Paul Douglas

Lara's OG motorcycle was a Norton Commando modified like a café racer. Note the distinctive crankcase cover.

Was originally just a generic sportsbike but myself and Neal (who really loved his motorbikes too) decided it should fittingly be a British classic instead.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_...

Weather forecast for the UK, showing rain on all days except Saturday, February the 14th when we are due some sunshine

Rain,rain,rain except for February the 14th...

Not really surprising is it?
With a few exceptions, entertainment press has always been more adjacent to PR than news journalism.

Fwiw, Gary Antcliffe was the 2nd programmer on Tomb Raider, starting after Toby and I had done some pre-production. He created the framework for the editors, ported what I had on PC to the Sega Saturn, and helped build the pipeline. He left Core a while after the other programmers joined the team.

This editor was also used on Core's Blam:Machinehead game as that shared some character/animation tech I had created for first Tomb Raider game. It could also import from Alias/Wavefront programs on SGI machines as an original design feature but TR only used 3DStudio on PC for modelling & animation.

YouTube video by This Week In Gaming Inside Core Design Studio In 1997

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFy...

Stu Atkinson 'demos' the character & animation editor for the OG Tomb Raider games. This editor was used to texture & paint meshes imported from 3D Studio 4 and link, sequence and markup sets of imported animations. Built in-house by myself and Gary Antcliffe.

#TR30

Victor wanted us to change in-game Lara to appeal more to a Japanese audience. Huge eyes/head etc. They faxed through examples really late in dev. Toby Gard really didn't want to alter Lara. As a compromise all that was changed was the manuals & guide. Not sure who did that render or illustrations.

YouTube video by BFI Snow (1963) - Geoffrey Jones | BFI National Archive

It has been snowing in the UK.
So an excuse to post this wonderful short from 1963.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl4p...

Some intriguing casting for live action TR.
Is the Sasha character a doppelgänger? Dead ringer for Lara...

Fireworks at the Ryogoku Bridge, by Utagawa Hiroshige, 1858: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/utagawa-hiroshige-last-great-master-of-ukiyo-e #fireworks #NewYearsEve

I look forward to reading that. The ports cant have been too difficult. More lucrative for them than me by sounds of it ;)

Lara referred to as Laura by Aspyr (c. 2022)

Lara / Laura - even the publishers sometimes get it wrong 😏

31 years.
Where did all the time go...

There needs to be another 90%+ TR after all this time...

I'm quite looking forward to seeing both new games now. Visually they are stunning, something we only dreamed of 30 years ago. We will have to wait and see if the gameplay and resulting feelings of exploration and adventure are as good.

Aha! We get best of both worlds... 🇮🇳🦖

Tomb Raider Allosaurus concept artwork by T Gard. 1994

Rawr!

She's back apparently.
Personally I'd prefer exploring new lost worlds than another remake/remaster/reimagining of something we crafted under intense duress in the 90's. Fingers crossed, eh.

Dinosaurs will always be cool though...

Well done our lass.

However, I suspect most of those magazine covers were in the 90s and 00s so it's hardly a contest nowadays. And I imagine Aloy is looking quite large in the rearview mirror too.

Let's hope CD and Amazon don't rest on their laurels, eh...

Bon sang, ça fait 31 ans pour moi et 29 ans pour toi.

A new book about Tomb Raider to peruse whilst interminably awaiting further adventures. 🇫🇷

The braid joints were animated via a rudimentary physics engine, rather than hand animated like rest of Lara.
The physics engine used spheres and boxes to represent solid objects like her backpack and neck to collide the braid against. Ergo, independent of polygon count.

It just needed tuning...

Lara's braid was replaced for a presentation at E3 as it would clip right through her back and neck which looked rather grotesque.
Then we had a huge list of higher priority tasks to crunch through before launch so it stayed as the temporary bun.

Nothing to do with polygon count as stated here⬇️🤦

AI-cloning of Lara Croft's voice has 'Tomb Raider' fans and actors up in arms In France, the apparent use of artificial intelligence to clone an actor's voice for video game character Lara Croft has fans and actors up in arms.

The apparent use of artificial intelligence to clone an actor's voice for video game character Lara Croft has fans and actors up in arms.

GenAI used in this way:

Not cool.
Not classy.

A lot of us from that era honed our crafts on the Amiga computer, before multimedia/game degrees became de rigueur. Eg. Toby Gard's animation portfolio created on the Amiga was featured in one of the computer art magazines a year or two before he joined Core Design too.

#Amiga

'Lohnar' open world 3d game demo on Amiga 500 by Paul Douglas. Early 1990s.

Definition file for a 3d object that kind of looks like a dalek. Really a tapered hexagonal prism with a sphere on top... 13 vertices, 7 polygons, 1 sphere, 1 partitioning plane (for sorting). By Paul Douglas, early 1990s.

The Amiga computer is 40 years old.
It was more affordable than PCs and Macs, allowing those of us who had limited means to be creative. I loved that machine, spent so many hours programming on it, building 3d objects for my demos and games, making sounds with a 8bit sampler and so forth.

#Amiga

All of videogaming history fits into 4 Duke Nukem Forever dev cycles.

Happy 40th Birthday to the Amiga 🎂

Grab a copy of our book - Commodore Amiga: a visual compendium: www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/...

#bitmapbooks #books #retrogaming #gaming #birthday #ocs @rachelsham.bsky.social

My experience was the classism was pernicious. Quite a few working class in the trenches but rarely in positions above that; "Congratulations, here's a job on the production line but don't get ideas above your station" It's been similar outside gaming, just with less exploitation and abuse.