Squeak People diary for dfaught

17 Jan 2008

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:06:49 -0700

Wow, it's been a long time since I blogged here. Been working on Croquet projects including: Procedural Textures and some Skeletal Animation Examples Lately, it's been movies which sadly were not made with Croquet, although Croquet is the subject matter.

3 Mar 2007

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:54:35 -0700

Progress on a Croquet physics engine idea has been inching ahead. I started out with the idea of basing this on Thomas Jakobsen's "Advanced Character Physics" paper because it claims to be fast and stable, and because Orion Elenzil had already done a cloth physics demo in the Jasmine version of Croquet based on this paper. Then while casting about I came across Leonardo Boselli's Apocalyx engine Hoverjet demo, which is very cool, and I thought "Why not put the two together for a cool new Croquet demo?"

I started down that path. In this demo, the physics particles are the avatar replicas. The physics engine #future recursive steps take place in the TSpace within the TIsland. The avatar user controls are redone so that the WASD and arrow keys add acceleration to the avatar replica, and mouse cursor position always does "looking around".

It has been lots of fun working out the avatar collisions with the heightmap-based mesh floor (hear the sarcasm there?). While I have the impression this should be fairly straightforward using a TRay, it seems to never work the way I think it should. Another "fun" thing has been figuring in the boundSphere offset in the collision calculations. And I have gone through a few iterations of interpreting Thomas Jakobsen's paper and how these collisions should be handled.

Anyway, after a while I finally figured out that putting these two ideas together would never work the way that I had envisioned. Thomas Jakobsen's collision reaction basically just stops the particle in its tracks, as though the floor mesh absorbs all the energy. That's part of what makes it fast and stable. And of course that is at cross purposes with what is needed for a hovercraft type similation. Maybe it's all a matter of interpretation, so I'm sitting back, mulling this over for now.

In the mean time, I've been trying to learn more about Blender and its texture painting capability (yes, you can paint in 3D with Blender!), as well as playing with the newest beta of Flux Studio that just came out.

After watching Ian Piumarta's video presentation at Stanford (http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/), I've been mulling over possibilites, one of which might match up with further MockTurtle development. Was the Babel language stuff in Croquet Jasmine based on Ian's work? Seems like it might have been.

Read Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" a few weeks ago. Highly recommended!

8-) 3-D oCC-

6 Jan 2007

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 21:13:53 -0700

I have been doing most of my blogging privately for several months now, which makes it more of a journal than a blog I guess. Copied from my TiddlyWiki, here is my current Croquet/Squeak ToDo list, in no particular order:

CCPainter - do some 3D painting? Reference John C. Hart painting paper. Finished Save/Load and simple method to build terrain from external heightMap. Made a branch from the alternate inflation experiment.
Metaballs in Croquet - methods for realtime?
DualMaze - need to subclass avatar for collision detection, want NPCs and all that robot stuff from UMN, my own models, what's the game/goal this time? Bigger cubes, maybe fit to a floor with varying height. Proper island-replicated random generator.
MockTurtle - More demos, new interpreted language? everything is a turtle?
function/data plotter in Tweak
Tweak-based simple OpenGL framework for higher performance non-collaborative things taking advantage of Croquet's code base.
PhysicsEngine - do a cubes or spheres demo? Working on something similar to Apocalyx Hovercraft Racing.
ProceduralTextures - make a 2D Tweak texture builder app. Still really like ArtOfIllusion's approach to this. Just in Squeak for now and GPU later? Or just go back to Jasmine where I had GLSL working.
Texas Hold'Em sample to explore Croquet facets and security.
Croquet filters/interactors exploration?
Maybe try something with grid menus? Context style, not whole screen.
VRMLImporter - X3D capability? maybe explore IK animation? Animation from Flux Studio?
Towers of Hanoi as simple demo collaborative app, maybe key to portal in DualMaze?

7 Apr 2006

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 20:34:38 -0700

When I saw it, I had to buy The Movies game because it allows you to create your own movies. The visual style is very much like The Sims 2 game. After playing with it for a while now, The Movies is like a big construction set. You can piece together lots of really cool movies out of its large selection of prebuilt action sequences and sets, but you can't create your own action sequences or sets. One more 3D tool that doesn't really do quite what I want nor interoperate with other 3D tools, but still lots of fun in itself.

