World Wide Web
If you follow my Twitter account, then you should already know that I regularly post stuff from Muddy Colors.
This is no exception, even more so because it will be relevant to my current work. Two posts by Dan dos Santos about basic image composition, the first one about value structure, the second one about temperature structure.
Those two posts struck a chord with me, since they clearly explain what I already plan to do in the therapy game I'm working on.
When it comes to games, adding depth to the composition is seemingly less of a problem, since the movement already provides you with that information. However, discerning objects you can interact with from the ones that act purely as set pieces is another question.1 The higher the player's velocity within the 3D space, the faster he has to parse the environment for clues – especially when the players are not able to influence their own velocity, which is the case in rail shooters. As it happens, I'm exactly making one of those, thus the need for an environment that can be parsed instantly.
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As well known by the red barrel problem. ↩
Currently, I'm sitting on a plane leaving for Amsterdam. So yes, I'm on holidays!
Internet connectivity might be limited during the next two weeks until August 8 – depending on the availability of free WiFi. All your pending requests and mail will be dealt with after my return, promised.
But then again, you might be in for some new flickr pictures afterwards … ;)
Living by the numbers – why yes, that's something I do and find quite fascinating. I love RescueTime and Google Analytics.
So it's no wonder I find Nothing's Time Tracker and Office Dashboard such an awesome idea.
Everyone continuously tracks the tasks they’re working on and thus generates his own stream of project Tracs, and there’s also a “team stream” running on a monitor in Twitter-like manner.
Project time tracking was now not only to be done as info to the project manager, but as statement of one’s own efforts. This new significance boosted meaning and quality of the Tracs. With that there is a much clearer picture of how different types of projects – and also for different sorts of clients – work.
The stream of Tracs is another knowledge tool that leads to many exchanges like “You’re having trouble with this? Maybe I can help.” or “Interesting stuff you do!“. Our latest “meta tool” therefore impacted positively on the internal communication culture: It was fun to add to the information stream with events and have an exchange in real-time. It repeatedly prevented task redundancies and helps tapping existing knowledge instead of creating it from scratch.
It functions similar to Twitter by keeping everyone in the loop.
Okay … normally, April Fool's jokes are somewhat lame, and I have a tendency not to repost them. But this one … this one is pretty cool.
Actually, it's a pity that it's just an April Fool's joke. With good writing and engaging characters, this show would have potential. Hat tip to Chris (or, actually, one of his friends – anyway, without being Facebook friends with Chris, I would not have found this).
Benjamin Burger has watched the episode titled Addicted to Games? of the BBC series Panorama, and is not exactly happy about it (as have been other people, as I could watch on Twitter):
Unfortunately the report was not satisfying at all. It was like looking for an intelligent crime story and ending up with CSI Miami. The whole show was just a show. [...] Panorama simplifies the Game-Scene to problem-kids and how they corrupting their family or social life.
Of course, the journalism is bad, the conclusions hackneyed – but it shows mostly one thing: games do make their way into (mainstream) culture, and just as with any new medium (like radio or TV or films or pop music, to name just a few), they are met with resistance and fear from the current generation that has not been socialised with that new medium. Even more so with games. After all,
[it's] a tremendous difference between watching games or playing them,
and that makes it even more scary.
No one denies that games can be addictive, and no one denies that games may be built upon such mechanics – but then again, even most board games use those mechanics, and no one complains.
The same goes with alcoholic beverages: obviously, it can be addictive; yet the times when politicians demanded a complete crackdown are long gone.
Writing Serialised Data to a String Instead of a File in C#
Instead of writing the serialised data to a file, which can be done using using (Stream s = File.Create("foo.xml")), you might want to have just the string – maybe because you want to send it to a server? You can use the StringWriter class to do so:
string data; using (StringWriter stream = new StringWriter()) { xs.Serialize (stream, foo); data = stream.ToString(); }
Uploading Data to a Server in Unity 3D
Unfortunately, you can't directly upload data to server in Unity 3D. Instead, you have to write some sort of wrapper script that resides on the server.
Since you can create POST variables in Unity, you can mainly work with those in your script.
