This series gets better with every single game. Who knew that this fun little overhead view- running around in a car- game would evolve into something as stunning as this:

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Here’s a robot done by some GarageGeeks guys that physically plays Guitar Hero. They call it Guitar Heronoid. With the help of some optical color sensors, a programmed “brain”, and some, uh, “extra” appendages (one hand with an extra finger for that elusive orange guitar button) it powers through the songs like a pron00b.

But this is a good thing, because moments after they conquer our video games, the robot armies will be setting us up for Matrix battery-mode.

Here’s a preview of some things up and coming for Eve Online. Namely: being able to see avatars in a bit more lively form than just a portrait. Magnus Bergsson, the CMO for CCP who develop Eve Online, states that these are all in-game shots. They seem to be cutscene fillers, but maybe there will be some interactivity. There’s also a good shot of the new hi-res station design at the end. As if the game didn’t lag enough as it is!

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Here’s Will Wright displaying a creature sequence from beginning to end in Spore at SXSW yesterday. It’s much like the original videos he showed when introducing the game a year or so ago, but obviously it’s being demo’d with the current engine and with a new creature being made up on the the fly. He gets all philosophical in the middle, as game designers are wont to do, and skips over village creation. But he goes much more into planet and space modes than before. The 17 minute video shows off planet weather, terraforming, planet invasion, creature encyclopedia, and galactic and intergalactic exploration.

Looks like the game is coming along just as expected. I’m hoping the replay value turns out as good as it seems, from the videos. And I hope the release date doesn’t get pushed back anymore (it currently resides at Q2 ‘07).

Living in Austin since the 80’s, it’s bittersweet for me to see what SXSW has become. On one hand, we get the best of all media worlds coming here: started with music, and expanded into movies, and now is huge on electronic entertainment. On the other hand, as a perpetual student, I can’t afford even a portion of the events anymore, much less the one grand fee of seeing everything.

Le sigh.

Or, maybe just CliffyB is getting it. The Gamespy preview for Unreal Tournament 3 (for the Playstation 3) says that it will have keyboard and mouse functionality, along with the regular PS3 controller.

For those of you hardcore PC purists, mouse and keyboard controls will be available in the PS3 version through the USB ports on the front of the machine.

We’ve long waited for this to happen, us original players of the FPS, on the PC. Here’s hoping that this isn’t a one-time thing, or a one-developer thing. Playing first person shooters with thumb-based console controllers is like running through a battlefield with dislocated arms. The aftermarket options for playing Halo with mouse and keyboard didn’t quite cut it. Heck, they could even make a weird mouse and keypad contraption proprietary to the PS3, and I’d give it a go.

I wasn’t really considering getting a Playstation 3, mainly because of its exorbitant price. But if the shooters released for that console all follow suit, I’ll start saving my pennies.

Koji Kondo, who did the original music on games such as Super Mario Bros., played a little concert at the just-ended GDC. Here’s him warming up before the show, with a song you might just recognize:

• Geomerics - Lighting » XBOX 360 to update it’s lighting and other graphics with Geomerics’ Enighten
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• BBC NEWS | Technology | Robotic age poses ethical dilemma » An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea.

Geomerics is a company dedicated to computer graphics and other algorithms. They have recently unveiled their Enlighten engine which coordinates several of their software/middleware advances to provide enhanced lighting in games. The foremost of these is their real-time radiosity, which serves to compute lighting, shadows, radiosity and others at run-time and on existing hardware.

According to their site, they use studies in geometric algebra ( a kind of multi-linear algebra) to come up with new and efficient algorithms to process real-time lighting and even physics calculations.

Recently, Geomerics announced that the Enlighten engine will be used to incorporate into games that are developed for the XBOX 360.

Here is a movie demonstrating some elements of Enlighten and what scenes look like without it:

South Korea is actually holding a conference whose purpose is to develop laws to ensure that humans do not abuse robots, and vice-versa. They are calling it the Robot Ethics Charter.

I think it’s a little odd, since there are no self-aware or sentient robots, yet. But it’s very novel that a government is choosing to make official laws governing things like robot ethics. Even though the Asimov robot laws were mainly intended for the robot itself, the South Korean laws seem mainly for the human facet.

“Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives,” Park Hye-Young of the ministry’s robot team told the AFP news agency.

“Others may get addicted to interacting with them just as many internet users get hooked to the cyberworld.”

Maybe they were frightened by the upsurge in sexy robots, or possibly the emergence of robots that think humans taste like bacon.

Even more likely: they watch too much Battlestar Galactica.

For and from my brother.

If you can see anything in these two pictures, you are probably colorblind. I’m not sure if this means there could be a way to make colorblindness useful, but it’s a good demonstration nonetheless. Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for the “answers”.

from Structure Strangeness

continue reading "Anti-Colorblind"

Best interpretation of a long time tech support joke. Tech support may have permanently scarred me, but I can still laugh about it.

Back in July, I made a video to illustrate how Project Reality plays, and to have a few laughs with some CoFRs I had been playing it with.

After getting a few comments on it in the last couple weeks, I just realized that I only casually linked it here on drzy, without so much as an introduction or the embedded video from YouTube.

So, as for the introduction: This video shows me playing Project Reality Mini Mod on a public server that happens to have a few other CoFRs also playing. I think this is version .32 of the game.

Those that play this BF2 mod know that you only can identify teammates. There is no way to tell who an enemy is specifically in-game, and there is also no concrete way to tell you’ve killed an enemy aside from standing over his still-warm corpse.

I took a demo of an especially long and intense play session on the map Road to Kyongan’Ni. I had no idea that I had any interaction with anyone I knew, aside form players on my team. It turns out, I had a pretty good battle with my friend Shack and his squad. By pretty good, I mean: they killed us, ran up the hill, avoided an oblivious tank completely, and then killed us a couple more times.

So, I wanted to show this to him and the other CoFRs. I recorded the demo and uploaded it to YouTube. It’s got a fair amount of views and a few comments over the months. At the least, it’s worth listening to the soundtrack by Matisyahu. And although it seems like it at times, I did not synchronize my camera movements to the songs, it just worked out that way.

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