Street Fighter IV is out. I don’t have it yet. I’m not very good at it so I’ll wait for the price to drop. Too many $60 games out there and I haven’t even finished GTA4 yet after starting in May 2008. Ouch. SFIV caught my eye in an early screenshot that was very confusing. It was a grid level of some kind. I mean, the walls and floor looked like graph paper. Awesome!

For some reason, I’m a sucker for grid patterns in 3d. I don’t know why. Maybe it started with the amiga 500. I remember their logo was this 3d red and white checkerball. The amiga logo a reference to 3D rendering. The checkerboard is like the basic of basics in computer graphics. You put a 3D ball on a checkboard plane and the 3d effect is clearly visible. Each block further from the focal point is distorted by perspective. You can look at each red and white block and clearly see the effect. The middle blocks on the ball are undistorted while the edge blocks hardly look like squares.

It’s just something I find interesting. When I see the Amiga ball, I get a feeling of “the test render is the final render”. The Amiga can do 3D. It’s already there. It’s just up to you to extend it. To me, the test ball is beautiful. It already has delivered.

I used to talk to this hobbyist 3D developer in Arlington. His name is Shamyl Zakariya. He’s a goddamn genius. He wrote this test app (among a million other things) that moved an inchworm model around in a 3d space. His 3d space was a big box with graph-paper type textures for the floor, walls and ceiling. He didn’t need to put textures up to do his test and procedurally creating grid lines is pretty easy to do in code. For many of his test apps and initial builds, he’d just render some grid lines all over the place. It’s not only fast and easy but it also can help with counting placement or measuring distances (like the ruler in Photoshop). Eventually he would replace the grids with textures and the illusion would be covered with something more realistic. How similar to SFIV’s training mode.

Fast forward many years later when I run into a Java based raytracer called sunflow. It’s got a processing library project called p5sunflow. Sunflow is a bit early on in its development and I was curious to see what people have done with it (if anything). I was checking out the gallery when I ran into a very familiar graph paper type 3d space that looks almost exactly like SFIV’s training mode. Note the wall at the back of the “room” and how similar it is to the SFIV room. I wonder what kind of approximation they used for the curve points? I wonder how much the level of detail was toyed with to make it look curved? I wonder if I could render a room like this?

The raytraced picture has the lovely advantage of depth of field. The blurring of the grid lines really make for a penciled graph paper look. Very nice with the lighting too. But then that’s exactly what rasterizing can’t do. But then there are no realtime raytracing apps yet.

So there’s my weird meme of grids that started many years ago. At least I’ve put this idea into a condensed post that I can point to if I ever get stuck trying to explain this to someone. And even then it probably won’t make any sense. But that’s ok.

Playing around with processing.org, a graphics framework. It’s very similar to NodeBox except it’s based on Java.

Related to processing.org is a hardware hacking chip called arduino that is $35. It’s a little circuit board that you can program over USB. It can do almost anything but what I’m interested in using it for is a tiny MIDI controller or input surface to use for live performance. The projects Processing and Arduino are related apparently and people are doing all kinds of crazy things with them.

Of course all this is pie in the sky right now. Combine that with my desire for a Clavia G2X modular and programmable synth I have a lot on my plate. However I’m deeply inspired by Duracell and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to take on creating a sequence on a Modular G2 and performing live with an acoustic piano and a footpedal or trigger of some sort (maybe this Arduino chip). At the very least it would be fun.

My 1st applet after the jump …

width="200" height="200" mayscript="true">

Source code: sketch_070523a

Built with Processing

Here’s the code made the image.

size(520,900)

drawpath(textpath("hexameter", 10, HEIGHT-10))


1. Got Dungeon Theme sheet music pdf off web
2. Practiced for two weeks
3. Recorded tracks in Cubase
4. Rendered to mp3
5. Recorded a couple fake play-along tracks
6. Imported all into iMovie
7. Added some cheesy transitions etc
8. Downloaded NES commercial
9. Uploaded to youtube

I need to fix the aspect ratio and rebuild the entire movie. I shot it sideways like a video-nub. Serendipitously, a post on a blog came around on how to rotate (with black bars) a movie that was shot sideways. What luck.

So following the guide I was able to rotate the movie back with some black matte on the left and right. Eventually it all came together, except the middle part is still stretched and I just put some cheesy bloom effect all over it to make up for the stretchy.

Saved off all the source video and mp3 files to my external firewire drive. My mini’s disk is full. It’s a sweet box but not expandable. Even firewire ports are at a minimum. I dunno what the next step is. Mac Pro? Home NAS? Fuck it?

