PUBLIC MARKS with tags "blog post" & 2006

In his book Out of Control, author Kevin Kelley describes a Las Vegas conference room where a crowd of 5000, led by Pixar co-founder and Rescue on Fractalus co-creator Loren Carpenter, learn to adapt and react as a hive mind as they play a game of 2500 on 2500 Pong. Each half of the auditorium took collective control of each side, registering their individual intent to move in a certain direction with the wand. The input led to a computer, which averaged and relayed the moves to the game, with initially disastrous but eventually workable results.

I realize this list may seem like a cutesy joke. But it isn’t. Go back, and re-read it. It’s actually a lament.

I’ve been steadily plugging away at my list of bugs and enhancements for the upcoming release and finally tackled one area that I had been avoiding: improving the AI of some of the bugs.

Formed by former members of Microsoft, Wildsnake Software has released a number of casual games over the years but later this year they will also be the exclusive publisher for new games created by Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov. Gamecloud got a chance to chat with Wildsnake co-founder "Andy" (he prefers to be called that in interviews) to find out more about the company and future plans.

In this tutorial I will explain how to open a mysql database connection using PHP and the all popular AJAX. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the XMLHttpRequest object works within php and the advantages of using it. This tutorial will be the first in a series of articles leading to the development of a fully functional dynamic web events application.

If sometimes you feel you cannot solve a problem and you feel tired - go to sleep and let your brain solve the problem while at sleep. It just might work.

Physics for Game Programmers shows you how to infuse compelling and realistic action into game programming�even if you don�t have a college-level physics background! Author Grant Palmer covers basic physics and mathematical models and then shows how to implement them, to simulate motion and behavior of cars, planes, projectiles, rockets, and boats. This book is neither code heavy nor language specific, and all chapters include unique, challenging exercises for you to solve. This unique book also includes historical footnotes and interesting trivia. You�ll enjoy the conversational tone, and rest assured: all physics jargon will be properly explained.

Geometry Wars has been hailed as the “Halo of Xbox Live Arcade” referring to the relative popularity of the game. Intoxicating, frustrating and addictive all in one, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved provides a constant challenge and level of enjoyment, a siren song to gamers enticing them to play just one more game before hitting the sack. More than 200 thousand gamers, roughly a quarter of which actually paid, are currently wearing out their thumbs and roundly cursing one man, whether they know his name or not. That man is Stephen Cakebread, the designer and developer who crafted this gem for Bizarre Creations.

Have you ever been curious about a book or movie and picked it up on impulse, despite knowing little to nothing about it, and then been just taken with it? Sometimes not having set expectations before experiencing something just makes you appreciate it that much more. Now, obviously I am talking about “Indigo Prophecy”, a game and not a book or movie, but usually I’m not so loose with my money as to drop it on a game that I have not researched carefully on the Internet. Fortunately, within the first couple minutes of game time I could tell that my 6th sense (game-sense) was still up to snuff.

GamePolitics and other news sources have reported on West Virginia's efforts to combat childhood obesity with Konami's Dance Dance Revolution. DDR is being used in the state as a supplement to school health and phys-ed courses.

Mu-cade is a new shoot-em-up by the master of shmups, Kenta Cho of ABA Games. He pitches his game as a “smashup waggly shmup”, which is, by itself, reason enough to check it out. With Mu-cade, Kenta has introduced physics into his formula of hardcore shooting games. The result is a great physics game (even if it will kick your ass in five minutes or less).

Like most people, I played around with Ning when it launched. I didn’t really know what to make of it and filed the link away as ‘one to come back to’.

In the comments thread on Greg's welcome post back last September, we had a bit of a chat about achieving real-world crowd densities on next-gen platforms. If you haven't yet seen Capcom's Dead Rising, it's worth checking out the new official trailer released last Friday - I count possibly 100+ NPCs on screen in dense urban environments, with no apparent interpenetrations and quite a bit of animation going on.

Se Bejeweled fosse um jogo ruim, como seria?

