Darkwind Media Blog

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.

Well, the heat here in Rochester might not make sleeping all that comfortable, but it certainly can make for nice photos (coming soon.) We have moved / are moving into our new offices here in Rochester to accommodate our slightly growing staff. One quarter has come to a close and we are ready to hit this summer running. We are going to be wrapping up some external and internal projects in the next few months as well as continuing our R&D in some advanced visualization and interactive technologies. We are thrilled to welcome Chris Cascioli to our team who will most certainly prove his weight in gold as we integrate his graphics and game programming talents into our work here. We are also thrilled to have Mathew Mikuszewski in house with us now who will be a major player in our web services. With all this full time work expect some really interesting updates from the Darkwind Media Blog in the coming months …

Every year the film industry follows a certain cycle that is incredibly predictable. When summer rolls around the film studios release their large-budget films. These films cost a considerable amount of money to make, and predictably bring the studios back most of the revenues they collect for the entire year. When autumn arrives the entire character of American cinema changes. Most of the larger studios have already pushed out their blockbusters. Instead, as Oscar season approaches, a new kind of film comes to the theaters. These are more somber, dramatic, thought-provoking, character-driven instead of epic, flashy, and effect-filled. The fact that these types of more serious films are released later in the year so that they are fresher in the minds of the Academy is irrelevant. Their existence alone is important to note.

It’s critical to recognize that there is a fundamental difference between the summer blockbuster and the autumn “Oscar-bait.” Both kinds are entertainment, yes, but they are different in many ways. I’d make the claim that fun and entertainment are not one and the same. Both kinds of film are entertainment, but blockbusters are meant to be fun. This is an important, though maybe minute, distinction that will be critical for this discussion.

How, if at all, does this relate to gaming? The answer should be fairly obvious, as gaming is but one member of the larger entertainment industry, sharing space with films and books. Gaming is the newcomer, the youngest, and it is without doubt useful to look to the more matured forms of entertainment for lessons. I’ve discussed films above, though books can teach just as much or more, and I will allude to some literature later in the discussion. But, for now, we can focus on how films can be contrasted with gaming as it is produced today.

It is trivial to match up Halo 3 with film counterparts like Transformers. Halo 3 is the very essence of a blockbuster: high-cost, high-revenue, effects-filled, and fun. Whether or not you think Halo 3 is a shining example of gaming, a great blockbuster of this industry, is not important. There are many genres of gaming, just as there are many genres of film, but there are very few that stray far from the blockbuster formula, regardless of whether they achieve blockbuster sales figures.

If you can see where I’m going with this then I’d like to offer first a few consolations to appease any dissenters. I am aware and follow with great interest the serious games movement, and the use of games as something other than entertainment alone. I concede that not every game is a Halo 3 clone or pretender (having earlier noted the many genres of games, I am speaking now as to the character of the game itself). However, there is still a substantial lacking in games that cries out for further discussion.

We’ve paired a representative from gaming with a similar sample from films. I wonder now if we can do it again with that other flavor of film. I would love to find the equivalent of Schindler’s List in the world of games. Is there no analogue for A Beautiful Mind or Crash? I don’t believe I’ve ever played a game with the same emotional impact, and I continue to be baffled as to why. It is without doubt that some would claim games intrinsically lack the ability to act as vehicles of emotional gravity as these films do, but I cannot accept that.

All of this is no doubt tied in some form to the maturity of gaming. Films, and most certainly books, have come of age. They’ve matured and been accepted and become respected and revered forms for communicating our thoughts to each other. I cannot say I feel games are receiving the same respect. The fact that the average gamer is not a teenager (far from it) is not what I mean by a mature medium. The fact that games are even questioned as avenues of artistic expression screams that we have not yet convinced ourselves of their power. What I mean to say is that games, it is time to grow up.

Now, I don’t want to seem condescending, because the last thing I aim to do is belittle the great work developers have been doing and are doing right now. But I would like to point out that more can be done. There is so much more we could say with games that we are not saying. There is much more I want to say with games than what is being said.

So, to all those who are making great, imaginative, artistic, and fun games: keep up the great work. Perhaps, sometime in the future someone (and I do hope it is me, but I concede it might not be) can introduce you to a kind of game you may not have even realized was missing.

Luster is nearing its next major release, which is 0.8. This release brings a lot of new features and bug fixes. Here’s a quick look at what’s new:

• Better integration with JavaScript in Internet Explorer, with more robust error handling and better synchronous communication
• Font handling with the ability to drawing text in 3D space (either flat texture or fully 3D text with depth)
• Robust a complete HTTP client system lets you post data and receive responses from servers, download files, and access web pages
• Support for multiple render targets lets you take advantage of latest hardware to quicken some renderings tasks which involve rendering to multiple textures
• Added 3D positional audio in a new official plugin located in the package com.darkwindmedia.audio

There’s are some major new features there, as you can see. There are even more small changes, fixes, and enhancements than what is listed. This is all in preparation for our external alpha testing that will be happening at the end May/beginning of June.

