I'm still trying to understand the full implications of this so read the following with that in mind.

There's are a couple of bills (H.R. 5889 & S. 2913) passing through the US Governmental Houses that are causing more than just a little bit of concern for artists and creatives the world over. Even though it's currently an issue specific to the USA, it does have wider more far reaching implications, it concerns something within the realms of copyright called 'Orphan Works'.

If you've not heard about this before then 'Orphan Works' are essentially any creative work (image, painting, sculpture, digital work etc.. etc.. in short any form of creative expression that's put down in "tangible form") for which the copyright owner and/or originating author cannot be found or determined, hence it being 'orphaned' (without [sic] 'parents').

All creative works are protected under (local and) international copyright laws, the most important of which, internationally, is something referred to as the Berne Convention. In a nutshell this 'treaty' protects creative (authored) works from being exploited without the originating authors permission by placing them, upon creation, under the all encompassing protection of 'copyright' (the Berne Convention apparently doesn't recognize or give merit to anything that would be considered 'Orphan Works'). It also sets in place a mechanism authors can use for the levy of heavy financial penalties if works are exploited, and it's this latter aspect that the current Orphan Works legislation concerns (amongst others); the limitation of damages liable by copyright infringements;

"...Potential users of orphan works often fail to display or use such works out of concern that they may be found liable for statutory damages, amounting to as much as $150,000." [1]

This whole debacle is based on the setting up legislation that effectively removes or severely limits liabilities due from people and/or entities that infringe copyright (on purpose or not), to the point where it all but (in)directly requires authors to register their works with the Copyright & Patents Offices in order to (re)gain fair and just compensation as laid out in previous copyright related treaties; that, in part, is exactly what they protect against, the direct or indirect forced or coerced registration of copyright. In other words, with this new Orphan Works legislation it becomes (in theory) cheaper for entities to infringe (claiming 'due diligence') and pay a minimal fine against Orphan Works, with the 'fault' being placed in the hands of authors for not registering their works - copyright protection previously made no such requirement a necessity.

It's not presented that way, obviously, it's purpose is hidden under the guise of being able to;

"... preserve important parts of our personal and national heritage, without giving a free license to infringe on established copyright protections." [2]

Whilst that quote is in part a bit of a red herring (it suggests 'historical' or 'education' use only) it's the latter half that is of concern from the stand point of the legislation itself; whilst it may have the language in place to 'imply' that it prevents a [sic] "free for all", the exact criteria of prevention are not set in stone nor indeed laid bare for all and sundry to clearly see and succinctly understand, in fact the only criteria that are mentioned translates as a rather open ended "due diligence" which is subject to interpretation and thus (potential) abuse.

Have a read through the following and act as you see fit, even if you don't agree with it, pass the information around, this is a real problem and a real law that is going through the motions that could have wider global implications.

• H.R.5889 - Orphan Works Act of 2008 (Introduced in House) [alt]
• S.2913 - Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 (Introduced in Senate) [alt]
• Summery - Leahy, Hatch, Berman, Smith Introduce IP Legislation
• CGSociety topic of discussion (additional information)
• Written Statement of Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner on Behalf of the Illustrators’ Partnership of America - this issue was raised in a somewhat sensationlist fashion by an article associated with the IPoA, whilst I don't agree with it having been done that way, it did bring the issue quite dramatically to front face of the greater creative community.

If you want to take action then take a look at the following, a series of sample letters that can be edited and 'personalised' before sending off to your Government representative. It's also suggested that International creative contact their local Gov. representatives and voice their concern from an international perspective.

• Sample letters of protest
• International sample letter of protest

WARNING : Do NOT do this if your laptop is still under warranty as you will void it literally the moment your touch the first screw with your (probably incorrectly sized) screwdriver. Seriously. Don't do it. If you break the machine the manufacturer will be more than happy to take all the cash you have to fix it, especially the big boys (Dell, HP, IBM, Sony, et-al). Also, usual warning about clean hand, static, touching metal case, not touching contact points and so on...

First things first is to take the back off to reveal the innards of the laptop; when doing this make sure you use the right sized screwdriver because there's nothing worse then 'ripping' the screw head slots and making them useless for future repair jobs that may need to be done (screwdriver head slips because of torn metal).

So this is the culprit, the Fujitsu Amilo A7620's ATi Radeon 9000 mobility chipset module (phew!) I don't remember there being quite so much electronic 'stuff' on the AGP version of this I had in my old desktop workhorse (back in the day), but anyway, as you can see the chip itself is exposed, along with the memory modules, that metal 'hook' shape to the left sits on top of the motherboard bridge chip (shown in the image above - the 'silver topped' one, lower middle right).

