Speed Coding

I'm working on a series of videos for youtube based off of those speed painting videos that started showing up a few years ago. I'm going to be making a small game where you have to climb to the top of a tower. In the first video, I set up the basic frame work for the game. The second one is going to set up a basic camera that will follow the player around as he goes higher and higher, and will have all of the floors set up. The third video is going to be mainly about the graphics, with animated sprites and possibly a small particle engine. The fourth video will set up the menu system, as well as a victory screen. The final video will introduce a sound system, as well as a possibly updated control scheme.

Source File:

Mazes Plus (the plus is for buttons)

I'm planning on making a program roughly based on Logic Quest 3d. In the game, you travel around mazes in first person. There also buttons that you can push to open and close doors. For example, you may need to open a door to be able to pass through the area, so you go to find its switch, but when you hit it, the place you are in is closed, so you have to go find a second switch to open up that door.

I made a simple drawing in The GIMP to show what the first level might look like. I'm not sure what kind of HUD I'm going to use in it, if any.

I'm considering using procedural generation to make the graphics. Procedural generation where the computer generates the graphics (in this, the images put on top of the geometry, called texture maps). For example, to generate the brick walls, first the computer would start with a blank red image. Then it will draw white horizontal lines across the entire image. The it will add shorter vertical lines between each of them. Finally it will randomly generate some noise to add realism. I followed the same algorithm to make the brick images used in the example shown above.

Procedural generation has several advantages over traditional art. The biggest one is that an image may take several megabites of size if it is big, where as a procedurally generated image only takes a few lines of code. Another advantage of procedurally generated imagry is that by adding some random variables, each image can be slightly different. This is useful if I would want to make an entire forest of procedurally generated trees. Normally, I would have to make many different models of trees, so they do not all look the same. However with procedural generation, all I would have to do is write code for a tree once, then I could let the computer make every tree in the forest unique!

Procedural generation does have some downsides. Mainly it takes alot more computing power to redraw these images every time the program loades instead of just loading it from a file. Also, one has to be careful to make it look realilistic. For the example image above, I decided to quickly come up with an algorithm for drawing the ground, and it doesn't look too good. For the actual game, I will have to come up with a new algorithm that looks better.

I can't say exactly when this project's going to come to fruition, I have a couple other projects I'm also working on, and theres only so much time once can program each day!

Orbiter on the launch pad.

I've been wanting to blog about this game for a while. Its called Orbiter. Orbiter is a flight simulator, but its mainly designed for flying in space. Yes, the default game comes with all of the planets and a good number of moons. Ever wonder what it'd be like to fly to Venus, or launch a satellite on a Mars? Well now you can try it out.




Not that you'll be able to really do much when you first get it, the learning curve is pretty tough. I'd recomend searching for some autopilot mods. Even someone who's been playing flight sims for years, such as myself, will still take a few hours before you can 'properly' land the shuttle.
I'd really recomend you download as many mods for the game as you can, or else you'll never be tempted to do much more than a few flights.
There are mods to increase realism, replay historic missions, or even build your own space station!
The requirememnts are pretty low (I was running a virus scan when taking the screenshots), which is good, considering you'll be running on accelerated time alot (unless you feel like waiting a year to get to mars).

I'm running my own pretend space agency, and I'm documenting it a bit. Be sure to look out for that.















Get Orbiter :

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

Get Addons:

http://www.orbithangar.com/

Dinosaur Skeletons

After a while, I'm finally able to add a new blog entry. Finals are over (yay) and I'm on break, so I have to find something fun to do.
Here's a book that I had when I was younger, but never got to do. This book shows how to take 3 chicken skeletons and make a fairly accurate apatosaurus. I loved reading this book when I was younger, because it has a great deal of information on bone structure to go along with the instructions.
Expect to see more entries with progress photos of the project.

Make Your Own Dinosaur
Out of Chicken Bones
by Chris McGowan
(c) 1997

A Late Night, Caffine Induced Post on Facial Recognition

Here is just a quick example of how a computer could judge the emotion of someone using facial recognition.

First the program would start with a photo of the head (fig 1.). The way that this would be acquired would vary on the project, but I'd like to see something like a web cam used to update the photo and emotion over time.

Then the face is cropped out of the rest of the image (fig 2.) Again, this dependson the situation that the program was made for.

Several points are found on the face based on physical features (fig 3.) The ones I used on this example are the two ends of the lips, cheek bones, each end of each eyebrow, the nostrils, and the eyes.

The location of the points relative to each other is calculated and this data is used to determine the emotion. In this example, the angle formed by Nostril 1, Nostril2, and Lip 2 are used. As shown in figures 4-6, the more 'sad' the face is, the smaller this angle will be.

For more emotions, the rules would have to be more complex than in this simple example.

Introduction to the shoe project.

Okay, so I'm working on a project to add wheels to shoes, so I can go downhill faster when I go to college or meet up with friends down there. I'm trying to make them be able to survive the fairly shitty roads around here, something that things like "heelies" cannot do well.

I've gotten most of the things shipped to me by now, and next week I'll be heading down to the shop to get some measurements and drill a few holes. Here's just a quick pic of how it'll look.

Introduction

Hello, this is my first real stab at blogging, but everything seems self explanitory.

I made this blog to document projects I'm working on, discussing various books and stuff, and just standard blog fair.


Things I want to do:

1. Post atleast one blog every week (hopefully more than that)
   
2. Include a ton of pictures
3. Try not to only half finish projects
4. Get some people to actually enjoy reading this blog