Mocap technology I’ve always wanted – invented 2 years ago!
Add comment May 4th, 2009
Posts filed under 'Game Development'
Characteristics of the Amateur Actor (written in 1938)
I stumbled upon an old article about amateur actors that can be applied to amateur game designers (I would classify myself as amateur) 70 years later. Being young and lacking in experience means that the art one creates is lacking in honesty. I can’t wait until game designers mature and begin to design/build games with the same emotional sophistication as award-winning plays + novels.
With these three possible methods in mind, let us turn to the amateur actor. Let us ask ourselves just what sort of material he is; of what he is capable and incapable; what he can be made to do.
The majority of amateur actors in the United States are young men and women of high-school and college age; the amateurs are made up largely of students. Their ages testify that they are likely to be immature mentally; their occupations as students, that they, perhaps, possess an intelligence above the average.
Indeed, upon examination, the amateur is found to possess a good mind and an amazing potpourri of information. He knows some history, literature, and science; perhaps a smattering of foreign language, though he is the exception if he can speak any language besides English. He reads magazines, current books, a few plays; he has picked up quite a bit of information and misinformation at the movies. His reasoning powers are not yet well developed; he has no philosophy of life that is his own (but he appropriates the latest philosophy he has heard or read for his immediate need, which is not great). His schooling has given him a fair power of concentration, an ability to listen and to under-stand what is said to him. And he has quick perception.
The amateur is weaker in imagination than in intelligence. Not that he possesses no imagination; he has one, but he is out of practice in using it. At a much younger age, his imagination provided him with many a grand adventure; but the public schools, which make a fetish of democracy, have geared his work for the majority, which means for the group below his capacity; and things other than the preservation and encouragement of the imagination are considered practical and important for the great lower groups. So he has taken on the habits of his companions and has used his imagination less and less until now he rarely exercises it at all.
He is still weaker in knowledge of and experience with the emotions. Of course, he is still young; he has, perhaps, lived a sheltered, uneventful life and has experienced no deep emotion. But the schools are partly to blame for this ignorance of emotional knowledge. The amateur has received no education in the emotions. Expression of feeling has been frowned upon by his teachers and laughed at by that “majority” among his companions of whom we have spoken. He has been permitted to experience sensations, shocks, thrills, but he knows little or nothing about the emotions of terror, pity, love—those emotions which he will be called upon to express on the stage. He is capable of understanding and feeling emotions, but he is without experience with them.
These observations constitute three general characteristics which our examination of a number of American amateurs (whose ages we have arbitrarily placed at eighteen or twenty) would be likely to reveal to us. Turning to the physical qualifications for acting, we would discover that our actors possess bodies that are well developed. Both the men and women have played strenuously as children and have continued to play in some form of athletics in school and college. Here and there one may be found who is awkward in the manipulation of his body, though, frequently, these young people handle their bodies reasonably well. They do not, however, use them with power or effete tiveness. Grace and rhythm of movement are usually lacking, and a strength and a sense of pride which give the body a theatrical effectiveness are unknown to most beginners.
The voices of our actors are found to be harsh and unpleasant, though there has been an improvement in vocal quality in recent years. Still, a full, resonant voice, which is a joy to hear, is seldom discovered. This matter of the cultivation of a good speaking voice has also been neglected in the schools. The actor, however, generally speaks the English language commendably, when we consider his training and his speech environment. Compared with the best standards, he speaks his language carelessly and incoherently; compared with the speech of the streets, he does remarkably well.
Perhaps, then, we are able to visualize this young actor sufficiently for a general characterization. He seems to be a keen, responsive, but immature, person whose imagination is dormant, whose emotional experiences and training have not been important; his body is adequately developed but untrained for acting; his speaking of his language is better than his vocal quality; and he does possess a capacity for accomplishment and development.
1 comment April 4th, 2009
Looking for meat billboards @ GDC
I’ve been making T-shirts for GDC and now need pieces of meat to slap them on – MUWAHAHAHA… I mean, I need willing and helpful and friendly volunteers to wear these shirts.
Add comment March 17th, 2009
You know the game industry is insular….
When two of the most successful games in the past 3 years get no mainstream gaming press coverage.
I was expecting GDC 2009 to be more open (appealing to a wider audience) but for most part it’s still 80% hardcore gamer focused with a small dabbling of the rest – mobile, virtual worlds, casual games, serious games, indie games.
Thankfully Habbo Hotel is getting press coverage, but that’s due to the developers speaking at conferences
Add comment March 16th, 2009
Games Of 2020 (my entry) – This Is Your House
On a whim, I submitted a quick-and-dirty home decorating game idea to Gamasutra / Mountain Dew’s Green Label Gaming contest. I didn’t win, but a friend did (congrats Jim) who wrote a humorous entry.
I’m posting my entry here because I WANT somebody to implement this and it’s my stress-relief from prepping for GDC and I tend to openly share game concepts. Disclaimer: Would I play this game? No. On the other hand, I will never play Halo 3 and COD4. I’m neither a casual nor hardcore gamer. My mother would be addicted to this game.
This is Your House
Summary:
Home decorating show + game combination made possible with easy to use touch-displays and improved 3D graphics. The future will be a friendlier, nicer now.
What:
The most popular game in 2020 will be a home decorating show/game, This is Your House.
Each week an exotic house is profiled and explored in the TV show section, but afterwards the viewer/player can re-arrange all the furniture + props + doors to score the optimal air-flow, light-flow, sound quality, etc.
Gameplay:
- Begin with empty room – similar to the one in the show.
