Speaker 3 00:44
Hello and welcome to another episode of our now for something complete the Machinima this week, Ricky is playing Elden ring again, and we won't be seeing him because he's busy fighting monsters and other stuff in the game, but I'm here with Phil rice, hello. Tracy Harwood, hello. So we'll be discussing the various machinima news and gaming related subjects that we've picked up upon this month. And Tracy, you go first.

Speaker 1 01:18
Sure, absolutely. Yeah, another packed week, month, even for me, I picked up some really interesting projects. I'll start with those. The first one was a GTA five zombie movie called survive by gabrion Films. It's a couple of years old, but I thought it was really interesting, because we don't very often see zombie films made in GTA five. In fact, we don't really see all that many zombie films, but guess what? We've got zombie film this month to go through as well. So that's quite interesting. So yeah, I'll put a link to that one and check that one out. Another project that I picked up on was Paul trilo, I think is pronounced, which is a love letter to Los Angeles. Now, Trillo. He's a he's a media, multimedia artist and a director. And this one has been created in 2d and AI. It's not really technically machinima at all, but it's an absolutely beautiful piece of work. It's quite, I think I describe it as kaleidoscopic in its color and form, and it's, it's really worth watching how he's melded the streets together to create this really interesting view of Los Angeles. From his perspective, I really enjoyed it. I could watch it all day. It's just so beautifully mesmerizing in how it's portraying the city. And then another one that I picked up on. We talked last month about neural vis. Well, this, this last month, neural visas released episode 485, pod Pog corto, even of it, of their tick tock, I don't think I've seen anything quite so funny for for really some time. This one's all about tariffs, and I thoroughly recommend it. Should you want an alternative perspective to the current political dogma about tariffs? It's brilliant. It's very, very watchable.

Speaker 2 03:33
What an interesting testament that is, yes, what an interesting advantage to his process of the fact that his production process must be so efficient that he can pivot and basically work in commentary on something very, very current. Yes, yeah. You know if it was taking him a long time to produce stuff from because when you're producing content like that, it starts with the the writing, right? And then he's got to perform the voices, and then do all the animation and stuff, and the fact that he could put something like this together so quickly, yeah. Now obviously, you know, tariffs have been kind of on the horizon of political talk for probably half a year now. But still, that's pretty quick, yeah, and I think it's, I think it's a it's, there's something to be said for that. You know, because a lot of production processes, even machinima ones, even ones that are, you know, quick compared to traditional methods, you can't really react that quickly, because it's by the time you get it made. No one's talking about it anymore, you know, absolutely, yeah, yeah, pretty, pretty, pretty cool. That that, whatever that process. Is which we're we're in the middle of studying right now here at the show, so we'll have more info on that, hopefully very soon. Thanks.

Speaker 3 05:08
South Park is the only sort of professional level animation that's able to turn around things that quickly, right? And

Speaker 2 05:19
they've got a quick, quick production process, yeah, yeah. I think

Speaker 3 05:22
it was when Disney star wars, the Lucas Film, they were able to produce an episode that week about it, within, I think two days they put something together, and it was a good episode. It wasn't like, Sure, it throws it together. It was terrible. They made it something good with it. So I admire that kind of speed and creativity that if you can put some together that quickly. So yeah, yeah,

Speaker 2 05:45
it's got to be challenging enough to do that even on a like here in the States, it's, it's Saturday Night Live is a weekly sketch comedy, mostly sketch comedy show on Saturdays, and they're known for commenting on news that happened just that week. And that's that's already impressive, that the but it takes quite a team, quite a large and very well paid team, that writes that stuff, and then you've got this whole team of actors and stuff like that. That's one thing. But you know, for for an independent platform like this, to to pull that off is it's quite something so

Speaker 1 06:25
well. I thoroughly enjoyed this one, and I know you guys did as well. So yeah, definitely check that one out. But I also wanted to highlight an no mid day, no mid day, whose latest venture is also quite interesting. Now, you remember we covered his weird mystery Halo series,

Speaker 2 06:46
Halo or was, was it, oh, wasn't he the one that did half life two, half

