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| functional body modification |
Posted 2008-08-26 23:27:52 by
Jim Crawford
Quinn Norton's 2006 talk on functional body modification. She's one of the people who implanted rare earth magnets in their ring fingers so they could sense EM fields. The talk has me bursting with ideas. Some takeaways:. . .
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| braid |
Posted 2008-08-10 19:47:11 by
Jim Crawford
Braid is a puzzle platformer that indie developer Jonathan Blow has been working on for the past three years. He's been fairly notoriously outspoken of late about the ethics of game design. For instance, he believes it unethical for a game to reward the player for accomplishing something trivial, because it amounts to rewarding the player for continuing to play the game. Getting a rare drop in an MMORPG clearly qualifies, but so does something as simple as the pleasant ding and score boost you get for picking up a coin in Super Mario Bros. He makes an analogy comparing this kind of gameplay to “drugs,” contrasting it with “food” gameplay, in which the gamer is rewarded for learning or improving a skill set.. . .
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| banned from the end of the world |
Posted 2008-08-02 02:49:46 by
Jim Crawford
So I've pulled the rug out from another project of mine in favor of the new hotness, a potentially exciting web project based around Google Web Toolkit, which is essentially a Java to Javascript compiler plus a minimal AJAX library.
GWT is interesting and potentially useful, but it seems really raw and beta even at version 1.4. For instance, if you try to build a project with malformed XML in the configuration file, you get a stack trace rather than an error message. For another, there's this little joy of an alert that I get when trying to run a simple RPC test from GWT In Practice:
There was an error: com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.InvocationException:
<html> <head> <script language='javascript' src='com.helloserver.HelloServer.nocache.js'> </script> </head> <body> <iframe src="javascript:''" id='__gwt_historyFrame' style='width:0;height:0;border:0'> </iframe> </body> </html> That's what I get, I get an exception identifier and a content-free snippet of HTML. No stack trace. No additional information in the server window, no information in the console I ran the whole shebang from. No logs anywhere, as far as I can tell. No mention of anything like this in the troubleshooting section of the book the example is from. Google searches for that exception identifier are largely fruitless. I could break out the big hammer at this point and start tracing through the machine-generated Javascript in FireBug, but give me a fucking break.
So I post the problem to the GWT Google Group, leaving out the parts about how GWT seems really raw and beta and how they should give me a fucking break. I subscribe to the group and get a couple digests that don't contain the answer to my question.
I stop getting digests after 10am today, go back to the group page to see what's up, and it turns out I'm banned. Not clear why, no recourse to contact the administrator to find out. Since I'm banned, I can't even look at my post to see if I was inadvertently rude somewhere, though it wouldn't surprise me if the post vanished as part of the ban.
I'd love to start throwing out conspiracy theories, but my guess is actually that the admin saw the <script> element in the error message I posted and assumed I was trying to post an XSS exploit or something.
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| the guitar hero 4 drum kit |
Posted 2008-07-17 00:48:12 by
Jim Crawford
Neversoft/Activision/RedOctane has attempted to one-up Harmonix's Rock Band drum kit by adding an additional input and using elevated cymbals in the drum kit for Guitar Hero 4. Having six inputs on the drums is nice, and having elevated cymbals is nice -- it sure looks a lot more like a real kit -- but I'm not so sure that it's going to actually provide a more authentic drumming experience. How would they handle something like Run to the Hills? First of all, the fill at the end of each section uses four toms and the GH4 kit only has three. No go. More generally, the position of the hihat is going to make 16th note patterns very difficult.. . .
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| glimpses of foolish 2 |
Posted 2008-06-27 00:41:23 by
Jim Crawford
Panda3D didn't work out as a demo platform for me because it also can't seem to use GL extensions on my machine. So Python is pretty much out the window. My current idea for a demo is Foolish 2 in 64k using Farbraush's libv2 softsynth library and the Windows Speech API. And OpenGL to render the ASCII animation, so we can bust into 3D ASCII animation when it's most dramatic.
The only problem with this idea, as I see it, is that NVScene isn't actually holding a 64k intro competition, just the 4k intro and 64 meg demo varieties. But, you know, fuck it. I don't need their imprimatur.
