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    Things are getting interesting …


    2011 - 09.21

    Urist McDwarf seems to have landed on a strange island armed with nothing but an axe, a shield and his amazing building device.

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    This land! it looks flat and boring, but those lakes look nice, maybe I’ll build myself a little house there

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    A nice little path to the lake to start with, and a nice strong foundation! Time for some walls methinks!

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    Ahhh, my finished house … and look, I can see also the sea in the distance!

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    I’ll just stand here and look at the lake mysteriously – actually, I know, I’ll build something else ….

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    A chair! w00t! Now if only I had a sit animation …

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    Unity and MMO experiment – advantages of rapid prototyping


    2011 - 09.19

    Many, many years ago I was an avid user of Second Life. The thing I loved most about Second Life was being able to build and create things for other people to enjoy. I spent many an hour on my own Sim, creating fantastic buildings and crazy script inventions.

    The Grid

    The Building Grid - and an untexture dwarf or viking midget, can't decide which is cooler.

    As phases come and go, I slowly got tired of Second Life. But, I still enjoy the feeling of creating things for other people to explore. I get a giddy thrill every time someone finds the easter egg in SpaceOreMiner, and decodes the cryptic message and sends me a mail about it.

    Some Cubes

    A collection of the default cube with the standard texture

    This weekend, I found a box of old designs for various buildings I had planned on building in Second Life, but never got round to creating. So, I thought to myself, why not create some of them for others to look at? Alas, my Blender skills suck, and anything I produce with Google Sketchup tend to look like something a cat may have vomited.

    So, I asked myself, why not build my own 3d environment, similar to Second Life, to allow me to create the buildings? I opened up Unity and a text editor, and got coding.

    A Cube Selected

    A Cube selected, and the god awful UI, the red colour indicates this is the currently selected object

    Five hours, and several beers later, I had the shell of an environment created. Building designs forgotten, now I had my own little world to build and play in.

    It is still very, very crude ( think early proof of concept ) but I am pretty happy and very pleasantly surprised that I could create such a ( on paper ) complex application in such a short time. I always seem quite surprised when I produce something quickly in Unity, perhaps I should stop being so surprised by it 🙂

    The world consists of three parts – A webplayer, a PHP backbone and a MySQL database. The webplayer allows anyone the ability to add and create objects within a 3d enviroment. The UI ( which is god awful at the moment ) allows full control of the size, texture, position and rotation of all objects spawned within the world.

    With the first version, you would hit create, an object would appear which you could type numbers in to alter the object. This felt pretty clunky, so within 20 minutes, I had arrow’s which would let you adjust the object visually, the object reflecting whatever attribute you were manipulating with the arrows. After 10 minutes of playing with construction, I built the Clone button, which when clicks clones the currently selected object – suddenly building got a whole lot faster! ( this again shows the best way to develop anything is to actually use it !) After another 10 minutes, I added some basic textures to the objects, allowing you to change the assigned textures from within the UI. This all fell into place so quickly, it was really a rather pleasant surprise.

    Textures

    A massive collection of six ( 6 ) textures !

    The meat of the project is in the Save World and Load World buttons. Every object inside the webplayer is tagged with the tag ‘building’. This allows the Save World button to very quickly located all the objects within the world ( via the GameObject.FindWithTag call ) and record every attribute of each object. This information is then formatted in a certain way, and then it is submitted to the PHP script via a WWW call ( via the amazing WWW class ) . The PHP script records this information, changes it into a database friendly format, and then saves it within the MySQL database. Sweet.

    Clicking on Load World calls a different PHP script, which reads this information from the database and returns it to the webplayer. The webplayer takes this information, spawns the correct numbers of objects and then alters the attributes on them to the database returned information.

    With these two functions working together, it is possible to create a persistent online world. I’m sure there are some limits somewhere, but the biggest world I have created had just over a 1000 objects in it, with no really delay in loading or saving – anyone who has built in Second Life knows that a 1000 prims is a helluva lot – with that many prims, you could construct an elaborate Gothic castle ( or a single woman’s hair piece, heh). Currently, the only objects that are able to be created are cuboids – but with the code base as is, it is very simple to add anything as an object, and due to the way the world is constructed, anything that can be an object within Unity can be added – so any 3d model basically 🙂

    A trilithon

    A trilithon with some randomly rotated cubes next to it

    I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this, I have a vague idea of a Minecraft type environment – but without cubes 🙂 Allowing anyone to build any thing they can imagine. The project doesn’t actually have a name as it was more an experiment ( well I like to think of it more as a code doodle ) than anything – but I think it could be a very useful addition to my arsenal of solutions.