Speaker 1 06:50
life yes, yeah, half life yeah. Well, yeah. Okay, so we covered that previously. Well, this time, this is a video that he's made about his justification for making a game, and it's probably one of the most interesting explainer videos that I've seen for some time. And I, and I, I guess, looking at that and reflecting on on that Half Life series that he put together, you can kind of see where the narrative arc connects. I think it's an interesting one. So another link coming there. Ben grusi also sent me an interesting another interesting World of Warcraft documentary. This one is made by Platinum Wow, and it tells actually a much more in depth history from some of the early years of World of Warcraft, including a few links than the one that we reviewed last month. Actually, there's some cracking excerpts in it, including interviews with people like Paul Marino and some of those I'd never actually seen. So it's a really interesting documentary. I'll put a link to that. Check it out definitely if you're interested in World of Warcraft and those early, early days. And then the last project that I want to just sort of mention, which I picked up from somebody I follow on x, is a GTA six, what I'd call a machinima. So it's a machinima made with AI really using cursor and Claude sonnet 3.7 it's a it's a real fun short. There's no story arc that I can see. It's just kind of random content. But I guess if you're sitting back and waiting for GTA six to come out, this one will probably itch a scratch for you scratch an itch, even for you, whilst you wait for the for the real thing to come out. So it's an interesting attempt, I think. Yeah. So they're my projects. Then I wanted to talk about a few Gen AI updates. First of all, I found quite an interesting conversational AI voice synthesizer. This one's called Sesame, and I'll put a link to that one. I think it's primarily targeting people that create chat bots. But at some level, it also looks like it could be an interesting generator for content as well. Possibly, you know, possibly extending a little bit of what 11 labs might do. 11 labs then also launched its actor mode, where you can use your own voice to direct the delivery of scripts, narrations, spoken by its AI voices. And there's a really interesting show and tell video, which I'll put a link to as well. So you're basically directing yourself, which is, you know, we talked a little bit about that couple of months ago. I think, yeah, it's interesting,

Speaker 2 09:56
because they've had a voice synthesis. Mm. Feature for quite some time, so I haven't, I haven't watched this video on actor mode. I'm not sure what's, what's different about that, but I'll, I'll be exploring that for sure. Yeah,

Speaker 1 10:08
I think it's how it's basically around training your own voice. Interestingly, we'll see what it does. I mean, you're, you're the only one I know that actually, really uses it. Phil, so be interesting to see what you do with it. Then runway has released Gen four, which enables you to quite precisely generate consistent characters, locations and objects across different scenes. I'm sure that will enhance how people use that kind of tool, and probably, along with other tools, might lead to more kind of creative content, not least because also a tool that launched, I don't even know how long ago this was now, because I can't keep up With the debate around it. Chat. GPT is 4.0 image generator. I want to say, was it last week or the week before? I

Phil Rice 11:06
can't remember. It's one or the other. Yeah,

Speaker 1 11:09
yeah. Okay, so we followed that at work for for a few days, and I tested it out. I was very interested to see that it was able to create words correctly spelled, which is a first for one of these tools. As far as I can see, it also has the capability to accurately represent connections between objects in images, and apparently up to about 20 different relationships can be represented in images. So it's, it's creating more complex images, but more accurately represented, which I think is, is an interesting development, however, what almost immediately kicked off then was a, I suppose the obligatory backlash, and this one is to do with Studio Ghibli becoming a bit of a meme for creators, I'd say, within hours of it launching. And, you know, within 20 or 2448 hours, I guess the studio had already sought legal advice on taking action against open ao AI over it kind of interestingly, because I was in there following it so closely, I think I can share the post that seemed to start it all off. So I'll do that so you can kind of check it out. But yeah, is that

Speaker 2 12:39
the one on the post on x by PJ ace, that's

Speaker 1 12:44
it. That's correct. Yeah, okay, yeah. So, although I've not seen that, it's gone anywhere subsequently. So I think it was like a week of heat, and then it's all died down again for the moment. But then, you know, there's so many other things that have launched in the last week. It's, it's, yeah, tracking it all is quite, quite tricky one I you know, so I don't actually follow them all in or I try not to follow them all, but I try to look for the ones that I think are most interesting. One that I found really interesting was this one called DSO, which is a method for aligning 3d generators with simulation feedback for what they describe as physical soundness. And basically it's a model that can more reliably generate 3d assets that are what they describe as stable under gravity and faithful to the conditioning images, meaning they don't fall over so easily and they can, and actually that, in turns, mean they can also be used for 3d printing, which I think is another aspect that's quite interesting in the way that these tools are are being developed. So that one, I thought, was particularly worth, you know, worth following that one. Um, then we also had a bit of a discussion. Phil, you might want to come in on this one as well. There was a recaming tool launched called recam Master. I'm not seeing a recap. AI, that's a dedicated recaming tool actually launched before, although, as you quite rightly said, it's, it's a feature that's included in many other tools. And basically, you know, this is, you know, you can feed in a video file, and then, you know, output from it all different kinds of perspectives on that image, as if it was a 3d asset that you

Speaker 2 14:38
Yeah, so you, you've got, like Photoshop, one of the first ways that, and frankly, the most useful way that it incorporated AI was generative fill. So if you have an image and you need to expand it out, or whatever, and it can fill it in, you know, with something that fits Leonardo. AI did that as well. These are all with still images now, runway and a couple of the other tools, but runway is the one that I've personally seen it. It will do what this thing is claiming to do, which is, I don't know, do you remember the what was that? What was that AI tool that was used for, where that that, that kind of now famous shot of someone dancing as they go out to be on stage, and someone had substituted it in to look like the Joker,

