Category: rendering

  • News from egglab

    9,000 players, 20,000 games played and 400,000 tested egg patterns later we have over 30 generations complete on most of our artificial egg populations. The overall average egg difficulty has risen from about 0.4 seconds at the start to 2.5 seconds. Thank you to everyone who contributed their time to playing the game! We spawned…

  • Egglab – pattern generation obsession

    I’m putting the final pieces together for the release of the all new Project Nightjar game (due in the run up to Easter, of course!) and the automatic pattern generation has been a focus right up to this stage. The challenge I like most about citizen science is that along with all the ‘normal’ game…

  • Making a butterfly shader

    From sketches to fragment shader tests (unfinished) – see it running in webgl with the source code here. This is for a genetics and mimicry game, more on this project soon…

  • Raspberry Pi: Built for graphics livecoding

    I’m working on a top secret project for Sam Aaron of Meta-eX fame involving the Raspberry Pi, and at the same time thinking of my upcoming CodeClub lessons this term – we have a bunch of new Raspberry Pi’s to use and the kids are at the point where they want to move on from…

  • Procedural landscape demo on OUYA/Android

    A glitchy procedural, infinite-ish landscape demo running on Android and OUYA. Use the left joystick to move around on OUYA, or swiping on Android devices with touchscreens. Here’s the apk, and the source is here. It’s great to be able to have a single binary that works across all these devices – from OUYA’s TV…

  • Jellyfish: A daft new language is born

    After trying, and failing, to write a flocking system in jellyfish bytecode I wrote a compiler using the prototype betablocker one. It reads a scheme-ish imperative language and generates bytecode (which is also invented, and implemented in C++) it only took a couple evenings and a train journey to write, and it even seems to…

  • Ouya development experiments

    The Ouya is a tiny game console which is designed for promoting indy games rather than traditional high budget productions. It’s cheap compared to standard games hardware, and all the games are free to play at least in demo form. It’s very easy to start making games with as it’s based on Android – you…

  • Genetic programming egg patterns in HTML5 canvas

    Part of the ‘Project Nightjar’ camouflage work I’m doing for the Sensory Ecology group at Exeter University is to design citizen science games we can build to do some research. One plan is to create lots of patterns in the browser that we can run perceptual models on for different predator animals, and use an…

  • Planet Fluxus

    Fluxus now runs in a browser using WebGL. Not much is working yet – (draw-cube), basic transforms, colours and textures. I’ve also built a small site in django so people can share (or perhaps more likely, corrupt) each other’s scripts. Also much inspired by seeing a load of great live coding at the algoraves by…

  • Al Jazari – ambient occlusion

    A big part of the look of Minecraft comes from it’s Smooth lighting, which includes an illumination model called ambient occlusion. Ambient occlusion darkens areas of an object based on how obscured they are from a wide area light source, for example an entire sky area, as opposed to a point light source. This is…