The Fujitsu Amilo A7620's ATi Radeon 9000 mobility chipset graphics card module

Now the heatsink that sits on top of the ATi 9000 mobile module is this aluminium thing below - which is shown with blue heat compound pads still where they were when it was removed - these basically take up the slack between the heatsink and the chipset because the heatsink itself isn't exactly as firmly anchored over the top of the graphics chip as it would be on it's AGP 'big brother'. So, what laptop manufacturers do is use a 'rubberised' pad that gets squashed and displaced when the headsink is positioned and screwed into place - and here is the source of the overheating / graphics issues; if you look closely at image below (and linked) there is an off centered indentation in the larger pad, which is a result of pressure on the the ATI 9000's chipset, and as you can see it's not positioned correctly, it's only covered about half of the pad, which means the ATI chipset has a good proportion of it's surface exposed to air (remember it's not in contact with the heatsink in any way), and this as we all know, is bad!.

Heatsink and the 'heat compound' pads that make up for bad connection between sink and chip

To illustrate this problem better the image below shows the ATi 9000 mobile chip covered the way it was when the heatsink was put in place at manufacture; as can be seen, almost 50% of the chip remains exposed!

The original positioning of the heatsink compound pad showing almost 50% of the graphics chips exposed to air

That's the source of the overheating crashes, easy to fix though by correctly placing the pad. It's worth mentioning here that the stuff the pads are made from is very easy to 'chip' if you're not careful; although it's 'rubberised' the edges have a tendency to crumble and nick with fingernails so caution is advised, try lifting from the underside rather than grabbing the edges.

Correcting the position and coverage of the heatsink compound pad

Time to put it all back together, heatsink compound pads in correctly positioned, the card back in place on the motherboard and the heatsink screwed over the top. Although the heatsink is quite large there's not much area given over to active cooling by the rotational fan; there are some fins in the exhaust channel but that whole plate tends to heat up, which is a substantially large area that needs to be cooled by the fan.

All done. Other pads place on the ATi module which is then sat back into the laptop motherboard

Heatsink back in place held there by a couple of small screws

Fujitsu laptops aren't the only manufacturers that seem to have issues with overheating (Dell, HP and others), based on the above is it any wonder; the CPU is more often than not taken care of with a copper 'passive/active' heatsink (copper pad with heat 'pipes' leading to a fan cool exhaust grill), the GFX chipset on the other hand, often seems to be over looked - I do wonder what the point is of having 'high end' graphics chips in laptops if manufacturers don't take care to cool them properly; marketing laptop computers as multimedia devices means the GFX chip is going to undergo some reasonably heavy abuse; use a laptop for content creation and game editing (and yes playing games) and you really are flogging the horse for every ounce of power you can get.

Laptop hasn't crashed yet since doing this.

[UPDATE]

Now with video goodness. You can now watch a short video which walks through the process of creating a new track in 'Simple' editing mode

Thankfully not much has changed in the new version of Trackmania Nations - Forever except for additional content and an interface redesign, in fact, they've made it even easier for novices to get up and running in no time creating their own tracks with the inclusion of a 'Simple' mode.

Create new custom tracks for Trackmania Nations Forever

The latest tutorial added to site walks through the general process of what you need to do to create brand new tracks; and it's very easy to do. So if you want to remove those skidmarks without the need to hire a road crew, read up and lay down your own tarmac!

• Creating tracks (track editing) for Trackmania Nations - Forever

Crazy Bump 1.01 now released

With CrazyBump now being a 'live' product it means that installing and using the app puts you into 'demo' mode (not sure if this is time limited); to get out of this now requires the purchase of a suitable licence; Personal @ $99 and Professional @ $299; Indie developers are encouraged to contact Ryan to discus licences, see here for more details.

At time of writing, previous 'beta' versions seems to be functioning but that will more than likely stop at some point in the future.

• Crazy Bump image to normal map generator

The latest tutorial added to the site runs through two processes that can be used to create smoothing on meshes using Blender 3D and whilst not ideal, they do work, go check um out...

• Blender 3D, UT3 and smooth groups on custom game models

TMN Forever weighs in at c.500MB.

• TrackMania Nations Forever news item

Download links

• TMN Forever @ Filefront
• TMN Forever @ Worthplaying
• TMN Forever @ Gamershell

TrackMania Nations Forever a free game courtesy of Nadeo

From a technological stand point asking 'why' is simple to answer; the tech. Obviously using UE3 brings with it to screen a whole slew of new bells and whistles and better in world fidelity than previous generations. Easy.