Speaker 1 15:34
yeah? Ai war, know what I'm talking about. Was, it was a, yeah, the Joker, yeah, absolutely,

Speaker 2 15:38
yeah, yeah. So that was a that's along the same lines. But this is, instead of substituting a character in it, it's swiveling around to look from other angles and using on the fly generative fill, to fill in what might be seen if the camera turns and sees a scene from other angles, which essentially is recaming, I guess, except that, of course, it's, it's not, you know, actual, an actual recam Like in a video game or, well, in real life, it'd be impossible. But in a video game, it's, you're actually, literally changing the perspective and seeing what really is behind them. Yeah, this is using generative fill to accomplish that. And, yeah, Midway runway has been doing that. I don't know if it's intentionally or if it's because you can run the same generation source, and sometimes it will do it and sometimes it won't. So it's almost like, what do they call those? Like a hallucination, almost, yeah. So I think what Recammaster is out to do is to harness that and to gain control of it and stabilize it and make make the results a little bit more refined, a little bit more consistent. I'm going to include, and I will, I'll show some if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see some examples. I did some examples. I actually happened to be doing some examples messing around with runway, and got some of those results I'm talking about. And then I came over to our planning board and saw Tracy mentioned this tool, I thought, what a coincidence. I was just doing this, not intentionally, but just runway. Was just spitting these out, these, these recaps, and the quality of them is all over the place, like, some of them are really weird and don't make any sense at all, and sometimes they'll completely change style in the middle of the turn. It's really weird. So I'm sure that they've observed that same thing and thought, Well, boy, if we could ever get control of that in the same way that runway one of its along the way. One of the things that runway enabled you to do was to to have some control over the the way the camera moves as it generates video from an image. Yeah, you can tell it to you want it to zoom in or zoom out, or pan left and right, or things like that. And this is, this is more of a Recam would imply, like almost a 360 a 360 turn and keeping things stable and consistent.

Speaker 1 18:21
I forget the name of the technique off the top of my head. You know, where you go into a, you know, studio with 360 cameras around you, and you filmed,

Speaker 2 18:32
oh, yeah, yeah. There was a real famous instance of that done for a it was Michael Jordan basketball player going up for this big dunk. And they took that. It has, it has something to do with the same technologies that were originally pioneered by the bullet cam guys in the matrix. It's, it's a bunch of still cameras that are that take images on a delay, on a timed delay, and then they stitch them together to make video.

Speaker 1 19:05
Yeah, yeah, we've got one of those studios at work. Oh, wow. Really, really irritating. I can't remember what the name of this system is. Off top, man,

Speaker 2 19:16
it does have a proprietary name, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, probably named after whoever created it. They

Speaker 3 19:22
about a decade ago. There's a team that had one of these, and they would go to comic conventions in London, and so people would get there in their costumes, and they'd do a pose, oh, wow, like a fighting pose or something, and they'd do the spin round thing. Very cool. Yeah, it was fun to do that. And they actually got Ray Park, who's the the actor who played Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, to go in it, and he had a lightsaber, and so he started leaping in the air, and I got to watch him do that. It was just so much fun. And then to see the end results of him doing that in slow motion, I was really stunning. I bet

Speaker 1 19:58
volumetric capture. Is what you call it, yeah, okay, volumetric capture,

Speaker 2 20:03
yeah. But so basically, what this recap master tool, I think, is trying to do is, okay, let's, let's, let's harness it. Let's, let's replicate a technique like that that's done in real world, but do it virtually with this generative fill exact technology. It's, it's intriguing, for sure. Yeah. I can see, I can right away see potential for abuse of it, but also I can see it as being kind of a lifesaver for if there's a studio who's, you know, working on these hundreds of millions of dollars films and a shot didn't turn out right, that they can use that to save it, you know. So it's, it's interesting that there's, there's some real commercial possibilities for the some of this stuff, yeah. And also, it also opens up some interesting doors for for amateurs as well. So it does, and

Speaker 1 20:57
I think if you can do it, you know, do create in real time, although I don't, I didn't see a lot of evidence that that's what you could do with it. But if you can create in real time, that's one of the big challenges, I think, with volumetric capture, is being able to do that in real time without too much lag. Because obviously, well, I'm not sure we are either. But that seemed to me a way of cutting down potential processing time by using a tool like this, rather than these quite complex, you know, multi cam systems that enable very, very expensive systems, but also very expensive in terms of processing capability to push it out in real time. So I don't know that to me, is an interesting one as well, for a number of other reasons. And then finally, also another interesting one is an AI assisted V tubing tool. I think I'm not sure what this one's called off the top of my head, I think it's called warp tuber. And this one allows you to animate character images, mapping your facial expressions and movements to them in real time. Now, we've seen a little bit of this over the years, on, on YouTube, you know, with with streamers, you know, putting avatars on as as basically like, like makeup, really. But it's kind of interesting to see that this is now also a developing area for ever more complex content generation.

