The wonderful Happy Action Theatre by Double Fine has been rebranded and given away fro free as Kinect Party. It is a very amusing set of Kinect based toys to play with plus some DLC. It sees you and hears in the room and does all sorts of collision detection games like popping a room full of balloons or Augmented reality things that add hats and gadgets to you as you bounce around your living room.
However hidden away are some really clever techniques. The Kinect is scanning the geometry of the room not just tracking the players. This means balloons bounce off your sofa, or pigeons land on tables.
The really clever bit is when as a player you are replaced. Take a look at this picture
The predlets were both in shot, but they get replaced by skeletons. The Skeletons are thinner and have more transparent bits then their human counterparts. The games using the Kinect manages to rebuild the background live behind them, removing them from the scene completely, then adding in a new character. This is not a stick on AR it is much more clever, or at least appears to be.
In another example both predlets were under water. Predlet 2.0 was dead centre of the picture, grabbed a hook and was pulled upwards on the tv screen to be replaced by an approximation of what was behind him. He is there but invisible.
Shortly afterward predlet1.0 did the same thing and voila… gone (but still in the room looking at the screen). Having obscured her Grandad previously behind her in the picture there he is, as if she was invisible.
The screen is done as an underwater scene so there is lots of wobbling of waves that would counter any odd image artefacts, but this is being done on live video on a free application on a console that is nearing the end of its run.
This puts what I wrote in Flush Magazine about the next gen Kinect and how it may deal with removing people from a scene into more context.
(not only is this game/toy clever it is really funny and a great laugh BTW 🙂 )
I hope this puts into context me spamming Facebook with Kinect Party photos, but I loved it when it was Happy Action Theatre and it has got more clever and engaging (and free).
Merry Christmas one and all, I am off to eat some mince pies.
games
Playing with physics and a lot more – Gmod + Kinect
I finally got around to trying GMod (Gary’s Mod). This has been around for a while but is now on Steam for Mac and PC with some interesting new features. A good few years back I remember us sitting in a bunker at Wimbledon in some downtime marvelling at the physics engine demo films for Half Life 2 and the Source Engine. Watching wood catch fire, things rolling around, dropping and floating in a high end game engine. Playing with physics is always fun in code or with a toolkit. At the time there wasn’t a toolkit to build with simply, though along came things like Second Life with some basic physic and lots of multiuser features.
It is a while since I have bothered doing anything with my Desktop windows PC other than get Minecraft going for the predlets. However I ordered a windows based Kinect. Having got the xbox one working on the Mac I wanted to do some development with the official Windows SDK. I only had a Vista machine and it turned out I needed to be windows 7 or above so I took the plunge and upgraded to Windows 8. This was moderately straight forward, apart from having to dismantle the machine to find the serial number on the soundcard to find the right driver. I then got the kinect working, downloaded SDK’s and version of development tools. However it was such a mess getting anything to work I started to lose interest!
How can I use the Kinect? Well a quick google and I found that the Gmod was there on Steam and for £5.99 gave me access to a fantastic building toolkit with all the physics and interesting options of the Source Engine. It also mentioned that it now worked with the Kinect. It also works as a multiplayer network. So this is metaverse territory! 🙂
The palette of things you can rez in Gmod is extensive
Once you rez something like a rusty bath you can spin it around in space with the physics tool.
If you let go it drops to the floor, with a satisfying physics engine bounce and crash.
If you want to put a ragdoll physics scientist in the bath you can do that too.
It is these ragdolls that have an extra context menu on them. If you have a Kinect plugged into your windows machine, and have the right drivers (1.6) then you can then control these ragdoll avatars with your motions. Not only that but you can control more than one at the same time. Lots of scope here for animated dance sequences.
The first time it worked was a magical moment, it blended the initial memories I had of the engine, with the buzz of what we have today to experiment with.
The skeletons of the Source avatars do not seem to be the same resolution as the more detail kinect skeleton so this is not perfect for my Choi Kwang Do attempts to instrument the body, but… they do help try out the kinect. The rest of the things we can build, and that the predlets will build is going to be interesting.
Oh, there is also an amusing “minecraftify” option in Gmod that turns all the textures blocky. So worlds are merging.
I have yet to try using the 360 kinect on the Mac with its version of Gmod but there is certainly a lot of exploring to be done.
Happy Holidays 🙂
Black Ops II – Dolly Cameras and heat maps
Amongst all the other features of the current game of the moment Call Of Duty : Black Ops II there are some great tools for exploring replays. Every game that you play is stored away on servers somewhere. In game you can pull one of those games as a replay. In the replay you have full control over the camera views, and can zoom back an forward through time. This replay is a reconstruction from the player data, so it needs the game to be able to see it (or anyone else’s shared replays). It does however allow you to render the replay to an actual movie and put it on youtube. Of course just a first person or 3rd person view of the game might get a bit samey, so hidden away is the ability to set camera positions and have cameras follow a virtual dolly to let us budding action movie directors create this sort of thing.
It seems to be having a few teething troubles as this was twice as long as this when I rendered it 🙂 However you can see the sort of control you can have over the cameras to make mini action machinima 🙂
The Elite web side used to be a subscription only extra add on, but is now open to everyone, this lets you explore the data in more ways. Things like the heatmap view of a level that shows a map view of where things happened and when. With the ability to drill down into the data and see what happened where. Of course this is not for everyone but it is interesting as it gives an insight into what gets captured and stored. Whilst it is just player positions and status over time, that is used to reconstruct the visuals it is a huge amount of data, given the millions of games that have happened already.
As you can see in this example I tend to die more than anything else 🙂 It is still great fun though.
Is the world falling apart?
Ok so it’s a dramatic title, but it is not about any 2012 apocalypse of the breakdown of our social structures because of the greedy few absorbing all the money in the world. No this is just an observation I got to make on the current incarnation of Assassins Creed, number III in the series.
The game is certainly a mammoth production, I have definitely enjoyed exploring the environment, as you should with a free roaming environment. Of course this means hitting the edges of the world. Quite often this is a message that an area is not yet available. However I was a little surprised when I leapt to climb one particular cliff and fell right through it. The great thing about rendering engines is that they obviously have no idea if something is right or wrong. If the collision constraints fail you can end up in some very unusual places.
I ended up in an ocean, but is clearly ended where the wall I feel through was. With the occlusion rendering backwards it looks like you can see the paths in the trees that are normally branches you leap to and from.
The water simulation was still running, but had a spooky drop off. The world was flat indeed and I had fallen off.
It’s not really witch space in Elite 🙂 but it was fun for a few minutes. Bugs FTW
Curiosity – Killed the cat?
Curiosity went live on the smartphones a few days ago. It is a well named free app/game/art installation/research project from Peter Molyneux’s new company 22Cans. The company name refers to the 22 gaming experiments that they intend to create.
I was intrigued as to what the team was going to come up with and how they would strip things right down to gaming basics but apply it to the dynamics of the devices and of social media. Being an entitled an experiment is also good because it does not set the expectation that anything will work or not, merely that it is worth a try.
Curiosity is basically a giant cube, a shared cube, a cube that each client sees in the same way. The cube is covered with millions of smaller pixel like cubes. Each player can zoom into the cube surface and tap a piece of the surface to chip it away. Underneath is another layer of the cube surface. Everyone has to join in to remove an entire multimillion piece surface with their own efforts to collaboratively clear the level and be able to start on the next one. In a giant social networked version of pass the parcel there is a secret final layer at the centre of the cube, hence the title Curiosity. There is to be one and only one winner of the information in the cube, the person to click the last ever surface cubelet on the last layer. Each layer on teh way down is a different texture and coloured picture. The first layer from Day 1 was black and shiny but was soon replaced with a green blobby type of laval lamp picture.
