Research: Chain of Life

I wanted to write this post about how we have finished working on our first game at work. However, during the process of taking pictures for the blog, I realized that we forgot to add a lot of the new descriptions for the animals. I guess we are not done yet. Nevertheless, here are some pictures showing the extreme changes we implemented for the game!

The original game opened with a pretty image, but one which we could not actually use in the final game. One of the more artistic people on my research team, Seo, changed the picture to a much better starting screen for the final game.

The game itself did not have particularly nice graphics because most of the objects were just taken from sources on the internet and patched together. The new game got completely new graphics and user interface to make the overall experience much better.

The bottom of the second image is cut off the screen because my computer does not have a high enough resolution to fit the entire game. In case you cannot see the giraffe in this picture, here is a more expanded view since it is one of the cutest animals in the game! And some more of the new animals and plants for your viewing pleasure.

Here you can see the change in animal selection screen, which was meant to be much more simple and not too obtrusive in the game:

One of the main game tools is that the season changes which limits which plants can be placed at any given time. The change is not that noticeable or exciting in the original, and is so much more exciting in the final game!

Finally, the ending screen for the new game is absolutely adorable:

We spent a lot of time rewriting parts of the code to make it more readable and efficient. The graphics also took a significant amount of time to complete, but the end result is an incredible game! I am really happy with the end result of our first game so I hope the next ones come out just as well!

Partial Eclipse

Today there was a partial eclipse in the afternoon. It was kind of neat.

AIAA Conference

This morning Chris, Steven, and I drove to Santa Ana for the Ninth Annual AIAA Southern California Aerospace Systems and Technology Conference. We were invited a few months ago to present our work on USLI at the conference. We watched a few of the other talks some of which were interesting and well done and others which were not particularly impressive. I think our presentation went really well and it was interesting presenting our work at the conference. A lot of the people who listened to our presentation seemed very interested and I think it was a great experience!

For lunch afterwards, we went to Bruxie Gourmet Waffle Sandwiches which was interesting and delicious. I had just some normal Waffles and a milkshake which were both wonderful. Chris and Steven tried some of the sandwiches, which Steven described as weird though still delicious.

First Day of Summer Research

Today was my first day of summer research here at Mudd! I arrived at the office at 10am this morning where I met with about half the students participating in this research project as well as one of the advisers, Mike. We then began testing many of the game which were available. Over the course of the year, students in the class CS121 work on producing games in groups. We then play all the games and select which of those to improve and test with students during the summer.

Today, we had about 7 games available to test. The other games were not available on the course website as expected. For those that we had, we each played all of the games and filled out a rubric identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Some of the games were great and had good educational potential while others were buggy or boring.

We also did a couple chores which included creating Windows accounts on the computers in the office and talking to Facilities and Maintenance in order to get proper card-swipe access to the building.

Overall, it was a fairly easy first day but a lot of fun! Tomorrow, we will play more of the games if Mike was able to locate them today.

School's Out!

I finished up the last of my finals and my last paper by Wednesday morning and have just been relaxing since then. The last couple days have just been spent hanging out with friends or catching up on some TV. The weather has been great: a lot of sun and heat. It might even be getting a bit too hot for me.

We turned in the last paper for USLI on Monday morning! Last night I had a party with my USLI team to celebrate the completion of the competition. We don't know our final score in the competition, but we all wanted to spend some time hanging out together before everyone leaves. A number of us watched the movie "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" late last night also, which was mostly a confusing spy movie that none of us really understood.

Today, I slept in pretty late and just hung out for a while. Then I went into the village with a bunch of people for lunch and to run a couple errands. Tessa, Carling and I spontaneously decided to head to the mall where we hung out for a couple hours.

The last official day for everyone to be on campus is Monday, so people have slowly been trickling out day-by-day. I'll start getting stuff packed up soon, but I will probably be in my room for another week or so before moving to my summer room. It's nice to be on break!

