The Hungry Ant

I learnt a lesson the other day. I am involved in 3 projects at the moment, 2 of which we started from scratch and were started with product opportunity assessments. The third project had already been running when I joined. I mistakenly made an assumption that the questions in the assessment were asked and the project had moved forward from there. The other day, once I noticed a few issues come up, I organised a risks meeting and out popped some fundamental problems that I would have looked to identify (and hopefully resolved) much earlier in the process. My mistake was too think that what seems obvious to a product manager (who is thinking in a certain perspective) is obvious to everyone (who actually may have different perspectives).

I just finished building a flash website for a very talented Sardinian photographer friend of mine. Check it out at www.antoniosaba.com and let me know what you think.

So my time at the laboratorio open source has come to an end. The experience has given me a real appreciation of the differences of working in a different country, an island and in another language.

Where next is to be revealed soon…

I have been doing my bit for the Ruby movement here in Sardinia. Here are my slides for my 2 day seminar.

Ruby on Rails intro italian

The BBC had an internal competition around the Creative Archive Project. They wanted to see what people would do with the video clips that they made available. At the last minute I decided that I wanted to enter, so with a week remaining, I knocked up my idea at nights after work and a long long weekend. The idea is to allow the simple creation of text and video based adventure games, as I grew up on Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone books and Text based adventure games. A part of this was also inspired by an MHP project I worked on at BBC Imagineering where we created a video and text based game for the Natural History Unit. This time I wanted to create a toolkit that allowed a user to create the games themselves.

It was the first time using Windows Forms and I have to say that I found it extremely nice to work with (compared to MFC and Win32). The code was hacked together using Windows media player 10 sdk for playing the video. I used an xml format for describing the environment (the rooms, the text, the video, etc) and even got to be able to add different actions like pickup and drop (those were the days!). With a view to building a drag and drop GUI to generate the XML file.

Anyway, after building the prototype engine, I had a day left to create a demo game and I have to say it was not only fun to create the game and educational in trying to build a simple narrative and learn about the content, but the end experience was compelling (in a simple way).

I am sceptical of many so called educational games. I think that as schools try to harness games in education they would be far better off letting the students build games rather than making educational games themselves (which seems more fun for the teacher). Not only would they learn the art of games making, but would have to appreciate constructing non-linear narratives and get to grips with the subject matter at hand.

I seem to have lost my only copy of the software in my dead computer. Rats, when I fix it I will put the code up

Oh yeah, I won the competition. 1 weeks work experience with Castaway 2 in New Zealand Not bad for a weeks work.

Here are some of the 3D desktop plants that I created while at Adtools. The project was to make numerous 3D desktop plants that grew on your desktop. It had to be small filesize (< 100kb) and work without hardware acceleration.

I based my ideas from the book “The algorithmic beauty of plants” by Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz. He uses Lindenmayer systems to create realistic models of plants. Implementing L-systems are not particularly difficult (in their basic form) but I also wanted to introduce the idea that the plants grow over time in a realistic way and also animate (like the growth of a snowdrop). In order to achieve this I needed to scale elements over time and change angles over time. I developed a parametric L-system model that allowed me to describe the plants. The parameters could then be applied on each timestep to increase the scale of a particular element or the angle. I also introduced different randomness factors.

Creating the rules to accurately describe a plant is somewhat complex, but it was possible to create extremely realistic models and animations. The models required a 3d artist to make the building blocks, like a leaf, branch bit, etc and the algorithms did the rest. We even made a christmas tree that had candles that lit up and had a christmas jingle.

The plan was to also allow the cross breeding of plants to produce variations into new executables and have multiple plants but ran out of time. However by changing angles, parameters, randomness and the mesh files you could get a large variation even without swapping parts of the rules. The valentines collection of roses had over a million downloads in a day.

Getting the filesize down was a challenge and optimising the system so that animations ran smoothly was really fun.

I can’t seem to find all the executables but here are a few to enjoy. They run on windows 95 through to Vista.

• 3D Snowdrop desktop plant
• 3D Lily desktop plant
• 3D crocus desktop plant