Brandmateriel Post-mortem

So, I finished the 3d tech-demo nicknamed “Brandmateriel” nearly a year ago now, but for various reasons (mostly work related) neglected to post it. A screencast of the demo is shown below.

Screencapture of my tech-demo. Yay! (CC: BY-NC-SA-2.5-SE)

As always with these tech projects you learn a lot, and as is often the case you land somewhere with enough new ideas that you would rather start over than take it forward. All in all though I’m very happy with it: the controls are smooth, I like the looks and the particle effects, and from a technical perspective I really like how the shadow turned out in the end (‘cos in my primitive renderer that was a major head-ache!). The stuff I would improve are mostly to do with the lighting model. My model is too general for what I use it for, and I could possibly save a few million trigonometric calculations per second if I used that. The demo runs smoothly in up to 800×600 (actually, resolution isn’t much of an issue in this kind of renderer: it is mostly limited by polygon count, but I’ve limited the screencast to the lowest resolution to conserve bandwidth), but if I were to add more (and more complex) models in order to make an actual game out of it, I expect that this would be an issue before long.

To try the demo four yourself, it’s easiest to go to clone the repository. Since Gitorious is closing down (though it’s staying up as a museum of sorts) I’ve migrated it to GitLab. If I decide to work on it, I will probably do it there, or maybe I’ll move development to GitHub. Whichever way, since I consider the project finished enough both of these repositories should be equally up to date for the foreseeable future.

https://gitorious.org/brandmateriel/

https://gitlab.com/brandmateriel/

For more on my inspiration for this endeavour (and for a really inspiringh and awesome talk about the technical challenges of early realtime 3d and how it was overcome), see this great Classic Game Post-Mortem from GDC 2011 by none other than Elite’s and Zarch’s own David Braben!

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Mergers and Fire Fighters

A very small update. I decided to take a few days off from coding, instead spending them digging, swimming and drinking beer (all both in game and IRL). I hope to get back on track again, but we’ll see. There’s a bit too much pollen in the air for any sort of major commitments. Speaking of commits, my friend Bam decided to make me socially awkward by cloning my repository, implementing a benchmarking suite and then requesting a merging of the two repositories. All in all, it wasn’t too bad, and since he’s a very competent programmer, his contribution (and praise) was appreciated.

Since the last update, I’ve implemented the simple linear fader, which perhaps gives even more predictable results than Gaussian. I also toyed with the light settings, but I’ve sort of concluded that I like it best when then light follows the camera precisely, though I may tweak that a bit in the future. Most importantly, however, I’ve made a new ship, which while being (I hope) a clear homage to it, isn’t just an imperfect clone of the Zarch/Virus Lander:

New ship, and slightly updated house model. Click for full-size! (CC: BY-NC-SA-2.5-SE)

The new ship is red, to reflect its designation as a “Fire Fighter”. I tried giving it stripes, but I didn’t like the look, so I reverted to the more simple design. The house has also been updated slightly, by dividing the faces into more triangles (4 per rectangle rather than 2) which gives it better sorting and shading properties.

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First steps in 3D animation

My friend Pica pica makes animated GIFs as a hobby, and is very good at it. Some examples are her philosophia naturalis studies at Reanimate Objects and the frankly fantastic (and more artistic) works available in the various Calendars at Unknown Incubator (seriously, check them out!). Another friend — Local Minimum — makes games, of late mostly in 3D. I’m not very keen on 3D graphics myself, but I like to fiddle with things, learning and understanding them, and I do like retro-games, so I decided to write a simple 3D-renderer in Python. It was quite fun mathematics, and I’m rather pleased with the first result, which I present as an animated GIF. Since they both inspired me to it (and since I had the data) I decided to visualise the terrain around their mansion as my first example.

The code is available at Gitorious. It is licensed under GPLv3. It uses NumPy heavily for the backend and currently uses MatPlotLib for visualisation. The latter is rather horrible for the task though, and in the future, I’m planning on making a simple shader algorithm and implementing surfaces in PyGame, though I guess in the opposite order to that stated… But, the future is not now, and now I am tired. Therefore, please enjoy the fruits of my endeavours thus far:

Terrain data from western Sweden, visualised using a primitive 3D renderer I made. The area is approximately 128 * 128 m². (CC: BY-NC-SA-2.5-SE)

EDIT: The future is semi-now! I’ve now rendered the same scene using PyGame:

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Urras and Anarres, an addendum

I realised that using the script I had written to make the maps of Tau Ceti, it would be a simple matter to make an animation giving the illusion of a spinning planet. The orthographic azimuthal projection approximates this very well, and once one has access to the equirectangular map, there is nothing special about the two particular hemispheres used in the original maps — any meridian can be used as the centre meridian of the projection!

