I really like the retro-future “rocketpunk” style these things have and am going to use the style in my game. There’s a good reference to the design at http://www.astronautix.com/craft/vonn1956.htm for reference.

It’s not in any of these shots, but I recently finished up a Flash Pixel Bender shader that implements terrain splatting. It gives a pretty nice effect, and allowing one to zoom way in on the map and still retain high texture detail.

von Braun Lander 1

von Braun Lander 2

von Braun Lander 3

von Braun Lander 4

…and gathered about two handfuls of flower
   unconnected
   In twenty years or more

‘N now he’s silent, he is dead.
   acoustician
   flu
   And they went to sea in a Sieve

Did not fall into the little hand
   appearing
   Sleep in your little bed

The anger, we all have it
   beseeches 
   And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute

Far and few, far and few
   Alabama Holding
   fast upon his shell

[Show as slideshow]

The idea is to make something that’s a hybrid of “Oregon Trail” (on Mars) with a small MMO-like environment.

and which
you were probably
hoping
I would click

Forgive me
they were outrageous
so fleet
and so bold

This time we are meeting at the OSU New Media Communications Game Lab, which is located in Strand Agricultural Hall, room 400.  Strand is between the MU and the Library, right off the bookstore parking lot.  Basically, climb all the stairs to the fourth floor, then head to the north end of the building.

For more information on the group, see our Google Group page.

I’ll be handing these out in class, but here is a link to the assignment sheet for the first project.  The basic goal is to design then create a small and tight game level that essentially makes sense.   Makes sense as in it’s not just a random collection of “stuff” on an island.  Note that levels will be limited to no more than 256×256 meters in size, and won’t have any AI, NPCs or other entities.  The only exception is that the student may add one boat or one buggy.  However the vehicle must make sense in the level.  No buggy in the middle of a jungle clearing with no roads, or no boats with no place to land the boat and a reason to land the boat at that point.

I am teaching a Special Topics course at Oregon State University this term.  It is a 4 credit hour Special Topics course that will cover some of the basics of game design and development via FarCry modding. 

A course overview is online at http://perludus.com/wordpress/?page_id=555

Students, keep an eye out for additional posts on the site for course updates, handy reading material and so forth.

I was recently going through some old file archives, and discovered a complete copy of a website I started in 1993 to host information on OSU Oceanography’s research ship R/V Wecoma.  It ran on a Solaris box on my desk at Oregon State University and used the NCSA HTTPd server. Think pre-Linux, pre-Apache, pre-PHP and pre-Perl.  Think when Yahoo’s address was at Stanford and hosted on Akebono.

I set up the site to check out this “web thing”, and decided to put the ship’s cruise planning manual on the site.  Previously, the manual was only available in printed form and on request.  Any scientists thinking of or planning to use the ship got a copy.  Of course putting it on the web made it far more accessable to the public.

What’s interesting to me is the structure (or lack therein) of the site as well as the graphics.  Following around the hypertextification does lead to a bit of the “You are in a maze of twisty little passages all the same” feeling.  The icons I must say though have held their own in an interesting retro way.  I recall using some kind of pixel paint program running under Solaris at the time.  Any photos were scanned on a hard to get to scanner that was locked away in a lab across campus.

Alas the “Finger the Ship” system no longer functions.  I had put the ship on the net while it was in port, and then had a script running on the ship that could capture local water temperature, winds, salinity and a few other numbers. If you fingered the ship you’d get the latest ship stats.

Anyway, here is the site.  Ah and for comparison, here is the ship’s current website.