Running at 60hz. Yep. All of you probably had no problems with Hz in phones before, but personally I hate everything under 60hz. I still wonder why I got myself a HTC Sensation, but then again, it was cheap. The Nokia Lumia 920 runs at 60hz, and it feels sooo nice. No lag, whatsoever, like you could have in Android on pretty much any device.

Compared to the HTC Sensation, Nokia Lumia 920 is not only noticeably faster and looks better, it’s also a whole different thing to hold in your hand. At first, the Lumia 920 may seem large, at least in my hands, but it makes up for that when you actually use it. It’s way easier to type on it (takes a couple of days to learn the new keyboard), especially compared to (most) Android phones where the keyboard continiously lags behind when writing. The Lumia also weights a little bit more, (when trying it – “heavy” is the first word that comes to mind to practically everyone) even if that could be a problem to some people – to me, it isn’t.

Now, we’re off to eating pizza. In the next part I’ll talk about what I did with my HTC Sensation today.

The rest of that night, I spent by trying to add a ringtone to my Nokia Lumia 920. Since I did not have a SIM-card and data-connection I used the WiFi instead. I thought it would be fairly easy. Because all the music I’ve got is stored on my DropBox, I looked up an existing application to view and download my DropBox content to my Windows Phone 8 device (yeah, I’m writing that out WAY too much)… I ended up with FileBox (because it was pretty much the only application with OK reviews…) and noticed pretty early that the WP8 Store does not have screenshots of the applications. I thought that was standard? How could you possibly NOT include a screenshot or video of the application you’re downloading? I could be downloading a really shitty app, fo’sho. (I did, later on) And yes, personally I judge Application’s shittyness on how they look. A good GUI = a good application, that’s just the way it works.  It should be beginner friendly, go by the theme of the operating system and you should like it at first sight. Otherwise it’s not worth it.

FileBox was really a “decent” application. It just did what it was supposed to do, nothing more and nothing less. It actually has a function to sync your photos to your DropBox automatically, but since this is done manually from the menu it just looses it’s point (It’s still better than syncing with Microsoft’s CloudAppSomethingWare-software, SkyCloud or SkyDrive or whatever it’s called, I really never got how that one works). I checked out some music, pressed a song, which redirected to the browser (“Internet Explorer”, of course..), which opened a stream and let me play the MP3-file directly. Awesome! I did that a couple of times, before trying to find a download button. Forget it. There is no way to download MP3 files from either FileBox, Internet Explorer OR the built in media player which streams everything. So I had to download an app to downdload MP3′s. Niftly enough, it’s called “MP3 Downloader”, and lets you paste an URL to download the MP3. Works flawlessly. But, how do I choose the song as ringtone?

It was a hard task. Harder then I could possibly imagine. It turned out that not only could you not choose a song from your ordinary music album as Ringtone, you have to actually place it in a separate folder on the phone, which is not accessible via any file manager (mainly because there isn’t one, apparently the Windows Phone 8 operating system does not allow Apps to directly write to the SD-card contents…), so I actually had to plug the device in via USB to my computer. Wattafakk? Well, at least I’m glad they did not require any standalone applications on the computer to view the contents of the phone (Apparently Windows Phone 7.1 and 7.5 required separate drivers that was not automatically installed when you plugged the device in. Weird. But then again, Apple does not let you sync from your iPod/iPhone to your computer soooo…). There was a nifty “Ringtones” folder, so I went ahead and copied the file to the directory, unlocked my phone and went to the settings to change the ringtone. And guess what? It wasn’t there. Apparently, Windows Phone 8 does not allow you to choose a ringtone which has DRM-protected content (wtf? so if I rip my own CD, I can’t use it as ringtone…). I quickly opened my Sony Vegas, pulled the song in, edited it a bit while I was at it and rendered it out to mp3, to finally copy it over to the goddamn phone and get myself a ringtone. FINALLY. IT WORKS.

To be continued. Hopefully.

1. one.com’s central system is down! Woah. I’ve never seen that happend before. I thought my code was broken for a bit, cause ftp seemed fine but http was sooo slow. This means that xno.se and dsres.net is down. This could affect certain softwares relying on my auth/stats-system, such as MB BF3 CFG.

