*waggles his horns and points excitedly with a hoof*
See that funky interactive visualiser stuff in the Xbox360?
We made that
.And thank fuck I can finally tell you that! It's been a reet pain having to sit on that information, but we were contractually obliged not to spill any beans until the official briefing. I've been beside myself with excitement, as you can probably understand. This is massive
.And this time there's no possibility of things going tits-up like happened with Unity - it's done and dusted, it exists and is already inside the OS of the Xbox360
. You WILL be getting your hands on this one .Since Unity was cancelled we've been working on a new, shader-heavy algorithmic graphics engine which we call "Neon". The Xbox360 interactive visualiser is the first application of this new engine, and I think you'll agree that the results are absolutely stunning. When you're done here, head on over to http://www.llamasoft.co.uk, which you will find is back up and rather different now
. There are screenshots and videos of Neon in operation there - check them out. Even the static screenshots are simply staggeringly beautiful. Seeing this thing running at 60 frames a second is just awesome. There have been nights when the Crew has been gathered here and we've been test-flying this where all of us have just stood flabbergasted in front of the projector screen, utterly lost for words at the beauty and complexity coming out of it. It's wonderful .It's been a long and strange journey getting this thing from a "wouldn't it be great if?" idea at a party to actually sat there inside the belly of the beast, one which wouldn't have been possible without preaching, evangelism, bending of ears in high places, proof-by-example and above all hard work and belief in a common vision by a bunch of excellent people.
But there it is! *points excitedly with a hoof* Inside the Xbox360 for smeg's sake!
(Sorry. It's still a little hard to believe it's all really true. I'm so excited by this start for our neon tech that I could burst into a million stinky pieces) }:-).
I know most of you will be really happy for us that we've pulled this off, and for some of you maybe this is even the killer app that'll push you over the edge into getting a 360 when it's out
. I know I'll be having one and hooking it up to the music server and the plasma and I'll never again think of playing music without Neon accompanying it .(And yes, Limb, I haven't forgotten. You'll be getting an xbox360 too
).I know there will also probably be a few who are disappointed or even upset at what they will doubtless see as me climbing into bed with the Evil Empire... well, the simple fact is that it was Microsoft who gave me the shot. Ninty and Sony both know what I do, but nobody was calling me up with any interest in making a next-gen lightsynth. Microsoft were the ones who believed in it enough to give us a shot, and by Goat, given an opportunity like that, I'd have to be stupid not to take it.
Look at the current state of play with visualisers. On both major platforms they are still using pretty much the same techniques as I was using back on the Jaguar. For more than ten years they've been iterating endless variations of the "jiggly dots in a bit of feedback" stuff and it's started to make the whole field look stagnant and boring whereas in fact it should be fantastic and vibrant and exciting. Somebody needed to come in and lay down a bit of shock and awe and Microsoft gave us the chance to do just that. The whole field will end up benefitting as a result. It would have been a massive dereliction of duty to the artform I've spent twenty years pursuing *not* to take the chance.
And we haven't sold our souls, or our IP, to Microsoft either. We've created for them an interactive visualiser for the Xbox360, and we'll not do a visualiser for the rival consoles for this coming generation. But if someone were to ring me up tomorrow and say "Blimey Yak mate, that Neon's a bit tasty, any chance of a bit of that for the next $not_a_console_visualiser_app" I could quite legitimately say "abso-smegging-lutely!" and we could be delivering working code in a few weeks. We can use it in games on *any* platform. The engine is small, efficient and portable. In taking this opportunity we've funded the development of our engine, raised the profile of lightsynths in general and the Neon technology in particular, and opened up all kinds of future possibilities for work for Llamasoft. I fully expect we will get *significant* follow-on work from this. I'm fully grateful to Microsoft for that.
Most of all - come on, you know me, it's never been about selling my soul to the highest bidder... this work is a labour of love for me. Nothing has shone as brightly and so close to my soul as this work. It's been my Light, even when at times everything else in my life seemed dark. Ever since I first started working on lightsynths my prime impulse has always been to get something I thought was wonderful more widely known, and with this work, after 20 years trying, we've finally pushed it out there in a *massive* way. *Millions* of people are going to plug in these boxes and discover that they've got something beautiful that they never knew of before. That's *wonderful*. It's a dream of 20 years coming true.
Go to the website and read the whole history of the lightsynths. Then tell me I'm a bad man for doing what I've done. Me, I'm fully proud and happy that Microsoft like our lightsynth enough to build it into the heart of their next-generation machine. That's awesome. I'm chuffed to bits to be working with them.
I must make it plain, too, that this has been a fantastic team effort. Lots of people worked very hard to make this happen, and I owe a metric fuckload of thanks to those people. First and foremost Giles, whose coding madskillz helped us get the Neon engine up and running in an amazingly short period of time, and also get it in such excellent shape in terms of portability. I can't wait to see what his outstanding mathematical vision brings to the engine as it develops from here.
Huge thanks are also due to Gaz and our side and Peadar on the Microsoft side for being the movers and the shakers who got the whole thing rolling, J Allard for having his ear bent and giving us the shot, Rik, Korruptor, Jedburgh and Jimaroid for endless hours of test-flights, not to mention criticism and feedback and support and friendship throughout, Rod S and K again for their awesome work in pulling together the absolutely lovely new website in time for this announcement, Fuse and Sickers for providing us with some excellent tuneage for our demos... there are so many people involved, some of them in multiple capacities, and they all deserve a fucking huge round of applaue for what they've done. You guys have got my undying gratitude for helping to make this all come true.
Huge respect to the Xbox360 team too - the fact that they've put together a machine with such an awesome amount of power that you'll be able to put under your telly for a few hundred notes is remarkable. That'll be one busy box in my place, serving up audio and Neon all day and my other media and fucking awesome-looking games at other times. Wireless controllers too. Excellent stuff
. Sweet toolchain too, it's been a pleasure to develop on (once I got XP on my mainbox that is) .(Yeah, I know I was ambivalent about it in the xbox discussion threads in forum - I had to be under the circumstances, so I took every opportunity to lay down a big stinky red herring wherever possible. I should be a fishmonger
. Oh, and I lied when I said I was going to my mum's just before Christmas, I was actually in Seattle with the Crew performing an early version of Neon at the Xbox team Christmas party. It was ace ).Well, that's about it for now, I've spooged my load (and boy am I glad to have done that, my love-spuds were aching something rotten holding all that in)
. It only remains for me to ask you all to form an orderly queue and head on over to http://www.llamasoft.co.uk where I believe you will find something rather excellent .You know what really makes me smile so much my head could fall in half?
It used to be that the Golden Age of Llamasoft was ancient history. But now it lies ahead of us. Starting today
.- Yak