A very simple, preliminary implementation could look like this:
concierge.php
<?php //concierge.php resides on the server – and might not be written so nicely, // my PHP skills are rusty. if ($_POST['action'] == 'save') { // Needs to be rewritten to add folders when they don't exist // – otherwise, fileputcontents will silently fail. file_put_contents('./'. $_POST['type'] . '/save.xml', stripslashes($_POST['data'])); } else if ($_POST['action'] == 'load') { $data = file_get_contents($_POST['type'].
While getting some answers on UnityAnwser, that were kindly answered by someone going by the handle of Duck, I stumbled over his website.
And look what I have found:
It's a F1 racing game, where you can design your own racetracks, based on Google Maps. How awesome is that?
It is an advergame for Vodafone – and you can play it over here.
... one day I have to start to count. Here comes another attempt to make something not so fun more interesting, faster, enjoyable. This time?
It's e-mail. Thank to Gmails rather open structure, other websites can plug into your inbox and therefore change the way you handle mail.
So as you go through your email, each function is given a points value. If you choose to skip a message, you’ll lose 25 points. Reply to something? You’ll gain 175 points. Of course, you can also choose to use Baydin’s other fantastic service called Boomerang to schedule the message to come back to you later when you’ll need it.
Of course, the goal ist to get to Inbox Zero; and there are even other games that do a similar thing.
The only problem I see? Currently, the gameification is not so much a gameification of the world as rather a pointification1 of the world. I wonder if there are other game mechanic schemes are out there that could be exploited to the same effect.
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That sounds somehow ... wrong. Rest assured that no pontifex has anything to do with that. ↩
There seems to exist a bug in Drupal 6, where placing a theme into a site-specific theme folder (i.e. sites/example.com/themes) will frakk up the caching.
While the theme might work at first, after the next cron run (supposedly), the theme will only output the HTML as defined by the template files, but without any CSS information. This happens to all users, whether anonymous or logged in.
Clearing the theme cache will resolve the problem temporarily – until the next cron run (and the next irate phone call by a customer ... >_<).
Moving the theme to sites/all/themes will solve the problem and keep you sane – which still poses the question what is wrong with the code in the first place. I will keep you posted – after all, this did not just happen to me alone, but other people too. *pheeew*.
I have not watched those yet, but they might be wort a look:
Kurt Reinhard from the Institut für Theorie, Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts, recently posted on Vimeo a fascinating series of short videos on the future of storytelling. The videos juxtapose the perspectives of some key thinkers in this space, including Clay Shirkey (NYU), Joshua Green (UCSB), Ian Condry and Nick Montfort (MIT), Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation, Joe Lambert from the Center for Digital Storytelling, and, hmm, Henry Jenkins (USC), among others. Each video is between five and ten minutes long and tackles some of the ways that shifts in the media environment are changing the nature of stories and storytelling.
The complete series can be found on the blog of Henry Jenkins.
The universe is pissed.
No, Human Gameplay Trailer from woodn on Vimeo.
Find more information about this Swiss iPhone game here.
This needs your immediate attention, so it will be a huge success.
Ian Bogost, videogame scholar, made the ultimate Facebook game, the very essence of all those games.
It is deceptively simple: you have a cow. You can click the cow, every six hours.
... and yes, that's it.
It is called, not surprisingly, Cow Clicker, and it can be played on Facebook. Of course, there is a bit more behind than just a funny name. It is both a parody as well as an exercise, an answer to the claims that the so-called social games on Facebook by Playfish and Zynga are not real games at all.
Most will consider Cow Clicker to be satire, and that's true in part at least. But satire these days risks becoming mere conceptual art. The idea of the "cow clicker" popped into my head almost involuntarily, as a playfully deprecatory name that seemed plausible enough that it might be real. The name was almost enough; surely it didn't need to be made. Here's what led me to do it anyway. [...]
As I prepared for the NYU seminar, I realized that theory alone might not help clarify social games—for me or for anyone in attendance. It's nice to think that "theorist/practitioners" like myself and Aki can translate lessons from research to design and back like adept jugglers, but things are far messier, as usual. The dialectic between theory and practice often collapses into a call and response panegyric.
Custom painted toys by Jason Jacenko:
