Aaaaand..... Action!

07.11.2011

I think the above pic is me around 4 years old, circa 1973. Yes, I'm styling in matching 6-shooters, rifle at right-shoulder arms, red plastic motorcycle helmet, green sunglasses, and matching blue pinstriped tank tpo and shorts. To be honest, I thought I was originally wearing cowboy boots in this picture too, but I guess that's how memories can morph over the years.

I'm getting over a stomach flu that crept in Tuesday night. For the better part of 5 days I had diarrhea - I've even got a missing 15 pounds right now to show for it. I'm sure the weight will come back fairly quick since it was from rapid fluid loss, but maybe my stomach has shrunk enough I won't be trying to eat whenever I'm just sitting around bored. I've been doing a good job switching to drinking a lot of water. Trying to stay hydrated will help do that!

I've been building up the board game library of late. Ironic in that we haven't done any gaming yet this year, but I've gotten 5 or 6 new games in the past 3 months to try out. The one I'm looking forward to the most right now is Last Night on Earth, a zombie game. Jer just picked up Zombies!!!, so it looks like we're in store for some undead gaming!

I think this qualifies as a pretty random post.

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Coconut Thrower Extreme

07.01.2011

So back at the end of April I was working through my first Unity 3D book. Since then I've wrapped up the first book and gotten most of the way through the 2nd book which gets down to the nitty gritty of running around in a 3D world and interacting. Granted, the interacting is limited, but I'm a beginner so it did a fine job!

The book uses a single game which you build upon as you go through the book. I love this approach as you not only build upon what you know (literally), but as you get more comfortable with the environment and the code as you see it over and over, you're more apt to go tweaking some parameters and learning something extra along the way. The path through the books takes the route of:

• Use the terrain editor to make an island (got to have something to run around on).
• Import a model of a building which has a door that can open and close. Script a trigger to make the door open as you come to it.
• Now lock the door! It will never open again. If the book stopped here it would really suck.
• When you get to the locked door, show a message that you have to collect batteries to power up/unlock the door. Import battery models and script how to pick them up and keep count. When you've collected 4 batteries unlock the door.
• Delete the 4th battery. Now the door will never open. Once again, it would suck if the book stopped here.
• Import some models of a platform, targets that can be knocked down and spring back up, and coconuts. Script a mini-game where you have to knock down 3 targets within a timed window (3 seconds) with the coconuts to make the 4th battery appear.

The above step was a lot of fun. I played around with settings and actually paid attention to how the scripting was working instead of just copying it. Once I got the last battery to appear after knocking down all the coconuts, I deviated from scripting and just ran around throwing coconuts. I threw hundreds of coconuts. I wandered around my little created island, throwing coconuts machine gun style the whole way. I went down into a small valley and watched physics at work as the coconuts would scoot along the ground, arcing along the hill, sometimes running into other coconuts and bouncing around.

After a few minutes of this I decided to go back to the platform with the targets, and as I turned and looked up the hill to the valley I had come down in, a herd of coconuts rolled toward me. It seems all those coconuts I had been throwing on the way here had kept rolling and were catching up to me. Hundreds more coconuts made there way down the hill - it was comical to watch them lumber about.

I went back to the book and found an interesting next step that I hadn't gotten to.

• Script the coconuts to destroy themselves after 5 seconds. This will keep the processor from freaking out.

Although my processor was having no problems, a 5 second lifespan would keep the coconuts from rambling on forever. It would also keep me from laughing unexpectedly, so after trying out the 5 second lifespan I decided to leave the coconuts immortal.

I told Jerry of my adventure in learning, dubbing my tutorial game Coconut Thrower Extreme. After all, every game needs a title, even if it's a throw away tutorial. He chuckled where expected and seemed to enjoy my progress. Fatherhood has taught him well and I can appreciate that. I told him that there was more to the book but I had learned what I really wanted. The next chapter was how to build a campfire with smoke floating up, but I didn't think I would have a lot of need for that right now.

At that point Jerry asked "Could you make the coconuts smoke?"

I immediately thought of coconuts flying through the air with a smoke trial lingering behind. Imagine if I had turned and that first herd of coconuts hadn't just been rolling toward me, but rolling and smoking the whole time. What if they had been... SMOKANUTS?

"You know, I think I could make them smoke." And with that I returned to the tutorial and learned how to make a smoking campfire. Then I found how easy it was to transfer the campfire smoke to a coconut. I sent Jer a text message: "We have smokanuts!"

I continued tweaking Coconut Thrower Extreme to include a thrown coconut counter (it's like a score!), and you throw regular coconuts until you reach a preset limit (for now it's 1000) at which point the coconuts become smokanuts! There's even a "Smokanuts Unlocked" message that pops up beneath the score. When you double the preset amount, you're rewarded with flaming smokanuts (I found a use for that campfire!).

For fun I told the boss what I was doing. Since he also has kids he would know the correct enthusiasm to feign.

Me: Jim, I'm working through a tutorial video game I call Coconut Thrower Extreme.
Jim: Yeah, what do you do?
Me: You run around and throw coconuts!
Jim: Cool. At what?
Me: At whatever you want!
Jim: Ok.
Me: And once you throw enough, the coconuts start to smoke. They become smokanuts!
Jim: Ok. Why?
Me: Because then it's extreme. And the game is Coconut Thrower Extreme!

