Darkwind Media Blog

Yes, that’s correct, Stormtrooper.

Over the last couple weeks, I have been working with Brian on the Human Visualization Project. While brainstorming with the doctors searching for the idea we want to focus our energy on, we have thrown around a lot of ideas ranging from games to training modules.

During one of our recent meetings with the medical illustrators, the idea came up that we do something with the central nervous system. With seemingly endless branches and paths a signal could take to reach the brain, we wanted to try and help make that easier for students to learn. We fired up Luster and decided to see what we could do.

Our goal: the user should be able to interact with the different branches of the nervous system by clicking them and following which path a nerve signal would travel if it was stimulated on the skin.

Since we were lacking some assets at the time, we decided to make things a little interesting. Enter Stormtrooper! The following video illustrates someone using what we created in Luster.

Hope you all enjoyed that, we’ll be posting some more pictures & videos of the real thing in the next couple weeks so check back to see how it’s going!

Bombs has been in fairly frantic development for the last week. Luster has made the development process incredibly quick. We’ve already begun play testing to balance the power of the towers and this testing has caused some minor tweaks to the gameplay.

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If you missed it, Bombs is a showcase game we’re working on taking advantage of Luster’s power and ease of development. We’re well on our way, with only 2 weeks put into it there’s multiplayer matchmaking and initial gameplay is being teased out. Here’s quick word on Bombs.

Each player starts with a single immobile base and 10 towers. These towers each exert and repelling force of a fixed amount. This repelling force only affects bombs (not other towers or bases). Bombs are “launched” from your base and are then directed toward and enemies base. First person to score 3 hits wins. But be careful, enemies may place their towers in a defensive configuration and could possibly even use your own bombs against you. To win you need to play a combination of offense and defense. The only things you directly control are the towers. Guiding the bomb is done purely with repelling forces.

With development going so quickly we’ll have initial screenshots and gameplay videos very soon.

Updates for the internal version of Luster are coming fast now. If you aren’t up to speed on what Luster is, it is a small, power-packed, rapid development platform for 3D applications. Following a Flash model, users install a common base which then allows them to access any application created with the system. One install, infinite applications. Developers create applications using the Eclipse-based editing environment. As we near a major milestone, Luster has matured into an amazing system, and it will be battle-tested at two major technology conferences this summer.

The first is Siggraph. For me, this is best conference of the year. It is an unapologetic geek-fest, where the greatest minds in graphics research gather together to show off their stuff. Well, one of the pieces being shown is from RIT. It is the Dome project, which is an installation meant to be a very inexpensive version of a Cave. One of the projects showcasing the Dome at Siggraph will be a 3D asteroids game created using Luster. Speaking of installations, a version of the Dome may be installed at the Rochester Museum of Science. We are unsure yet if Luster will be used to power any application used there.

The second major conference is IGARS (International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium). This is a conference put on by IEEE and is an important one in the world of remote sensing. What’s remote sensing? Spying on you with satellites. Luster is being used to power an application which visualizes 3D sensor data in real time.

What else is Luster up to? At the moment we are creating a compact strategy game called Bombs. It supports up to 4 players and is a real-time, fast paced, physics-based competition where you use force towers to push and pull bombs to destroy your enemies’ bases. If that description is a little short then you’ll be happy to know we’ll be putting out videos in the coming weeks that explain it a bit more.

Stay tuned, because we’ll only have more news about Luster and other Darkwind Media projects as the summer continues.