2. BurgerKings twitter account is being hacked, right now. I guess they chose a really bad password…

3. Hurr. Im gonna play BF3 origin was down yesterday so couldn’t play then. In other news; I’m getting so tired of online requirement in softwares and games today. I know I’m contributing to that part, but I’ve made it redundant and most of my softwares should run fine without connection, except those requiring it. If you’re gonna have an online requirement in a software or game, do it for a good reason and make sure you have at least 99% uptime per month.

After several invites, people whining here and there like “OMG DOTA2 IS SO AWESOME!”, I’ve actually tried it out. A couple of times. Let me explain from the beginning.

In the dawn of time, about three years ago, my friends in school (yeah, I actually had friends back then!) forced me to play Dota. I knew what it was, or well, kind of – because of Basshunters famous song pretty much – but I had not played it until that day. I started off with Venomancer, or whatever he’s called, and stomped the fuck away. Actually, I sucked, like you usually do when you play a new game – but let’s not mention that, because I want to keep my awesome fanbase. Mainly because I’m a pr0-her0-esp0rt-fragger, and not mainly famous because of my programming skills. Ergh. (Okay, I stomped a little back in late BF2 with the tank, but other then that – no I’m no fragger. I was being sarcastic, if you didn’t notice. Duh.), anyway, back to the story. I played Venomancer. Or Slither. Oh Screeny, stfu and just tell the story now – would you? Yes. Please. Thanks.

Once upon a ti… Fuckit. We played a couple of games of Dota, LANing on our school computers, I thought it was nice but meh, not any kind of game I wanted to play for long. One day, everyone was playing HoN and like “OMG SCREENY YOU HAVE TO JOIN US”, and I was like “WTF SURE NOT LIKE IM GONNA DO ANY WORK IN SCHOOL TROLOLOLOL”, and then I realized it cost money. Like, 30 euros or some shit, can’t remember, but it was about the amount of money I had left on my paypal account, so what the heck. I bought it, played it 3 times, it sucked and I forgot about it. It became freetoplay. Just like when TF2 became free2play, i was… Well, I can’t really describe my fury. It bursted out of my ears. “HATS, YOU SAY!? WHATS THIS BULLSHIT. I PAID 30 EUROS TO GET A HAT!?”. The explanation is ofcourse “HATS IS THE SHIT!”, but meh, selfish me don’t really like the fact that I spent 30 euros on a virtual hat that I barely never use. Or can trade for anything. I stopped playing Dota and HoN and all other MOBA / WECANTAGREEONTHEABBREVIATIONBUTITSANRTSWITHHEROESANDSTUFF. Anyway, last year people forced me to play LoL. League of fucking Legends. I’ve heard sooo much bad about this game, and the people who taught me how to play treated me like shit. Not neccessarily because they wanted to, but because they thought it was kind of fun. I never told them I didn’t like it. (Aww, sad moment, I got called bad on the internet. You should cry now.)

Where were I. Wait, yeah, I started playing LoL and it was kind of fun! I started playing it more and more and more… and you know. More. Fuckit. Then, all of a sudden, LoL and Dota and HoN was all forgotten, because Dota 2 was the fucking most awesomest thing that ever happend! Except that it looks like someone took a dump in your morning-bowl of porridge, took a spoon and spun it around and said “TASTY!”. No, I don’t like how Dota2 looks, and the fact that you have a weird delay on everything (not every hero tho, but most). However, until this day, I’ve kind of hated it. Mainly because I’ve got >15 invites in my inbox the latest couple of weeks, but also because I never played anything but Venomancer in it. And, since I sucked with it last time, I sucked with it those times I played Dota 2 – because, you don’t choose the hero, the hero chooses you. Yep. You’ll just play it, and if it feels nice, you continue to play it. I didn’t really realize that until too late. I’m not even going to try to describe the horrible feeling you have when you’re playing a hero/champion/whatever that you don’t fit with.

So yes. Dota2 today was actually kind of nice. Mainly because I got to play Pudge and Undying, and because tombstones fucking pwn the shit out of everything, but then again – medium bots doesn’t really have the ability to co-ordinate, or even target the tombstone, so my ~20 kills perhaps should’t feel as great as they actually feel. Credits to both my girlfriend, m0rphinebunny, and Söör Didrik, the Harbringer of Fluffiness for making this an evening I’ll remember and some experience I may never forget.

