Monthly Archive for April, 2006

BusyBodies is a project I’ve been working on this semester as an independent study with Jeff, although I’ve been hiding from him lately because I have been dissatisfied with my progress. I need to stop doing that. Anyway, BusyBodies is a video game that lets you create programs in 3D space by arranging robots around a virtual world. There are some good reasons why I am doing this, some of which are on the BusyBodies, some of which I’ll have to write about soon.

After a marathon session of Blender wrangling, I have finally gotten some of the basic pieces of the game implemented in software form. I don’t even have a screenshot for you, because the pieces are really basic. My first couple milestones were just to get the 3D environment set up, and do basic drag and drop of 3D objects. So, the screenshot is just a cube that you can drag around the screen.

But holy crap, when I got that thing moving… that was thrilling.

It’s been a little scary because the last time I sat down to try and figure out the Blender Game Engine, I failed miserably. I ran into problems, and got completely stuck, and I was worried the same thing was going to happen here. But I think there’s a decent chance Blender will suit my needs pretty well.

And if it doesn’t, I’m completely screwed.

But, I’ve made good progress today, so I’m off to bed. Hopefully tomorrow will be another leap forward. And hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have something worth taking screenshots of.

This is how you sell software:

(people on PlanetInformatics click here)

I just came across Google SketchUp, a cool little 3D modelling tool that Google recently acquired.

Google SketchUp’s push/pull feature

When I was in high school I was really interested in the design of 3D modelling tools. I used Caligari trueSpace, which has always had a pretty innovative user interface. Traditionally, 3D artists have used multipled 2D views–top, front, and side–to draw and manipulate 3d objects. Caligari was one of the first companies to allow you to do a lot of different kinds of manipulations in 3D space by clicking and dragging on various parts of an object. You didn’t even have to click back and forth between tools… just grab onto different parts of the objects and different things happen. It always seemed faster and more intuitive.

One of the projects that caused me to fall in love with Brown University when I was back at UConn was Sketch. The project seems defunct now, but I always thought it was a beautiful idea… you sketch an object in 2D, the software guesses at the 3D shape, and then you can rotate it around and clean it up. The fact that they actually got it to work reasonably well is a testament to the brilliant folks who built it.

One of the things I always thought there should be more of in 3D applications was drawing on surfaces in the 3D view. For example, if you wanted to create a door in a wall, I always figured you ought to be able to just click and drag where you thought the door should be, choose a style of door frame, and be done with it.

Google SketchUp seems to be doing this kind of thing. You create new shapes by drawing on existing surfaces, you drag things our in the 3D view, you can easily line things up by dragging them and letting their “snap” feature do the work. Great stuff.

I’d download it, but it’s only available for Windows. Google seems pretty un-serious about releasing stuff for Linux. That’s another entry though.

WARNING: This entry will have absolutely no redeeming value for anyone except programmers. My apologies to all you non-geeks.

Macromedia Flash has some strange quirks, but I have to say, this is one of the strangest. While debugging some ActionScript, I got the following error:

 **Error** C:\Documents and Settings\epukinsk\
      Desktop\myalignment\Main.as: Line 126: There
      is no method with the name 'RoundTo'.

     		chargrid.SetCell(row, 0, String(0));

Except when I look in Main.as on line 126, there is no such line of code. There’s not even a mention of RoundTo. In fact, RoundTo is no where in Main.as at all.

So I start commenting out code to try to narrow down the phenomenon. If the compiler is giving me nonsense, at least I can figure out when it’s giving me nonsense. After about a half an hour, I found the bug. The offending RoundTo was in Code.as*, which is included in Main.as. Somehow when Flash finds an error in an included file, it shows up as an error in the parent file, even though it uses the proper line numbers from the included one. Go figure.

Maybe I should bulk up on compilers to get a better sense of how Flash’s preprocessor might work. Honestly, I’d rather work on other things.

* Note: You might think that Code.as is a terrible name for a source file, and in most cases you’d be right. Except in this case, I’m basically implementing a debugger. So there are objects representing code in my code. The naming issues are unavoidable.

“I know this is an emotional debate,” Bush told the Orange County Business Council. “But one thing we can’t lose sight of is that we are talking about human beings, decent human beings.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Sometimes I like our president.