During the course of development of Luster, Colin and I discovered an excellent new use of the technology: presentations. By combining Flash and Luster we could make amazingly compelling presentations. The ability to demo 3D interactive content within the presentation, use the 3D assets to accent our points, and have Flash’s excellent 2D capabilities as a foundation, has been wonderful. Hopefully we’ll be able to put a few of those presentations online as tasters for what Luster with Flash can do.

The other side of this project has been the Luster Editor, which we’ve been quiet about until now. It is the development environment that is paired with Luster. It allows for complete start to distribution control over Luster. It is nearing the public alpha stage now, which is why I’m revealing a few details about it:

• It is based on the Eclipse framework
• It provides a state-of-the-art coding environment for Luster including syntax highlighting and debugging
• It provides advanced resource management

Yes, those details are a little vague. There will be plenty more information as we moved through this public alpha phase and get some proper feedback.

Watch this space for more updates about this public alpha, new demos, our presentations, and the new features going into Luster 0.9.

We have had quite the few months at Darkwind Media. I’ll have to put this in list form to keep my thoughts straight.

• Luster has moved onto a stable release cycle, with 0.6 the current version. 0.7 is due out very soon.
• Several businesses around Rochester have agreed to be a part of our closed beta. We are talking to more as time goes on to gather more users.
• Several projects are using Luster as the platform for their 3D applications.
• Immersive environment exploration is an application which runs in a large projected environment which totally encompasses the user. This project is making a 3D exploration of the solar system. The rendered image will wrap around giving a 360 view of your surroundings as you navigate freely using Wii remotes.
• Virtual theater is a grand project seeking to meld real actors, real crews, real audiences with virtual environments and actors. The project will use Luster to create a distributed theatrical performance where motion captured actors allow distributed audiences to experience rich and high-quality theater anywhere in the world.
• DIRS is a visualization project which allows analysts to view aerial data in multiple spectrums at high resolutions. The renderer can also create 3D images by analyzing the flat 2D data. Luster is being used to create a real-time viewing experience for this generated data. This allows human analyzers to move around in 3D space in real-time

We’re also preparing an all-new version of HVP, which will sport a 3D media browser, and a completely reworked navigation system as well as look-and-feel. New demos have also been created including a standard box physics demo, as well as a facial animation demo. Videos and picks will be coming shortly!

I found this little demo video on my machine the other day. This demo shows an engine we were working on previously for a competition being held at RIT. It was required to be fully 2D, no 3D polygonal models here. We weren’t happy with the traditional 2D feel of graphics, so we put in pseudo-3D lighting (2.5D lighting?) and normal mapping. Our fully 2D sprites started looking 3D with dynamic lighting and normal mapping.

I no longer update the Odyssey Framework that is mentioned in the video. It is available on sourceforge still, if you are interested. Luster has taken over as my prime focus.

Hope you enjoy this look back on previous work by our team!

Without too much fanfare here is a video of our simplest tech demo:

It shows a short but very hi-res snippet of BBC’s Planet Earth documentary playing in a 3D environment. It allows for some minimal user interaction. This came about one night because I decided to see how quickly I could make a simple demo in Luster. Turns out, pretty quickly. I finished this in about 1 hour, and it took 78 lines of code. Most of that was simple scene setup (position lights, position cube, position camera, etc.).

We also want to let everyone know that Luster is starting to come out of its shell. For the next few months a student at RIT is using Luster to create a demo inside of the dome. The demo is a 3D version of Asteriods using the Wii Remote for control. In order for this to work Luster must render in 4 viewports in super-widescreen, which then gets wrapped all around you to create immersion. Some of you may have experienced this before in CAVE installations, or even in an Imax theater.

Recently, the Luster platform has reached a stable point in development. Progress on HVP has continued, but we’ve also taken the opportunity to start developing demos of the technology. There are plenty of possible applications for Luster, and we would love to show you a few. Some of them are decidedly Tech Demos, meant to show the capabilities of the system.

I’ll post back very soon with updates, screenshots, and some descriptions of what these demos show.

We have just updated our blog design. It is based off of a theme called “Gray-gets-green.” I am feeling good about the design so I think it will stick around for a while.

In other related news, we are now working on securing two of our new clients. Once we get more information on this, I will be sure to post about it.

Stay tuned-

Colin