well, I found it strange to play the whole game without talking to anyone, so I’ve added trainers to each training station and got Daniel Chan to write up some dialog for them to guide you through the training to the final battle.
Version 0.61:
- added trainers who guide you through the whole Mage Master experience.
- fixed underpowered spells from increasing your opponent’s health. It now says
attack was ineffective.
- moved game save to START so that those O saving loops go away
- use O to exit from battle preparation screens.
- all new mage upgrades now happen at green or white training centres
- rearranged the order of the training centres to have a more natural flow around the road, and switched the game save format. The order is now: white, yellow, red, blue, black (tournament) and green. Please consider restarting your game, I load, but don’t gurantee the integrety of your old games.
Well, it is coming along well. I still have lots of work to do on the cut scene player, but the game play is starting to feel pretty solid. I think that the title screen is looking great.
Well, I’ve decided that Battle Arena would have more rewarding game play if there were cut scenes, so I’ve got wicked.fable to start working on them. My son wants Lego guys, so I found a brick md2. Here is a preview of some of the potential characters, plus a preview version of the throne room:
So hopefully the cut scenes will make the game better. I am working on a simplified script language to describe what happens in the cut scene.
Language for describing a cut scene:
- explicit timing
for milliseconds
- declaration
actor name md2file skin
set objfile
prop name asefile x y z roty
particle name duration spawnrate spawnduration radius scaleamount (directionx,y,z) shape (windx,y,z) directionvariance startcolor endcolor
terrain name elevimage colorimage
- camera action
camera close-up-on|medium-shot-on|long-shot-on name
camera look-at from=x,y,z to=x,y,z
camera pan-to from=x,y,z to=x,y,z
- actor action
appearat name x,y,z
walkto name x,y,z
doaction name action
- misc action
show name
hide name
delete name
dialog iconfile “text”
particle-effect name x,y,z
I have the particle effects working pretty well for Battle Arena now. I’ve cleaned up the fighting code enough that a duel seems to resolve correctly. So the next step is to work on a map mode so that you can level up your pantheon of mages.
Finally I have an update to share with you. I’ve been working on collision for Adam Street, and it’s coming along nicely, but it still isn’t running fast enough for my needs. So while I optimize that, I have been working on a few different projects. One of the most promising is currently titled HardHat’s Battle Arena.
In this game you will be able to pit your skills against other (AI) players. Although if my son wants to play against me at some point, I may consider a two player mode. And you just battle to defeat the other player. It is based on MD2 characters, and so far it seems pretty promising. Here are some screenshots of some of my tests. It’s pretty plain so far, but I’ll be adding a particle engine and some more details to the terrain (maybe a tree and a fence). The frame rate at this point is in the 100 to 120 (imaginary) fps, so I have enough to do some nice particle effects without too much slowdown I think.
I attended the industry insider presentation by President and CEO of Activision, Mike Griffith. He talked about a number of things, but mostly he focused his talk on the phenomenon call Guitar Hero. I know Guitar Hero well, having made a PSP homebrew game based on freetar, called Gunnar Hero (which I should add Frets on Fire support to). At any rate, I listened carefully to what he had to say, and to his insights into what is driving gaming.
On that note, the presentation started off with a video of a guy on a bicycle, playing Guitar Hero in the real world, including bonuses and road markings.
Once Mike Griffith reached the stage, he made some bold claims about what Guitar Hero is doing to the gaming industry and how it is affecting things. In fact he spent a lot of his talk discussing the effects of Guitar Hero and of course boasting about how popular Guitar Hero really is. He pointed out things like how Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock is the first ever game to sell over $1 billion worth of copies, and how over 50% of Guitar Hero players are female (breaking the typical profile of the classic gamer).
He talked about how the Guitar Hero guitar controller and the Wii remote are changing the way people play games compared to the paddle, joystick or gamepad of previous game systems.
He couldn’t say enough about Guitar Hero. Not only does the Guitar Hero game make people play games more, but it is attributed to increase the sales of actual guitars and other musical instruments. Recently a survey showed that 3 out of 4 players say that they are more likely to learn to play a real instrument and two out of three musicians are more likely to practice as a result of playing Guitar Hero. In fact, last year there was a 27% increase in the sales of real guitars last year. Kind of intriguing since analysts speculated a year or two ago that it would decrease interest in real instruments.
Meyitzo asked me to post some videos. Here is a performance by some staff from Neversoft who are working on a new Guitar Hero: Metallica with song. It works with four players (guitar, bass, drums and singer):
It even shows in the music industry. Songs featured in Guitar Hero have experienced growth in the rate of downloads. Songs experienced between 15% and 843% rise in music downloads of those songs.