Out of Sorts

Through the course of the previous semester, I have been taking a class called "Typography and the Book Arts" during which we write, design, and publish our own book as a class. This semester we created a book titled Out of Sorts or All Sorted Out.

The book is a two-sided, accordion fold book which is stored in a colored plastic case. We selected this case in order to limit the amount of time to bind the book but also because the clear plastic allows the reader to view both titles of the book (one on each end). The advantage of an accordion book is that it can act as a display book by standing up on a long table such that all the pages are visible at a single time.

The purple text here is mine!

The goal of this years class was to design our own font based off of an image by German artist, Hans Schmidt. This font was based off of simple geometric shapes because we began the class by carving our own letters into 1.5" tall cherry wood using a hand chisel. However, part through the class a small subset of students (myself included) began to work on turning the hand drawn and carved font into a digital version which could be used on any computer.

To develop the content of the book itself, we wrote short paragraphs based on our experience with the process of designing and producing our own font. On one side of the book (All Sorted Out), each student was given a single page for the short text they developed and decorated the page by selecting a couple words which highlighted the message of the text.

Here are some pictures from the page which I wrote and designed:

Next, here are a couple pictures from some other interesting pages on this side of the book:

Page Designed By: Winnie Ding

Page Designed By: Tessa Jacobs

On the other side of the book (Out of Sorts) we showed the evolution of the images created during the class. These images are much larger centerpieces but also contains the table of contents, introduction, colophon, and artist signatures. My professor for the class enjoyed the text that I wrote for the side explained above, and decided to include it as a centerpiece on the back. This piece was the purple image mentioned above, but here are some more details from that image:

And here are some pictures of a couple other interesting pieces from this side of the book:

Text By: Travis Athougies

Page Designed By: Drake Escrofani

The experience was a very difficult one and involved a lot of work. Setting up each printing press takes hours on its own and the actual printing process for each page consists of another few hours. Of course, the large wood blocks in our own alphabet had to be printed separately from the small metal type, which meant that every page had to go through the press multiple times. Additionally, since every page is double sided, a single page had to be printed on with about 3 different times. A mistake at any step of the process would ruin the page and limit the number of books which would ultimately be published. However, despite all the work and stress, it was a fun experience and the outcome is wonderful.

Overall, we made about 100 copies of the book. About 20 of them went to students in the class, the professor, and the Scripps college library. Then, there are a large number of individuals who pre-order the book every year because they want to support the press. Finally, there are some books left over which are available for sale to anyone who is interested in purchasing one.

Musical Visualization

As the final project for my Media Studies class, we had to create an approximately 2 minute abstract video. I chose to create one based on the song Intro by the xx and the result is shown below:

The process of creating this video was long and tedious at times. I began by listening to the song multiple times and identifying the time at which each major note occurred. I placed these times along with the sound which goes with them in a huge list in an Excel spreadsheet:

Then, I had the complicated process of selecting the shapes which would be used and determining their location on the screen so that I could enter the information into the animation software which I was using, POV-ray. I first determined all of the information I need within the same spreadsheet as shown above. I then entered the information into POV-ray which I could then use to render the necessary frames.

The problem with this process was that it was really easy to enter information incorrectly which could cause the frames to appear incorrectly. In the example below, the three frames should be nearly identical but due to an error in the code, the third frame experiences an unexpected jump.

I had a really hard time figuring out this problem, but with help from my professor I was eventually able to get it working correctly. Then next problem I encountered was in actually compiling the frames into the final product. To do this, I used Windows Live Movie Maker. However, it seemed at first that the only amount of time each frame could be displayed was 0.03 seconds per frame. This caused a problem because when all the frames were compiled, the movie was about 1 minute 50 seconds long instead of the necessary 2 minutes and 3 seconds. This caused all of the timing to be off, which was extremely frustrating. However, I soon found that I could set the movie to play at 0.03333 frames per second, which ultimately achieved the desired effect.

The final project consists of 3700 unique frames, about 2,500 lines of code in POV-ray, and multiple days worth of work. However, I am ultimately very pleased with the final product.