Fucking >750 words. How do I manage this shit. Goodnight, folks.

• Maps from Project Reality (cause they’re fucking awesome)
• Original gamecode based upon Battlefield 2 Deathmatch Mod created by Elxx
• Omnicide skins, sounds, A.I. and likewise aswell as parts of gamecode

Now, well, this solves the main “part”, and will most surely be exciting in any way – but a main problem will be kits. BF2 does not (as far as I know) support any type of individual picked-up weapons, so that you can drop them or pick them up individually. There is actually an easy way to solve this:

• Kit & weapons management code from WoOkiE Sniper Mod created by WoOkiE Scouty

This way, we would generate every single existing kit, and write a python script to control it. When you spawn, you spawn off with just a knife, when you run around there is carefully placed weapons, we could use a modified version of Sandbox to save down locations of weapons, and then let the python code randomly place out random weapons on the saved locations. How is this going to solve the kit problem, you say? Well, if we create a radius within the saved location, that the python can react too (such as flags), it will spawn an “invisible kit” having the weapons you currently have on yourself, plus the additional weapon that you’re within the zone to pick up, so to say. We would loose any ammo information, tho, and it will probably be hard to track whenether the weapon has been picked up or not (but this can probably be done by checking if the entity exists after the player has exited the zone..?), and if the weapon is not picked up it will delete it (or any other kit left behind) when the player leaves the area. Katsching!

It still sucks with ammo, tho. But perhaps all kits can have zero ammo when spawned, and the python script can create an invisible, no-clip supplybox with just the amount of ammo you need and make it stroll with you when you walk (so no-one else gets it)..? That way you could possibly have control over ammo. I have no idea actually, but it would be fun to do something like this. It’s sad that I don’t have the time…

Just an idea.

The Battlefield 3 Aftermath Teaser, a sample of Noken’s work at DICE

It all started back in 2005 when the Battlefield 2 demo came out. My brother and I, who were both Battlefield fans since 1942, wanted to do something else besides playing the game. I’ve always been interested in making machinima movies but I haven’t had the knowledge how to do it. So how do you do? Well, you start trying.
The first tests we did were never released, but we started to get a grasp of what could be done. We quickly realized that creating frag movies or semi realistic action flicks wasn’t our cup of tea, we’re just not that serious.
The first creation was named The Biggest and the Best, a 3 min montage of me, Sudden and some other friends, goofing around on the Battlefield doing stuff our way. By the time we released it, we hadn’t seen that many (if any) Battlefield 2 comedy machinimas and we weren’t sure if people would like it.
I remember watching the view count increasing slowly and when we finally reached a hundred views we were very happy, the “movie” was a success. A week later we reached a thousand and after another week or so we hit ten thousand views. I felt surreal that that many people would even bother to watch our lite experiment.

This was the start of it all, but before I continue I want to explain where the name “Snoken” came from. My brother and I had picked our nicknames from a Swedish comedy show called “Anders & Måns”. Sudden was an old lady who played the keyboard and Noken(well Nöken to be correct) was an ugly, yet cute, dog with almost no hair and teeth. Then why Snoken? Well, that one makes more sense I guess. It’s just S(udden)+ Noken. Snoken is also the swedish name for Grass/Water Snake and this is why we have the snake as a logo.
As a side note, people have gotten so used to calling me Noken that some actually think that it is my real name… well, it’s not. My name is Marcus.

After The Biggest and the Best we realized that there was room for more comedy machinimas and this time we wanted to create something that was a bit more structured. The result was Battlefield: Double Dash, a Mario Kart parody in Battlefield 2. This time we needed a few more actors, so we asked for help on the forums. One of those who replied was Mr.Pettson, who’s still a part of Snoken Productions.
Of course, you can’t have a serious recording session without breaks, and during the breaks we were just… well, doing stupid stuff. After a while we had so many extra scenes that we were able to create a separate machinima, which we released at the same time as Battlefield: Double Dash.
The movie was called Ya Rayah.
The two movies were quite popular and we got a lot of positive feedback on the community sites. Getting people to our recording sessions wasn’t a problem anymore so the question was, what should we do next?

