the imaginary hackathon

WILTW #18: Interpreting

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:32:03 -0400

So last week I was reading about shape grammars. This week, I wrote an interpreter. Hopefully next week I’ll start making some sort of programming language for shape grammars, sort of like LOGO, I guess. That’s the plan.

I wrote the interpreter in Ruby, which is slow, but a functional language, which makes things a lot easier. Kind of based it on Peter Norvig’s article on writing a LISP interpreter in Python, which is a fantastic article: I knew nothing about interpreters before this week, and it taught me to write one. It’s not on rubygems yet because I couldn’t think of anything to name it. Also because it’s basically useless at the moment.

Anyway, my “language” at the moment is basically LISP. All the shape grammar stuff will come through a library for this language. It would have been better in the first place just to write a library for another functional language, but hey, I learned to write an interpreter. Gimme a break. It’s on github here, but it’s seriously bad and shouldn’t be used by anyone. Here’s the kind of program it’ll accept:

[begin
[define x [+ 1 3]]
[define y curr_pos]
[define z [~ [+ x 2] [norm y] 4]]
[define l [+ x z]]
[move l]
[point_down]
[return_to x]
[point_down]
]

It’s pretty heavily modelled on LOGO, as you can guess. curr_pos is the position of an imaginary pointer, point_down just records your point on the output file, return_to moves the imaginary pointer to whatever vector you feed into it, move moves the pointer in a direction (i.e. adds a vector to the imaginary pointer).

What I was planning to do was add some new functions (written in the language) like ‘triangle’, or ‘recursive triangle’, in a similar vein to recursive drawing. However whilst writing this post I’ve realised a library for Ruby would do a far better job. Hopefully I’l have that on here next week.

On the other hand, learning Sanskrit is turning out to be really fun. Also I read this answer on Quora and now I have to learn it.

WILTW #17: Cloudcuckooland

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 07:09:00 -0400

Meh, this isn’t going to be a very interesting blog post. Read at your own peril.

Books

The Birds - Aristophanes This play was exactly to my tastes; rude and flamboyant, fantastical and hysterical, operating on some twisted comedic half-logic and totally exaggerated. It’s total slapstick buffoonery. It’s the Classical equivalent of a musical. I was enchanted by the wacky utopia of Cloudcuckooland, so naturally I started making a game adaptation. Let’s see how far this goes.

The Age of Gold - HW Brands This was a history of the gold rush in the US West, but reads more like a novel than a history book. I mainly read this because I liked the film There Will Be Blood, but the characters in H.W. Brands’ book turned out to be far more appealing - and it is a book mainly about characters, highly personal stories of immigrant treasure-hunters from all over the world. Incredibly romanticised for a history book, at least until the last quarter which is a more conventional historical analysis.

Tech

Been reading up on some more procedural art. I read this SIGGRAPH 2001 article which uses L-systems to generate buildings and cities. This got me reading about shape grammars. I’m starting to think it’d be really cool to have a functional programming language for 3D graphics (something like Logo, but better).

Other

I’ve learned to read and write the devanagari script, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten in one week with Sanskrit. Hopefully next week will be better. As described in the other post, I’ve realised something that is (I think) important about game storytelling. And that’s it fot this week.

Fun With Teeth #5: Adaptation

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 17:51:00 -0400

Video game adaptations are nearly unheard of, whilst film adaptations are abundant to a fault. Is this because of a difference in the video game and film industries, or the two media themselves? I hope it’s the former. Of all the possible explanations for this phenomenon, the most disappointing is that it’s more difficult to tell a story with a video game.

I’ve just started programming/designing a video game adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Birds. The Birds is a flamboyant comedy first performed in 414BCE in Ancient Athens. It’s about two disillusioned Athenians who decide to seek the help of the birds to build a utopian city in the clouds called Cloudcuckooland. They plan to include intercept offerings to the gods, build a wall to stop riff-raff coming in (remember, this city is only accessible from the sky) and let the birds take the place of the gods. However, all the foolish plans don’t fall through; the mad idealism actually prevails. It’s a big, over-the-top, hysterical and often crass comedy about a place. I instinctively knew this would make a good video game.

The few adaptations of novels and the like that have been made generally use one of two approaches. Either the game makes an awkward McLuhan-esque mistake and gives you a film punctuated by spurts of pretty typical gameplay, or it crafts an environment and lets you explore, thereby letting you (the player) discover the story. This is what’s good about the storytelling of Bioshock, Portal and to some extent Enslaved. They concentrate on building the setting, and guide the player through it in a way that they discover the story.

There are exceptions, of course - Braid does a good job of telling the story partially through game mechanics. This is cool, but it seems to me like a really unnatural way of telling a story. It’s true that the the essential part of a game are it’s incentives and rewards, but the complicated parts of human nature that you’d want to explore in a serious story aren’t the parts about responding to incentives and rewards. Broad aims and goals, maybe, but unless your game is about a ruthless monomaniac - and I suppose the protagonist of Braid is-, game mechanics aren’t the best way to capture a part of the human experience.

Luckily, video games, at least since the 1990s, have another component: the setting. By this I mean not only the lavish 3D universes of modern video games, but also the music, the non-player characters and what they say - essentially everything but the game mechanics and cutscenes. In other words, I mean the game world. I think that the most natural way to tell a story through a video game is to make a setting and let the player explore it. Maybe I instinctively thought of making an adaptation because the story of The Birds was so setting-centric. (Interestingly, the story of Cloudcuckooland is quite similar to the story of Bioshock’s Rapture…)

If there is a certain kind of story best told through a video game, it seems that there should be certain kinds of stories best told in other media. And this is the case - long, complex, introspective stories make good novels but not good films. Maybe it’s time for game designers to recognise that video games are not about incentives and rewards, but about settings and exploration. Let’s scrap the cutscenes and the levelling up and bring on the living, breathing, digital world.

