Rapture

So I've finally finished all of Valve's games in Developers' Commentary mode. This mode allows you to play the game with a number of nodes set throughout the levels that, when activated, provide context-sensitive information, straight from Valve's employee's, about the current situation. To me, this provided great insight into Valve's thinking process and made me dearly wish I were part of their team. The numerous iterations and design changes they make collaboratively make the process seem creative and as if design incorporates the opinions of each of their employees. I think the most catching piece of advice they had to offer came in Episode 2, when one of them said something along the lines of "If we do our job correctly, you won't notice anything special... It'll just feel natural." Here he referred to the added detail on Alyx Vance's character model. It took his specific notations to bring the changes to my eye, but he was indeed correct: she was looking more organically fluid than any other installment in the series. This advice applies for all aspects of realistic game development, though; you can see it in Valve's structuring of their levels.

When the same team produced Half-Life, making it the most popular PC game of its time, it was easy for them to layout levels and explain blocks in the players' pathway: the setting was an enormous, labyrinth-like research facility set underground. Transitioning that same gameplay into the outdoor, real-world environments of Half-Life 2 was a success but definitely took some creativity. You have to look closely and know a bit about the Source engine in order to see where they cheated, where they had to come up with an obstacle. The commentary definitely helped develop my sense of how they tackled each new problem.

Dear Valve,
Ride in on a Strider, my knight in gleaming HEV armor, and carry me away to work for you forever
Love,
Pat

Tonight me and a couple of the guys attended a Microsoft Student Partnership XNA game development conference tonight. It took place in the cybertorium and as well as giving out free things a lot of information about the basics of using XNA for game development were reviewed. I picked up a copy of the XNA package and have started to look at it, though Source will always be number one in my heart.

Microsoft also hosts an international Imagine Cup which offers students the ability to showcase their works in a competition which could mete them both professional respect and tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. Check it. Anyone interested in creating a student group to pursue this? Be nice to hear if anyone wants to look into it.

XNA as a game development package works for a couple of reasons:
1. Object oriented nature is built into C# but the language retains the universality of C++
2. Common game functions are encapsulated in the package to save on coding
3. Free to develop on the PC, cheap to develop on the 360
4. Immediate access to licensing (opposed to the Source engine's license which must be purchased from Valve)
5.????
6. Profit

Warning: above link highly inappropriate

Step one: Satirize a national tragedy
Step two: Have your outrageous pictures uploaded to Facebook where everyone can see them
Step three: Attempt to justify your humor through poor logic

Try it! Wait, someone already has Read and be more or less disgusted. It's even worse that these are Penn State students, but in such a big school I guess there have to be the occasional idiots.

Relevance?
Facebook usage and security settings. The group had created a photo album showing off their racy costumes, intended to be viewed only be close friends. They set the viewing privileges to reflect this. However, some sort of mixup occurred where the girl allowed the album to be viewed outside of the friend circle and a group was created focusing on the album's content.

Do I really have to point out the moral(s) of this story?

Just manage your profile on the internet wisely.

Shameful picture of one of the perpetrators:

You might have seen posters around the campus regarding it. I find this campaign HIGHLY relevant in the face of our colleagues' Virginia Tech "costumes," and specifically the spread of it across the internet.

I thought I'd look into the program a bit more and judge its effectiveness. I've come to the conclusion that the Take Control program is probably very helpful for the computer illiterate. However, I think that the average Penn State student will know enough about the concept of the internet to understand how a Facebook picture could be shared with others.

I think the way they address the consequences of such things, though, definitely highlights some areas students might not consider before posting a picture. It actually made me more conscious of my stupid Facebook profile, which I normally don't give half a regard to.

ITS has managed to get this campaign out there in several ways. One, through posters, Stall Stories, flyers and man-size cardboard cut outs in the HUB. Two, by offering some pretty sweet prizes to encourage interaction with the site. In order to enter the contest a student has to actually read a lot of the material on the site and pass a quiz. I entered a long time ago because either prize is pretty awesome, and I'm sure many more were drawn in by this.