Speaker 2 22:39
Sure, there are a couple tools on Steam, both made by the same company. Bear with me a second. I'll look up what they're called. I cover

Damien Valentine 22:51
it's cool either.

Tracy Harwood 22:53
Yeah, I'm sure. I think the

Speaker 2 22:55
latest version of it is called animes. Okay? I think, yeah, animes and face rig was the original

Damien Valentine 23:03
one. Oh, yeah. I say, I got, I had face rig.

Speaker 2 23:07
And I'm not sure that either of them are, are being very actively Well, it looks like animes is updated as of a month ago or two months ago. So that's the that's the more recent product. But a lot of people really preferred the the way that face rig worked, and it's still available in the in the in the store. But you know, those are pretty they're pretty interesting that it's customizing your avatar that you're going to animate is last, I last, I looked at it quite challenging, yeah, like, it's not very friendly at all, right? And honestly, what you know, it's easy to Hindsight is 2020, but what they should have done is partnered with Reallusion to to make it something that that incorporated with character creator four, that would be a logical thing to do, because then the possibilities are endless. You know, you rig it up if you can, if you can get it to be rigged up in character creator four, which was plenty of pipelines for people to do that, then just bring it right over to animes. It benefits them both that they didn't do that. So the process of actually getting from, let's say, a character creator for rigged avatar into this is just like way too much. Yeah, unless you were going to be using this in a regular professional capacity, it's just more work than it's, then it's worth, and it's an interesting tech, for sure. And yeah, it's, I'm sure that it's, it's going to continue to be something of interest.

Speaker 3 24:54
Sorry, as I say, I got friends who does V tubing. I have no idea what kind of software she uses when she's. Is streaming, but her character is two dimensional, and I know that she's changed it a few times, but what she's done is she's commissioned an artist every time she wants to change it. Is

Speaker 2 25:10
it kind of anime styled? Damien, yeah, yeah, yeah. There is something out there, and I don't know what it's called, either, but I've seen others that using that as well, yeah,

Speaker 3 25:19
but I've watched it, obviously being interested in machinima and animation. When she was doing it, I watched the character very closely to try and figure out how it works. And obviously it's done in pieces, so like the head, and then you got the eye, each eye separate, and the mouth and the nose, yeah. But expression

Speaker 2 25:32
almost like Moho or character, or what's the Reallusion version of Moho, cartoon animator? Yeah, and it is, it's pieces, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 25:42
Like the the upper arms, different pieces, and so on. And then the outfits, all different pieces as well, because she had like, really long hair that kind of floated around. And so you could see where this if you, if you know what you're looking for, you could see the segments, sure. So when she moves ahead, it kind of moves with her. So that's quite impressive to watch, but I have no

Speaker 2 26:02
idea that's that's much more processor. It's more, much more resource friendly to animate 2d and parts like that than to try and render in real time. Yeah, that's, you know, with, with these Nvidia cards nowadays, that's not really, probably much of an issue, but, but, yeah, it's, it's it, it's pretty sophisticated, and you can have some really neat stylized looks using that.

Speaker 1 26:28
Well, speaking of real illusion, I and and other projects actually Apple art studios. Well, I, as I was, immediately drawn to the fact there was Apple arts, although, turns out it's nothing to do with Apple and is, in fact, an Indian company which has launched what, what it's called an animation shopee, which basically looks like Quite an intriguing potential competitor, I would say to realusions character animations. They have launched their in house animation library, which is designed to provide ready to use animation files for what they describe as game developers, filmmakers, content creators. And in fact they say they are the leading motion capture studio offering custom motion capture services and pre built animation solutions in India today. So yeah, there is a direct competitor, I would say, to realusion on the market. I don't know how it competes price wise. But I'd be really interested to see how that one unfolds over time. Because, of course, it's an Indian studio that's recently bought Tippett studios, isn't it. So yeah, there's some quite interesting competition shaping up in this kind of arena, I think. And then finally, the other thing that I wanted to just touch on is this really interesting video that's been created by Bela news that talks about how steam works and it's it's basically a review of the algorithmic problems that steam perpetuates, and it's quite a good articulation, I think, of the inequity of these customization algorithms. It's the same problem that we see with YouTube, too, and ultimately, it's all about the share of revenue they derive from promoting only those gains products that that actually make money so that they get and get a cut of it. Now we've said many times now there needs to be another distribution system for indie Creator content. And this is yet another example of how indie creators always fall foul of these so called distribution systems, the only ones really that exist in the market today. So yeah, as I'll put a link to that, you can check that out so you can see just how biased these systems really are. Very disappointing, I have to say. But of course, you know they're not. You know they're not. They're not like the Internet Archive, if you like, they're not free at all. But I think if you if you really wanted to understand just how they do work, it's worth keeping an eye on these kinds of videos and and folks like this guy making these kinds of exposes. Really, it's interesting to see it. That's it for me. I've got nothing else to talk about this month. Quite a lot. Having said