Totally rad t-shirts came in from oddica. The packaging was awesome. The service was great (even when K had to return a size) and they packaged in a bunch of buttons and stickers for free. Rad.

Even the individual shirts were wrapped in cool plastic bags. The shirts each came with a library card as if they had been checked out from elementary school.

There are some rad threads they have, lots more artists coming, hope they do well. Death panda hoodie:

Sites like kidrobot, giantrobot and oddica have that artistic edge that unfortunately might come across as elitism. There’s no accounting for taste I suppose but I only have limited non-cubicle time. And in that time, things need to be hip. Of course it’s a privilege to have the time to worry about such meaningless wishes but when in Rome, pursue happiness like the Romans do.

In addition to the shirt madness, K and I are looking at townhouses. We’ve been planning this for a while now. Hopefully it all comes together this summer. We’re interview agents right now, we have a lot more to go before we’re chilling in a new crib. It’s a buyer’s market and we’re finding very hungry professionals out there. Good stuff, lucky timing. Sucks to have thrown away all the rent but it’s a good time to enter the homie-ownership epic saga (with no prequel, only pre-qual).

Yeah. Clothing cost and closing cost. Hmm, has this entry’s two topics been tied together yet? Good, I was sick of my own horseshit.

IGDA (International Game Developer’s Association) meeting yesterday was just a recap of GDC’07 but it was a few hours of interesting conversation. It was a decent turnout, maybe 15 people from all walks of life. Three of the guys there recalled what they saw and who they talked to.

I recalled the Wii experience at Edgar’s house. I said, [WiiSports] It’s better than real bowling. Which is true. When we played 4 player bowling on a couch with our socks off on hardwood floors, it was better than real bowling. I stood up at the IGDA meeting and did the motion of Wii bowling:

• Stand up from couch
• Toss a ball forward
• Slide across the hardwood floor in socks
• Auto-scoring by Wii
• Sit down on couch
• Drink beer while watching someone else bowl

And then I did the same demonstration as if I was at a real AMF bowling lane:

• Stand up from bench
• Toss a ball forward
• Slide across the hardwood lanes in bowling shoes
• Auto-scoring by bowling system
• Sit down on bench
• Drink beer while watching someone else bowl

Everyone laughed. Which is good since I kinda hijacked the conversation for 3 minutes even though this was my 2nd meeting.

I was severely outclassed by many at the meeting. People from EA, people from BethedsaSoft, people with major entertainment contacts. For example, Patrick Dugan was at the meeting and he had a lot of fine things to say. He specifically talked to Miyamoto and Reggie. He said they were nice, Reggie was very busy obviously. Patrick has had a lot of contacts and experience for someone who is 21, I was humbled. He talked to Will Wright previously. Amazing. Rockstars of the video game world.

Hell, Patrick was behind getting the Columbine game controversy exposed. Apparently he knew the guys behind it and suggested that it get submitted. Then later he brought it out into public light because it was getting too much debate by the other developers in the contest. I might have his story a bit wrong but regardless, I was like “are you serious Patrick?!” because I had read all about this on gamasutra. Speaking of gamasutra, one of the games he worked (Play With Fire) on was featured on the front page a few months ago. Starstruck, I’m like I saw your game on the front page. He just kinda laughed. I’m such a noob.

He’s far, far, far along the path to indie or commercial gamedev. I’d be very surprised if someone doesn’t throw him $6 figures to make a title.

At the same time, I think I brought some hands-on experience to the meeting. Patrick name-dropped Unity and I chimed in. It’s an all-in-one Mac development tool that lets you develop cross-platform. It’s super slick. You can publish to the web, to Windows (with the Pro license) and the Xbox360 (with the Pro license). It’s a tool that I’m going to buy this year after some more low-level learning is done. If you want to see something I did in 2 hours, here’s my first test with Unity. You’re going to have to download a small web plugin. It’s caused no issues for me in 6 months.

The unity test is a wine glass model I made in 3d Studio Max. There’s no interactivity. It wasn’t easy because I’m not a modeler but the end result is loading a model on a Mac development tool and publishing it to the web. Pretty amazing for a $150 tool.

Anyway, I think the IGDA meetings will be good for me. I seem to be able to hang a little bit (at least on the technical side) and as long as I listen more than talk then I won’t come off as a pretentious asshole when really my intention is to share information.

Until then, I’m working on three things.

One

My animated box thing. You can read more and see an animated gif of what’s working so far with that link.