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    My Tweet Archive


    2011 - 06.06

    After looking at my rapidly growing library of tweets coupled with a definite twitter addiction I’ve decided to add a new section to the blog which will contain an archive of all my tweets. The reason? vanity mainly 🙂 That and the fact that I’m sure the up to the date info will be tasty food for GoogleBot to chomp on.

    After making the decision to put my tweets in an archive section, I went searching for a solution. Alas, none could be found which would fit my idea – most of them seemed to just grab your tweets and automagically place them as a post on your blog. I didn’t really want that, as my blog articles tend to be a lot higher quality than my quite spammy twitter feed.  So I decided that I would use a Page, and roll my own.

    I haven’t really done any coding for WordPress, with the exception being minor tweaks to things – so had no idea where to start. After reading the codex and about 30 mins of web searching, I searched for two plug ins that I would need. The first most excellent Tweet Tweet – which really does all the hard work.  It grabs all my tweets and saves them to a local database.  Quite a bit of a time-saver there.  The second was the incredibly useful WP exec PHP which allows php code to be embedded and run in pages.  I had all the tools I need, so got coding.

    After battling with the almost mysterious URL re-writing WordPress ships with, along with several heart stopping moments when I thought I had borked my install to such a degree I couldn’t get it back, I had the My Tweets section completed.  All in all, about two and half hours work.  But now I can sleep soundly at night knowing that even if Twitter deletes all my precious tweets, I’ll still have a back-up of them 🙂

    If anyone is interested in a tutorial or some code or something, drop me a comment and I’ll see what I can do 🙂

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    Indie Games


    2011 - 06.01

    As well as spending my free time writing games, I do spend a lot of a time actually playing them. Recently I have noticed 90% of the games I have been playing have been indie games – mainstream ones don’t really seem to hold much appeal anymore. Sure they tend to look fantastic, but they just seem lacking. Maybe the freedom indie folks have without publishers means that can actually mix things up a bit. Maybe focusing more on game play than looks makes the difference. Maybe I’m getting old and indie games seem more acceptable than the stuff the young ‘uns play 🙂

    Anyway, the mainstream games I have played lately have all seemed to be very similar in nature – even those that have the occasional new game mechanic, it just all feels the same. Indie games, on the other hand, seem very different. They tend to hook me with one specific feature and/or story line element and then get me addicted by the rest of the offering. Sometimes not even that, Revenge of the Titans hooked me purely with their fantastic art direction 🙂

    I’m quite happy to see an increase in mainstream acceptance of indie games.  Minecraft, I think, has been the major game changer in this. It is the one the media has picked upon most, and the one even non-gamers have heard of. Selling millions of copies while still in beta probably had a large part to do this. On a shallow level, graphically, you can’t compare it to any main stream game – its seems generations behind what is available in any modern mainstream title – no splashy reflective water effects, no models with more polygons in it than I would dare to count, no textures which are bigger than my screen. It has simple, clean, retro looks. The look isn’t important here ( though I will admit during sunrise/sunset standing at a high vantage point there is a certain beauty about an organic world made of cubes ) – the game play is what counts. No need for a story. You aren’t a brainwashed government trained killer, or a survivor of a plane crash or even a gangster trying to prove your name. You are there. You exist. You are given a world, and left at it. What you decide to create or do is your choice. Just a quick youtube of the word Minecraft will show you some quite simply amazing things people have created with it. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. I can’t imagine trying to sell a game concept like this to a big company – ‘Well its made of cubes, and you can build stuff’ would seem like quite a large risk to any one. No story or flashy hooks, just simple clean fun.

    I applaud Valve for their obvious love of indie games – steam as an awesome platform for game distribution and has such a huge audience that it allows a large spotlight to fall upon indie games that otherwise might never be seen. Hell, even their pretty epic Portal 2 release was quite literally powered by indie games 🙂 Another big advantage of steam for indie developers is the nervousness of people buying things online. I know that the internet is meant to be becoming safer for online transactions, and if anything does go wrong I can always contact my bank – but still seeing a webpage for an indie game asking for my credit card details ( personally ) is a bit a turn off. At least when I am buying through steam, I know that the trust between Valve ( who lets face it, are huge ) and the indie developer ( who lets face it, tend to be tiny ) must be pretty good – therefore it encourages me to buy. That and the convenience of steam generally is a huge motivator. I do worry about the day steam closes down and I loose all my games, but I’m hoping that never happens. Maybe burying my head in the ground a bit there, heh.