Speaker 3 29:41
that, I got a few things a few days ago from when we are recording, Nintendo had the big reveal of the switch two, which is the successor to the Switch console. I don't know exactly what machine potential this has got, but we have seen since we're doing the. Show a few films made with the Nintendo Switch, which is a portable device, and the switch, too is also going to have portable potential. You can hook it up to the TV and play it that way if you want, but you can pull it out and you can put it into like handheld mode. It's obviously a more powerful device, and they can run games that are more graphic intensity than the switch can. Probably won't be able to compete too much with the modern the modern Xbox or Playstations or high end PC. But if you wanted a device that you know you can play games on the go. It's there, and it'd be interesting to see if people do use it for machinima, because it did have the switch had a record mode, so you can record the some of your gameplay, and you'd have the video files on your device, which you would then have to transfer to whatever you want to do the editing on. I imagine the switch two is going to have a similar feature. It was discussed. Yeah, it wasn't discussing the direct but, you know, it's not a big thing to talk about. So I'll be just to see what happens with that next thing. Little bit of backstory before I go into it. I went to a comment convention, no surprise there a few weeks ago, and there are two things that happened. One was I went into the main room where they had the stage and people doing talks. I caught the end of this studio who doing a demonstration of motion capture using, I don't know what suit they were using, because I didn't get the introduction to it, but they had one guy was there explaining it, and someone else's wearing the suit, and they had a laptop running the software, and so he was showing how the calibration works. And you're doing some demonstrations on stage, which is being projected onto the screen behind, so you could see the result. Immediate thing, unfortunately, I didn't catch the name of the studio or the name of these guys, and I didn't see them again because I sat down. I was saying to friends, that's what I do with s the Empire, so they're interested in that. But

Speaker 2 32:16
then you don't think for Coco, I don't know. I

Speaker 3 32:19
really I was too far away to have a good look at it. Was it tethered, or was it just, again, too far away to see? Okay? I wanted to get up and catch these guys to chat with them. They just appeared. So I never saw them again, to talk to them. But I thought it was interesting that they'd gone to this convention. It was only a small thing, a small event, but they were doing this version capture on stage, and so I wanted to mention that. And the other thing I saw is it's, it's an Australian comedian called John Robertson, and he has this show called darkroom, which he performs live on stage, and it's based on 80s text based adventure games. So yay. Yeah, Phil, I think you would really appreciate this the show. He's got some on YouTube so you can see some of his performances. So what he does is he he comes out on costume, and he's got the the game projected behind. And what he does, he picks people out of the audience to play it. And the idea is, they wake up in a dark room, they have to find the light switch, rescue their family and escape from the room. Now, the way it's rigged is you can't even survive long enough to find the light switch. Pretty much every decision you make either goes in a circle or it results in death. And everyone he's he's got this table set up. He calls it the table of wonders, and everyone who plays wins a prize. It's usually some piece of junk that he's got. Like when I saw him, he'd gone to the local supermarket and he bought things like a bag of pasta and some Minecraft socks and stuff like that. So he's just giving that random chunk to people. So the show is hilarious. He swears a lot, so it's not necessarily suitable for kids, although that does seem to happen. Kids do go in and watch this, and he questions the parents about that. And so it's not necessarily machinima related, but it kind of is, because it's performed in real time, but

Speaker 2 34:29
on stage, it's really fascinating. I'm going to check it out. Yeah, I highly

Speaker 3 34:33
recommend it, just don't be shocked by language uses. Okay, so I thought this is something I want to recommend, because if you get a chance to watch it live, it's worth it, and it gets people riled up. So when someone dies, you have to shout, you die, you die, you die. He wants the whole audience to shout it at the person. That is just so, yeah, that's that's something I wanted to bring up. As a good piece of fun. Next thing is the next round of RTX 50 series graphics cards supposed to be announced this month. As of recording, they haven't been but they should be coming in the next few weeks. So if you're looking for the it's the 5060 TI and just the fifth regular 5060 don't know what the prices or anything like that going to be, but that's due to be announced on the 15th of April, unless that's changed since I posted it in the news. Well,

Speaker 1 35:34
probably they're going to be a lot more expensive than they were last week. Yeah. Probably.

