todd

Quaternion Revolutions

The game is finally coming together. It has a name (Apperihelion), a goal (activate the pillars while avoiding the monster), and had a simple help screen that tells you little more than I just said now.

I'm off to find some sounds that will fit better. Good arcade beeps and boops are surprisingly hard to find on the 'net, for me anyway.

The next thing on my list, after adjusting the sound, is to update the protagonist's animation cycle...I still need a good silhouette to make a design stick, though.

Of course the rings rotate...

Spreadsheet

Self-Generating Virtual Environments

(In situations where buzzwords are required, then "Artificial Life and Architecture")

I propose to apply methods common in emergent systems (such as artificial life) to building virtual environments. While a human designer could determine initial restraints to the space, its ultimate construction would have no direct human input. The goal, then, is to develop the system so that it generates a space that is navigable by the user, coherent in form and appearance, and engaging within each variant of generated spaces.

Had trouble outputting a workable xls file, here's the info in Word: Budget

The Quaternion Reloaded

Quick update:

Built in world-shifting/eclipse dynamic...to do that I needed an eclipse, and to do that I needed a sun and moon. So they're in there. There's no screenshot, but trust me, they're there all the same.

The player shifts between different but somewhat familar planetoids by aligning the sun (a static point in relation to the planet, and hence moves when the player does) and the moon (which has a regular orbit, and is not affected by player movement). All of this while an antagonistic predator slowly creeps in on your position.

The planetoids themselves tell the semi-narrative...indeed, they're really more to be looked at than navigated. The player's actual navigation involves looking at the sky (while avoiding the loose cannon predator on the ground).

Working with the sound some more...when I get it to a point I'm happy with I'll post the relevant links of where I found the proper tutorials (they're good, and there are a couple...)

Now: The modeling (so I can post a screenshot and have people know that some visual changes have been made), and possibly addition of more collision points. The stinker, of course, will be concocting the cushy front end.

Watch this space for the monthly assignment update, as well as a final draft.

Unfortunately you cannot be shown what the Quaternion is, you must be told about it to understand...

Finally, finally figured out how to have a mobile agent and the user share a common coordinate system...now I need to adapt this to a map system.

Basically the whole thing involves accessing the transformation matrix and extracting the translation coordinates, numbers untouched by various wacky rotation vector components...

As it stands now, the user has a walking animation, taking a series of models and using them like animation frames. The effect makes the user look like a jarring 2D animation, which I kinda like within in the flowy, groovy 3D flythrough type environment.

The predator also works, to an extent. Has a pseudo following code, just enough to keep you on your toes. Vocalizes when it reaches the player.

To do:

collision detection for world as well as predator
meshed environments
stereo sound

The extra week is nice, it means I actually got a little sleep. I have been doing some work on my final as well (source coming).

Theoretical Coffee Break

I've been shoving my nose into matrix calculations, vector addition, and quaternions for a while now, so I just needed to stop and have a break, and talk about some of the actual ideas I want to be pursuing (not just linear algebra). These will be some of the issues I'll be exploring for my semester project, and potentially my final.

I've been fascinated by what I call the "digitally complete library" entity. Basically, for any finite list, there are a finite, if extremely large number of combinations. Cycling through every sequence of five letters, for instance, from AAAAA to ZZZZZ will net every five letter word in the english language, as well as a lot of gibberish.

The gibberish the key problem, of course. This is also known as the "monkeys and typewriters" problem. The classic example is that, given enough time, enough monkeys (or computers) will output the complete works of William Shakespeare.

What I'm interested in, though, is what other novels these monkeys might write in the meantime (and heck, afterwards). Again, there's a lot of text to look through (and doing so would probably take longer than the predicted lifespan of the universe). Being able to hunt through this "noise" is where things begin to get interesting.

While cycling through every sequence of five letters will net mostly gibberish (with a few bona fide words here and there), there are sequences of letters that make grammatical sense, even if they currently don't have meaning.

This could also apply to images, sculpture, or, in my case, virtual enviornments.

In any of these cases, you need an "alphabet", or atoms of the system (pixels for digital images, letters for language). You also need a grammar, for how the alphabet fits together.

In the case of a virtual environment, the "alphabet" could be a bitmapped tile, or a polygon. Above that, you'd have polygonal meshes, or groups of tiles. The "grammar" would be extremely dependent on the abilities of the user to navigate the space. If you want a user to navigate from point A to point B, sticking them inside a cement block with no doors (while possible using an "alphabet") would not jive with the grammar or rules of the space.

The next step is to build an algorithm, or method of using such a grammar so that the resulting environment is interesting. If I were producing a digital photograph from an arbitrary set of digital noise, I suppose I'd outline colors I wanted, shapes, etc. Chaotic systems, things like cellular automata and other forms of AL provide some potential for acting as systems to "cull the noise" so to speak.

Indeed, one can argue that digital creation is actuall a method of focusing, a process of removal. Just as a sculpture chisels away pieces of marble, a digital artist starts with every potential combination of a system, and using various tools (programming algorithms, keyboards, wacom tablets) decides on a single instance of that system above all others.

Related Texts and Pieces:
Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges
9 Billion Names of God, by Arthur C. Clarke

Every Icon- John Simon, Jr.

P.S. It should also be noted that the Halt Checker problem in Computer Science, proven to be impossible, is indeed possible for any finite case. That is, if you know how large the machine will be (in terms of say, memory), all you need to make the halt checker work is a stopwatch. In order to see if the program will run indefinitely, simply run the program and look at the stopwatch. In time, the computer will either (a) cycle through every possible state or (b) recieve the same state twice, meaning that it will cycle through that same state again forever.

While it seemes rather inefficient, this is kinda how most people debug a program that may have this issue: It runs until you're pretty sure it's gonna keep running.

Enough ramblin'...back to transformation matrices...