    Anyway, this random little discourse was just meant to be ‘In between development posts I am going to post some indie game reviews’ but, alas, it seems to grown somewhat 🙂

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    Project: Cards – a short story


    2011 - 05.29

    Inko and I are currently working on teaser trailer for Project: Cards – which will show the basic story of the player and the first few battles that they will take part in.  The following is read audio which goes over the top of some awesome concept artwork Inko has come up with.  Currently, it is my not very dramatic voice over the top of it.  Hopefully we can find a cool voice actor before we put the trailer live – if you have a cool voice, feel free to comment and offer your services 🙂

    I awoke from the dream. Well, I had thought it was a dream – but it seemed more real than the unfamiliar world which I could see through blurry eyes. Visions of myself leading a mighty army against the forces of darkness. The God of Courage charging along side me into the melee. The clashing of sword on armour, the smell of blood and sweat. The God of Courage laughing with mirth as another foe was slain against his sword.

    In those few moments of waking, the confusion of the dream and reality made me pause before suddenly awareness dawned on me. I had been chosen.

    I was in a clearing, which was not where I had laid my head down to sleep I was surrounded by lush greenery and a small brook bubbled to one side.

    As I crawled over to the brook to wash my face I saw my reflection – there was a small mark on my forehead , a mark which had appeared over night, a mark which was his mark – the mark of the God of Courage.

    I knew from that point on, my life would never be the same again.

    Suddenly a screech filled in the air, and turning around I saw a terrible sight, a dark skinned goblin approaching across the clearing. A cruel looking dagger was in its hand, a look of hatred and murder in his eyes.

    Power suddenly filled my body and with a battle cry I leapt at my armed attacker, catching him unawares as we fell to the wet grass. I felt more alive than I had ever before as we tumbled for control. The collision had caused it to drop the dagger, which lay a few feet from me. After a savage blow to its head, it gave me the time I need to grab the dagger, and with a victorious yell I plunged it’s own weapon deep into its neck.

    Dark blood erupted from the wound as I watched it die underneath me, my heart thumping from excitement when suddenly I felt something even greater enter me – a raw power I had never felt before. I let it consume me, screaming a wordless cry as I felt something starting to form in my blood soaked hands

    I do not know how long I just knelt there, the goblins body cooling underneath me, my eyes staring into nothing before my suddenly my consciousness kicked in and I looked at the object now in my hand.

    I had seen one before, I had seen many in the dream, I recognized the strange paper thin crystal material instantly, the runes carved into it both familiar and alien. It was a card.

    I held it in the air letting out a shout of pure joy – this was the start of my adventure.

    A few uneventful days of walking lead me from the lush forests into a land that was obviously worked for crops. With the card held in a pocket near my chest, I walked through fields of wheat toward what I presumed was a farmhouse on the horizon. The birds chirped as the sun beat down upon my neck. Ever since I got the card, everything had seem more in focus, more real. The world around me was more beautiful than ever.

    As I approached the farm house, I sensed something was wrong and as if to confirm my gut feeling, smoke started to billow out of the windows of the small building – it was being raided!

    I broke into a run, racing toward the smoke, as I got closer I saw a bandit pull a woman from the burning flames, bringing a knife to her throat – but before he started to slash it he caught site of me running toward him – throwing the woman to the floor as he smiled cruelly and let out a shout, causing many other bandits to appear from inside the building and joining him.

    The energy hit me again, joyful at the thought of battle, I laughed as I instinctively channeled it into the card I had pulled from my pocket, feeling it start to warm from the energy I was instilling into it. I closed my eyes, and as I raced toward the bandits and threw the card at the ground infront of me.

    The second it hit the ground, the world seemed to explode. I was thrown backwards in the opposite direction I had been running and the ground erupted from where the card had landed. I looked astonished as I saw a head emerging from the ground, a head which was the size of a boulder, and had the looks to match. Two more explosions erupted from the ground as two giant hands emerged infront of me. I watched awestruck as a monster made of rock started to pull itself from the ground.

    My monster. My creature.

    The bandits where charging, weapons out, hoping to defeat my summon before it had chance to attack. They failed. A single slap of its giant hand I saw one bandit thrown clear into the side of the building, hearing a sickening snap as he back broke killing him instantly.

    I got to my feet, and with my creature, we both started to attack the bandits. My stolen goblin dagger easily cutting flesh, as my creature smote others down with every wave of its giant hands.

    I could feel every time one of them died, the now familiar energy filling me as sword clashed against sword and as their life force left their body and entered me.

    As the fight concluded, I looked over my slain foes, while the sole survivor of the bandit attack sobbed in fear. I didn’t hear her cries of sorrow and thanks, I was watching my hands with glee – as I watched three more cards fade into existence in my open palms.

    I needed the cards, just as the cards needed me. I watched as my mighty creature faded from reality, instinctively knowing in which card he resided in.

    With the battle lust now leaving my body, I helped the woman up – consoling her, familiar words leaping into my mind now that my addiction for cards had been satiated. Hearing her sobs, seeing the pain in her face – I swore to myself that I would never see anyone in that much pain again. The God of Courage had chosen me, and I would defend all people against evil.

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