Yep, enki is (of course) still up to crazy stuff all the time.
He's been porting/rewriting JimmyRig to pure javascript to run in the browser, and has written a completely new auto-rigging auto-skinning animation system that does its thing in about 600 milliseconds on average, completely new (and better) algorithmics. It greatly changes and shortens the workflow cycle when you want to experiment with a character.. it's so much easier to test things and check out changes. Rigging is like a single-button operation that you don't have to worry about anymore. The new JimmyRigJS is of course completely lightwave compatible (still one of our favourite 3D packages because it's so straightforward, call us old-school, hehe
and does any BVH animation, so you have real power at your finger tips.
You really should get in touch again, since there's a lot we old-schoolers can do when sticking heads together, you know. We have 'geek-night' every thursday evening at enki's place, so maybe it's a good idea to keep your Skype channel open on thursdays from around 20h00 (Brussels time). My skype account is 'frank_honeypot' (don't ask where the honeypot thing came from.. it's an old girlfriend's idea and I'm too lazy to change it) and enki is 'enkimute'.
Frank Aalbers is working at Pixar now, as technical director, last thing I heard... he's happily married and all, and has a kid too! Really cute. I haven't seen Danny in quite a while, but now and then he visits Belgium too.
When they come over to Europe again, I'll let you know.. maybe we can meet up somehow and eat some dirty pita (Frank still loves that), who knows
In case of OpenGL troubles on older gfx-cards and stuff, you should really catch up with enki, since he's the local uber-expert on those things. He'll probably trick you in porting Verve to WebGL and have you run it in a browser online in no time, so beware, since he tends to do that with people, haha
No, really, if you feel inclined as such, that would actually be a very realistic option... his pimtools engine has been ported to javascript nowadays, and is more powerful and flexible than ever. It also has a neat and simple UI-system on board, so it's very easy to experiment with (I always find this UI-stuff a bit of a pain in the butt to code, when you really want to concentrate on cool algorithms and stuff, and not be bothered with layout and buttons, especially on OpenGL where you usually roll-your-own anyway).
Since you probably do a lot of stuff in shaders, in Verve, there would be no big technical hurdle either, or even performance issues for that matter. And the pen support, I think there are some nice API's for that too... I should look that up, but I guess so... let's simply ask enki. I have a leap motion around too, so that could also be a nice input path to consider, maybe. Steven experimented with that some time ago, and if I'm not mistaken, he wrote a little interface for pimtools for it, and reported it's pretty damn accurate (and cheap!).
(speaking about pen support: any ideas or hints about me purchasing that Wacom Cintiq Win8? I'm really eager to take the step, but I simply don't know which one I should pick... budget is no problem, but then again, I would do it to run Verve, so yeah... wondering a bit what to do
I'll send enki an email to join the party here, and get in touch on thursday nights! You can join the geek-night virtually on webcam or so, if you like.. it's always heaps of fun!
cheers!
loki
Fri Apr 25, 2014 2:24 am 
That's such a cool surprise! What on earth is Enki up to! I'm kinda sad we didn't get to keep in touch, because I really enjoyed our brief time together very much! Right now we'd have some really exciting conversations, since I've joined the openGL explorations. But I'd imagine that he's moved on to wilder things such as openCL or Cuda or so.... anyway. I'm flattered they talked about me every now and then. I haven't heard anything from Frank or Danny in a long time. I take it they're still alive?! 
