Here’s a sample video from the course that I taught on game design in the fall of 2012. This video is from fairly late in the semester, so it assumes that you know a little something about 3D meshes and what ‘procedural generation’ means with video game design: editing objects with code, at runtime, rather than by hand, beforehand. I have to caution that it’s fairly technical, but there’s some good eye candy (especially in the second half), and a lot of good information about how to create and edit meshes from...
read moreAdding real-world architecture to your game has a ton of benefits. It can set the mood, add authenticity, and give an emotional punch to your game. Plus, and let’s be honest with ourselves here, it’s a heck of a lot easier to base your game on a real place than to come up with something from scratch. So if I’m a game designer and I don’t want to get sued, pretty soon I’m going to ask myself: Can I include a famous location (like Times Square) or a historical building (like the Taj Mahal) in my game? Do I...
read moreA showcase of screen captures from some of our past and current projects. You’ll find a variety of projects here: games, simulations and data visualizations. Our older projects were all in Second Life – our newer work is mainly with the Unity game engine. A number of these screenshots were taken during the making of the game, so they may lack polish, especially in the on-screen UI elements. Click an image preview to view it full-size. TerraViz An experiment: Can we use a game engine to visualize scientific data? TerraViz is...
read moreGoogle has announced the sale of Sketchup, the popular 3D modeling program used by millions around the world. Originally developed by @LastSoftware and acquired by Google in 2006, Sketchup has grown to over 30 million users. Sketchup was acquired by Trimble, a California-based maker of positioning software and hardware, including GPS, optics, laser, and more. According to the Google blog, Sketchup will focus on “our core communities: modelers who have been with us from the beginning,” specifically “in the architecture,...
read moreWe’ve been making some changes to our data visualization tool, TerraViz. As well as adding some new tools (the ability to annotate (draw) on the globe, a magnifier, image looping, …) we’ve been pushing the boundaries of Unity a bit, trying to figure out where the hard limits are. For instance, we’ve added the ability to view NOAA’s FIM model at its current highest resolution of 30 km grid cells. This results in 2.8 million hexagons displayed on a sphere, which you can see below and which translates to...
read more