Speaking of which, I noticed that the newest beta release of NVidia's CG tool says it includes Collada support. This could make things either much easier or much more difficult, as far as getting CG incorporated and accepted into Croquet.

I'm doing a personal blog/journal/project notebook now using TiddlyWiki and a few plugins. I keep it on a flash drive so that I can plug it in at home or work. I might put it out on the Internet some day just as a convenience for me. It would be interesting to extend TiddlyWiki so that either SVG or VML would let me create and keep some simple sketches in the Wiki. Right now, I'm using an external paint program for this, which works okay but adds a few more files to keep track of. The TiddlyMath variant includes SVG, but hasn't been kept up to date with the newest TiddlyWiki, and doesn't allow interactive drawing.

Currently reading "Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)" by Neal Stephenson. It was recommended to me by Peter Moore of the U. of Minn. Croquet team after a little literary discussion. I can tell that the choice will be difficult when I finish this book whether to continue with this series or go back to Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series. They are both excellent.

3 Feb 2006

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 15:54:17 -0700

At my job, all day long I deal with the bits and bytes of data networking and a variety of attached computer systems, trying to make sure that they all work together in a reasonable fashion. At the end of the day, when I go home, after my kids' activities and my honey-dew list, I often spend some time playing with computers a bit more. Many people have asked me how I can stand to spend my own time with computers after dealing with computer problems all day long. I suspect there are a few other people that might read this that have similar situations.

The two most important facets of my answer to that question are: 1) the network and computer field is rapidly changing - I happen to agree with Alan Kay that things are far from all worked out, so there are constant challenges to be met and the more I can learn about new advances in the field, the better prepared I am to meet those challenges; and 2) I attempt to separate the type of activities that I do with computers on the job and at home - since I deal with the bits and bytes of problem solving a lot of the time at work, I try to spend my own time at home doing creative things with computers as a release.

This creative release doesn't always work out, as I seem to continually run into either problems that need to be worked out to enable creativity, or the attraction of technical elegance in cool new stuff. But I do try, at least sometimes, to stay in a creative mode at home. Squeak is one of the most powerful tools for enabling creativity with computers that I have ever come across. Making powerful tools easily available to non-programmers is exactly the type of thing that stimulates my creativity. When I am attempting to be creative, I don't want to have to worry about writing or debugging code, so things like EToys that allow me a greater degree of control without coding are wonderful things.

One of the most enjoyable things that I can remember doing (outside of twisting 500 balloons into 300 figures for a line of kids in 5 hours) was a series of local access cable TV shows that I did years ago using Deluxe Paint on an Amiga computer. Deluxe Paint had a simple, powerful, well thought-out interface that allowed my creative juices to flow without the technology getting in the way. As the Croquet environment begins to come together and eventually mature, I am hopeful that it will someday allow me this same feeling in a 3-dimensional medium.

I still use a paper notebook to keep my personal notes and figures. It's simple, portable, and allows a wide range of expression. So what would be the advantage of using something like TiddlyWiki, TiddlyMath, or Josh Gargus'es Sketchbook instead? The most obvious answer is that these things can be easily and instantly shared electronically with a large part of the world. Extending this idea into the Croquet arena, tools similar to these could allow a large part of the world, or at least some selected portion of it, to collaborate with me in 3-D creative bliss. What could be more fun than that?

----------------------- After a few days of thinking that I had crafted a few paragraphs here that really summed up how I relate to Squeak and Croquet, I finally realized that I had missed the mark. The thing that is very appealing about Squeak is that it contains strong elements of BOTH sides of the technical/creative coin. I really intend to exploit the creative side of computing when I'm on my own time, and the strong technical attraction of Squeak both enables me a wider range of expressiveness and distracts me from creativity. An interesting dilemma ...

22 Dec 2005

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 15:11:59 -0700

Still playing with Machinima (3D-game-based filmmaking). Looking at different scriptable 3D engines, like pyogre and luxinia, just to see how well they work. I am amazed at the lack of interoperability with 3D stuff. None of the 3D engines I have looked at can easily exchange models with Croquet or with each other, let alone any animation.

