Fall 06 is finished. I have a paper on simulation in games that is in, and I will post it after I clean it up a little. I have started work on a big Povray project, which will be a lot of fun to work on. Next semester will involve more work on the Obelisk engine, which I am slowly extracting from its infancy. There are two papers in the making that will be completed then, a paper on quests in Charbitat, and a detailed paper on how the AI side of Charbitat works. I should have more research posts then, as it is my hope to get some paper summaries in, which will be useful for general use as well.

It has been a while before I made any good rendered artwork with Povray, but I have a few neat new abstracts up in the rendered art section. This is not a lot, but these are low resolution versions of some much larger images that I have on my desktop. It’s good stuff.

Part of the reason for not posting new material is that I have not had much time to work on things, but also I have not had the energy to take on the sort of projects that I generally like to do. Perhaps I will start something new in the not too distant future, but who knows how that would pan out. In the meanwhile, I figured I would post some of what I’ve got while it’s fresh.

I have done some scrounging and am building the capacity for orbit traps into Genetic Image. Orbit traps are one of the more interesting ways to represent classic complex function fractal imagery. For those of you who see a lot of the fractal images that have that sort of lacy-spiky characteristic, there’s a good probability that it’s created with an orbit trap.

The math is pretty simple, I did a major reworking of complex function fractals in Genetic Image so that they’re possible, and it’s possible to do a number of other interesting things. My main complaint with them is that the performance is still really terrible, as compared to Perlin fractal noise so I tend to bypass complex fractals a lot of the time. They also don’t have very many outputs, so they don’t show up very often unless they’re heavily weighted.

I am going to spend a little bit more time getting interesting effects, and seeing if I can encourage the traps to appear, create other interesting behavior. Also I’ll need to do a few more bug fixes. Always the bug fixes.

Also, for those who are curious: the image to the right was created using a very very quick Processing prototype, and the code for it is here.