Progress with my Isometric Engine has been slow to static, seeing how I only ever seem to spend a day every six months or so on it (damn you paid work). But every time I play with it I come up with something cool to share, so now, if you have five minutes to kill, you can have a play with my isometric world builder.
Within the cube you create your own isometric spaces and structures, and rotate and zoom around them. Click on the image to launch, and have a play around.
There will, inevitably, be a game built with this thing one day soon, so this will be the level editor. If you come up with anything cool-looking feel free to email the XML to me, or post it below. With any luck, if the credit crunch starts biting and the work dries up, I may find a day free to finish the physics sometime in the next year. Don’t hold your breath though.
I’m sure this isn’t the first PaperVision game, but I might make claim on it being the simplest. But then I only really had a day free to do this, which doesn’t allow the time for any sexy 3D modelling or texturing. Otherwise, you’d be looking at day-glo Tron Light Cycles racing around the grid below, rather than blue blobs. The keys are A/D or Left/Right arrows, and the idea is to collect the green things. The rest you can work out for yourself. Fullscreen version here.
What you’re looking at is PaperVision 3D. Not the silly snake game, but the Flash 3D engine rendering all those polygons. PV3D is probably the greatest Flash Open Source success story to date. At my local nerd club, a recurring topic of conversation is the “Open Source question” – i.e. should I open source my code or not, and what exactly do I gain by giving away my work for nothing? The creators of PaperVision, Carlos Ulloa, John Grden and the rest of the crew, answer this question. Rather than being the authors of a great 3D engine no-one knows about, by setting their code free they have become the leading experts in a 3D engine that EVERYONE uses.
At November’s FOTB conference PV3D was on every developer’s lips, within six months even clients are asking for PaperVision. By giving away their work, the creators of PV3D have made themselves coding mega-stars. This is how Open Sourcing works, the trade is in kudos, not commodities. The Open Source movement is the economic paradigm shift of the 20th Century, it happened in software five years ago, last year it made it’s mark on music, this year it will be publishing. The year after that … who knows. As the Chili Peppers advised, give it away, give it away, give it away now…
It’s been six months at least since I’ve had the spare time for any ‘leisure’ coding but I finally found a few hours to get back into my Flash isometric 3D engine this week. And I’m really chuffed with what I’ve achieved.
You can move the ball with keys QAOP (once you’ve clicked on the movie) but the really interesting bit is the sliders. Thanks to AS3’s speed, I can now redraw the isometric space at runtime, so it is a “true” 3D engine.
If you’re in the mood for some outside the box thinking on interface design, how about putting a bit of physicality into your learning and controlling it with a Wii remote?
Already you can run Flash content on the Wii, and control it with the remote. But now there are third party apps for reading data from the Wii-mote on a Mac or PC.
Lets just ignore the accessibility considerations for now, and think about how much more fun eLearning would be if it involved flinging your arms about.
2. Just about everyone seems to think we should be rediscovering the play in our work.
Even Keith Peters was suggesting we quit our jobs and start making casual games for a living. (Next year the theme will be “Flash – not just a toy”)
3. There is a revolution in Flash audio just around the corner.
4. 99% of what we do as developers is shit, but we need to do shit to make that 1% of masterpiece. (Andy Polaine paraphrasing Hemmingway)
5. Flex is not exciting any more, it just IS.
(Same goes for everything else we were excited about following FOTB06 – Papervision, AIR, etc)
6. Flash is so last week. We should all be learning Processing instead.
7. The Dead Sea is dead because nothing flows out of it. This is why we should be giving away at least 10% of our stuff. (Chris Orwig) Preferably 10% of the shit, not the masterpiece I presume. (Personally, I advocate giving it all away).
So, unsurprising, I was very excited by the project Tom at Flexible Factory has been working on recently. He has reverse-engineered the open source Jasper emulator, originally written in Java, and rebuilt it in ActionScript 3. From Tom’s account this sounds like it involved some pretty hardcore coding, but I’m glad he persevered as now we have Flasper, the Flash ZX Spectrum Emulator. It’s light weight, can be easily embedded in a browser, and it ROCKS!
Tom demoed this for the first time last night at Flash Brighton, the regular get together of the local Flash talent. Every time I attend one of these meeting I find myself blown away by the range and quality of work being produced across our small collective. It can be quite intimidating, I mean, if all you can show from your recent work is some pretty fractal effects, how do you follow a guy who’s been mapping and simulating the brain of a snail (Hi Peter).
Last night we also saw some sweet animation, an AIR Twitter app, and a Flash/ASP project called Communicator World, the work of unwrong, an Edinburgh company who have just moved down to Brighton. Welcome to the south coast guys, I think you’ll be right at home here.
But everyone’s work was great, so I shouldn’t single anyone out. The full list of last night’s exhibitors is on the Flash Brighton site.
Or Granddad’s Guide to Computer Games Part 3 (Part 1, Part 2).
