Speccy Nation

Back in the 1980s I was an enthusiastic owner/programmer of the ZX Spectrum, my games "Bod and the Vampires" (jointly written with Richard Notman) and "King Penguin in London" were never published but there were many good games released from both big and small publishers.





Speccy Nation looks at the best of these such as Sabre Wulf, Skool Daze and my favourite the super fast Death Race 2000. It also looks at some of the less popular titles that had unique UI elements or otherwise pushed the boundaries of what computer games were at the time. It's a great book for reminissing or for study. Dan Whitehead's observations and comments reflect some of the humour of the time and it's clear that he's done a lot of research. The book finishes off with some links to popular emulator sites and archives. Definately worth getting hold of.

Carrara 8.5

Not been active in the animation field for sometime now but I was taken by the statement "CMS Integration" on the promo for Carrara 8.5 and thought I'd have a quick look on their website.

http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-8-5-pro

There was not much there so I searched the DAZ forums.

Jon: "Does this allow me to go through my content and ‘tag’ each of my items with various keywords, so I can search by keyword and bring up all those items at once? If so, how do you ‘tag’ older content."

Admin: You’d need to use the Content Database Editor in DAZ Studio to tag your items

The general description of the content manager is as follows:

The DAZ Studio Content Manager provides the ability to place items into categories so that they can be more easily located. This database allows you to categorize all Poser and DAZ Studio content into one content listing and do a search for a particular item.

I also tracked down a couple of tutorial about adding Meta Data to your creations and a more general tutorial on content manager.

As far as I can tell this is not a colaborative style CMS. It does help you avoid duplicated content just to be able to categorise it with multiple tags so it should help with managing assets.