I’ve been familiar with Cellular Automata for a while, and I generally tend to approve of them. Especially when they have some nice evocative qualities. We read and discussed Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science in one of my classes, which was a lot of fun. We really tore into it. My problem with the book is that while I appreciate and respect the ideas behind his work, the mathematician in me wants to wring the book until theorems come out, which of course they don’t, because there are no proofs.

I feel especially frustrated on that account because of the work I did with strange attractors. I found significant visual evidence that the parameter space for the attractors has fractal characteristics, but I was never able to prove it. Very sad.

Anyway, revisiting Wolfram led me to remember my use of cellular automata in GeneticImage, and thinking about how they could be used in Painter or other projects. I was quite pleased with the last applet posted regarding Painter, so due to this, I think I will post one with a cellular automata generator. This is primarily intended for artistic rather than any other purpose. Please fiddle with knobs and levers to your heart’s content!

Looks like applets don’t work for you

At long last, the storm is gone and the dust has settled. InTEL: Deployed, students are actually solving problems with it, this is a HUGE victory and step forward for the project. Mermaids: The social system is in place and functional. With some additional world building, things will be beautiful. Practice Qual: Completed, successfully. Granted, since I write at a terribly slow pace, it took twice as long as intended to actually submit it. That will become an issue for the exam upcoming, but I’ll just have to exert more discipline.

Otherwise things are mostly well. Audrey has been sick for the past week, but now seems to be recovering. All is working out in the end.

Work on UI for Painter continues with the Netbeans platform, which is encouraging and successful. The summer will call for prototypes of some research experiments. And where that winds up, who is to say.

I’ve been very font of Netbeans, and have just recently been getting into the wonderful world of module development. It’s fun and exciting stuff, but very complex. Netbeans modules aren’t necessarily the way for every project, but they certainly have some power behind them.

One of the applications that have been developed using the platform is blueMarine, and it has been on the Netbeans front page for a little while now. I haven’t dug into it yet, but it certainly looks nice and versatile, maybe enough so that I can make a full fledged app for Painter using it. Who knows? What is really fascinating though, is that they have published a huge design document for the whole thing! It uses UML and everything. Very swanky. There is still a lot that is missing and needs to be written, but the very thought that they would do such a thing is astounding. It shows a great attention to detail and usability, not just for end users, but for developers and designers. I haven’t looked through their source yet, but I can imagine that the design document would be hugely beneficial for doing so.

Maybe all projects ought to do something like that. Hmm….

Because I don’t know when to quit on these things (or, possibly because working on somethings helps me relax from working on others), I made some nice progress on Painter, and rather than showing images, I figured I might embed an applet. This is very simple, and contains some primitive graphical methods, but is nonetheless quite neat and has its own sort of style.

The applet will think when you click on it, and if it thinks for too long (10 seconds) it will realize that it is confused and allow you to click again. If you are interested in this project, it is available via svn on the Painter site. The documentation on the site is abhorrent, I know.

EDIT: Due to strange technical issues, I had to take the applet down, as it was causing issues with browsers. I truly regret having to do so, but I just haven’t been able to fix it yet.

It’s actually been a very very long time since I’ve taken a test of any kind. This seems rather odd, since I’ve been a student for many years now. I think the last test I took was in my last undergraduate courses, which would have been in Spring 2004. Four years is a long time in that respect. Certainly others have suffered through worse, though, so I’m not trying to claim unique or special hardship, I just think it’s unusual.

This weekend will be the practice exam, then, on May 1st, will be the real thing. I’m nervous, but not scared, so that may be a good thing or a bad thing. We’ll see what happens after the practice.

Following that, I’ll have nice stuff to report on some research thoughts. I think that simulation and proceduralization as general concepts may have a substantial value to them, especially when it comes to deconstructing something into a model and then applying that model to the schematic of a game. These processes are transformations, and are creative by nature.

I’m not sure where the question of focus can enter the picture, certainly some things may be more focused than others. I could potentially entertain a large theory while giving as supporting examples various separated ideas, but I’m not sure if that would result in a thesis so much as a strangely shaped table. Who knows?

More later.

In my copious spare time, I’ve been working on Painter. Today I was able to get it to produce some sort of image. Amazing! Painter is essentially a metaprogramming project, and it generates its own programming control structures. Generally what I’m trying to do with it is put in some sort of automatic Processing. Eventually it will be able to do a lot more. But, we all must start small.

So, just in the rare and unlikely case anyone is interested about how I am spending my time, I’ll give you all an update: Right now I am working on two major projects, and preparing for qualifying exams.