- Drag and drop (using finger) furniture from the right side of the screen to the room.
- Press “score” to get a ratings for:
- Air flow (prevent stuffy rooms with large furniture block air paths)
- Uniform light (place windows + lamps optimally)
- Colour/pattern variation (who wants to live in a grey room?)
- Acoustic quality of room (is the room good for audio listening?)
Technology like fluid simulation, acoustic rendering, and final gathering will be used to score the player. Complex algorithms implemented for mainstream uses.
The show/game will scan the objects in the house into 3D models for the player to use. 3D graphics should be powerful enough such that the 3D models will be nearly photoreal. Technology like this is beginning to pop up (see Mental Ray RealityServer):
Results can be shared online. Custom patterns for furniture, drapes, etc. can be created by placing a real object in front of the webcamera (all consoles and TVs will have one built in).
Real pieces of furniture can be ordered in the game… so the game is part 3D IKEA catalogue, 3D game, 3D television show…. mixing passive entertainment (TV) with online sales (furniture catalogue) and world-building (game).
This is Your House is a better “virtual world” than Second Life – it will be accessible to grandmothers and children alike. There’s no Second Life porn, there’s no weird goth people flying through the world and there are weekly furniture updates. This is Your House takes the best part of The Sims (home decorating) and makes it accessible to PC illiterate and also provides near-photoreal results.
The Sims now:
This is Your House (circa 2020):
The second most popular game will be a spin-off of This is Your House – called This is Your Garden where players grow virtual gardens. Again, the interface will be the touch-sensitive LED display.
How:
In 2020 we should have paper-thin touch-sensitive displays that can be “taped” to any surface like a desk or wall. Homes will have a 8 feet by 4.5 feet display “taped” to a wall.
Sony and Phillips low-power LED displays (now):
Like how LCDs replaced CRTs, low-power/thin LEDs will replace LCDs. These displays can be used as touch-sensitive input devices – no different from what you see in Star Trek and other Sci-Fi movies.
The games of the future will be less and less like hardcore games of today.
The mainstream will be playing games without consciously “knowing it.” These “universal games” will be integrated with television shows as the display also acts like a touch-sensitive surface. A separate touch-sensitive LED display can be used as a remote/joystick if the player does not want to play standing upright.
Why home decorating:
In the future, gaming will become mainstream more than even the Wii has. The nature of gaming will change. Instead of hardcore violent fantasies we get reality-TV like fantasies of home decorating, gardening, fashion, being a celebrity, etc. that also act like marketing tools. Advergaming to the extreme made possible by technology that seamlessly blends into our normal life.
Why LED displays:
Time and time again, history has shown us it takes about 10 years for research or high-end technology to make it into mainstream. High-definition digital video was available to visual effects production houses in the mid-to-late 90s. 3D graphics cards for the consumers appeared around 1996 after this technology had been available in high-end SGI workstations since 1982.
What is appearing now in 2009 is “digital paper” – low-power thin LED displays. In about 10 years this technology will be cheap and plentiful.
Why other technologies will fail to arrive:
The state of the art now will be mainstream in 10+ years except at a lower-cost point. Holographic video, non-calibrated real-time motion capture, brain wave sensors are still all very primitive and even the state-of-the-art is not very reliable. In 10 years the results will improve, but few of these improvements will arrive at the consumer level.
Add comment March 6th, 2009
This is exactly what I’ve experienced
Today’s Gamasutra article mirror’s my personal experience. From concept to final animated game model is a series of COSTLY iterations which is why drawings and a game design document mean crap and why “lightweight” iteration is preferred over building “final-quality” models.
And as he says, “the problems are too varied and the expertise necessary to anticipate them belongs to too many people — animators and riggers, designers, engineers, as well as concept artists and modelers. There is no way to plan it all out on paper.”
“Treat the early models and rigs as tools for refining and proving the concept, not early jumpstarts on the grind of production. Even rapid prototyping can’t completely eliminate glitches, but it can help to insure that they are fewer in number and that they are less costly in terms of work wasted and time lost. ”
Plan all you want… the answers (is it fun, is it practical, etc.) are in the prototype.
Add comment March 4th, 2009
Gaming in 2020…
This contest has got me thinking about the future in 11 years. I’m sure 90% of the applicants will choose some far fetch technology like holographic video. What’s been proven over time is that research takes about 10 years to enter the mainstream so what’s being published as state of the art now will be practical in 2019.
All of this HD video stuff is old hat as I dealt with $250K D5 VTR (Video Tape Recorder) way back in 1998 that could record near film-quality (HD) digital video. It took 10 years to bring this technology to the mainstream.
So what about Holographic video? It’s still very primitive. I remember all the MIT research in the late-90s about it, but the technology to send out the interference patters (holograms) was crude back then and still is. Computer bandwidth is also a major concern. PCs can barely handle playback of a single stream uncompressed HD video… let alone the amount of data required for holograms.
What’s more plausible is haptic display surfaces like Microsoft Surface where the research is about 10 years old now (MIT Tangible Bits)
1 comment March 1st, 2009
Yes, original IP games do sell!
De Blob on the Wii sells 700K units.
Add comment February 27th, 2009
The Supers (prototype) update
It’s been 8-9 months since I’ve posted any images on my project…. here are some short videos demo-ing the shaders + animation:
The Supers – Beetle turntable from Nelson Yu on Vimeo.
The Supers – Hero turntable from Nelson Yu on Vimeo.
And one demo-ing some early problems with physics:
The Supers – Physics FAIL from Nelson Yu on Vimeo.
Add comment February 20th, 2009