The basic game mechanic of tapping away with your finger tips for ages and ages, emptying areas or randomly dotting around is certainly not the most taxing game idea. It does though have the pure elements of gaming grind that you find in any RPG and in particular in MMO’s. The visuals are of course basic, a textured cube covered in deliberately wonky tiled cubelets, which you only appreciate close in.
The game lets you play completely anonymously with your fellow tappers, or you hook to Facebook for the usual friend spamming and tracking. Each tap produces a score in the shape of coins. These coins can be amassed to use special tools like bombs to remove the surface more quickly. Save up enough and you get a range of chisels.
So all in all this seems almost completely pointless as a game, it does appeal to a certain compulsion to join in, not so much to expect to be the last person discovering the end point but to see why it is worth bothering at all. This is an intriguing introspection on Curiosity, as I am curious as to how the experiment is going and peoples motivations to try it.
This is where it is very interesting as to what 22Cans are going to find out. No doubt lots of people will try it, like any free game and have a little go. They only have to tap one cubelet away, if enough people do that the cube with be cleared. The number of layers of the cube is obviously just data, so 22Cans can do what they want, unlike pass the parcel this is not a static wrapping.
How people try and maximize their scores is interesting too. A bonus multiplier builds up as long as you are tapping and clearing at a regular rate, stop and its reset, miss and its reset. So zooming in with precision to get a large enough view of the cubelets for fingers not to miss and systemically clearing a screen offers one type of reward, zooming out and fast random scattering an area also works. I am assuming that the context and usage of each player is the sort of data being collected.
I have often pointed out that many games companies do not understand true high volume sites, with the exception of the big MMO guys. The focus on 3 player shards in games is not prepared for the massive influx of small packets of information from hundreds of thousands of people at a time. The launch of Curiosity will certain level up some sys admins. The initial experience was one of the servers being all over the place. It’s free and it’s an experiment remember, so no one should be up in arms at this.
22Cans now have some detailed massive scaling experience, assuming they did not have some already. It is also a game that is both social and anonymous, something that is in my particular area of interest. Pseudo anonymity is always intriguing and Social media can be used to provide ready and willing game players so you can work as a team despite not knowing one another well. This is sort of lacking from the cube world. There is a sense that we are, to quote a much mis-used phrase “in this together” but the sense of others is an occasional server refresh and lots of your cube face disappearing as someone else clears it. You can pay a few of your chip coins to look at friends Facebook stats, but that is mostly buried away. Again this is an experiment so I am guessing they are looking too at how many people are bothered at looking at one anthers stats 🙂
You can of course theorise as to the depth of experiment that this actually is. The fact I am bothering to write about it, to have even downloaded it may itself form a small part of some massive data gathering. The cube has the #curiosity hashtag and other text messages floating across its surface so engagement outside of the game is certainly being explored.
I will certainly be following the next 21 experiments with interest. I suspect many of them will start to cross over into some of the work I have been doing and even one of the patents 😉 as Peter and his team look at how social media can be an operating system for gameplay rather than a conduit or portal for games to be delivered into. I may have to offer them some consulting time 🙂
So get tapping, even if it is just to say how pointless it all is. Of course not tapping or bothering will be valuable data too. Yikes I am wrapping myself in a knot!
UPDATE 9/11/12
This video has appeared which is a great, and honest, behind the scenes admission of the size and scale of dealing with massive amounts of users and data with a small team. It is not a grovelling excuse or a press release it is genuine frustration and indicates the hard work and passion of the team. Keep going 22cans 🙂
Another game another horse – Assassins Creed III
I spent 6 hours the other night playing the news Assassins Creed III game. There is of course much more to do but I thought I would share a little of the experience, whilst trying not to produce any spoilers. The original Assassins Creed was something that looked like a great leap forward (no pun intended on the fact it is free running across rooftops) with some stunning animation, huge backdrops and crowds of people wandering around to add to the atmosphere. I remember it particularly at the time as there were a few colleagues in my corporate world who had not come across games of this type before and who were also coming to terms with virtual worlds. Our virtual worlds looked nothing like AC. Equally I had to point out the millions of pounds and person years of effort that had gone into making things that stunning. Also I often had to point out that the narrative and story is the point in AC and that just because we have things that look like games they are not, they served a different purpose.
