I gave my sister a copy of Small World for Christmas. For those who are not aware, I am pretty serious about my board games. If you are interested in game design, as I am, there’s often a lot more meat in a board game than in a computer game. So yeah. I guess you could call this “research”.

Premise of the game:

Someone took the “Rise and Fall” Civ 4 mod and made it a board game. In “Rise and Fall”, you control a civ during it’s golden age, then you cycle to controlling a new one. You often end up sacking the civs you have built up in the past.

So the real genius in this game is threefold:

First, the civilizations you play each game are randomly generated from a stack of “adjective” tiles and a stack of “race” tiles. Like so:

The adjectives and races each have their own special powers, so when you combine them, you get a ton of replayability. It’s like Cosmic Encounter when you play with more than one alien power at a time.

Second, these adj/race combos are sorted in a priority order, so that each player effectively “bids” on the combo that they want. To skip over a combo in the order, you need to place 1 VP on it. Unloved combos accumulate VPs until someone snatches it up.

Third, unlike “Rise and Fall”, the player is in control of when to put their race into decline and pick up a new one. Picking up a new race is nice, because new races come with a vital stack of tokens, which allows you to do more on your turn. Old races tire and eventually run out of tokens, but you score points for every territory they hold. Choosing when to throw in the towel with your current race is often a difficult decision.

In any case, Small World is fun, and if you like to play board games you should pick up a copy. It’s the best new game I’ve played since Dominion.

This was a great week on the job hunting front. Jo got a job offer from Volkswagen – they want her to work in the Palo Alto lab on hybrids, fuel cells, biodiesel, and other green stuff – which is pretty much exactly what she was looking to do. I accepted a job offer at ROBLOX, a really cool computer game startup. I have been writing videogames since I was eight, but I never thought that I would end up working as a professional game developer. This position at ROBLOX, however, seems like a ridiculously good fit for me. They are building online games that involve worlds made out of virtual Lego blocks (by which I mean “generic toy building blocks”). Players enter game environments where everything is made out of small bricks and every brick is physically simulated – meaning the entire world is destructible.

There’s an alpha version of the ROBLOX game client on the company website, which I’ve been having some fun with today. Currently the game has two modes. You can visit the sandbox environments that other players have made, or you can enter the experimental multiplayer third person shooter game and run around a large level lobbing rockets at other people.

Today I made a ten minute visit to “arkitect’s Place” and took some screenshots.

This office building is made out of 2500 individual bricks (!!!)

Being an intrepid explorer, I enter the building and start climbing up the stairs

Eventually, I make it to the top of the building

From where I am standing, I use my rocket launcher to fire a rocket at the roof. This causes pieces to fly everywhere. One hits me and I fall off!

Playing with the rocket launcher is a lot of fun. I just blasted the front of the office building.

The ROBLOX engine does an incredible job with the game physics. I’m running on a cruddy 4-year old laptop and I get a reasonable framerate in this level. Anyone who has any experience with physics engines such as ODE or Tokamak will appreciate how hard it is to simulate a stack of bricks, let alone an entire office building. 2500 rigid bodies is a lot for my machine – in some of my other projects Tokamak and ODE both top out at around 400 for realtime simulation. Even more incredible is how well ROBLOX handles physics in multi-user environments.

My friend behind me lost his arm somewhere. Whoops.

I decide to go exploring in the rubble of the office building. I can’t quite get up the stairs.

I try to blast the debris out of my way, but it doesn’t work out like I had planned.

* * *

I start work on Tuesday. I think it’s going to be awesome.

Long exposure of the gang car throwing up sparks

I am all caught up on my blog now (don’t miss the pictures from the bonfire below). I’m heading back to campus tomorrow. My dad and I packed up the trains today. Not much has been happening this past week – it’s been so long since I’ve had a week of free time that I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’m kindof disappointed that I didn’t spend any of my time working on one of my computer game projects. I did get some reading done and today I took pictures of some of my old games to sell on eBay. I was briefly addicted to Master of Orion III, but now I’m a little frustrated with its pace of play, so I will probably give it up when I get back to school.

Well it’s off to packing for me. I got some cool new games for Christmas that I am bringing pack that we will have to play sometime. I’m also looking forward to Ski Trip in about a week.

Which isn’t exactly an encouraging thought, given the mountain of stuff I need to do between now and then. I started knocking things off today, though. This morning I took the French SOPI, a silly oral proficiency exam given on a computer. I hate computerized tests, give me good old fashion pencil and paper any day. In addition, I had my final critique for Painting III today; despite the sad state of my triptych, “Superman. Feynman. Spaceman.” it seems as though I am going to get an A. I’m actually planning on mailing Superman home so I can finish him this summer. Even though finals are yet to start in earnest, I’ve already begun compiling a list of things I want to do this summer.

At this point I’m ready to settle for accomplishing any five of these line items.

AGEIA’s “PhysX” physics chip supposedly provides hardware accelerated physics for computer games (and ostensibly other applications). This is an interesting idea, as interactive physics are important for creating convincing virtual worlds. Even a bare-bones matrix math accelerator chip would be great for speeding up the heavy calculus that a physics engine has to deal with.

There are only a couple problems with this product:

So, sadly, there will be no hardware-accelerated ninja physics in the near future for me.

Hmm. This blogging thing is the kind of thing that I will be really obsessive about at first, and then completely lose interest in in two weeks. So expect a deluge of posts and then a vast silence.

Erc and I are working on making a 3d computer game with ninjas running around a medieval village wielding katanas, chucking throwing stars, and kicking over cows. As part of this effort I’m learning how to use 3D Studio Max to make level geometry that we are then going to load into the open source 3d graphics engine, OGRE. I haven’t actually been able to get anything besides a cow model imported into Ogre from 3ds, but lots of other people apparently have, so it’s just a matter of sitting down and figuring it out. More on that later. For now, I want to test to make sure I can post images.

This is a medieval village I built from a tutorial in this book I bought, “3D Studio Max 5 Fundamentals”. It’s not a bad book, much better than the other one I bought a while ago, “3DS Max 5 Bible”.