Two

Creating a colorwheel class (rotates colors like screensavers do many times). The end result would simply be this:

RGB (0.0,0.1,0.9)
RGB (0.0,0.2,0.8)
RGB (0.0,0.3,0.7)
RGB (0.0,0.4,0.6)
RGB (0.0,0.5,0.5)
RGB (0.0,0.6,0.4)
RGB (0.0,0.7,0.3)
RGB (0.0,0.8,0.1)
RGB (0.0,0.9,0.0)
RGB (0.0,1.0,0.0)
RGB (0.1,0.9,0.0)
RGB (0.2,0.8,0.0)
...

It’s deceivingly simple. It would be used by other things and not really display anything by itself.

Here, blue is decreasing while green is increasing. The goal is to ping pong blue->green->red->->green->blue->etc. It’s harder than I thought.

Three

Drawing three curves that go through (0,0) and (10,0) with varying steepness.

Generally trying to remember calculus so I can draw the curves. Yahoo Answers has really helped a lot on the math side of things. So far, the math side of things have been kicking my ass.

The color wheel is related because I want the curves to be different colors for readability.

Send motivation please, kthx.

I accidentally agreed with an older PA post. I was talking to Tim after seeing him on Xbox Live playing the Crackdown demo. My IM was something like:

Me: Crackdown is cool I guess. It’s way over the top but … not to nickpick, the font is so lame. I wonder if the developers were forced to use it because it’s a MS font.
Tim: lol

Or something close to that effect. Of course I sound whiney but that’s not really the case. I’m in the throws of beginning gamedev and the very first thing I played around with was fonts. Default OpenGL fonts suck. They look horrific. And there’s very few people that care enough to work on it. FTGL is something I’ve messed around with but it’s not a great solution for reasons I barely remember. Getting in bed with MS is your only option on the 360 but even on the Mac some of the best font tricks are NSObjects which means your audience better be running a Mac.

Bleh to portability. And bleh to me pretending I’m a real developer. I’ll post some screenshots later today of my “nice” proof of concept. It’s mostly stolen code but I can’t afford to reinvent the wheel when I’m sizing up effort. Nice fonts or nothing at all.

So while all of this is klinking around in my head, PA posted this about Crackdown. Remember Crackdown? That’s the topic that I started this raging post with … O_o

So, yes, I do like it, but there’s something I don’t understand.

You’ve got this big, open-world game that runs well and has a unique look. Against all odds, you’ve managed to carve out a multidisciplinary gameplay niche and make it work. What’s more, your game is now indelibly tied to one of The West’s most potent action franchises. So why does your entire interface look like a first-pass prototype?

I have to say that red flags are raised whenever I see that default Xbox system font in a retail game. You’ll know what I mean if you see it. Talk to Nate over at Blambot, for fuck’s sake.

The font is just the beginning of it – every time data is communicated to the player it’s done in a lackadaisical, lifeless fashion that looks like it must be the example code they ship with the Goddamn devkit. It looks cheap, and it is cheap, only it’s not, because this thing costs sixty fucking dollars. I’m not going to deprive myself of otherwise solid entertainment because of it, but this is nonsense.

Yes! Yes, exactly. Thank you. The Xbox system font he’s referring to is Arial 14 point and it’s so played out. I don’t want to be reminded of Outlook when I’m blasting space alien vampire hooker mutant rockstars. Blambot, yes, buy the $20 font you bastards. Wouldn’t this look so much better than that Arial crap?

Windows typography just isn’t even a phrase. It’s an afterthought. Lose the Age of Empires frontrosity.

TL sent me this totally rad video he did. I ripped out the music (although awesome as it was) and replaced it with my own thingy. Somehow, the timing worked out really great, like when the drums drop out on THE END. Awesome editing, awesome idea TL.

1 stone, a movie submission for the 72-hour film festival that TL and I worked on. See the end for the full list of credits. A lot of people helped out and they all did a fantastic job.

I learned a ton about editing, workflow, working with a team and tight deadlines. TL’s rig was absolutely amazing to work on. At one point we were using Final Cut Pro and starting up Logic. The disk was really crunching so TL made a backup of the movie project. About 10 seconds later his Mac froze up hard (probably because of my Virus’ driver we installed). We had to hard reset it and when it came back up, the project was corrupted. That was a near-miss. Had we not had a backup, the project would have failed. Crazy.

As usual, the quality for the web is slightly reduced. Although the quality to begin with isn’t some million dollar film stock, this isn’t some Hollywood flick. Hope you enjoy it, it was fun working on it and we may continue to work on it. The competition encourages groups to re-submit the same piece year after year.

In addition, I expanded on the title idea a bit.
Download audio file (title.mp3)