Battlefield: Double Dash Trailer

Stunt movies, with people showing of their skills, had grown so popular that making one just wasn’t that inspiring to us. We had both seen sketches in other games before and we really liked the idea of putting sketches we really liked into the game. We also wanted to create something for the people who played the game on a daily basis. As you probably know a lot of the jokes in Mine are based on people’s behavior in the game.
Mine got crazy popular almost immediately and we could find it on most Battlefield Community Sites.
Battlefield: Double Dash and Ya Rayah which both had around fifteen thousand views couldn’t even compare themselves with Mine. It hit a million views in only a few months and this was when people still downloaded it from a site instead of just streaming it from Youtube.
We started to get bombarded with fan mails, the crew grew bigger and Swedish TV called and wanted me to do an interview about creating machinimas. Then suddenly one day we got an email from DICE, DICE! The guys who made the game, saying how much the appreciated our work.

After Mine we still had a lot of ideas of other stuff we could do and with the community asking for more we just had to make a second one.
Mine 2 had more or less the same concept as the first one, just bigger, better and had a lot more work put into it. I think we actually had a full server when recording the biggest scenes. Coordinating 63 other players isn’t always the easiest task, but it’s great fun.
We we’re really happy with what we accomplished with the sequel and Snoken Productions had grown to be a very well-known group of people, even outside the Battlefield 2 community.

As always, we were looking for ways to “up” our latest creation and the next project had to be something different, something with a story and real characters.
When Battlefield 2142 came out, a guy called Fnotte started making short sketches with two characters called Steve and Mike. I really liked what I saw and contacted Fnotte and said, Hey! I really like your stuff, want to join our team? He said yes.
Frost: Episode 1 was now under full production. A machinima series in Battlefield 2142, following two soldiers who accidentally time travel to a cold and war-torn future.
The big difference now was that almost everything was made by us, meaning that we didn’t only write the script and recorded the scenes. We also did all the VO and composed a lot of the music ourselves.
Frost never became as popular as Mine, but we never expected them to be either. Frost was different, you really had to get to know the characters instead of just having random sketches like before.
One thing is for sure though, the quality improved a lot with the Frost series. We became better directors, compositors, editors and script writers. The game wasn’t the limit anymore. If we had an idea for a scene that needed a cloud filled sky, but couldn’t find one in the game, we made one ourselves.
I believe that if you really want to achieve something, you just need to put some time into it, to make it happen.

One of the Steve & Mike classics, “Problems Underfoot” by Fnotte

Snoken Production wasn’t the only thing happening to me at the time. I had just finished high school and was on my way to pursue my dreams to work at DICE. The first step was to apply for a Video/Movie Graphics Education called SOFE. Things were going well and I spent days and nights at school, learning how to create 3D-graphics and other cool stuff. This of course, as you might understand, made it more difficult for me to work on the Snoken movies. After a while of struggling we decided not to finish the 4th episode of Frost. This was a really tough call, but it had to be made.
You see, and this is the probably the most important thing of all, Snoken Production was never us trying to be seen by everyone, to earn any money or to become bigger than any other machinima makers. It was just us doing what we loved, and that was to make movies that we and you would enjoy. Not to be the machinima group with the most views, but to be the ones that made people laugh.
As you can probably tell, I never compare our popularity with others, but rather with ourselves. We always looked for a new way to express ourselves, to create something different, the get better at what we do, but never without being humble about it.
The main reason why the crew of Snoken Production still play Battlefield 3 together and have meetups, is because it’s a group of really good people. People who never put themselves above the others, but contributed to the common goal of having fun while creating.

So where are we now? Where am I now? Snoken Productions is very much alive, we just don’t create videos anymore. We still play together, we meet up as often as we can and we talk on a daily basis. Four of us are now working in the game industry and most likely a fifth one in a couple of years.
I started working at DICE in 2008. Actually, the first six months was my internship, but it seems like I did something right so they let me stay.
I work here as a Video Editor, you might see what that came from. As a video editor you’re pretty much in charge of all video content at DICE, from start to finish.
It’s everything from creating a script, to recording, filming, editing, adding effects and composting. Then there are also other things, which are not related to trailers, like developing in house tools to help the team visualize the game. At DICE, the video team isn’t a separate group of people off site, we’re a part of the team and I hope that it really shows in our trailers that we know our game and that we’re true Battlefield players.
I also spend a lot of time looking at what the community is doing. I’ve seen so many great things on the forums and the amount of work some people put into their movies is amazing. I’ve also met a few of the guys behind the videos and they’ve been a pleasure to talk to.