Speaker 3 35:40
So you know, if you're in the market for a new RTX card, and the 5090s and 5080s are a bit out of your price range. Well, maybe this will be cheaper. But who knows? Like you just said, Tracy, next one. There's a game called insoi has been released. This is a Sims competitor. They the developers say it isn't, but when you look at it, it looks like it is, clearly

Speaker 2 36:07
is, yeah. It clearly is, yeah.

Speaker 3 36:11
It looks a lot more photo realistic than the Sims

Speaker 2 36:16
definitely more. Yes, I'm I'm really intrigued. I'm not, I'm not interested in the gameplay at all, but it's an intriguing looking engine, yeah, so I'm going to be watching it for I assume at some point it'll steam always does sales on this stuff, right? So, yeah, that and Starfield will both be in my list. Yeah, last time there was a star field sale, it lasted like two days like I saw I got the notice. I thought, Oh, cool. I bookmarked it. I'll take care of that. This weekend I came and it was already, already back to full price. But anyway, yeah, so it looks interesting. There's you'd mentioned earlier. Someone had mentioned earlier, just in this episode about, oh, we were talking about animes and face rig and real, real time capture of face. And insoi has that built in to where you can actually, first of all, they've got a pipeline to help you basically do the equivalent of in character creator realizations. Character Creator, it's what's that plug in, called Damian. I'm blanking headshot, yeah, that's it, where you can take a photograph or a series of photographs, and create a skin, essentially for for the character and enjoy has it basically supports the idea of bringing your own face to be your, your Zoi, your, your Sim, but then also to have real time control over the facial expression and whatnot of it. Now, I don't know how that actually works into the gameplay, other than just it's it's neat to look at, and I also don't the only time I've ever seen it done in a video, they were doing it on the character creation screen, but I assume that you can do it while playing the game as well. I don't know it's, but it's, it's interesting. I think it's the first, first game that I can think of that has that real time face expression capture built into a game like it's designed for that, like an actual game, not just a utility, but an actual game. So it's, it's, it's an interesting one to watch. I think they do have any kind of camera control in it, and that I don't know yet. Either I don't know either, because seems like a natural game to to create machinima, and just because it's, it's really good looking renders, like it's better looking renders than anything I've ever seen out of The Sims four. But the Sims four is, what, 10 years old now, so, you know, of course, but it, I think, even if it doesn't perform as well as the Sims, as far as sales go, seems to raise the bar, and that, I think that ultimately, that that competition is a good thing, because I assume there's going to be another installation in the in the Sims franchise at some point. They're, they're very good at keeping very mum about it, but I have to think they're working on that well, hopefully this didn't scare the heck out of them, you know, like, what if this is like, so beyond what they're doing and make them retool, I don't know.

Speaker 3 39:43
Well, the last thing about the Sims was, there was going to be a Sims five, but they decided to put all their effort into creating more content for four. But maybe now this is out there thinking, well, maybe we should try and compete with this, because this looks so much better than our team. It

Speaker 2 39:57
does really. Yeah, the comparison is. Is not particularly favorable. Now, there are people who just like the esthetic of The Sims four, and so they'll to them that doesn't matter, you know, they like the look of it. And I get that, yeah, but yeah, you can't deny it's, it's they, they've, they've done some things well, I think, Oh yeah, definitely. I'm sure that there's plenty of things that the Sims has or that you can do in The Sims that you can't in this and it maybe it doesn't stack up in all regards. But visually, yeah, Wow, looks really good. I

Speaker 3 40:34
mean, with The Sims four, you've got so many content packs to try and compete with that. Of course, the Sims is going to have all that content to that enzyme just cannot compete with because inZOI is a brand new game. That's not a fault for inZOI, it's just the reality, right? A new game versus a game that's had a decade's worth of expansion packs. Yeah, and I think that was the thinking behind the Sims five. Was that why they decided to not focus on that for a while is because when they release Sims five, people can say, Yeah, but it hasn't got all this other stuff that we're used to. Because no matter what they choose, they can't put everything in, and they obviously want to keep some of that for expansion packs to self as the Sims five,

Speaker 2 41:14
right? I'm sure in zoy probably has a similar business plan, probably Yeah, for content packs and stuff, but it, what will be nice is, if they will, kind of, I think an innovation that would be nice to this genre of game would be official tools and pipelines for bringing in your own content. And I realized that to do that, it's to the detriment of their business interests, technically, right? The easier it is for people to create their own clothing and furniture and all that, then the less incentive there is to to buy the packs. But maybe enjoy will be approaching it a little differently. It'd be nice to see that.

Speaker 3 41:55
I think the answer to that would be, instead of just having an expansion pack that's new, like clothes and stuff. New features, yes, that is absolutely modest.

