Well, it’s all over. I’ve finally graduated from Monash University with a PhD in computer science. Now … what’s next? :)
Category: blog
My personal blog.
Moonman is a game about exploring, building, and surviving in a strange land. It is currently in development by Ben Porter, with music composed by Gio Lobato, and will be available for PC, Mac, and Linux in mid 2013.
Moonman is a platform game featuring a procedurally-generated world with a rich ecosystem and a plethora of creatures, elements, items, weapons, and machines. It is heavily inspired by games such as Knytt Stories, Terraria, Nethack, The Incredible Machine, Minecraft, andDwarf Fortress.
More details can be found on the moonman website.
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ascii animator in the news..
Ascii Animator was mentioned in Game Developer magazine, now that’s exciting! I was mentioned (I’m eigenbom btw), complete with a printing of my ascii mech (top-left) and the some creations by other TIGforums dudes. The article just appeared out of the blue, and was spotted (and photographed) by UberSprode from TIGforums.
In other ascii animator news, the program now comes bundled with libtcod, which includes some basic support for loading and saving ascii animator files. This basically means that rogue-like developers can easily create ascii-based “graphics” for their games (as much of a paradox as that may seem).
Development of ascii animator has ceased at the moment as I am now working full steam ahead on my game (details coming soon) — but the program is very usable in its current state and has no major bugs that I’m aware of.
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moonmenmockups
Here’s some simple sprite mock-ups for my current game project..
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form generation screencast
Mini-post. Here’s a screencast of some procedural graphics software I’ve been working on as a postdoc.
A project I’ve been working on in my spare time the last 2/3 weeks is a program called Ascii Paint. Ascii Paint is a simple open source painting program which uses ASCII characters instead of pixels. Ascii Paint was started by Shafqat Bhuiyan & Jice, but I heavily adapted it, adding, amongst other things, a more refined UI, export to animated gif, palettes, layers, and a better file format.
Ascii Paint can be used to make ascii art, mockup scenes from roguelikes, or even to make ascii animations. You can download the program, read a tutorial, and check out the source at the ascii-paint project site.
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PhD Thesis now online
My PhD thesis has been accepted and is now available online. It may be of use to anyone interested in the nitty-gritty details of my generative form system, SDS, or if you want a recent literature survey of biological inspired procedural techniques for 3D meshes.
Link: Thesis (low-res) (pdf)
The pdf is screen-resolution, so if you would like print-resolution then please contact me, and I will make a higher-res one available. :)
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The level-set, The Voronoi
My first post-doc job has now begun. I’m working with my PhD research group, exploring process-based form generation, whatever that means. In a nutshell, I will be developing a system for the real-time generation of 3D animated forms (think Panspermia, Turbulence, Werkkzeug, etc.).
We are currently leaning towards using Lua for the specification of the forms, and C++ and a bunch of libs (VCGLib, Boost, Bullet Physics, etc.) as the underlying engine. VCGLib is a library for manipulating triangular meshes, and comes packed with a tonne of mesh processing algorithms, i/o routines, etc. There are some alternatives (CGAL, OpenMesh, etc.), but at the moment, VCGLib seems like the easiest and most feature packed library. Some first tests, with VCGLib’s marching cubes algorithm and export routines, combined with interactive lua scripting, is shown below (be sure to watch it in HD).
In other news, I am working on a prototype for a new game. I’m keeping the idea to myself until I have a good prototype, but the game will be browser-based and have android/iphone ports. Here’s a peek at some early work in map layout. Note that the maps are being generated by code (javascript) running in your browser. All this stuff is written in Haxe, of course, assisted by useful libraries such as Polygonal.
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Thesis Submitted!
It’s done, my thesis has been written and submitted for examination. I can’t believe four years have passed since I started. So many things have happened since then, including my wedding, and trips to tasmania, vietnam, new zealand, and many countries in europe. Once my thesis has been accepted, I will be uploading it to this site — just in case anyone is interested. Probably the most useful component of the thesis is the bibliography, referencing the corpus of research into developmental and physical modelling for procedural graphics. Maybe I will upload it separately as a html document.
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eightbit.cema
The cema crew, eightbitified -> http://eightbit.me/