your own you can be happy with it at times. But for a proper product for somebody else then it really needs to be polished beyond what I normally do. Of course I should do this with every song I make but I sometimes want to move onto the next one. You know what it’s like. I am also writing a website for the game, which is ace! I love HTML and CSS.

On the Dues Ex: Human Revolution project. It’s paused for a second. I have done most of the sound effects. They need to be refined and polished but they’re mostly there. I’m just a little stuck with the music. I’m hoping that after my other projects I will have the inspiration to write the music for it.

On the gaming side of my list is Minecraft. I have finally gotten a server and it seems to be handling the stress pretty well. When my friend Paul gets back from Canada I’m going to start my lets play series, which I will be composing all the music to. Thats right. I’m replacing the music to fit in certain situations. Like idle, battle, mysterious, epic. Stuff like that. It’s going to be so much fun! It also means that I’m getting people to build story arcs and puzzles for us to discover. I think it will be one of the most entertaining series I’ve done.

Lastly my Halo Reach project is still in production but I do not have the resources to do all the sound effects myself yet. Which is the plan. I don’t want to take from other sample banks for this. I want to record and edit EVERYTHING myself. So it could take up to a year! The game could even change too. So we shall see.

Thats everything for now. Look forward to it! It’s going to be a heck of a few months for me.

So I’ve been making my own sound effects for a while now. And something I’ve always wanted to do is fire a weapon. A real fire-arm weapon. I’ve always found sound libraries and the internet to be a pretty poor source for free gunshot sound effects too. One day in the future when I get a temporary job (or if ii’m lucky, the job of my dreams) I can afford some new recording equipment. Right now I’m running on a single XLR audio interface and I do not fancy using an XLR-Jack lead, plus the problems with phantom power will be annoying and force me to use a dynamic microphone.

The interface I ideally want should have 8 inputs and works via USB, although I can live with a 4 track and a pocket recorder too. 

So, the plan is once I get some upgraded recording equipment I will go down to the local shooting club near Barby and ask to record some of their activities. Maybe one day they will let me do some specific audio recordings. it’s just an idea though. In the meantime I can buy a blank firing side arm and make do with that. Blank firing weapons are legal in the UK as long as they have that stupid two tone orange paint job. I will hopefully be filming all this too.

The long term future plan is to either go to an army training camp and record some drills (with permission), or fly to America and have a go myself!

Okay, so after a long tedious design and coding period, the website is up! It’s mostly working and ready for the rest of the content to be added. At the moment the site is almost bare. It has no articles or free downloads so over the next few days I will be adding content to the site. That means re-writing all my previous articles and saving them as a PDF with proper images and such. I also need to select bits of music to upload for free. I MAY do some articles on HTML and CSS, since i’ve spent a lot of time doing it to make this site.

As for other things, there are still a few bugs I need to work out and I want to tweek a few things too. Mainly the space between text and other items. The large bug is on the index page. When this page is resized the javascript slider goes all… funny. I have no idea how to fix it but I will try my best. Also the contact page is now working (I think) so feel free to use it now.

So the new website design has been built and uploaded. Although it is far from perfect. There are a couple of bugs that I need to work out. I hate how it looks perfect in Dreamweaver but when I preview in a browser it goes all skiwif. But thats web design for you!

First off I the easiest thing to fix is the footer. I will need to put the images in side <ul><li> tags in order to get them to sit right. I also need to change the images as I re-used them from the previous website design and forgot to turn off the stroke around the edges. As you can see when you rollover them, the stroke vanishes.

The next thing I need to sort out, which is also easy, is the navigation. I just need to link the current page the user is on to with an anchor tag instead of just an image on its own. Something like <a href=”#” img src=”image”>. That should solve the problem. I really should have converted a page to a template, but it wouldn’t have made much of a difference as each page is unique anyway.

The final thing I want to get sorted is the Javascript slider on the index page. It’s supposed to slide between featured articles and new stuff I’ve done, but it’s being awkward!

Thats all for now. I will post on twitter when I fix each of these things.

So I thought I would post an early, and current design of the website. There are still a few changes to be made, but once I sort out this javascript problem the rest will fall into place.

Early:

Recent:

I’m having trouble getting the featured section in place. DW doesn’t like my div tags!

The footer is going to be changed to the same colour as the navigation system.

That’s all for now.

(Thanks to http://www.youtube.com/user/mattsaundersmcp for help with the design, and help learning HTML & CSS)

I will be setting up a different blog account to link to it. So my personal blogs dont get mixed up with my work blogs.

Hi everyone, I decided to do some Arabic articles because the best way to learn a language is to teach it! I’m not that advanced in this subject so for the first couple of articles I will be doing this from memory. After that I will be reciting what I learn, and learning as I write. So lets get started.

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Well I feel like writing another article, and I said I was going to do this one day so here it is. For those who dont know how to read unsigned binary (basically, positive numbers) then I shall go into it briefly so you can continue to somewhat understand the rest of this article.

Binary is a series of numbers that a computer reads. These numbers are called “Binary Digits” and are thus shortened to “Bits”. Since a bit is either a 1 or a 0, they are tiny insignificant pieces of data by themselves. This is why they are grouped together to form words. 4 bits is a “nibble” (1010) and 8 bits is called a “byte” (10100010) and so on.

To read these as a number you must understand that each bit represents a specific value. Starting from the right, these values start at 1, and then double for each successive bit. Looking at a nibble. the right most bit (the least significant bit) always starts at 1. This doubles to 2, then double again to 4, until we reach the left most bit (the most significant bit), which is 8.

In a nibble that has the binary value of:
1010
we can work out the number it represents as:

Least significant bit = value of 1, but there is a zero = +0
next bit = value of 2, there is a 1 which means we add it = +2
next bit = value of 4, there is a zero = +0 
most significant bit = value of 8, there is a 1 which means we add it = +8

2+8 = 10

That was working out numbers in a unsigned system

So now how we look at methods to understand negative numbers. The first option is called “Sign and Magnitude”. Basically this uses the MSB (most significant bit) as a way to tell the computer if the number is positive or negative. If the MSB was 0, the number would be positive. If it was 1, then it would be negative. This is not used often because it has two main problems.
The lesser problem is that it reduces the number it can represent by half, although this is a technicality as the number still spans the same amout, its just over positive and negative now.
The main problem is this:
0000 = 0
1000 = -0 

See what I mean? you have two ways of representing zero. So thats out of the window now.

There is another way of representing negatives but it has the same problem. All I will say about it, is that it is called “Ones complement”

The final and correct way to represent negative numbers as binary is whats known as Two’s Complement. This method is very different from the last as the process starts with flipping the bits, and then adding a binary value of one. The best way to explain it is to show you through example:

Starting number 1010 = 10

Flip bits = 0101

Add binary value of 1 = 0110 = -10

So in a two’s complement system 1010 is 10 and its negative counterpart is 0110. This also solves the double zero problem. Lets look at zero in a 4 bit system.
0000 = 0

Flip the bits:

1111

And then we add a binary value of 1:

10000

but this is a 4 bit system, so the MSB gets removed and we are left with:

0000 = 0

HUZZAH we have solved it! Now you know how to represent negative numbers using two’s complement! I hope you have enjoyed this article and if anything needs explaining in more depth then let me know.

Take care everyone.