Anyway, here we at at AC III, which has had more than 2 other games since the original but this is apparently the main plot line.
It is interesting in that the first 45 mins or so is really a tutorial, a lead into the story before any starting titles. Just like a Bond film usually does. However you get so immersed in what you are doing, enjoying the visuals and the story that it is a shock when you are suddenly faced withe some starting titles so late in.
I had also seen that we had a new character and time to exist in and explore. It was supposed to be a native american, a sort of outdoors hunting ninja style. So it was a little bit weird to spend the first 5 hours of the game as a completely different character. (yes 5 hours more of what is in effect a preamble). This had a plot point and one that I think worked, once you accept the time and effort you need to put in. Eventually though you are set free to roam the American Wilderness, free-running from tree to tree hunting animals. It gets very Red Dead Redemption though once you start riding around on horses.
After 6 hours the game is opening up, but it is also seemingly following a lot of other plots of films. The main one that stuck in my mind was Star Wars. A lot of “I am your father” and also you go off to be trained by a wise old man. As a native american he decided you need to blend in more so changes your native name to Connor (You still dress like a native american but apparently people are not bothered about that in Boston). Connor, is of course, the surname of John in the terminator films 🙂
It is an interesting historical setting, attempting to blend with the American War of Independence. You meet the main protagonists in the uprising. I got to wander tunnels with Sam Adams and hunt papers for Benjamin Franklin.
In Boston itself it is good to see all the original buildings like Fanueil Hall in place. It has a great atmosphere, just as the previous cities in previous games.
I have seen that the main game is about 20 hours long, which does make me wonder why the first 6 hours have been spent doing the setup up for the next 14. I am sure the pace could have been sharpened a little. However, free roaming games have a certain feel to them where you are quite happy to not advance the story but just hang out. it might be driving in GTA listening to music, sitting playing cards in Read Dead Redemption etc. There seem plenty of self setting challenges in AC III too. The scalability of buildings, the need vast distances you are able to cover in the frontier that pull you away from playing it too quickly and missing something.
It is with out doubt a great achievement in AAA development. In a world where small cartoon birds or fields of slow growing corn has been attracting all the attention we still do have room for blockbusters like this.
I will go explore some more, I hope I get a light sabre soon 🙂
Under pressure – games and simulations XCOM
This week I have been looking into how we get one of the virtual worlds projects to put some pressure on the people taking part in a simulation, but not make things so over the top that they give up. There are lots of gaming examples for entertainment that place layers of pressure on people, so there is lots of inspiration to draw upon. In particular though, the latest incarnation of XCOM, Enemy Unknown provides a lot of pointers.
XCOM is a turn based strategy game. For non gamers who may thing it is all fast moving running around and trigger reactions they my be surprised to find out that sometimes games offer a bit of time and thought. XCOM gets you onto a battlefield with a small squad of soldiers against an enemy alien force of invaders. Different units have different abilities on both sides and how you use these and how you take your turns is the key. In many ways this is like a game of chess. You can take as long as you like to asses the situation and make each of your turn based allocations of movement.
(Image from xcom.com)
Just these battles alone provide a degree of stress induction. When you are stressed you make worse decisions, so you start to work out when to act carefully or rashly to deal with an ever changing situation. Probability and chance throw curve balls as you decide to take a percentage shot at an alien only to be let down by the hidden dice rolling against you. You also have to consider when is a time for a tactical withdrawal. Soldiers that survive missions get promoted and gain extra abilities. Lose a high ranking squad and you are on the back foot with a group of rookies.
