Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.
This mind-boggling technical demonstration from Kevin Karsch et al. from UIUC shows just how far algorithmic interpretation of imagery has come. The possible uses for it are many and varied, but the potential for games has really piqued my interest.
[verb] Give up (something important or valued) for the sake of other considerations
Giving up. It’s not really something you associate with the timed-reward structure of most games. Gamers have become accustomed to a steady accumulation of, well, pretty much everything, so who in their right mind would ask players to give something up?
Over the past few years one of my major problems with project development has been getting appropriate feedback on which to judge the effectiveness of change. Naturally, this has made me a huge fan of integrating automated metrics into the development process at a very low level, and nowhere more than in my own game development.
Recently I’ve had the opportunity to hit some frustrations with some of the analytics packages commonly used by indie game developers, such as Google Analytics (good event tracking, patchy game library support, massive reporting lag), MixPanel (excellent real-time updates, based around funnel analysis for sales / conversion tracking), and Lumos (nice debug event tracking, immature reporting tools, Unity-specific).
Enter brief.io, my latest project. The goal is to provide platform-agnostic deep analytics with custom reporting functions — in real time — for game and app developers. I’m currently accepting applications for a closed beta period to test library integration for Flash, Unity, and HTML/Javascript, and hope to be rolling out the first deployment in the next couple of weeks.
If you’re interested, head on over and sign up for the beta, or drop me a line in the comments below!
Hybrid race / collecting / combat game set inside derelict spacecraft. 2D overhead space ships in zero gravity; small arenas with environmental hazards. Single player against AI, possible multiplayer. (more…)
Alice did it, and from there I’ve found some more interesting people doing it. So to throw myself aboard a bandwagon (and break a long dry spell without posting), here are 5 things I’m thinking about right now:
Dear Meg Hillier,
As a constituent whose career and majority of personal communications are conducted across the internet, I’m very worried that the Government is planning to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate.
The Bill contains measures that favour the protection of commercial interests at the expense of an individual citizen’s rights — specifically measures that allow copyright holders to issue requests to limit or even terminate the internet connections of private individuals based only on the belief of the copyright holder that the individual has infringed their copyright. In effect, this creates a situation outside the bounds of a fair and just society where a person can be punished by the withdrawal of a service that the UN is proposing be considered a basic human right.
PyPlants has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few days (well, evenings), and now from its new home as PyPlants on bitbucket sports a completely rewritten rendering backend which is more modular, should be really easy to plug into, and now supports POV-Ray out of the box.
What’s that you say? A 3-D ray-tracer? Yes indeed, as promised in the second part of this series of development diaries, I’ve now finished work on an update that turns this:
("A", "I+[A+O]-->>[--L]I[++L]-[AO]++AO")
("I", "FS[>>&&L][>>^^L]FS")
("S", "SFS")
("L", "['{+f-ff-f+|+f-ff-f}]")
("O", "[&&&C`>W>>>>W>>>>W>>>>W>>>>W]")
("C", "FF")
("W", "[`^F][{&&&&-f+f|-f+f}]")
Into this:
Rendering of an olive bush from pyplants povray renderer
Unfortunately it’s now 2am, so the write-up will have to wait for the weekend. Do feel free to grab the code and have a poke around. You’ll obviously need povray, pygame, and pycairo installed, but everything else should work with python’s included batteries.
Every now and then someone at TED presents a technology or an idea that’s so utterly amazing, or ridiculously simple that it can’t help but change the world. David Merrill shows off an MIT project called Siftables in this talk, and even though I’ve been messing around with computing for 25 years my jaw is still dragging along the floor. Check it out.
Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the 2006 best seller Eat, Pray, Love, and in this year’s TED talks gave a fantastic talk on the nature of creative genius. In a room full of scientists, this talk on being possessed by a creative muse, a spirit of genius, raised a standing ovation. This utterly enthralling talk is an interesting perspective on creativity.