Presentation: 4/5 Fairly effective at getting the word out about the program, but I'd like to see maybe an email or something more convenient for a student to just click and read. The warnings are encapsulated in Facebook-esque profiles, which make them more humorous and easy to digest.

Information: 3/5 Useful for those just getting started with social networking, and to at least put a slight caution of sharing passwords etc in the minds of the students

Overall: 7/10 I think it's great the school is working to protect its students electronically as well as through campus security.

Anyway, enter the contest, but you better not win because I want that stuff.

Check out this crazy little story.

So there's this guy who's a guy in real life but a girl in Second Life... and then there's this other guy who was playing a guy in Second Life for awhile, but then decided to be a girl instead, and then the first guy met the second guy, and they fell in love, so now they're a couple-- even though they're really two guys into girls.

Look, I don't think it's that hard, you're not really into girls if the "girl" you're in love with is a dude. I'm not getting political here, the plain fact is that these two guys are in love with each other, no matter if there's a female facade they associate each other with. They might not be sexually attracted to each others' male RL forms, but I don't know how cool it is to be lusting after a female avatar anyway. Two guys who aren't gay, but share similar likes are, I know this sounds crazy, probably more like friends. I don't know why these two are keeping this relationship going, because it has 0 possibility of translating into a stable RL relationship.

Second Life is pretty much the playing ground of sexual deviants. This story just demonstrates how deviant a G-rated relationship can get.

Want to watch the transition of the video game into interactive art? I've harped before about how awesome Portal is (I even bought a shirt too show my support) and I'm sort of engineering my mod towards a similar aesthetic/mood. Anyway these joirks over at Game Radar have a habit of posting serious articles about video games, actually a rarity on the internets.

Here's two I'd like you to look over:

This one just sort of praises it in general. Nothing I didn't know already, it's fantastic.

For a more serious, indepth and probably overexaggerated look, check this one out. Examining everything from sexuality in the game to minimalism, it's quite the philosophical tour de force.

If you read my earlier article, I suspect it's because of the writing that the game played out so well. Also, being a two hour (appx) long game, they were forced to plan out every second the player would go through. The puzzles being linear, storyboarding must have been easier, as well as the timing of ingame events. Indeed the developer commentary points towards this being the truth.

Obviously it's gonna be nigh impossible for any single person to develop a usable 3D game engine. So basically you'll have to go 2D via XNA or Game Maker or just plain old Flash. The other option is to borrow someone else's engine and make a mod. And by someone else's I mean Valve's.

I was introduced to modding through my interest in Counter Strike. Me and Pat Bonner got all up ins with the mapping, which is basically one of three tiers of construction that go into a mod. Portal sort of stirred my interest in actually working on a real mod.

The three tiers:

Programming. Although Source's "source code" isn't available for editing, classes and header files may be edited freely. A modder can also create new classes, including new NPCs, a different GUI, new weapons, etc.

Mapping. The next level is implementing these new classes, as well as existing architecture, in a "map", or the world in which a user interacts. These includes designing the flow of a game, creating the setting, establishing the game's mood, and scripting game events. A mapper lays down the walls, ceilings and floors, textures them, inserts "entities" to produce effects, and places in lighting.

Modeling. Unlike the starve-yourself one, this Modding involves manipulating in 3D, textures and primitive objects to create the detailed representations of smaller objects or more detailed objects than the mapper can handle. They design the weightmaps for ragdoll effects. Some do double time as animators, designing the motion of the ragdolls and then creating scripted sequences in which characters interact.

Couple of things for the prospective modder to check out:

GDM, a journal for the pros, interesting outlooks inside

The Valve Developer Wiki, basically the handbook for using Valve's editing tools. Infinite knowledge is stored here, it explains every keyvalue of every entity in the game. However if you want more in depth explanations and examples of implementation, you'll have to head over to some sick nasty...

...Tutorials. My favorite are the SDKnut's tutorials, which explain most of what you would want to do. It helps to have a human guiding you step by step sometimes. Which is why the next one is so useful.

Forums. The official Steam community forums have years of questions asked and answered and if the archives don't help you it's likely that an active member can.