I’ve recently left the games industry, off to focus on eLearning for the foreseeable future, so this may be the last of my curmudgeonly rants on how ‘Computer Games’ were so much better back in my day. My first post on this subject, a love letter to Braben and Bell’s Elite, which mourned the death of the creative ambition of the early computer games, has been one of the most widely read pieces I’ve ever written, so perhaps I’m not alone. But if you want to want to continue reading about computer games, without the nostalgic grumpiness, I recommend Si’s excellent chewing pixels blog, he’s the main man when it comes to the modern crap.
It’s probably a generational thing. I’m of the ZX Spectrum generation, turned on to programming through experimenting with one of Clive Sinclair’s babies – the ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum. This is why I understand the allure of the blinking cursor.
In 1983 we didn’t have desktop metaphors, we didn’t have mice, all we had was a blinking cursor. There wasn’t something to click to open a document or load a game, your mysterious machine just blinked uncomprehendingly at you, waiting for you to type a command. This is why I am a great fan of a dimly remembered genre of computer game called the text based adventure. Advances in computing graphics capabilities have meant the text based adventure is now regarded as a relic of computer game history. I think this is a mistake. The text based adventure is one of those genres that transcends medium – it is midway between a book and a game. It is a narrative in the form of a conversation, but not as a passive reading experience; you are responsible for one side of the dialogue, and to progress you need to keep up your end of the conversation.
If you’ve never played one of these games I’ll give you an example. The HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy game, inspired by the 80s books, and written by Douglas Adams himself (who was a great evangelist for text based multi-media in the 80s), is one of the best examples of the form. It starts like this:
You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can’t.
It is pitch black.
And that’s it. Just that and a blinking cursor. It’s now up to you to try and communicate with the game and unlock the narrative. Your first command might be “turn on light”, “go downstairs” etc, but as the scene is being constructed in your head, rather than onscreen, it is only when you are arrested after leaving the house that you realise you have forgotten to put any clothes on.
It is a wonderfully absorbing way of playing. There is a version of the game on the BBC site, which will alarm the purists by its addition of graphics, but give it a try, see how far it sucks you in.
Another of the finest examples of the genre was ID, a game by Mel Croucher, one of most imaginative creators of the 80s for whom the modern games market would have no room. He didn’t create many games, but every one he did was pretty much a genre in itself.
ID had no graphics, just a percentage in the corner of the screen. There was also no opening message, just a blinking cursor. You had to start the conversation, with no clues as to what you were meant to be doing. Without giving too much away, it unraveled to be a dialogue with an entity living within your machine, who had experienced several previous lives. Your progress was marked by how much you could discover about this entity, by winning its trust and getting it to open up to you. The modern equivalent might be chat room grooming.
No-one is making these games anymore because nowadays we can create amazing graphical environments, so we don’t need text based adventures. This is illogical thinking; just because on film we can now create a CGI Spaceship it doesn’t mean every film has to have CGI spaceships in them. Not every game needs a realistic graphical environment to be compelling. Just look at the recent success of Sudoku. I think there is still a place in the world for the text based adventure.
I’ve recently seen someone has mashed the Hitchhikers game with Jabber, so it can be played as an instant messager conversation. With the popularity of text messaging, and the limited low bandwidth communications of mobile phones, I think there could still be a market there.
And before you ask, yes, I did try and suggest this to LittleLoud during my time there. I was laughed out the room.
So someone please, write a text based adventure for 2007, market it to the kids who love their AIM/text messaging, and make a million off it. You can buy me lunch as a thank you.
Growing up in the Midlands in the 80s, most children had to endure copious trips to Dudley Zoo. The only highlight of these visits, the dangled carrot that got you past the sleeping hippos, bored lions and the seemingly empty reptile house, was the arcade, which featured the original Star Wars arcade machine.
This machine was a classic. It had two killer features. First was the design of the cabinet “ a reclined seated position, speakers behind your head, an X-wing style controller in your hands, and the glass panel behind you which all your mates clambered over while they awaited their turn. At the age of 10 this was the nearest I’ve ever been to experiencing deep space combat.
Second killer feature – the vector graphics. They looked stunning at the time, and have aged really well. There’s something about the austere simplicity of those lines, which I’m sure must somehow tie in to my love of comics books on an aesthetic level.
So after playing on one of these machines for the first time in 20 years at GameOn, as well as Elite, Asteroids and the more recent shareware game Warning Forever, I left the exhibition demanding the return of the vector game. When even shoe-gazing is getting it’s second time around, surely vector graphics are overdue their revival.
ID had no graphics, just a percentage in the corner of the screen. There was also no opening message, just a blinking cursor. You had to start the conversation, with no clues as to what you were meant to be doing. Without giving too much away, it unraveled to be a dialogue with an entity living within your machine, who had experienced several previous lives. Your progress was marked by how much you could discover about this entity, by winning its trust and getting it to open up to you. The modern equivalent might be 
Growing up in the Midlands in the 80s, most children had to endure copious trips to 
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