The 3D modeler anim8or is pretty good, but unfortunately it doesn't export in any format that Croquet can read. Still like Art of Illusion the best for a 3D modeler right now.

Just picked up the P5 data glove, which eventually I will want to use natively with Croquet. I still want to get the VR-3D glasses, too.

Other cool stuff I have come across recently: P/ISM, GP2X, TiddlyWiki, SwarmSketch, and Edward Tufte's Sparklines (did I see this on the Squeak maillist somewhere?). I really like Edward Tufte's work, and didn't realize that he had a pretty good web site to go along with it. Silly me!

Now reading "Eye of the World" by Robert Jordan because my daughter recommended it.

15 Nov 2005

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:07:13 -0700

I am continually sidetracked by new ideas. It may have to do with having little play time and aiming for some kind of positive experience with each bit. This month, I'm not spending much time on updating Jon's MediaView web browser and also not working on the ProceduralTextures project. The former, I keep thinking, will not be needed when Areithfa Ffenestri works a little better. The latter I have decided to put off until the new version of Croquet is available, whenever that might be, mainly because I think that the user interface is an important part of the project, not just a bunch of texturing code.

Picked up the book "3D Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima" by Paul Marino along with a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004, just to see how a bit of that goes. Here is an animation I did a while back, mostly some inside and sideways jokes about my workplace.

Reading cheap fiction right now (Alan Dean Foster and Patricia Cornwell) although someday soon I'll get back to some serious reading.

9 Sep 2005

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 04:01:26 -0700

Sidetracked again! Instead of pouring on the effort in the Procedural Textures project, I have been playing with a fun-time diversion of Artificial Life simulations by interpreting the bons-alife package on SqueakMap into Croquet spaces. There are other similar projects in Squeak, but this one isn't quite as dependent on Morphic as say Kedama, and yet it is interesting enough to provide some big fun with little time investment.

Also been following Orion Elenzil's adventures with Croquet physics simulations with great interest.

Still (re)reading Simon Danaher's "Digital 3D Design" and "Texturing and Modeling" by Ebert et al.

1 Aug 2005

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 14:45:12 -0700

Having finished the minor update to VRMLImporter for Croquet, now I have finally started playing with Procedural Textures. Based on Joshua Gargus's and Tobias Germer's code, I got both (NVidia) Cg and (OpenGL) GLSL shader programs to run in the same scene at the same time the first night that I started playing!

In email exchanges with Josh, he has now gone the direction of using CgFx from Croquet, which is basically an external file format for specifying shader programs along with fallback methods. The main tools available right now for creating CgFx files are (NVidia) FX Composer and (ATI/3DLabs) RenderMonkey, both of which require Windows XP, which I no got.

There is some doubt that any of this will be workable with the coming Hedgehog release of Croquet, because of the peer-to-peer object sharing and the way that OGL objects are stored in the scene graph. We'll see!

So, I have been concentrating on doing simple things with GLSL for now, and came across (Typhoon Labs, I think?)Shader Designer, which is helpful for building GLSL shader programs.

I lost a little bit of steam for this project when I started using Art Of Illusion for 3D modeling. The procedural texture support that it includes does most of what I originally wanted to do, externally but importable to Croquet. Doing procedural textures with the GPU is fairly cutting edge, and I could see it being a few years before the general Croquet community has the hardware capability to do this.

30 Jun 2005

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:37:31 -0700

The new drivers are here! The new drivers are here! As of June 22, Nvidia released their new drivers containing the OpenGL Frame Buffer Object support that I've been waiting for. A few days later, I bought myself a newer video card that has pixel/fragment shader and vertex shader support. So now the project should all start to fall into place, right?
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/croquet/ProceduralTextures

I would like to finish the fix to the Croquet VRML importer that I'm working on before really diving into this though.
http://bugs.impara.de/view.php?id=1333

Gave up on reading Gutenberg Galaxy about a third of the way through. Got the gist of it, but I'm definitely not enough of a literature buff to really be able to comment on this. Went back to my favorite fiction authors for a breather.