The Mod database.
Here you can view the lives of nearly every single Mod out there. There lies hints to what makes a mod successful, as well as tips to get over the slump a lot of mods hit halfway through their production.

Not sure how useful this will be to anyone but me, but I think if someone had helped me out with this information I would have had an easier time getting acclimated.

I have actually been following this mod since its early inception. It's basically a port of Half Life to the source engine, unlike Valve's pathetic attempt, they are actually updating each texture, model, and even the gameplay to a HL2 level. Look at their screenshots with great amour and wish you were the game makers.

A beautiful looking Headcrab zombie.

Alright, so in-depth analysis time of the Cyberpunk books I read. I feel they really deal with a lot of IST issues.

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of the entire punk subculture. Cyberpunk stories, set in the future, focus on antiheroic protagonists who deal in the realms of the illegal and subversive. Unlike mainstream science fiction, the goal of Cyberpunk is not to showcase a single new technology, but to explore how technology will affect the societies of the future. Cyberpunk settings most often portray the future as dystopian despite all of humanity’s advancements. The authors of these works do this to point out modern day societal defects, giving the genre its punk ideology. Although primarily a literary movement, Cyberpunk occasionally crosses over into other forms of media; easy examples would be The Matrix or Blade Runner in movies. Common themes include genetic and cybernetic augmentation of the body, drug use, corruption, the danger conformity poses, capitalism’s inherent failings, and the computer programmer as the new outlaw.

The first author I’ll mention is William Gibson. I don’t think anyone cares about his background or other biographical stuff so I’m going to skip that. Gibson actually coined the term Cyberspace, which is thrown around a lot nowadays. His first novel Neuromancer explored the idea of having a universal virtual network. I’ll run you through a summary I wrote real quick just for context.

A freelance hacker is coerced into working for a mysterious employer to illegally break the constraints the government has placed on an Artificial Intelligence named Wintermute. The hacker, Case, eventually discovers that his employer is Wintermute itself. Wintermute was created as the logical half of a larger entity, its twin Neuromancer having the ability to emote. Case, with the help of a cybernetically enhanced female assassin, a Rastafarian spaceship pilot, and the reanimated memories of a dead hacker, breaks the restrictions around Wintermute, allowing the two AIs to fuse.

The world Gibson created for the story was wraught with sexual depravity, more widespread and more potent drug abuse, corporate corruption and other extensions of current social issues. Wintermute and Neuromancer embody several extremely human traits; Wintermute, cold and calculating, represents both the male personality and the left logical hemisphere of the brain. Neuromancer, perceptive and empathetic, represents the female persona and the right creative hemisphere. Their fusion creates a very much human superintelligence. Gibson’s portrayal of the two stands in contrast to the mechanical actions of the human characters. He’s hinting here that technology dehumanizes in an equilibrium reaction; the more we make machines manlike, the less like men we appear.

Neal Stephenson would probably be considered postcyberpunk, which is basically one two many prefixes for my taste. The distinction between cyberpunk and its post cousin lies in the outlook of the protagonists. Postcyberpunk protagonists are not inherently lowlife characters; they instead work against some aspect of their same dystopian futures. This makes postcyberpunk works decidedly more upbeat, and Stephenson’s works have made me laugh harder than any other author I’ve read, except maybe Mark Twain. The change from cyberpunk to postcyberpunk styles is most likely due to the contradictorily positive effect of the internet and other emergent technologies. Still, Stephenson’s and Gibson’s works share so much thematically in common that I find it hard to separate their two universes. Stephenson and Gibson actually have a friendly feud going on between them, and meet often at writers’ conferences.

I focused on two stories of Stephenson’s, Snow Crash and the more recent Diamond Age. Snow Crash looks at a world governed solely through capitalism and unified by a virtual reality known as the metaverse. Diamond Age focuses on the growth of nanotechnologies and how they will change our lives. Most notable in this book is the existence of a “feed” which is like having a water line into your house that instead brings in pure elements, which a matter compiler can then rearrange into nearly any form via nanotechnology. The result is a fairly cheap answer to world hunger, but problems stemming from the tribe-like architecture of the new global society end in bloodshed.