Speaker 2 42:04
Can't do premium content, you know, content that would be really hard for the average end user to make, yeah, because it's so good. And then yeah, new, actual gameplay features that is,

Speaker 1 42:16
or a market where they're, um, taking a cut.

Speaker 2 42:20
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Frankly, they would be dumb not to do that, although

Speaker 3 42:26
Bethesda have done that with star star fields, and that's not been so well received as from the Well, you're

Speaker 2 42:33
right, but I think part of that is because, for for very long in the Bethesda universe, wasn't it. It wasn't done that way, right? It was just, it was just open and free and and so late in the game, they decide, okay, we want to get ourselves plugged in here. And I understand their reason for wanting to do so, but that's part of the pushback. Is because there was this other previous way of doing things to compare it to, maybe within Zoi that with it being kind of a fresh start, they won't have to worry as much about that, you know? And I guess, I guess

Damien Valentine 43:07
there's different game as well. So that's

Phil Rice 43:09
true, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 43:11
who owns inZOI? Is that?

Speaker 2 43:15
Remember the name of the company? It's South Korea based, I believe, is it? Yeah?

Speaker 1 43:21
And zoy means, what is that life inZOI? Does that mean? Is that like Zoe?

Damien Valentine 43:29
I don't know. It's not, it's

Speaker 2 43:31
not her name, zoys. Zoi is a The name zoy of Greek origin, means life,

Tracy Harwood 43:39
yeah, okay,

Speaker 2 43:41
but how that, how that's, that's apparently a Greek root, so I don't know if it means something different in, interesting in but, you know, you figured they had to come up with some short, simple Name That wasn't sim out of trouble, right? So yeah, you know, I think it's

Speaker 1 44:07
to be catchy philosophical is it? Was it right? Baurdillard and all that, or Bourdieu and well,

Speaker 2 44:14
and they sell it as a life simulator. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 3 44:18
So just to answer your question, Tracy, I just looked up the steam page. It says developer inZOI studio, and publisher is craft and Inc, I don't know if the publisher owns it or if they're just publishing it. Probably not. Yeah. And it's the reviews are very positive, so it must be very well received.

Speaker 1 44:38
Looking forward to hearing a bit more about this. I think we talked about this one a little bit last year. Yeah, that was a demo

Speaker 3 44:43
which I tried, but it wasn't very optimized, so my computer couldn't very well, right, right?

Speaker 2 44:49
Yeah, I'm seeing, I'm seeing a lot of Let's Plays for it and and the the the reviews that I've seen are overwhelmingly part. Positive. So, yeah, I think it's been a decent launch form, and I'm excited to see what people make with it. And some of the complaints are about are related to camera controls. But I don't know if you know, without having played with it myself, I don't know if it's just that they don't know how to use it, or if it really is limited how modifiable that will be, or is this game modable in ways that the Sims four might not be? Those are all questions that will really, I think, determine the the direction of things. Some of

Speaker 3 45:31
the if some of those complaints could be the camera controls are fine. It's just not the same as the Sims four. Which people Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, yeah, because people still complain about the Sims four camera controls and not the same as the Sims three, which apparently had the best camera controls in the whole series. So, right, yeah. All right. So my last piece of news, it was an article I saw in The Guardian, which is a UK newspaper, and it's called blockbusted. Why homemade Minecraft movies are the real hits, and it's talking about the Minecraft movie that has just been released. The Guardian is quite well known for not liking popular movies. They will review them badly, no matter how well they're doing in the cinemas or how popular they end up being, but what they've been doing is looking at machinima films. Now they don't actually mention the word machinima in the article that, as far as I noticed, but what they are looking at is people who have made movies out of Minecraft, and they seem to be more impressed by those than the actual movie itself, which I thought, Well, whoever wrote this article is probably not the target audience for the Minecraft movie, so that might be part of it. But I thought it's interesting that a mainstream newspaper here in the UK was looking at machinima films, and I thought, I just want to share this article so people can have a read of it and