This on the ground tactical part of the game is the major part of the experience but there is a higher level strategy as you have to finance this ongoing war and research new weapons and engineering facilities. There are so many facets to this and resources are very tight that you do have to make some big decisions that impact the flow of the game. Do you focus on putting up satellites and fighters to deal with incoming ships, direct scientist to research defensive capabilities or powered up weapons for the soldiers. How much do you expand your base, considering the power consumption of new facilities.
(Image from xcom.com)
The multi faceted nature of what has to be considered is what makes this game work particularly well. You may be in the thick of it in a combat situation, considering the intricate detail of which move or weapon to use but you have in the back of your mind what needs to be done before the next mission and what to focus on there.
As with many games though the odds are against you, interestingly the game does have an impossible setting. Indicating that the alien invasion will be successful, but how long can you survive the inevitable loss. Interestingly this harks back to the original arcade game space invaders, where you are pretty much never going to win, you run out of money or time, but you always lose.
So the key here is that you need to feel that you can make a difference, but you have to know that there are other forces at work, other decisions that need to be made in and around the specific detail of any event. Any simulation needs to layer the pressures on the participants. That may be actual decisions or levels of detail of information that inform the narrative but aim to overload and confuse just to the point of stress. Too much and there is almost no point proceeding.
Balance in games and simulations is the key. Atmosphere and a story let humans fill in some of their own levels of details as that engage with it. Whilst there may be an algorithm as work obscuring it, or making it less obvious and throwing in random elements help a greta deal.
XCOM is a great game (as was its 1995 original). Turn based strategy games still work too which is great to see.
A real educational game that rocks
I am typing this with some very sore finger tips on my left hand as yesterday Rocksmith arrived in the post from Amazon. I known this has been out stateside for a year but it has finally hit these shores. If you have not seen Rocksmith or been dubious about it, it is a music game where you play along with tunes with a guitar. Hey that sounds like Rockband/Guitar Hero! Well this time you get to use your real guitar and play the full notes (hence the sore fingers).
I have dabbled with guitar since I bought a Fender Squire and an amp with my first pay check. I never played anything much though I know a few chords and the blues scale is always nice to wibble around.
Loving music and not being quite able to match my guitar playing to the music I sort of lapsed. Music games were a great way to get back into playing something in some way. I wrote about the early, pre Rockband, experiences back in 2007 on eightbar whcih then got picked up by
the Boston Globe in 2008 !
I had noticed that my ability to play rhythm had improved using the basic Rockband instruments. It is why I upgraded to the 102 button guitar to get closer to real guitar with a game and even got to play a bit on the TV on the Cool Stuff Collective
I recently finished the tour mode of Rockband 3 (I had been playing for ages but not bothered with the tour too much it was always a party game)
Feeding Edge is also embedded in Rockband both as tattoos and our bands name and Logo as a bit of fun
Having finished Rockband 3 it seemed time to upgrade to the all new Rocksmith. My Fender was still sitting in the corner and Predlet 1.0 has also started guitar lessons at school.
I plugged the guitar in with the lead that is jack to usb into the xbox, loaded it up and I was instantly amazed and how well it worked. You are straight into a tuning section and the guitar was spot on in seconds. Clearly it was picking up the right signals!
Like Rockband/Guitar here the notes drive down towards you. They are coloured based on the string, a picture of the guitar fret board shows whats about to be played. When the notes arrive you pluck them.
The really clever part is the auto adjusting skill level. If you start to get the basic single notes and rythm it will start to add more. In the career mode it gently eases you through songs, but you start instantly with the Rolling Stones Satisfaction with the iconic sounds of that tune. Predlet 1.0 dived straight in and was really happy to play the song. She already had the guitar basics from her lessons so knowing strings and frets made it easier as it did with me.
I carried on the career line for a while then just dived into playing house of the rising sun. This is where I saw it adjust to my level very quickly. It gave a few notes and before I knew it it was showing the proper chord progression. Chords that were stored away in the back of my brain, C, A, E etc. So there I was playing rhythm guitar on my old electric with a responsive backing track that if things went slightly wrong it would turn down the level let me get my act together and back into it again. That makes this the best of all music games.
