Category: blog

A Ligeti inspired piece I whipped up this afternoon.

A Luminous Urchin grows in space…

I recently participated in Pyweek, a bi-annual game programming competition where entrants build a game within one week in the Python programming language. I never usually finish the games I build, so I thought this would be a good incentive.

The theme, released only at the start of the competition, was “Get Off My Lawn”. Entrants had to include this theme in their game — though as it turned out you can interpret it quite liberally. I was fortunate enough to start and finish a game for the competition and, out of 29 entries, mine was ranked 6th, which I’m quite pleased with.

Due to the time constraints of the competition, I found myself taking all sorts of coding shortcuts, which, if you applied them in a programming course, you would be failed for. I also quickly learnt to accept the various bugs in the system and move on to the next component. It was an excellent, but exhausting, experience that I recommend to anyone with an interest in game programming.

I have redesigned my website, and you can grab a copy of the game there.

I just uploaded an old video of my 2d generative system growing a starfish. A full size image is also available here.

Here’s a new video of my generative geometry system, SDS. A primitive limb is growing from the original egg geometry. It’s a bit rough, but a step towards my goal nonetheless.

The cactus, originally uploaded by eigenbom.

A sketch I did a while ago. I want to build a system that produces images like this.

Me from inside…

Me from outside…

I’ve started a blog for the cema crew, that will hopefully get updated on a daily basis. It contains short experimental artefacts built in a short (<30mins) http://thecemadaily.blogspot.com. It might take a while to get posts/week > 1.

Also, as I write this pyweek is running. It’s a big biannual game programming competition, where the constraints are: it has to be written in the Python programming language, and it has to be started and finished within a week. I am entering a game, which I will hopefully finish for once, and will post here when I’m done. Wish me luck!

As part of my Beads work, I explored the possibility of bypassing Javasound and working directly with a low-level sound library. In doing so I built an (almost) complete Java wrapper around RtAudio, a low-level, cross-platform audio programming library. My project, JRtAudio is now accessible online, so check it out if you’re interested.

As for whether Javasound is slower than, say JRtAudio, the results are not looking good, but are kind of obvious. The benefit of using JRtAudio only appears when you want a really simple API combined with low latency.