Stephenson likes to focus on the interactions of people with new technologies, and doesn’t often help his readers with some of the lingo. New acronyms pass in and out of conversation, indicating the complete integration of things like the Feed into everyday life.

I’d really suggest any of these books, or even any in the cyberpunk genre for you guys to read recreationally. Really fun and interesting stuff.

Check out these interviews for a more personal look at the authors:

Gibson

Stephenson

So the Ideas program has hooked a lot of us up with professors with whom to do research next semester. Kind of pumped about this opportunity, I figured most undergrads would find it hard to get research opportunities. I've been assigned to Dr. Ocker, working on "Enhancing Learning in Global Teams." Right now I only have guesses to the exact sort of material this will entail. Perhaps we'll be working on concept sort of like this one I found over at our favorite conference, TED. Check out the clip, it's got some interesting ideas in it.

I hope to hear from everyone over the next semester and to share with them interesting experiences from our research opportunities.

I guess part of being in IST is that we examine the effect of technologies like the internet on our culture. There's an interesting article over here, a little longwinded, but it deals with two criticism of the internet which actually come from different angles.

The one is a pretty normal criticism, the article sort of sums it up when it says

The Cult of the Amateur, is rather lightweight and we treat it here as an example of a traditional approach: "The cultural sky is falling, and it is all the fault of the Internet!"

I think the other one is pretty unique, it actually deals with some serious issues about the entire Western culture. It's from the perspective of a Buddhist, and it's neat to think of the internet in a new philosophical way.

Alright, I got two links here I want to share that sort of provide some insight into our future occupations. This dirty little secrets link, which aren't really that dirty, mostly little, is still kind of interesting to think about. I think one of its best points is that tech degrees don't really give you the experience you need in a job. They help get you into the job but there are so many languages and systems out there that you'll almost undoubtedly have to start from scratch when you get onto a job site. However, a degree and the training it involves will give you the mindset and logical skills you need to adapt in a new job situation. A couple of these secrets are more like habits of IT pros, and since we're all heading in that direction, we can decide to abandon said bad habits if we wish. Still useful.

These "tech disasters" range in severity. The article's written in a British perspective, but a lot of these seem to happen in America. Frankly I'm not surprised. Anyways, the majority here don't seem to be human error persay; obviously the software bugs were caused by human error but software bugs occur regularly. I'd call it more fate that transposed these small flaws into full-blown disasters.

Thinking back to what happened last night, I wondered: How would Penn State alert its students of a V-tech sort of situation?

Luckily we have this system.

Register and feel safer! Kind of brilliant of our school to have such a system.

College:
Pros:
Wake up later, get done earlier, less homework, more free time, less class, wider variety of food.
Cons:
Waiting 6 weeks to do laundry makes me a dirtball

Classes:
Pros:
Homework due only every other day, still small numbers of people in each of my classes
Cons: Not as regular a group of people as in high school

Enh, this is all stuff that everyone's gonna find. I'm enjoying myself greatly, learning a lot, and it really excites me that I already have a potential research opportunity. School is finally starting to seem relevant to my future career. That makes all my work seem doable. It's been really easy for me to adjust, I dunno who has a problem with it. The freedom is great and I still get stuff done. Everything seems in balance.

Pat Mulholland,
Signin' off.

It's unconventional, but sometimes the Source engine is modded for purposes other than gameplay. Look over yonder. That's Frank Lloyd Wright's infamous Falling Water house, modelled in the Source engine. Fully realized physically, unlike any attempt that could be made in Second Life. It looks beautiful. To me at least, then again I am in love with the engine.

Actual house:

The Source engine version:

Not bad, eh?

Advantages: This would be an example of a Mirror World; it mimics an object in real life, virtually. This would probably be best used for virtual tours. I know there is a function in Source where commentary markers can be placed in locations referenced by their content. This would work well for anyone who could not actually visit the house.

Perfect example of a simple but well-illustrated augmented reality system. Check it.