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.
The map represents the city in which the game takes place. It will comprise all of the physical objects in the game.
structure:
Suckerville: the Game (early planning phase) is based on the comics I write. A few of which are at my comics page. I thought it would be neat to create a game with these characters where you could interact with them. This idea transformed into a lofty concept for a complex(-ish) society simulator. This game is single player and therefore all of the society, except for the players character, are simulated.
This game is loosely inspired by the Nintendo’s “Animal Crossing.” I saw my brother playig it one day and noticed his character had a shovel. I asked if he could hit people on the head with it, for a hilarious cartoony response. The answer was no, unfortunately. I thought I’d make the game like this except you could hit people on the head with a shovel. Naturally this would only be fun If they reacted to what you did, but how far could this go? The problem with the characters in Animal Crossing is that everything they do is tightly scripted. How can characters made to be dynamic. Many game programmers dream of creating emergent behavior in their dynamic content. Is this even possible?
Imagine walking around a city of ridiculous cartoon characters. They talk to you and to each other. They tell you what they like and dislike. They tell you that they don’t like it when you hit them with a shovel. They don’t like it when Charlie down the block hits them with a shovel and ask if maybe you could do a favor and hit him with a shovel. And the shovel smacking is only one of the many things you’ll be able to do. The point is, the characters “know what you are doing and they “remember”, and this affects the way they behave towards you. These characters are not like the typical video game characters that sit around helplessly while you run their errends either. They can do all of the same things you can do. And they can talk to each other as well as you.
The original idea is based around concepts
– 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.
15 Sept 2005
Where is Everybody?
luke is contracting in reno
titus is dogsitting
ben garrison is sleeping
others said they’d be here, but they did not show
Since Last Time:
Vinny-
-poked around looking for scenegraphs
-panda3d would be good, but no Mac (sadly)
-options are ogre, and crystal space (more of a game engine)
Graham-
-nothing on Mused
-been working on SWIMM, trying to get MARSYAS to run on win32
This Time:
Vinny-
-play with Croquet (notes that it’s in Squeak- why it is so slow)
-wants to render words
Graham-
-get segmentation working
-refine to sample accuracy
-speed up a song by upping the onset rate
Mike-
-start school at UCSC
Realities:
Vinny-
-played around with Croquet -… it’s Squeak (slow and difficult)
-dragged around a full size card of Alan Kay (as a rabbit) and shot him with lasers
-Commotion is calculating save path – without full file pathname.
-no rendering just yet.
-submitted startup school app
Graham-
-fixed the frame by frame segmentation
-started working on zero crossing sample refinement
-didn’t finish
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!
God Tower is a very difficult puzzle game. Each level presents you with an image, and the point of the game is to guess the riddle that the picture presents. You input the answer to the riddle ( all lowercase one word), and then you proceed to the next level. I only had enough patience to get to level five (with a hint on level 3.)
I learned about God Tower from jay is games. Jay runs a fantastic blog about web games and game design. If you’re looking for something to burn some extra time, jay is games is a good place to start.