WILTW #16: I'm somewhat pleased to say I can't really sum it up in the title

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:18:23 -0400

This has been the first week of my summer holiday, and having no obligations means I can use all my time to indulge my batshit interests. They’re not really connected, so I’m just going to list everything out. I’m aware that this is a horrendous structure for a blog post, but I don’t really write this for an audience; I write this just as a way of becoming clearer about what I think. So, uh, sorry imaginary readers.

Books

Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag I’ve been reading this on and off for ages but I’ve finally finished it, and it’s just fantastic. It’s a collection of essays written in the 60s about (then) contemporary culture. Sontag is an incredibly cogent and precise writer, and part of the reason I read this was to improve my writing. And it’s culture commentary, so if anything it’s a good guide on what to read next. But most of all, her ideas are brilliant. I really enjoyed this, especially “The Imagination of Disaster”.

The Art of Always Being Right - Arthur Schopenhauer This was kind of funny, but nothing that special. It’s essentially Schopenhauer listing logical fallacies, except with a really cynical misanthropic tone. His idea of “The Will” comes through a bit, but otherwise it doesn’t really mention his philosophy.

Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe I’m not sure whether this play is skeptical of science, or whether Faustus is just a tragic hero in the role of the Enlightenment-era scientist. I felt the imagery was really extreme - grotesque demons, even Satan himself, Helen of Troy, Faustus punching the Pope. I also thought it was a little strange how after making the pact, Faustus doesn’t really gain anything. I suppose this means the play isn’t really about the temptation of material gain, but the hubris in thinking one can get it through illegitimate means (selling your soul to the Devil is very illegitimate, methinks). Faustus’ mistake isn’t as much greed as it is thinking he knows better than the religious tradition.

Tech

I’ve been reading some of the SIGGRAPH 2012 papers and they look really fantastic, as always. Anyway a few thoughts:

My first thought was that these people’s results would make a good normal map generator of sorts. (Or maybe a mesh generator that could be used with some instancing stuff, I dunno.) Unfortunately their paper isn’t publicly available so I don’t know exactly what the method is.
I haven’t been keeping up with fluid simulation so I’ve just learned that ghost SPH is a thing. From what I understand, this doesn’t actually involve any ghosts. Instead, they use air particles (“ghost particles”) as well as fluid particles, so there are never any particles at the edge of the simulation, which caused problems with SPH before.
Now this is something really cool. I was interested in this kind of thing before I saw this, so maybe I’m a little biased. Combine this with procedural art and laborious 3D modelling is over. I haven’t read the article yet but I love the idea. Hope to program this next week.
Rainbows! This one was apparently written by Disney, so I guess we’re going to be seeing this in films soon. It’s an incredibly detailed explanation of interference patterns and reflection of light at the level of microscopic water droplets. Seems to be a kind of ray tracing-based thing. My first thought was “isn’t this going to be a a bit slow?” And yeah, their render took 350 minutes. Maybe this could be adapted into a less complicated model could be used for games and other real-time things.

Other

Saw this exhibition on British design since WWII at the V&A yesterday. It was a lot better than I expected. Original Bowie costumes, Damien Hirst’s art from the 90s, clothes from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop “Too Fast To Live, To Young To Die” - I was impressed. And it was really nicely curated. They didn’t just hang things on walls, walking through the exhibition was an experience. I would heartily recommend. I thought it was kind of funny how they claimed Apple products as British, because Jony Ive was born in London.

In other news, I’ve decided to start learning Sanskrit. The book arrived yesterday and it looked so horrendous I was too scared to start. I’m already a passive speaker of Sinhala, but I’m not sure that’s going to be much help. I find it really weird that the European (Romance, Germanic, etc) languages come from the same basic root language as Sanskrit. And here I thought I was learning a new language family. Anyway, wish me luck!

Fun With Teeth #3: A Cute Lil' Diophantine Equation

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:18:00 -0500

I came across this easy but strange maths puzzle about a Diophantine equation, equations that can only have integer solutions:

The smallest non-trivial integer solution is x=3, y =2. What is the next smallest?

This is a pretty easy problem but it kind of loops into itself, so I had to blog about it. Anyway, rearranging:

We know that both (x+1) and (x-1) are multiples of two, and either (x+1) or (x-1) must be a multiple of four. We also know, as (x+1) and (x-1) have a difference of two, that they can’t share any factors greater than two. However, (x+1)(x-1)/2 is a perfect square, so both (x+1) and (x-1) must have a factor other than two or four that is a perfect square. Let’s assume it’s (x-1) that’s the multiple of four…

So…

Tah dah! We’re back where we started. Now if we plug in the smallest solution to the original Diophantine equation, i.e. m = 3, n = 2, we get (x+1) = 18, (x-1) = 16. (Using the trivial solution gives us the smallest solution.) This leads us to the next smallest solution x=17, y = 12. It’s also proved there’s an infinite number of solutions, since you can just keep plugging in values for the next smallest ones.

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EDIT: I’ve been pretty boneheaded and written this whole article about a pretty well known phenomenon. I kind of expected that was the case. Oh well. You can read about Pell’s equations here.