For people interested in computer racing, I found a video on Google Video of the Popular Science bringing Forza head to head with reality on the Road Atlanta track. Some MS developers, Popular Science crew, and Panoz Motorsports (www.panozmotorsports.com) guys compare, side by side, laps on the console to laps in reality captured with hood mounted cameras.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4261577868516679739&q=%22road+atlanta%22
What is a game?
Games are fun – thats why kids play them. Games are about exploring the possibilities of your surroundings, devising a limited set of rules, and then interacting with your environment as limited by those rules. A ball, some people, and a flat surface can turn into golf, football, soccer, kickball, baseball, or basketball. All of these share the same basic elements, but otherwise differ widely due to the application of a (generally) small set of rules.
Engines are games without rules. They are generally based on other rules that are too boring for us to care about, like the rules of physics, sound, or computers (graphics engines, sound engines, etc). Sometimes, engines are made that try to make creating games easier – these are called game engines. They usually tie together all the other engines that you might want to use, and provide a framework to base a game upon. Some game engines are the Quake, Quake 3, and Doom 3 – any of these can be purchased, so that you can write a game using them.
Sometimes, game engines are released as games – like Doom, and Quake 3. These games tend to get a lot of hype – look at the smooth rendering and high framerates of Quake 3, or the 2.5D environment simulated in real time in Doom. Unfortunately, these games tend to have short shelf lives. Doom got the best run of this, due in part to factors outside of gameplay: being the first game massively distributed over the internet, and the relative adolescence of computer games in general. Ultimately, they tend to have a short shelf life once the hype wears off.
Ground breaking engine games are tough, and then generaly come out poorly. I think the reason for this is the same reason as any ground breaking software development project: breaking new ground requires research, experimentation, and analysis of your experiment. Once you’ve figured out the lay of the land that you have recently created, you can now devise a structured environment to play in, ie a game. Games will always be about imposing rules, because rules are the essence of games.
Games that have great engines
| Poor Games | Good Games |
| doom | doom 2 |
| quake | quake2 |
| quake3 | Sim City |
| doom 3 | GTA Vice City |
| Used New Engine | Used an Existing Engine |
| doom | doom 2 |
| quake | quake2 |
| quake3 | GTA Vice City |
| doom 3 | |
| Sim City |
Whats different with Sim City? It was written to be a simulation of
demographic forces, and was later turned into a game. It also took
years to develop.
– Since Last hackday
– Luke
– Started porting eclipse SAP development tools to Linux
– Replaced windows native libraries
– Vinny
– Commotion
– Abstracted out all of my application singletons
– Got everything working again
– Some scenegraph research, ogre3d is the way to go
– Stackless python and continuations…
continuations are cool and powerful
– Today’s Plans
– Luke
– Working on browser component for SAP plugin
– Vinny
– lisp hacking – implementing while
– Today’s Reality
– Luke
– learned a little about the browser
– got the mozilla to integrate
– still trying to get it to load inside eclipse
– fixed a few more IE specific quirks
– spent some time trying to fix dhcp again
– Vinny
– lisp – wrote while as a macro
– (defmacro while (condition &rest codeblock)
`(loop (if (not ,condition) (return)) (do
(and),codeblock)))
New GUI editor – FCKeditor. Hopefully this is an improvement over HTMLarea/Xinha – play with it, let me know.
This week, I am putting aside my standard project to work on hacking! I haven’t played with lisp in a long time (and then only scheme), so I’m putting some of my perceptions of lisp to the test. As usual, the event is at your local Caffeine HQ, Octane.
Come feed your caffeine addiction and chat with us! Last week we saw the Atlanta Python meetup, maybe we will run into another group whilest we chatter over projects. Hopefully Titus will be present and not detained by the Seattle Mafia!
Hilarity!
Hijynx!
Zealots of every operating system!
Has anyone noticed that Octane has an overwhelming Mac to non-Mac ratio? I think that its the highest I’ve seen in Atlanta. If you’ve got a Mac, come hang out with the cool people!
Some links from today’s meetup:
The Microkernel Paper
Atlanta Python Meetup
Other Atlanta computer type groups that I found on meetup.com:
Notes from today’s meetup. Lisp! Regedit! Messenger! None of these things are in the notes.
– Since Last Hackday (a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away)
– atlhack.org
– last time, failed to do audio chat
– graham
– hard drive crashes. all project code lost
– rewrote lots of project code, but not back up to speed yet
– luke
– wrote an interface for connecting to nethack via lisp
– vinny
– atlhack related stuff
– CamelCaseSmackdown
– cron backups
– added project module, but no SVN support yet
– titus
– investigated biojava, a java API for biology
– ben
– rewriting autograder
– looked into a netbeans architecture
Click to see Plans and Realities.
– Today’s Plans
– graham
– implement peak picking – will have simple segmentation done
– luke
– finish lisp interface for nethack
– investigate specs for two other projects
– vinny
– get opengl object to properly Init contexts
– titus
– research the eclipse modeling framework and SWT
– ben
– make a test sample autograder that just compiles code
– Today’s Realities
– atlhack.org
– this time, failed to do video chat. next time, shared AIM / IRC?
– graham
– did peak picking!
– thresholding (> .25 percentile), zero crossing the derivitive
– checked into SVN
– luke
– bridge is reliable
– a bot engine has been started
– vinny
– beat the crap out of code, refactoring style
– got openGL context to display
– titus
– eclipse was not going to happen on his laptop
– second project: bindary newsgroup poster that doesn’t suck (C#)
– got some basic code in SharpDevelop
– ben
– wrote test autograder, but it doesn’t work
Here is a posting that I recently received. Maybe someone knows someone who might be interested in this… (-Vinny)
My name is Ed Grasing, I’m an executive recruiter and
co-founder of Revelation Partners, a boutique engineering services firm located
in the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech.
I’m writing to you on behalf of an Atlanta-based
client that is looking to build out their web / UI development team. This
client is doing some very cool work that is very visible to people, and being
accomplished using the latest & greatest site development tools. Here
are some specifics:
Term:
6 Months to
start
Location: 75 /
285 Cobb Galleria area
Required Skills:
·
2 years Macromedia Flash development
·
2 years C++ GUI application development on
Windows 9x/NT/2K/XP
·
Strong understanding of Windows internals
·
2 years Windows TCP/IP network programming
·
2 years relational database and SQL/JDBC
·
Strong object oriented design background
·
2 years experience using object oriented development techniques
Desired Skills:
·
Macintosh OSX Objective-C Cocoa/C++ Carbon
development
·
Expertise in implementing security protocols in
custom client and server application (SSL/X.509/MD5)
·
Linux/UNIX C++ development
·
Exposure to a formal development methodology tool
·
Experience developing for Sun/Netscape and Apache web server platforms