luke's projects and other things

Why do people think Megaman 9 is a good game? Sure, the little blue guy is cute and makes cool little 8-bit sounds when he jumps and shoots things but holy crap, that has got to be the most frustrating game I have played in years. I am not sure how I got into this hobby given that I grew up playing that kind of game. Game genie, I heart you. I wish Megaman had gotten a treatment similar to Bionic Commando in BC: Rearmed. Also, due to my mention of BC:R, Braid was pretty awesome and if you have a 360 you should check it out. It even inspired me to buy music from Magnatunes. I picked up some Jami Sieber albums. It's electronic Cello and it's quite nice.

I got the 5-disc Bluray set of Bladerunner. My first introduction to Bladerunner was actually the Westwood Studios video game, and that was a great game. I remember reading an article about the rendering times for all of the art in EGM (I swear it said something about terabytes of image data.... really? this was a while ago!). At some point, one summer, I rented the director's cut, and now I've recently watched the final cut and the original US Theatrical cut. It is such a great movie and I love soundtrack. The environments are beautiful, and there is a sort of eerie familiarity seeing them because I remember running around in the world.

I'm still mucking about with Processing. I like it because because I can do "clever" hacky things and not feel guilty about it. It's a sort of stress relief. While I'm all for good software architecture (and somewhat paranoid and perhaps have some strong feelings about it), sometimes it's nice to scribble and not worry about it. Much. I guess I still do, a little. Oh well.

This is old news, but I got a PS3 a while ago. I feel like such a consumer.

Force unleashed is freaking awesome. There's nothing more fun than throwing jawas into space. Those little guys really fly.

On an unrelated note, a coworker pointed me to processing.org, and I've been playing with that. It's pretty neat. Nothing cool to show yet, just learning it.

Music: I found Evren. He's this dude from Toronto, he does that song "Do I Go" that's in that Toyota Matrix 2009 commercial you always see in the theatres now. Nice song.

That is all.

I would usually tell you that I would never buy an apple product, simply because I really hate iTunes. However, this weekend I purchased an iPhone. I couldn't help it. It was so shiny. It's still shiny. I can't help but stroke it gently like a caveman petting some shiny bauble. There's something very primal about that.

Also, I've been playing Braid. I really don't spend a lot of time playing games these days, but Braid is short. I'm not even finished yet but I would say that innovation-wise, it is up there with Portal. The puzzles are very satisfying and creative. Also, Bionic Commando Rearmed looks neat. I only played the demo but I intend on picking it up when I'm through with Braid.

I just finished PA:A ep 1. I like it. Everyone who likes PA humor should get this. It has some good real-time-ish RPG style combat, and obviously great PA humor. The credits song is also fun.

While searching for an explanation of why, god, why did they put that deleted scene of Subotai talking like the surfer dude he is into the DVD release of Conan, I found some interesting stuff. First is that "Subutai" was the lead strategist of Ghengis Khan. He was a smart fellow who was able to coordinate armies 500 kilometers apart from each other without the Internet. This is also interesting because the "crush your enemies" quote is similar to something that Ghengis Khan said. While roles played by the Conan/Subotai pair and Ghenigs Khan/Subutai are completely different, perhaps some source material for the movie characters was drawn from the later.

The second bit I found on wikipedia. You can find it here.

What caught my eye was the "riddle of steel" section. Even considering that I've seen this movie far too many times, I've never really "figured out" the riddle of steel. The closest I got was that steel isn't really strong and isn't a source of power. I suppose I could have told you that without watching the movie. After reading the wikipedia page, it occurred to me that that neither 'steel' nor 'flesh' is something you can equate to power. It's more about the meaning projected on either due to one's beliefs. The wikipedia page suggests that the final battle scene at the burial site is a change in Conan's mentality from a brute force approach to craftier battle tactics. It then goes to suggest that once he sees his father's sword break, it occurs to him that neither steel nor flesh have power, and that power lies in your beliefs. And supposedly, this is how he defeats Thulsa Doom in the end - he is forced to subdue his belief that Thulsa Doom has power over him. Then he lops off his head and shows the cult followers that hey, Thulsa Doom was really just a guy after all, not a God.

He was a guy who could turn into a snake and shoot life-seeking snake arrows, though. So who knows.

In any case, this is interesting to me because finding meaning and creating meaning is related to the "that which does not kill you makes you stronger" quote. That which does not kill you imposes upon you a purpose or meaning, and you are challenged to overcome it. I think Nietzsche was an active nihilist, which would be in line with this.

While the second movie is definitely a 'pulp' sword-and-sorcery movie (and is also crap), I maintain that the first is more interesting than merely a bodybuilder's fantasy movie.

Improved the qjulia thing. Now it looks a little better and has specular highlights:

With specular:

With a bunch of random lighting stuff that was supposed to make it look red but ended up making it pink:

Created with: qjulia -constraintAxis 1 -constraintValue 0.1 -r -0.23 -i 0.32 -j .4 -k -.7 -iters 40 -dim 400

I was computing useless data and doing 100 times too many computations, so it's 10 times faster now. Now to save it and make it render pretty!

EDIT: It just occurred to me that instead of converting a point cloud to a mesh, I could just ray trace and probably have fewer computations. Just not sure how to get a good normal...

So sometime between 10pm last night and this morning I got a quaternion julia set visualizer going. So far it just generates a point cloud given a min/max bounds, an initial constant, and the 'slice' along one of the quaternion axes that you want to constrain.

The remaining problems are that:

• it's slow to compute.
• it's big, as I'm not doing anything clever and just have a 100x100x100 grid containing the data, and I want a bigger grid than that, so I can convert the point cloud to a polygon and save it as an OBJ or something.

So I'll try to make it cooler, I guess.

Here's a picture:

This is with c = -0.8 + 0.2 i + 0.1 j + 0.3 k, showing the 'contour' formed by setting the j axis to 0.1.

This is the same one from a slightly different angle. The grid is low res so it's hard to see what this thing actually is, so maybe this will help. Then again, maybe not...

I'm sure this guy has been linked from everyone who has ever wanted to do this, since he actually seems to know what he's doing.

So, Assassin's Creed is pretty much awesome. If anything, the voice-overs are a bit repetitive and the guards have a penchant for understatement. While hiding in a haystack, I heard a guard say, "So, there's a murderer nearby!" upon inspection of the courtyard full of corpses that resulted in my dispatching a Templar and the 8 guards who saw me do it.

Well, I finally have a shiny box to show for it.