Speaker 2 47:00
well, and you know, my my son and my daughter are. My son especially is, you know, long time Minecraft player. He's a Minecraft content creator, and is very plugged into that community. And he, and he and some colleagues of his that I think probably have have kind of a aspiration or dream for, you know, one day making games like this, Mojang and Minecraft, Mojang, the company that you know, the developers that that make it, they are a point of study for everyone. Everyone watches what they do and and they it's very important to them to have an opinion on every change that's made to Minecraft. It's, it's, it's a thing that's very much the opinion of, at least, from the exposure that I've had to the Minecraft community through my kids. That's the opinion that's broadly out there amongst Minecrafters as well, is that if you'd ask them, what would we want from a Minecraft movie in the cinema, it would be something made to look like it was made in Minecraft, not this weird, corporate CGI version of things, and you know, the known actors being a part of it not important to them at all. Now, as I shared with both of you, my son actually went and saw the Minecraft movie opening weekend and said it was the most fun that he'd ever had in the cinema that he can ever remember. But it had nothing to do with whether or not the movie was any good. It was. It was loaded with a bunch of people his age and he is the Minecraft generation. Grew up with it, and the movie was very, very cleverly made use of memes to to kind of be the beat points of of this movie, and the the audience just loved it. And apparently that's happening not just at my son's university, but with with, you know, younger people as well, and that that is really what this movie is, the splash that it's making is this very unusual, high energy community experience that I think the only thing that we could compare it to would be, I heard similar stuff about the Mario movie, but the Mario movie, we were still kind of coming. You know, the movie theaters hadn't really made their full recovery from COVID habits, and so it didn't really, it just didn't track the same level of energy. Now. Numbers wise, it did exceptionally well. But I went and saw the Minecraft movie with with them in the theater. And there was nothing like what he described for this. But this, he described something that sounded to me like the Rocky Horror Picture Show for for the 21st century. You know this, this participatory everyone dressed with their Minecraft shirts and cheering at certain points and maybe even saying certain lines from the trailer that had been memed since Jack Black's appearance in the trailer came about. They were, you know, it was like a chorus going along with it, and stuff, just just, it's fascinating. We talked quite a bit about it before the for the show today. So it's, it's, it's definitely a movie to watch. It's, it's a there's, it's a cultural phenomenon, but in a different way than, say, the Barbie movie was, you know, the Barbie movie had a similar was very, very popular amongst Gen Z in particular. But the Barbie movie was, Barbie movie was different because they were trying to do something different with that movie. I feel like they were trying to actually package a message for that generation in there. You know, Greta Gerwig, who is the director they had. They had very clear ideas that they wanted to communicate. And I think arguably, they succeeded in doing so, whether you agree with the ideas or not, they did communicate them very well. From what I understand about the Minecraft movie, there's, there doesn't seem to have been any such effort. It's very plastic. It's very just kind of empty fun. But maybe that's what Gen Z wanted right now or something, because they seem to have loved it. And right now, it's on track. But by the time this episode's out, the real numbers will be out, but it's on track to perhaps be the biggest opening for a video game related movie ever, and the prior, the prior king of that was the Mario movie about a year ago, right? That would, that was that broke the record at that time. It looks like Minecraft is going to either come really close to that or maybe even surpass it. And yet, it just doesn't have even the Mario movie had had some kind of a little bit of substance to it, I guess. And this seems like it has less of that, that this is more. This is a cotton candy type of thing, you know, and yet they love it. So, yeah, I think it's worthy of study, like, what? Why did this work? So remains to be

Speaker 3 52:39
seen. Well, I'm glad people are enjoying it. I'm not. I am too, yeah. Oh, I was

Speaker 2 52:44
so happy he caught, you know, when my son calls me, he's away at university, so when he calls just to tell me how, how much fun he had, and he didn't expect to like they bought, they bought. He and his friends bought a whole row in the theater to go see this movie with the explicit intention of going there to make fun of it, because they were convinced this movie is going to be a stinker. It's going to be awful. Let's go laugh at it. Let's go. Let's go so we can all just have a, you know, laugh at the expense of this movie about how awful it is. And it turns out that they were probably right about the movie, like in terms of how that what they actually thought of the movie. That is what they thought of the movie. I the movie. But in spite of that, this quasi religious experience happened, and they had the best time ever. So, yeah, man, how do you That's weird. That's very strange. Yeah, I can't think of a modern comparison to that. So it's, it's like I said, I think it's worthy of some, some study of what, what's going on there? Oh, no, doubt we'll find out.

Speaker 3 53:52
Yeah, well, I'm sure I've seen at some point, but it's not a film that necessarily wants, makes me want to rush out to the cinema to go and see it. No,

Speaker 2 54:00
no. I mean, I would have loved to go with him, but that's that's really about just being with him, not, yeah, no, he wanted to go see Don Golden Pond. I would go watch that with him some. Yeah, no one in the audience even knows what Don Golden Pond is. I'm glad Tracy,

Tracy Harwood 54:20
that's a generational thing.

Speaker 2 54:22
Yes, I'm old. I am old. I'll say that just like Jack Black did I am Steve.

Speaker 3 54:33
That wraps up my news.

Phil Rice 54:39
Yeah, I think that's everything,

Speaker 3 54:40
yeah. So yeah. Thank you for everyone for listening. Hope you found our news interesting. Let us know if you got any comments about any of the things we talked about. If you know anything more about insoi or any of the other stories, please let us know we'll be watching that game. Particularly. See what people do with it. So for myself, David Valentine, Tracy Harwood and Phil rice, we will see you next week. You.