So, proof of concept. . . .
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| demos again |
Posted 2008-06-17 01:43:51 by
Jim Crawford
Uploading all those demos got me interested in the current whereabouts of the Green Grapes, which led me to zsazS's livejournal, which led me to gd's livejournal, the latest entry on which was about a mini demo party he was hosting in San Francisco on Sunday. I.e., the next day. So I ended up spending the bulk of Sunday hanging out with about twenty sceners.
. . .
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| new smush album |
Posted 2008-06-01 17:12:33 by
Jim Crawford
Smush's 2007 comeback album, Hop on Pop, is now available! You can go download it, or you can go listen to it online and then reflexively hit the back button.
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| building better DRM |
Posted 2008-05-28 17:23:21 by
Jim Crawford
According to Boringboring, Paramount is sending out copies of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with portions of the soundtrack muted. Evidently this is a new DRM system, to track and to deter piracy. Of course, like all DRM, this ruins the experience for paying customers without affecting piracy in the slightest.
There are non-invasive watermarking techniques available, so using such a scheme to track piracy is inexcusable. Deterring piracy, on the other hand, is harder to do without ruining the experiences of paying customers. I've got a couple better ideas:
Using polarized light, project unpleasant images such as Goatse or Tubgirl onto the screen, overlaying the entire film, and give viewers polarized glasses to filter it out. Clever pirates will simply put the glasses in front of the video camera, but there's an easy solution to this, too: if anyone tries to enter the theater with a video camera, don't give him the glasses.
Take advantage of the idiosyncrasies in the human optical hardware that don't exist in video cameras. For instance, you can hand out a card with colored blobs on it, and cue the viewer to start staring at it a minute before a key scene in the film. Then when the scene is about to begin, you cue the viewer to look back an the screen, and you calculate every displayed frame as the difference between the intended image and the negative of the image they were just staring at.
Of course, the minute before the scene would have to take place in the dark, so the viewer didn't feel like he or she was missing out on the visuals. Every theatrical release would have to do this. Working a dark scene in right before an important story sequence without making it seem unnatural and arbitrary would become the hallmark of a great filmmaker, much like how the best porn film screenwriters slip the sex scenes in without a hitch, and how the best Interactive Fiction fits the puzzles in.
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| code style |
Posted 2008-05-25 23:30:24 by
Jim Crawford
I ordered a book on C# a few days ago. It was odd, to want to get a technical book again; lately I've just been -- and this seems to be the general programmer zeitgeist nowadays -- relying on google for just about all my technical questions. But the question I had in this case wasn't a technical question, it was a style question, and style questions don't fit search engines. Not only because it's harder to translate such a question into a keyword search, but also because given a decree from a random blogger or forum poster or what have you, it's much harder for me to verify whether it's sensible.
I've been programming in C# for a couple years now and I still don't know what, you know, good code is. Not the way I did for C and C++. I think partly this is because C# style is still evolving; it's still a relatively new language. But partly I think it's because the way I've been learning languages changed.
For C I had a mentor, a really brilliant guy. For C++ I think the big driver was working with Tim, who had a very strong, and rather incompatible sense of style from his university studies. Coming to understand each other's extreme positions on style, and coming to a compromise between them, was really the C++ code style boot camp neither of us knew we needed. The three solid months of coding in the same room on the same project helped in that regard too.
For C#, what I basically have is Adam's old codebase for RECE, the RosArt External Combustion Engine, a very large and very general website back-end which was architecturally solid but very much a work in progress when he left RosArt for greener pastures.
Python actually makes an interesting contrast -- when I started working in Python I felt like I was solid, stylistically, very quickly. Python lends itself to elegant code well, has a tiny syntax so is quick to pick up, and due to its hacker roots, has a user-base that can be trusted to a much greater degree to know what makes makes good code. Another factor to consider, though, is that coming from a C++ and Perl background, Python is such a pleasure to work with that you could probably spew out any old nonsense and it would be as much a pleasure to work with as well-written C++ and Perl programs are.
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