Snoken Productions outside Liseberg in 2008

It’s been a really interesting journey and I never knew that I would end up at DICE when we took our first steps in making Battlefield Machinima. I’ve learned so much during these years, not only how to make videos, but also how to work with other people. Sure, you can create something yourself, but you will miss out on the fantastic stuff that happens when you have a really solid group of friends, inspiring each other to take work that you’re doing to the next level.
If someone asked me what advice I could give to people who are in the same position as I was a few years ago, it would be to never give up. It’s probably one of the most common things to say, but during the years I’ve seen two kinds of people. The ones who put all their effort into whining about what they can’t do and then you have the people who put the same amount of effort into finding the solutions.
The second advice would be to always believe in yourself, but don’t forget that there is always room for improvement. What drives me is the knowledge that I can always get better at what I’m doing, even though I’m really proud of what I’m creating at the moment.
Always be open for constructive criticism, you can learn so much by listening to others. You should
of course stay true to your vision and only change the things that really needs changing.
Last but not least, never forget yourself. I spent a lot of late nights at school, working on different projects and sure, I made a lot of progress, but sometimes you really need to be able to give yourself a day off. It might not help you for the day, but it will help you in the long run.
So keep pushing yourself to become better at what you’re doing and make sure to have fun while doing it.

This is where I will end this blog post. I hope it was a fun read and that you got something out of it. Now it’s time for me to gather the forces in a clan match against Blue, you know, that other community that make Battlefield Machinimas.

Cheers!

Marcus “Noken” Johansson
Snoken Productions

If you want to see more things about Snoken and Noken, check out the following links:
Noken’s youtube
Noken on Twitter
Snoken Productions on Facebook

My girlfriend (m0rphinebunny) has got her own apartment, I’m currently basecamping it like a fucktard (yeah, I can’t afford one myself so I tend to steal others apartments). This computer lags (guess it is because I’m installing a bunch of stuff), and I’ve been failing at school. Well, not too much – just enough to make me worried. Really worried. That means, less internetz, moar real life. Or more… books! With, eh… Yeah. Mathematics and stuff..

I’ve also heard a couple of rumors on megaupload, aswell as rumors of cats. And stuff. This blog post is really so irrelevant that all of you could just google on pictures of elephant poop and it would be more useful, but here’s the catchy point: m0rph’s (yeah, m0rphinebunny, as mentioned above…) apartment has ONE HUNDRERD MEGABIT INTERNETZ. 100mbit. True. Still, this is how fast my dropbox syncs:

In other news, some idiot over at the group who created my previously installed twitter plugin (that made you guys able to read my twitter feed from my blog), apparently updated it and required it to install more plugins, and when I did – it screwed everything up. So I removed the twitter plugin, and the presq-plugin aswell as all my previous twitter posts that were stored here on my blog, and let them burn in hell. I’ve no idea if I’ll ever go back to the system again, but I sure as hell won’t draw much attention on facebook anymore, cause Mr. Zuckerberg wants me to pay for you guys to read my news. Which sucks. So you guys will just be able to hang around on my website instead, don’t rely on other sites. I guess twitter will have to do the same sooner or later.

Wall of text.

Now I need to get m0rph up (it’s 23:23 here, and she’s drooling all over my stomach while snoring like hell), take a shower and put her to bed. Nighty!

• Interface remade and polished, with FamFamFam Silk Icons
• Loading screen
• Improved performance on both Mac and Windows
• The ability to switch browser core on Windows (Native/WebKit)
• Easily inject JavaScript into the current browser
• Zoom Control
• Resources specific for Windows have now been disabled on Mac (less CPU usage)
• Ctrl+T shortcut now enabled (new tab)
• Plugins can now be toggled, defaults to off
• Fixed pagepanel-in-tabs-bug (entierly removed the embedded pagepanel inside the embedded tabs and replaced it with coded placement of the browser)
• Fixed focusing bug
• Fixed browser size bug (webbrowser larger then the actual window)
• Some other bugs fixed which I can’t really remember

I hope you guys enjoy it! There is a download link below the gallery of pictures.

> > > Download ModBuilder Battlelog Browser v1.3! < < <