However, if you ask 'why' again but from within the context of the target user base for these games (presumably 'teen' or under - there aren't any clear details on this), the answer isn't quite so clear cut; typically the demographic groups that play these games aren't known for being that 'bleeding edge' (if at all), tech savvy or even interested in that aspect of 'gaming' so, it does beg the question as to why use an engine that has the steep system requirements that UE3 has on a user base that don't look at 'interactive entertainment' from that point of view? Maybe I'm looking at this from the arse end but it just doesn't make any sense to me, not even from the point of view of using something simply because it is 'next' (current) gen technology.

Added to this is the supplementary fact that these games are part of an online 'social network' platform and things get really interesting, why? The downloading of 'next' (current) generation of UGC (user generated content) - making a custom shirt texture to fit over your avatar suddenly becomes a serious resource management problem, an 'old gen' 512x512 *.DDS image at 200k suddenly becomes a 1024x1024 x 4 (depending on what graphics effects you use) at several megabytes; not a problem in of itself until you start to download items as a user sat in a room where 12+ avatars are all wearing custom made gear!

Can you spell 'lag' in several languages?

The good news is that there are more current and 'mature' MD3 scripts available that have been put through their paces for some time by various projects running on the open source IOQuake3 engine; Open Arena in particular has made a point of using Blender 3D and these MD3 export/import scripts as part of the content creation production chain.

• Blender to MD3 export/import scripts

Whenever you use a none industry standard application to develop content for games you always (pretty much without fail) hit some rather large brick walls; smoothing, or "smooth groups" is one such wall and one of the biggest to get around. The main reason for this is that game development studios often integrate an in-game solution to smoothing modelled 3D assets that's often based on the way their main 3D content tools work with (and output) "smooth-groups". This presents a big problem for the hobbyist custom content maker in the sense that they are not (generally speaking) going to have access to the same type of professionally capable tools to make their custom 3D content as a development studio, so being 100% compatible is always in question, is it the tools causing problems or the user? And so on.

Because of the way software companies have implemented smooth groups into their various 3D applications, it means that SoftImage's XSI won't be using the same method as 3DS Max's which will again be different to LightWaves handling of it, which is different to Blenders...

Design Note : There are generally speaking three ways to create smoothing on 3D objects, by...;

• Smoothing based on 'Angle'

  Basically this tells the 3D app to smooth lighting over surfaces based on the angular different between neighbouring faces; for instance, if you had a smoothing angle of 10° set across a collection of faces lying on a flat plain, they would all be considered part of the same smoothing 'group'. But, if you angled one of the faces so that it was 20° from the horizontal (tilted upwards) the edge along which the faces are bent creates a 'border', as a result, two 'groups' on either side of the inclined edge are formed; because it had gone over the 10° limit that had previously been set, it forces the 3D app to consider the polygons either side of the 'border' created by the incline as separate 'groups'.

• Smoothing by 'Group'

  A 'group' is literally just that, a 'group' or collection of selected faces that are given a common 'identifier' which tells the 3D app to 'smooth' all the faces that carry the same identifier as part of the same group of faces. So having different 'identifiers' on different collections of faces means that borders are created where those individual groups meet.

• Hard or Soft 'Edges'

  This method is similar to the above 'group' smoothing in that the technique is applied directly to the mesh itself; the main qualitative difference however, is that areas of smoothing are defined by the edges of faces (edge-loops - the lines that define and travel along the outer limits of a polygon face). Generally speaking, a single contiguous 'smoothing' is applied over an entire model, edges are then selected and 'marked' as being 'hard' or 'soft' (on/off). Where ever a hard edge is found a smoothing boundary is formed with the end result being the appearance of smoothed 'groups' (smoothed 'zones').

Forced Smoothing (forcing smooth groups)

Normally the way around the problem of smooth groups is to 'hack' or 'force' the smoothing on 3D objects by splitting vertexes to create polygon 'islands' - these are faces that can be detached from the main body of a mesh whilst remaining part of the parent object itself (see image below).

• see the forced smooth groups tutorial here for more details on this

A forced smooth group based on vertex splitting to create polygon islands on a mesh object.

An alternative method is to create smooth groups using UVW map islands; and object is UVW mapped in such a way as to create individual 'islands' on the overall UVW; borders or UVW edges between each island are read and render in such a way as to create 'groups' on a mesh (see image below).

An example of laying out individual UVW map sections to create 'islands' which are often rendered as 'smooth groups' by game engines - hard/group edges follow the borders laid out by each UVW map section.