He then went on to discuss three key pillars of growth in video games, that aren’t being experienced in other entertainment fields. Specifically he stated that over the last 5 years consumption of movie tickets, music purchases, network TV and filmed media are flat or decreasing. Video games, on the other hand have grown to 12% of all leisure time.
He mentioned that he sees three basic things growing the field: story telling, community and interactivity. He gave story telling examples of Call of Duty which he claims delivers a cinematic level of story telling. For community, he talked about the 600,000 members of the Guitar Hero: World Tour portal as well as the 141,000 songs recorded and mixed in the GH:WT software which have resulted in 21 million downloads of new user contributed tracks. Finally he talked about the interactivity offered with input devices such as the Wii remote in games like Activision’s Dancing with the Stars and GH controller guitar and drums controller.
Here are his closing remarks, preceded by a video montage of recent releases from Activision:
Well once again we are at the Consumer Electronics show. Already we see taxi ads everywhere for the various booths and can’t wait to dig in and get at some new gadgets. We are especially looking forward to seeing what new announcements are going to come from iRobot, Wowee Toys, Roboware and other exhibitors that we met last year.
Maybe Panasonic will suprise us with a demonstration of the kitchen cleaning robot which is built into the counter, and was demonstrated recently to the Japanese press. An older video from 2007 shows a more humanoid approach that they’ve tried.
I had the pleasure of having dinner with Stephen Gentner who is the founder of RoboRealm, and Roger Gay who is the VP of Business Development for iRobis. I greatly enjoyed talking to both of them over horderves. I’ll get to RoboRealm in a second. But first I found out lots of interesting info about the state of the art in Genetic Programming for robot behaviours from Roger. He has a wealth of knowledge about this and the subject of what things were invented in Sweden (where iRobis is located).
Now back to Stephen and RoboRealm. RoboRealm has made it a mission to make robot vision easier by making a free Windows application that allows even a novice to give a wide variety of computer vision capabilities to a robot. By combining dozens of pre-implemented algorithms with tuning parameters with a great visual editor it makes it easy to experiment and see what algorithms are the most effective. To make it go from theory to practice, the visual stack of vision algorithms can connect together such as stacking progressive filters or by passing values through named variables. To make it even more powerful, there is a simple way to add a line of scripting here and there to do extra calculations that the existing modules don’t already offer. Finally there is support for control of many basic robot platforms including Lego NXT, Sabertooth motor controllers used by First Robotics competition and other kits. At my office I use both Lego NXT for quick prototyping and the Sabertooth motor controller for my 14-dof robot, so I felt right at home.
The NXT robot can be built from a single Lego NXT kit. Stephen admits that Lego can fall apart when it crashes into an obstacle, but at least it is easy to repair. I think it is clever how it uses the red ball from the kit as an omni wheel. And it seems pretty effective too. He uses remote desktop to control it with the RoboRealm application running on the EEE PC, and that means you could control it from the PSP as well, since it is possible to use the homebrew VNC client to access whatever is running on the EEE PC.
In his talk, he demonstrated several object avoidance techniques and how to build up a stack of filters and even do stereo vision. In total he brought 4 robots which were all wheel based, and included a kit robot that I was unfamiliar with, one based on iRobot Create and the other two I mentioned already.
I was so inspired by the talk that I have downloaded the app, and demoed it to the other people at my company.
If you know a lot about me, you would know that I am keenly interested in a kitchen cleaning robot. In fact, I started a company with two partners in 2006, to design one. But I’m not alone in this quest. There are other groups working on this same idea. One such group is a Silicon Valley group that are working on the ReadyBot Project. You may have seen their first video on youtube but the FAQ says that so far, they are primarily teleoperating it (ie by remote control). Also they believe that the robot shouldn’t necessarily be doing all of the work autonomously, but instead require help to get past that last 15% of the job. By skipping the trickiest parts they can make a robot for a reasonable price that can do what is needed.
Now personally I feel that the current test videos that show custom tools that need to be attached and detached manually lacks an elegant simplicity. But then again, simplicity perhaps only comes from observing the patterns in a combination of special cases.
At any rate, I came across one of the people from the team that are working on it, on the show floor. He had the prototype unit with him and was discussing what it could and couldn’t do with the people who walked by. He was next to a booth that specializes in sensors, and was using those in his robot.
Anyway, it was nice to see the prototype in person, but I didn’t really get a demo of what the latest improvements were, since it is still a research platform and wasn’t in the demonstration environment. I see now that they have released a new video on youtube though. So maybe that will interest you.