Now is it orange peel I rub on my finger tips to harden them? ouch!
Sleeping Dogs drive on the left
I got the game Sleeping Dogs (xbox version of course) back last month as a birthday present. I did not get much time to play it as we headed off on holiday, but once I got absorbed into it again. It is a free roaming, story driven virtual Honk Kong. It is of course in the style of Grand Theft Auto IV, as that really defined the genre. You take your character from place to place in various vehicles that you buy or steal. You choose to follow main mission quests to advance the storyline and/or take on side missions, races, favours and challenges.
Sleeping Dogs differs in several ways and advances the genre very nicely. The main advance is the quality of the hand to hand combat. Being set in Hong Kong it has a martial arts flavour to it. When you engage in combat it is more like a virtua fighter/tekken style to the combat with lots of techniques and counters to play with. You don’t know all your moves at the start, you have to learn and earn them. This keeps the fighting fresh as you level up and get new moves to try. The fighting is almost always you versus multiple opponents too which keeps you on your toes. Having practiced a martial art (Choi Kwang Do) for the past 8 months I now look at game fighting with a different eye. Choi is defensive and not used aggressively but this is game space and it is good to see some of the differing styles. The fights do go on a bit though as its all about health bars. Later on there are guns and shooting too to add to the variety. As this has RPG elements you do of course end up not winning every fight, you have to level up through other activities.
A filtered instagram shot of the screen 🙂 it shows the style and the sort of mess you get into.
The levelling up also comes in various strands. The story is split into police work and triad work. You are an undercover cop with split loyalties. Each of the major story arc points provides extra skills in a level tree. Each only has 2 branches but provides enough thought and variety that you get to contemplate how to spend that 1 level point you have just earned, without being swamped. in the end though you should end up with them all.
Another levelling up, which occurs across all the missions is your reputation or Face. This gradually builds up the more you work the more you get. Each level then provides a perk.
In case the missions, driving around, fighting and collecting special locked boxes is not enough you also get to alter your clothing. It may seem odd in a hard nosed martial arts cop-crook-athon bloodfest that clothes become relevant but it does provide a little extra side challenge. Certain clothing combinations and items add 5-15% to the levelling up scores depending on what you wear.
The game is rated 18 and I would hope that most parents realise that this really is 18. The storyline is quite hard hitting at times, the language is always full of swearing. The fighting is pretty gory, you are usually left covered in blood which remains until you change your clothes. That is more cartoony. However, having completed the main story now it got pretty serious at the end. There are a lot of game engine driven cut scenes, some great acting and voice, but the last ones made me wince. This is great as it had not just become a collect -’em up grind. It fitted with the plot (which I am not going to spoil) but it definitely was not one for the kids.
The other really nice thing, as per the title of this post is that it is set in Hong Kong, where, just as in the UK they drive on the left. So many games are US based and in NY or SF and there we are on the wrong side of the road 🙂
There is some DLC planned with new missions. This will be great though having played through the story I wonder how they are going to make this integrated and not just some missions you missed that you go back and play.
A cracking game though.
Yay! Flush the Fashion 3d print article published
Issue 3 of the full Flush the Fashion magazine has just gone live, complete with my multiple page spread on 3D printing 🙂 It starts on page 107 (but obviously read the rest of the excellent mag too.
It is awesome to see professional the job done on the text I wrote and some of the pictures I provided, but added with a whole lot more.
Makie’s are in there, Second Life Reebok trainers, Minecraft printing and the TVRRUG reprap as seen on The Cool Stuff Collective and a Raspberry Pi case.
Two articles into this does that make me a journalist officially now 🙂
You can view it online with the viewer above or download it here as a PDF and there is a regular weblink too.
***Update there is also the newstand ipad version which looks brilliant too, flush magazine if you search on the app store 🙂
So virtual worlds last issue, 3d printing this issue whats next? I have a cunning plan.