The first major project is an NSF funded endeavor called InTEL (Interactive Toolkit for Engineering Learning). The project is a significant high profile collaboration with the engineering department and my home department of LCC. It’s a pretty crazy project, we’re basically trying to proceduralize Statics and make a software program that will help students understand its core principles and use contexualized and real-world examples to help emphasize the relevance of the discipline. Right now we can do a small subset of it, but we’re planning the rest, and it is my responsibility to develop a schedule and coordinate with a new programmer for the summer work. Also, there are about a dozen bugs and things that need to be fixed before the applet is deployed to students next week!

Mermaids is an MMOG based around the principles of emergence. We’re building it with Multiverse, which is a great and powerful architecture, but still in its developmental stages. Since I’m the person on the team the most familiar with the architecture, I’m responsible for coordinating the work that everyone else is doing and getting it incorporated into the whole. We have models to convert and import, areas to build, and there is the social system and the ecosystem plugins to get working. Most of this needs to get done before next Tuesday, when one of the students is presenting his MS thesis that uses Mermaids. Also, there’s Demo Day.

I am also going to be taking my first qualifying exam and am busy covering a ton of reading to get there. The good news is that I only have about 20 texts to read or review before the exam, which is the day after Demo Day. Exciting!

Given that I’m currently wrapping up the 2nd year of the PhD program, I have a lot of people, such as my advisors, asking me, what am I going to do for this degree anyway?? So that’s been much on my mind. There’s a lot to be done there.

Also, Audrey and I are moving. So we need to find an apartment. Our deadline: Demo day.

So amidst all of this, Audrey drags me to see Explosions in the Sky, which were playing locally. It was hard to put the work down and let it go for a little bit, but it was not disappointing. Beautiful harmony and loud distorted guitar noises are awesome.

How do games get that incredible feeling of immersion and being there? Sometimes, games don’t even need to be believable, but they have a capacity to snare in the player. They just manage to pull the player in to a mental state that is synchronized with the logic of the game world. When this phenomenon happens in a state of performance, the result is flow, which has been examined in many situations. Immersion does not necessarily require high performance flow, it may be as simple as stepping into the magic circle. Realistically, though, the magic circle is a very strange object, and its borders are permeable and fuzzy. How can we understand immersion, or at least credulity, to make use of it in game adaptations? (more…)

Simulation is important because of the way that it works at a fundamental level. Simulation consists of:

1. A mapping between things that are outside the simulation to things that are inside the simulation, a representation. The representation converts things in the world to tokens or symbols in the simulation itself.
2. A set of rules that defines the relationship and interactions between the tokens, a model. Models are interpretations of how things work.
3. An actual execution and application of the simulation, where the state changes from some set of initial conditions to some later conditions after a period of time. That is the run of the simulation.

Among these is the gap. The gap is a property that emerges from simulation, that is a consequence of its definition. A simulation is dependent on both rules and representation. Without rules, the run of a simulation is nothing more than an arbitrary sequence of states. Without representation, a simulation is just a mathematical entity in abstraction, disconnected from reality. However, simulations can take advantage of one more than the other and still be called simulations. This means that there must be some sort of negotiation between what is handled by the model and what is handled by the representation. The disconnect and distance between these is the simulation gap.

The magic of simulation occurs when the model and representation work synergetically to produce something that seems to work beyond both. Ultimately, the simulation here is something experienced. Simulation authors must therefore use the gap to creative and expressive advantage. Many games are successful because of their care in choosing what to simulate versus what to represent.

Closely related to this is the immersive fallacy. The nut of the immersive fallacy is the idea that a game can be made better by expanding player’s agency in the game world. The line drawn between in this idea is between player agency and simulation. I guess that would be defined as the agency gap. Generally I have been concerned with the simulation gap, but the agency gap is very significant due to its construction of believability through participation. The simulation gap is significant because its construction of believability through mechanics.

We had a longtime friend of ours come by and visit today, which went respectably well. He has graduated from his arduous job at the pizza place and is now intending to take up snowboarding (or something). Said friend is also been a lifelong gamer and was one of the shadow agents whose operations led me to discover gaming. Having spent extensive time in the “académie”, I’ve also gotten to know the Ludologists, the Narrativists, and now, Miashara. It feels like the stars have been aligned to make something really awesome happen. Unfortunately, it may take some time for that to amount to anything, so I grilled him about gaming and where he sees the relation of stories and systems. (more…)