At that point Jim began to laugh, no doubt because of how stupid it all is. Maybe I need Coconut Thrower Extreme : Stupid Edition?

I've got a couple of things to do next in Unity, and the direction I take depends on my mood.

• Daz 3D has a Game Developer Kit that looks to optimize Poser models for game engine use. I've got 10 years worth of Poser models laying around, so spending a little money to be able to use them as game props would be saving money in the long run.
• Mixamo lets you apply animations to character models (either ones you have or you can select models from their stock). This could work well with those Poser models, especially since most of the animations are rigged specifically to work with them.
• CGSpeed has a download of 2500 mo-cap animations in BVH format, which is the animation format used in the above 2 bullets. I downloaded a and applied a test walking animation to one of the Poser models last night and it worked wonderfully (in Poser, I still don't have the export-to-game path in place.... yet).
• 3D Buzz has a 3rd person camera tutorial that covers a lot of ground. From the looks of the finished product they've got, it's a really nice camera system.
• There is a 180 video tutorial series on creating an RPG style game in Unity. That's a lot of videos.

Permalink game dev

A Tom Hanks Mood

06.26.2011

This week finds us watching Tom Hanks movies. I don't know why, but I'm in a Tom Hanks mood. Before Saturday, I didn't know there was such a thing as a Tom Hanks mood.

	Apollo 13 (1995) - I've been wanting to watch Apollo 13 since picking up the 15th anniversary edition (a year late), so maybe this was the movie that started me thinking about Tom Hanks movies. Even after 16 years this movie holds up well, maybe in part because it's set in 1970.
	Green Mile (1999) - This is one of the movies on my list of if I ever see it on TV I quit flipping channels and watch it. I'm not sure how many times I've seen this movie, much less the parts here and there when I'm flipping channels. Somehow I'd forgotten how Michael Clarke Duncan just looms over everybody at 6'5".
Still To Watch
	Cast Away (2000) - I had to go buy this one today. Somehow it was missing from the collection. I guess I'd watched it on VHS a couple of times, but not on DVD. I was wanting to watch this one right after Apollo 13, but that's when I found out I didn't have the movie. Thanks to $5.99 and the "used" section at MovieStop, that's no longer an issue.
	Saving Private Ryan (1998) - I'm not sure if I'll follow through and watch this one. It's on the list since I just finished The Pacific, but I'm going to have to be in the mood to watch for nearly 3 hours. I like the movie, but it's not on my all-time favorites list.

I suppose I'll still do other things this week. Not sure what I'll have time for though...

Permalink movies/tv/dvd

The Trainer of Trainers

06.21.2011

I tend to read wrestler's biographies. I've read most of the WWE biographies published over the past 10 years. I know most of the events that are gone over in any given bio, but I enjoy picking up some behind the scenes info. You can usually pick up a little extra of someone's personality from their biography based on how they view events, people, places, etc. I guess that makes me feel like I know these people I see on TV every week just a little bit better.

The latest biography I'm reading is Bill de Mott's The Last Laugh which has just been published by Crowbar Press. Crowbar is one of those publishers who tend to gloss over the little things in books, like spell checking. It's not bad spell checking, it's more syntax checking. It's not unheard of to read "we took they're hand" or "and then the the other guy". I notice it more in the later chapters, almost like you can see the editor get tired.

Syntax picking aside, I've enjoyed reading Bill's book. You get the feeling you're sitting down and having a beer with the guy while he tells you his life story. I grew to like Bill while he was a trainer on Tough Enough back in 2003. There's something about his personality that makes you think he's a no-shit guy, and I like that.

I've still got about 50 pages left in the book. Right now there are little stories (paragraphs usually) about the kids he's trained in the developmental territories. Overall it's not the best bio I've read, but it's been interesting enough to keep my attention.

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Ads & Cookies

06.14.2011

Whenever there's a slow news week, one of the bullets that pops up in the technology arena is how websites install cookies for advertisers and how it can be a risk to your personal information and ultimately lead to identity theft costing you billions of dollars, personally. One of the joys of developing websites for the past decade plus is that I understand a little about how cookies work, so I don't jump on the paranoia bandwagon. In fact, I kind of like the ad-based cookies targeting what I may be interested in. I'd rather see an ad for a computer doohickey than a sewing machine.

There are some parts of these 3rd party cookies that I don't understand. I emptied out my cookie cache and opened up a non-commercial website. Above are the cookies sent to my computer when I go to my local NBC affiliate's website (WAFF). It sets cookies for 5 sites (revsci.net, doubleclick.net, scorecardsearch.com, adblade.com, quantserve.com) when I visit the front page. That's not just reading cookies to find out what ads I should be seeing, but setting them. There's nothing there that makes me worry about my personal information being passed around, but that's just useless crap cluttering up the browser.

Sometimes I go browsing and the adservers think I'm interested in an item when I'm not. A couple of months ago I was at LeatherUp.com looking at motorcycle gear. I was looking for a specific helmet, found it, and ordered it. For the next 2 weeks it seems every banner ad I saw was motorcycle helmets from LeatherUp. I got tired enough of it I went through and deleted cookies, which luckily got rid of the unwanted ads and replaced them with something of such minimal annoyance I don't remember what it was. Since then I go through roughly every other month and clean out ad-based cookies. If nothing else it narrows down ads to what I'm currently interested in.

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