Gostaria de apresentar neste artigo uma reflexão a respeito da qualidade e nível de diversão dos jogos atuais em relação aos jogos antigos. Esta reflexão partiu da observação de uma possível tendência, entre os gamers com quase 30 anos (como eu), de avaliar os jogos mais antigos de maneira desproporcionalmente favorável.

Perception is a fundamentally underconstrained problem. You get information in through your senses, but not enough information to be absolutely sure of what is causing those sensations. A good example is perception of depth in vision. You get a pattern of light falling on your retinas (retinae?), in two dimensions, and from that you infer a three dimensional world, using various clever calculations of the visual system and some assumptions about what is likely. But because the process remains fundamentally underconstrained, there is always the possibility that you will see something that isn't really there - that is, your visual system will take in a pattern of information and decide that it is more likely to be produced by a scenario different from the real one.

However though AI Planning has much to contribute to both these fields, particularly in producing more convincing Non-Player Characters and autonomous intelligent characters, few AI planning researchers have been involved in this work, and the technology, where applied at all, has often been used in a somewhat ad hoc way. In addition, games company use of AI planning has so far been limited - A*-based motion planning the main exception - with practitioners feeling that the technology is too computationally expensive or risky for integration into computer games.

Today Yahoo! released our internal Yahoo! Design Pattern Library under a Creative Commons License. This first release of interaction design patterns is small (just 13) but we'll be adding to it over the next few months.

Este é o vídeo de nosso bate-papo sobre gamearte, que rolou no SESC Consolação dia 20/02/06. Para quem não pode estar aqui, ou quer relembrar, veja aqui o vídeo hospedado no Google Video.

# Web Developer - The absolute must-have extension for anyone who builds web sites, no matter how small or few and far between. # MeasureIt - No more eyeballing pixel widths! # ColorZilla - I shudder to think back on the huge PITA of getting hex codes for colors before this lovely extension... taking a screenshot, pasting it into Photoshop, using the eyedropper tool... how much time have I saved because of it? (Answer: lots.) # FireBug - As mentioned on The Javascript Weblog; just darn useful. # IE View - All the maddening bugs of IE without actually having to launch the browser. (With the caveat that it doesn't do me much good on my Mac at work, where I don't have IE/Mac installed.) # Live HTTP Headers - Go along for the ride from user interface to server and back, making all local stops. # EditCSS - Modify currently loaded stylesheets. # Cookie Crumbler - Convenient way to quickly clear cookies from a domain. # Clear Cache Button - Another small convenience that makes a big difference.

Texto sobre o "submundo" da tipografia digital.

Não existe uma pessoa no mundo que precise de uma furadeira. Elas precisam de um buraco. Então a Black & Decker não está no ramo das furadeiras e sim no ramo dos buracos. [por mim ele podia ter parado aqui, mas sabe como são as estrelas…] Mas, na verdade ninguém precisa de um buraco — as pessas querem pendurar obras de arte. E ninguém precisa pendurar obras de arte, mas sim ter uma sala mais bonita. E ninguém precisa de uma sala mais bonita, mas sim ser feliz. Daí a Black & Decker não estar no negócio de furadeiras, mas sim no negócio de fazer as pessoas mais felizes! Assim como todas as outras empresas do mundo!

Um clássico do Golder Shower. Para quem não conhece, vale assistir até o final. É a cultura do videogame presentes em todos os lugares.

TV Escola abre a programação do mês com uma viagem pelo corpo humano 31/01/2006 12h30 A TV Escola desta quarta-feira, 1º, abre a programação com Cirurgia Videogame, que mostra uma viagem pelo corpo humano e como os instrumentos cirúrgicos se parecem cada vez mais com jogos eletrônicos, que orientam minirrobôs cirurgiões e nanocâmeras. Em breve, as desconfortáveis endoscopias serão substituídas por câmeras-pílulas e equipes de especialistas poderão operar de qualquer lugar do mundo por telecirurgia. Às 7h, 9h e 21h. [...] A TV Escola pode ser acessada pelos canais 27 (Sky), 237 (DirecTV) e 4 (Tecsat) e também por antena parabólica analógica e digital. As grades de programação estão disponíveis no portal do MEC. (Assessoria de Imprensa da Seed)