Edit: I have now added an animation of Gethen as well.
Edit 2: As an astute reader pointed out below, the original animations spun westward, meaning that the sun would rise in the west and set in the east, contrary to one’s expectation. There is no physical reason why the opposite should be preferred, but it feels more natural, and there is evidence in the books for this interpretation, wherefore I’ve updated the animations.
Breaking News! New and improved versions of the maps available here!

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tau Ceti, a planetary survey

Warning: Wall of Text!
This was supposed to be a post about some maps I’ve drawn, but it turned into a minor essay (featuring fifteen footnotes and two poems). This regularly happens when I set about describing my work (this paragraph is no exception). I am terrible at leaving unimportant details out of the picture. Since the readership of this blog is very limited, however, I have decided that it is all right this way. I wrote it mostly for myself anyway. If you don’t want to read about my love for maps and my love for the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, feel free to jump to the maps, or got to Get Stuff where you will find more versions. (I also made some animations of the planets revolving which can be found in a follow-up post.) If, on the other hand, you are interested in the background to and process involved in the making of the maps, you are more than welcome to continue reading.

Breaking News! New and improved versions of the maps available here!

Fan-cartography

I’ve always loved maps.

I remember, that when I first discovered fantasy (through The Hobbit, as it were), for many years I held the opinion, that a map was a sure sign of a good novel. If there were ample appendices or a word-list for a made up foreign tongue, all the better! I have since realised that a map is not a sure sign that a book is worth my time, and that not all the appendices in the world could save a bad book from being bad read — I remember one fantasy heptology in particular, whose appendices were beyond most in ambition, but whose story soon dwindled from acceptable to dull, and in the end turned offensively stupid. But I still hold, that a mediocre book can be saved by an inspired map, and that a good map always makes a good book more memorable.

After The Hobbit, I read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (great appendices), Eddings (mediocre, but good maps) and the Earthsea trilogy by Le Guin (excellent and with excellent maps [0]). At some point I discovered Science Fiction, and started to prefer it to Fantasy, even though science fiction novels seem to be utterly devoid of maps. Until I discovered The Dispossessed. Science fiction, by an author I knew I liked, from having read The Word for World is Forest and the Earthsea books — with a map!

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Synaesthesia, a plug-in for GIMP

Synaesthesia, according to Merriam–Webster, is:

Gimp-supported synaesthesia emulation (click for full size!)

… chiefly British variant of syn·es·the·sia:

noun \ˌsi-nəs-ˈthē-zh(ē-)ə\

1: a concomitant sensation; especially: a subjective sensation or image of a sense (as of color) other than the one (as of sound) being stimulated

2: the condition marked by the experience of such sensations

— syn·es·thet·ic \-ˈthe-tik\ adjective

The Wikipedia article is a bit more detailed. Synaesthesia, the term first coined by Charles Darwin‘s half-cousin Francis Galton, is an umbrella term for many different brands of this super-power, the most common of which is probably grapheme–colour synaesthesia, meaning that numbers and letters are perceived as “having” a colour. This is the kind of synaesthesia that I have; see this neat web-app for a hands-on demo: Grapheme-Color Synesthesia Mapper. For an excellent talk on the matter, see V. S. Ramachandran on TED (starts at 17:40; there are more talks of his focusing more on synaesthesia on youtube, also, his private homepage also has some neat illusions).

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A book

(Go here to read the story first, if you prefer not being spoiled!)

A book, by Andreas Skyman

For longer now, than I care to count, most of my creative efforts have been oriented along the lines of creating a book for my brother. The idea was first born from an off-side remark by him, saying that he wanted to see something written by me in print. As I recall, it was said as a compliment for my christmas gift rhymes (one of the few traditions of that holiday that I can say without hesitation that I like), and — flattered — I decided this would make for a suitable birthday present, later christmas gift, later still birthday present, and so on… The book was finally finished in December last year, and though the stories stay with me, I must say that I am glad to finally be able to put the work behind me, as unfinished projects always tend to clog my creative pipes and give me a terribly bad conscience in the progress.

As per usual, I’m going write something about the creative process here; if you prefer reading without any imposed prejudice, I suggest you go here for downloads.

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